Liquid Lies (15 page)

Between Gwen and that door stretched rows of cars. All shiny. All high-priced. Most with Nevada plates.

“Xavier,” Nora warned. “We’re losing time.”

At the sound of Nora’s voice, Xavier snapped out of his disturbing reverie. He turned to Gwen with such disdain she thought he might strike her, so when he snagged the chain connecting them and pulled her closer, she flinched. Xavier was tall, probably six-foot-five. He loomed over her, his quick-pumping chest pushing out breath from his nostrils.

“Don’t go wandering off,” he said. “If you get too far away from me, I won’t be able to hold the illusion. If you just appear out of thin air, they’ll shoot before they realize who you are.”

Tedranish burbled out of his mouth so fast and soft that Gwen couldn’t make out the words. But she felt the wave of enchantment wash over them. Only after Xavier started across the parking lot, pulling her behind him, did she realize he’d never actually drunk any
Mendacia
.

“How…” she started, then stopped as another surge of magic careened into her.

They cleared the last row of vehicles in the lot and headed straight for the door. The two guards watching over it were Secondaries. She could sense their signatures as clearly as she felt the wind through the loose knit of her sweater.

Secondaries and…Ofarians.

Gwen dug in her heels and pulled back on Xavier’s damned leash.
Hard
. “Help!” she screamed in Ofarian. “Over here! It’s me, Gwen Carroway! Hey!”

One of the guards raised the last of his smoke to his lips and looked right through her.

Xavier circled around them, chain in hand, and pulled her tightly to his side. “They can’t hear you. They can’t see you. Now shut up and come with me.” He stalked wide around the guards, tugging on the chain.

Would they really fire if she somehow disabled Xavier’s illusion? She had one of the most well-known faces in the Ofarian world, practically a Secondary celebrity, for chrissakes. Surely their reactions wouldn’t be that quick.

Sliding up against the wall next to the exterior building door, Xavier checked his watch. When it hit noon, the door swung inward.

Two new guards exited. Xavier bolted for the opening, dragging her with him. She stumbled, the cuffs gouging into her wrists. The door was closing. Xavier ducked inside. Gwen had no choice but to follow. As she slipped into the dim interior, the door caught on her heel, stuttering in its otherwise slow sweep, and drawing the attention of the guards.

Just inside, Xavier shoved her against the far wall. The two guards who’d been outside now stepped in, one of them running his hand along the door and its hinges. He turned his head and mumbled into a shoulder radio that someone needed to check the main entrance door.

The whole thing took less than five seconds.

As the guards strode down the long, shadowed corridor and disappeared around a corner, she rounded on Xavier. “What the hell is going on? What is this place?”

“You don’t know?” So much in his voice: rage, sorrow, hurt.

“No. I don’t.”

Xavier lifted his eyes above her head. Gwen turned…and gasped so loudly she was sure Xavier’s illusion couldn’t have kept it masked.

The square sign hung above the door. A stylized
M
, backlit in eerie blue. The symbol Gwen had recognized before Big Bird. The logo she’d been trained to think of as her future, her life, and the wellspring of her people.

She was standing in the ultrasecret
Mendacia
manufacturing facility, known as the Plant.

In the name of all the stars in the sky, how had the Tedrans found it?

There’s more than one lie in that bottle
, Nora had said yesterday,
other than how it’s made.

“Come on,” Xavier murmured into the darkness. “You have an hour to learn the truth.”

He didn’t have to drag her this time. Morbid curiosity and a profound sense of dread propelled her forward.

The initial corridor branched off into a maze of gray-painted, faintly lit hallways. Like the building’s exterior, there were no signs inside. No
YOU ARE HERE
maps, no arrowed plaques directing them through the facility. Yet Xavier knew exactly where he was going.

He pulled up in a short, wide hall lined with doors spaced evenly apart. Each door had a small, rectangular window. The silence squeezed her in a giant fist. Everything smelled of disinfectant. A chill raked over her, and she hugged her arms to her chest, but not even a parka and electric blanket would do the job.

“In there.” Xavier pointed to the middle door on the left side. He was so pale now he almost glowed. “Look.”

She didn’t want to. She was dying to.

She crept forward until the chain between them pulled taut, then she rose on tiptoes to peer into the wire-crossed window.

Inside, a row of cherry-sized lights traced where the gunmetal gray walls met the ceiling. An Ofarian man stood inside with his back to the door, the silver
Mendacia
logo stitched just below the curve of his collar. When he shifted to one side, she saw that he was not alone.

A woman with long, stringy, white-streaked hair sat bound to an awful contraption. A metal semicircle wrapped around her waist, clamping her lower body against the far wall. Unyielding chains attached her ankles to the floor. More chains around her wrists pulled her torso forward over a metal table, immobilizing her chin on a padded rest.

Above the table, right in front of the woman’s face, hung a glass sphere the size of a basketball. Inside the sphere, spindly arms supported a tiny blue bowl.

The Ofarian said something to the bound woman and emphasized it with a sharp gesture.

The woman stared right into the sphere, the glass fogging with the bursts of her breath. Sweat started to stream down her temples and drip onto the table. In the chains, her hands curled into fists. Her face red and shaking, the woman started to cry. Gwen could not hear her, but she sensed it was the sound of indescribable pain and severe loss.

The air inside the sphere began to condense, transforming into a pale silver mist. It swirled, slowly at first, then faster and faster, churning into a tiny tornado directly above the blue bowl. Then it collapsed, compacting, its particles slamming together.

A single drop of luminescent silver liquid formed in midair, then dropped into the bowl.

The woman went boneless in her restraints. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her fists uncurled as unconsciousness claimed her.

All that for one drop. One drop that cost a fortune.

The Ofarian guard unstrapped her and roughly lifted her away from the contraption. Like a doll, he dropped her into a wheelchair.

As the guard finagled the wheelchair out into the hall, the poor, spent woman’s chin dropped to her chest. Gwen wanted to go to her, grab her arms, and shake her and ask why,
why
would any Ofarian agree to do this to themselves once they knew the price.

Then, as the wheelchair rolled by and she caught the distinct Secondary signature, it hit her.

That woman wasn’t Ofarian. She was Tedran.

FIFTEEN

Xavier hadn’t been inside the Plant in a year and a half
.

The monotonous, ashy walls stretched for him, tried to steal his energy, but they wouldn’t win. Not this time.

As the wheelchair carrying 075B squeaked past, Gwen’s shackled hands flew to her mouth. A long, low moan leaked from her throat. So she’d figured it out. She wasn’t as stupid or arrogant as Xavier had thought.

Two years ago Nora had appeared out of a cloud of glamour in his cell. She’d told him she’d been observing him, that he was the strongest Tedran she’d seen. That she’d chosen him for a hero’s task. It took her two months to convince him she was real, another month to prove a whole world existed outside the gray Plant walls, and three more months to coordinate his escape.

She needed an inside man, one who could help her free their people. One who wanted to make his captors suffer. Now here he was, in the moment he hadn’t known he’d been living for: showing Miss Ofarian Princess what her people were really capable of.

Gwen’s whole body heaved. The guard with the wheelchair spun to turn a corner. Another guard appeared wheeling 003AC toward the draining room. The last time Xavier had seen 003AC, the younger man had just barely gotten hair on his face. Now he looked good and used. The man in the chair might be only eighteen Earth years old, but his skin sagged off his face. Black half-moons pulled down the lower lids of his dull, lifeless eyes. His thin, frail shoulders curved with severe defeat and resignation.

Xavier used to look exactly like that.

The two Ofarians paused to briefly exchange idle talk. Just a normal day to them, punch in, punch out. The 49ers, the traffic on Highway 50…Once those things had been foreign words to Xavier. Still were, to an extent. He remembered lolling in those chairs, listening to the drone of the guards’ voices. Not caring about anything, not even living.

Gwen spun back to him, her gold hair as wild as the look in her glassy eyes. Xavier drew himself up to his full height. Challenged her.

003AC’s wheelchair headed for the room 075B had just left.

Though Xavier didn’t watch, he listened to the clank of the restraints as the guard looped them around the young man’s extremities. Xavier heard his faint protestations, then the whimpers, then nothing. Yes, the room was soundproof, but the sounds rang as loud as sirens in his memory.

“Enough,” Gwen said. “I understand.”

From just this little room? Xavier almost laughed. “Oh, no.” He backed away from her heat and scent. She disgusted and frightened him, but he’d show her everything Nora wanted him to, even if it destroyed him.

“No. You don’t know the half of it.” He thrust an arm over her head, pointing in the direction 075B had gone. “Walk.”

But when they reached a T intersection, he was the one who came to a halt. 075B had disappeared somewhere into the maze of corridors. Here the Plant branched off into various levels of hell. He’d learned all about hell after he’d gotten out. He’d learned an awful lot about an endless number of awful things. This place still topped the list.

Even though he resisted going forward, he looked into Gwen’s pale face and knew he had to. Not for her. Fuck no, not for her.
Because
of her. She would be the one to make all this go away, to erase hell and turn it into some version of heaven.

The corridor to the right loomed dark, save for the intermittent circles of white light falling from the wall sconces onto the floor. Yellow-and-black tape striped across the double door at the far end. Wall spray paint declared it:
CELL BLOCK 1
.

A jagged rock lodged in his throat. “Through there.”

She watched him too intently, too many questions hiding behind her lips. His skin itched under her scrutiny. The wonder and horror in her eyes pissed him off. And he hated Nora a little bit for making him come here again.

They stopped in front of the closed doors.

“What now?” she whispered.

He turned to wait for 003AC to come back from the draining room. After a few minutes, the wheelchair swerved around the corner. As the guard pushed 003AC through the security doors, Xavier followed, forcing Gwen with him.

Inside the cell block, the dim green lights overhead made his stomach churn and his head swim with their insistent buzz. Even Gwen looked horrible in that light.

The long rows of iron bars stretched seemingly into infinity. When he was younger, the end of the block had seemed a world away. Now he could run it in a few seconds. And a year and a half ago, he had.

Though he hated to touch her, he reached back and pulled Gwen to his side against the bars to 003AC’s cell. Gwen inched back. He shoved her nose into the iron, and she watched like she was supposed to. It was almost like when Adine had first shown him a horror movie and he’d covered his eyes and she’d laughed at him. That awful humiliation, knowing he’d been scared by something so fake.

This wasn’t fake. Not remotely. And Gwen had to see it without childish hands over her eyes.

Inside the cell, the guard tilted the wheelchair and 003AC slid from the cushioned seat. He collapsed in a shapeless pile of skin and bone on a mattress shoved in the corner. The guard kicked the chair around and left, yawning. The cell lock clicked behind him.

Gwen didn’t follow her kinsman. She remained locked on 003AC. The boy’s eyes opened a bit, showing nothing but white. His body flattened on the mattress and his back expanded and contracted with deep, even breaths.

“Will…” She cleared her throat. “Will he live?”

“If you call this living.”

Someone rustled, unseen, in a cell down toward the end. For a second he hoped he’d been heard, that his people knew he was coming for them. But that was impossible. Neither he nor Nora had made first contact yet; they’d been waiting to snag Gwen. Besides, Nora had apparently been sneaking into the Plant for decades—observing, planning, waiting—and never once in his life had he sensed a thing.

Gwen’s voice tightened. Snapped. “Will he be all right?”

“Eventually.” He swallowed, and it hurt. “In twelve hours or so, when he finally comes around, they’ll feed him. When his strength returns in a day or two, they’ll send him back to that room. And so it goes. On and on. Until it kills him.” When he turned to her, she was doing this thing with her throat—holding it tightly within her hands, as though choking herself.

“There’s more.”

She sucked in a breath. “How many of them are kept here?”

“Three hundred. Maybe more. That’s not what I meant, though.”

He tried to lead her to the end of the cell block, desperately needing to get out of there, but she paused before each cell. Most caged Tedrans had collapsed like 003AC. One, awake now, sat with his hands tucked into the hollow behind his knees. He stared at nothing, awaiting the appearance of a uniformed Ofarian.

Gwen’s hands had moved from her throat to the long zipper of her sweater, where she clutched it with white knuckles. “Why can’t they use their glamour to get out, the way you got us in?”