Liquid Lies (43 page)

The sight of this guy—Jonah, apparently—lit a fire under Gwen’s ass. The fear in her expression switched to loathing, and she started to struggle again. Jonah said something in Ofarian in her ear. The knife pricked her skin, drawing blood, and she went still. The fight burned strongly in her eyes, though. Good girl.

“Right about what?” she spit at her father.

“I told him you’d pull in Griffin,” Jonah sneered. “That Griffin’s pathetic love for you would obliterate any intelligence or Ofarian loyalty.”

Reed snuck a glance at Griffin, whose face had gone red with rage.

The Chairman held up a hand. “I had to know if we could trust the protector of the Translator—and head of my security force—to not let his emotions get in the way.” He slowly came forward, and he did not look happy about this scene at all. Not angry, just sad and disappointed. “I would not call it pathetic, but love is the reason why we rely on our marriage system. Love is too unpredictable. Marriage is deliberately based on advantage, not emotions.”

“You can’t just ignore emotions,” Gwen said.

The Chairman gestured to the hill. “And look how you’ve compromised Griffin and David, and all the others.”

“I’d do this again,” Griffin said, shifting his gun from Jonah to the Chairman, “knowing what I know now. Gwen is better than all of us combined.”

Reed searched Gwen’s face for a reaction, but she was focused solely on her dad.

Jonah started to wrangle her backward toward the van. He’d been hit in the leg during the firefight and limped. “I was wrong about one thing,” Jonah said to her. “I thought you’d go for the kill.” He used his chin to indicate the injured Ofarian soldiers still writhing on the ground. “You know, eye for an eye.”

“I’m not like you,” she snarled.

Jonah was trying to get Gwen into one of the SUVs, Reed realized. Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.

Reed inched to the right, improving his target angle on Jonah. “Stop. Right now.”

Jonah raised his eyebrows, his tanned skin wrinkling over his forehead. “Shoot me and the knife goes in.”

“Jonah, no!” The Chairman thrust out a hand.

“You won’t hurt me,” Gwen blurted. “I’m the only Translator you’ve got.”

“She’s right, you know,” Reed told Jonah. “I’m just one of the people here with a gun and they’re all on you. You’re outnumbered. Let her go or this ends badly for you.”

The Chairman reached for something in his pocket. Reed swiveled, barrel aimed at Gwen’s dad.

“I’m on Jonah,” Griffin said behind him.

Good, because Reed wanted the man who’d manipulate and sell out his own daughter.

The Chairman whipped out a phone. “I didn’t want to do this, Gwennie. I really, really didn’t.” He pressed a button. “Reinforcements.”

The Ofarian called David pivoted and ran a short distance up the hill, binoculars to his eyes. No headlights yet, but they’d come.

“So this was all a test?” Gwen’s voice had evened out into the deep, hard tone of someone seriously pissed off. She’d gotten her spark back, that defiance he’d witnessed the night he’d tied her up in the back of Nora’s van.
Hold on to that
, Reed silently ordered her.
Use it
.

“Yes,” Jonah said, sweeping a satisfied look over Griffin and his team. “To weed out the traitors.”

The Chairman moved closer to his daughter. Reed could see the emotional battle in her expression: disgust fought with love.

“The protest ends tonight, Gwen,” the Chairman said. “You will come back to the city with me. Be a part of the people you love.
Lead
them. If you do that, we’ll pardon the treason. Please. Please don’t make me lose a second daughter.”

The Chairman looked on the verge of tears, but Gwen was spitting mad. She struggled again. A stripe of blood wept from the cut by her ear and stained the neck of her sweater. Jonah clung to her, clearly vacillating between wanting to hurt her and appeasing his Chairman.

Through it all, Reed watched Gwen make her move. Her struggle masked the movement of her hand as it worked its way into her pocket. Man, she was brilliant. Courageous. What did she have in there? Gun? Knife?

“
Mendacia
is wrong.” She pulled hard against Jonah’s clutch. Whatever she had in that pocket was now in her hand; Reed could see the bulge of her fist through the cream-colored knit. “Everything about it is wrong. Don’t you have any sense of guilt? That truck is filled with people, not product.”

The Chairman’s face frosted over. “They’re paying for their ancestors’ atrocities.”

“You believe in lies!” she shouted.

If there had been an Ofarian on that road who hadn’t already been staring at the Chairman and his daughter, they did so now.

Gwen looked into the upturned faces of the soldiers. Her voice carried easily, surely. “We’ve all believed the lies. Our ancestors saw in the Tedrans the same thing you see now: profit. Even on Tedra we used them. No, we were not their slaves. No, we did not revolt and instigate the war. It’s always been the other way around. Our people rewrote history to satisfy themselves.”

No one moved. Not the Chairman, not Jonah.
Now
, Reed wanted to shout to Gwen.
Get away while he’s distracted
. Reed would shoot Jonah if he knew that was what she wanted, but this was her op and she clearly had a plan.

She gazed into the eyes of the guards. The injured men and women exchanged questioning glances and looked up at the Chairman. They wondered if his own daughter spoke the truth. She’d planted the seed of doubt and Reed thought it was a clever strategy.

“Shut up,” Jonah said, regaining his focus and pulling her back toward the van.

But her dad edged closer, eyes narrowed. “Why should we believe you? Why should we believe what you say over what’s been passed down through generations? What gives you the right to question what can’t be proved?”

“There’s a woman in that truck who remembers. She was on Tedra when it all happened. She was part of the immigration here. She knows.”

Jonah snorted. The Chairman went eerily still. Several Ofarian soldiers craned their necks toward the semi.

“That woman kidnapped me,” Gwen said. She was so strong. So lovely. “She wanted me to destroy you and the Board to bring about change. But I believe in our ability to change ourselves. No more death. No more lies.”

“Our people have built their lives around
Mendacia
,” the Chairman said. “You can’t just rip it away from them.”

“Wrong. Our people have built their lives around what makes us different from Primaries. We want to be special. We want to be proud of our culture and uphold its secrecy. We can do that without
Mendacia
.”

“No, Gwen. It’s the cornerstone of our existence.”

“You and the Board have used our fear of the Primary world to lasso us into your control. You’ve allowed so few Ofarians to work in the Primary world, and those that do still answer to the Company. You’ve arranged it so the Ofarian teachers and bankers and construction workers are all dependent on the success of
Mendacia.
Only when the Company did well, did they do well, too. And you think that because of this, we will throw our conscience into the gutter to maintain the status quo. But do you know what
I
think? I think that the Board has kept the secret behind
Mendacia
for so long because you knew that if the Ofarians ever found out, they’d turn on you. End it all.”

“No. They’d turn the other cheek and hold out their hands for their paycheck.”

She gasped. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

The Chairman lifted his chin and Reed saw where Gwen had learned that little gesture.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s test that theory.”

Jonah chuckled and glanced down the road. “That’s the best part of your little speech. They’ll never find out.”

Gwen smiled. Reed held his breath.

“That’s what you think.” She lifted her foot and kicked back,
hard
, into Jonah’s injured leg. Jonah howled, the knife tumbling from his hand and clattering to the asphalt. He reached for the wound, his body buckling.

“Bitch!” Jonah spit.

Gwen wheeled away, putting space between her and the two Board members.

Reed charged into the opening, propelled by intense pride. He leaped onto Jonah, knocking him backward, one boot pressing Jonah’s arm into the ground. The other foot kicked the knife under the van with such force it skittered out on the other side. He aimed his gun right at Jonah’s heart.

“Don’t move, Chairman,” Griffin said.

Reed looked over his shoulder to see Griffin holding Gwen’s father at point-blank range. But the Chairman’s defeated, murderous eyes clung to Reed.

“I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” Reed said to the Chairman. “I’m Gwen’s.”

The Chairman started to shake with fury. “You’re Gwen’s what?”

Reed grinned. “I’m just hers.”

And there it is
, said Reed’s ice blue eyes.
It’s yours to do with
as you please, even if it destroys me.

He actually believed, Gwen realized, that she’d destroy him on her way to getting what she wanted. That was her own fault, for approaching him in the lake house the way she had.

Wrenching her focus from Reed, she closed in on the Chairman. She had to view him as that right now, because to think of him as her father, as the man who’d taught her how to hit baseballs in the park and played Barbies with her without protest, she wouldn’t get anywhere.

Sometime between their confrontation in the manor and now, he’d dosed himself with
Mendacia
. The forty-something man she barely knew watched her with fearful anticipation. She pulled from her pocket the most powerful weapon on that battlefield: the cell phone Griffin had given her on top of the hill.

Raising the phone to the Chairman’s eye level, she pushed
on
. The photo that came up, bright and disgusting, made him gasp.

She looked over her shoulder at Griffin, who nodded solemnly. The morning before the Board meeting, she’d secretly left the photos—the ones he’d denied in the diner—on his bed, in a place he couldn’t ignore, hoping for his compassion to kick in. And it had. He’d come through for her spectacularly.

“Photos inside the Plant,” she said. Thumbing through the barrage of awful images, she lowered the phone and slowly walked back and forth in front of the Ofarian soldiers. “Imprisoned Tedrans. Drained of their powers. Dying before their time. Forced to procreate to increase inventory.”

Xavier leaned heavily against the giant wheel of the semi. His ashen face was half buried in the crook of his elbow. When her gaze met his tortured eyes, he closed his so tightly his eyelashes disappeared.

Many Ofarians leaned closer to the ghastly images. Most grimaced. All murmured in shock.

“How did you…” the Chairman began, crimson staining through his glamour. He couldn’t even finish. Him, the man who could bullshit his way out of a Colombian prison.

Gwen moved to stand between him and Jonah. She couldn’t tell if the Chairman’s
Mendacia
spell was actually fading, or if his true, aging self was pushing through in his time of exposure. Either way, she glimpsed his real face, wrinkled and spotted. Desperate. Hurt. Livid. His sagging, reddened eyes glared like a dragon’s, but she wasn’t remotely afraid of his fire. Two weeks ago, maybe. But not now. Not ever again.

“I’m sending these to every Ofarian,” she told him.

“No,” he breathed. “For us. For your people. Don’t.”

“They deserve to know.”

Jonah’s hand, the one not trapped by Reed’s boot, clawed for Gwen’s shin. Reed flexed his thighs, crouched down, and pressed the barrel of his gun to the Vice Chairman’s forehead.

“Do what you have to do, Gwen,” Reed said.

Her finger hovered over the phone’s
send
button. She wanted the Chairman to watch her every movement.

He stretched out a hand, his voice trembling. “Think about what you’re doing, Gwennie. What it will mean to all of us. To everyone who depends on
Mendacia
.”

“I have.” She met his pleading eyes dead on. “And the difference between you and me is that I have deep enough faith in my people that we will be able to grow and prosper without it. I believe we will be able to find our individual ways in the Primary world and not be so dependent on one such thing as this. I believe in the future, not the past.”

She couldn’t have made this move any earlier, though her trigger finger had itched. If she’d blasted the Ofarians with the images the second Griffin had handed her the phone, the guards in the caravan would have received them, turned the vehicles around, and disappeared with the Tedrans and the product. Waiting had killed her, but it had paid off.

She pressed
send
.

The Chairman crumpled forward, hands braced on his knees.

She liked to think that she could feel the weight of that message launch from the phone. She liked to think she saw its power rise from the constraints of circuits and plastic, fly over her head, and search out each and every one of her people. The ultimate truth bearer.

Various ringtones chimed throughout the Ofarian crowd huddled at her feet. Some soldiers reached into their vests to get another look at the proof she offered. Some just let their phones sit, the evidence too awful to see more than once.

And she wasn’t done yet.

Her thumbs danced across the phone’s keypad. “Now I’m telling all our clients the Company has folded and
Mendacia
production has been shut down.”

The Chairman exploded back to life. “No!” He lunged.

Reed wheeled off Jonah, charging to intercept the Chairman’s attack. Jonah took full advantage, scrambling to his feet and diving for Gwen’s arm holding the phone.

The same enemy with the same purpose. Two assaults. Two angles.

Two gunshots.

She screamed, the surrounding hills throwing back the sound in screeching echo.

Jonah fell smack to the pavement, face first. A flower of blood bloomed aggressively on his back.