Secret Worlds (454 page)

Thomas frowned his disagreement with a slight shake of his head. Unlike Alex, who had to use mnemonic devices to keep track of information, Thomas could flip through memories like file folders. “Gracey had a daughter and a son. The daughter’s just a mid-level. Like all girls.” His voice was disappointed.

Natural women and men had a roughly twenty-five percent chance of parenting a powered child. Add in a powered father, and the rate rose to fifty-fifty, but the children were always mid-level strength or lower. Powered women always produced Spark children. However, mid-level powered woman had an almost thirty percent chance of producing the coveted highly powered Spark, although those children were always male; with a highly-powered father, the rate rose to almost fifty percent.

The official story said every female born with power was naturally limited to mid-level or lower. Thus far, the records supported the story. At some point, it was widely believed, a hiccup in nature would produce highly powered girls. Since female Sparks bred true, they would produce only high-powered children. If one of these theoretical females produced children with a high-powered male, the possibilities for their children, and for the future of Sparks, were limitless.

There were communities—Neo-barb run—that patched together hydroelectric power or made do with windmills built from scavenged materials. But the Council had invested in humans they could control since the beginning. Their obsession with finding any such girls had been growing over the last half-century, a response to fear of hypothetical children strong enough to resist the growing restraints on Sparks. If they lost control, they lost power—literally and figuratively.

Thomas, of course, was obsessed for the same reason. The girls were the key to the long-range goals of Fort Nevada’s move toward revolution. He saw the children born of such high-powered women as the future of free Sparks.

He believed the Council was spiriting away girls as they were found to be highly powered, before even their parents were fully aware of the magnitude of their difference. They hadn’t been able to discover to where or by whom yet—the occurrences were too unpredictable. Now they’d found one that had escaped that fate.

“He had another daughter. He faked her death. He hid her away, which may explain his varied interests.” Alex took a breath. “After his death, as soon as she was old enough, she left the city. She’s been living on the edge of tribal lands and working as a black market Spark. That’s how we found her. We heard rumors and put ourselves on her schedule so we could bring her in.” His voice turned mocking. “Can’t have any Sparks not pulling their weight for the good of the Council, now can we?” He shook his head. “Imagine my surprise when we pulled up and she had a corona around her like the sun at full eclipse. Like I said, it hurt to look at her.

“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. Emotion tightened his throat, and he swallowed to clear it. It had been beautiful, but still. Clearly, Thomas’s obsession had wormed into his psyche and latched onto Lena. He crossed his arms and continued. “And it was only the beginning.”

Thomas was still now, utterly focused on his friend. Alex recognized the excitement bubbling beneath the surface. But that surface? Calm.

“One of the disappeared girls,” Thomas said. “How old?”

“Twenty-four. Young enough, and old enough. Tiny thing. Big green eyes. Coated in freckles. Not pretty, exactly, not that it matters, but stunning in her own way.” He frowned. What did that have to do with anything? He barked a laugh as he focused on what mattered—the personality they’d have to work around to get her to join them. Just because he admired her ballsiness didn’t mean he couldn’t recognize that her strength would make things harder. “She’s a tough little pain in the ass.”

Thomas took a deep breath. “Please tell me you’ve brought her here?”

He shook his head. “She got away—”

“Dammit, Alex! This is important!” His gloved hands shot up to frame his head in anger and disbelief.

“I damn well know how important it is! She took us out. Took. Us. Out.” Alex made sure he had Thomas’s attention. “She can do shit nobody else can do. Not me. Not you.” He took a deep breath and released it in a noisy gust of frustration. “She had some kind of early warning system. Probably Dust. One minute, we were in the middle of a conversation, our guys scheduled to start moving in, and the next, she
knew.
Who we were, why we were there.” He shook his head.

What came next had been terrifying. Once he’d recovered, he’d felt such a euphoric rush at having found her that he’d had to tamp it down and twist it into rage. “I didn’t even have enough time to react. She just—our lungs stopped working. Our muscles contracted. It was agony. And she had enough control to put us on a fucking timer.”

They had hoped to find a Spark evolved to a dangerous, exquisite extreme. They’d found her, and that presented a danger all its own.

Alex ran his hands through his hair. “She took us out long enough to get out through her escape tunnel. Dust-made. Dust-protected. I found the exit in the side of an arroyo before we cleared out. The damn thing was a good three hundred feet long.” He shook his head again. “She made it to the tribe. I couldn’t do anything at that point.”

“You know where she is?”

Alex nodded.

“Then we’ll go get her. Tonight.”

Alex closed his eyes for a moment.
Shit
. He’d figured Thomas’s reaction would be strong. But this was on the extreme end.

“No, Thom.”

“Yes! She cannot get away. She belongs with us.”

“We’re not ready to go to war. And that’s what it would be. We have to do this the way we do things. We have to be smart.” Alex stared down into Thomas’s pale eyes, holding onto his calm. One of them had to.

Thomas took two quick steps to stand inches from Alex. “We cannot allow her to disappear. She is—she’s our Eve.”

“I know. And I’m working on it.” Alex grimaced. “My partner knows he’s onto something big. And as soon as the Council gets wind of this girl, they will scramble everything to ensure she is taken into custody.”

“Then you get to her first, Alex. Because if they get to her first and they can’t figure out how to harness her, they will kill her. And either way, they win. You get to her first. You bring her home to us. I don’t care what you have to do.”

Alex took a long breath. “Decades of work,” he reminded his friend. “Decades. Of
my
work. And we are so close. Zone Three is primed. I’m not willing to undo that for a girl you didn’t know existed five minutes ago.”

He wasn’t. Was he?

“I knew she should exist. And now that I know she’s real, we will do whatever we have to do to bring her home.”

Arguing would be pointless. Thomas had anticipated this moment for too long. Alex nodded, his mind working angles.

Like this reaction wasn’t exactly what you wanted: an excuse to do whatever it takes to bring in the perfect Spark. The perfect weapon.

“We can have both. I can make it happen.”

“Then do it.” Thomas stepped away, raised his arms to resume his workout. “But remember, she’s our priority now. Once we have her, we have the future.”

Lena sat cross-legged on the hard-packed earth floor of the medicine woman’s home. Soft, bright wool pooled before her knees as she worked the yarn and knitting needles above her lap. For the first hours after the agents had driven her away, she’d paced restlessly between the small bluff rising above the arroyos and Santo Domingo to the east, watching agents move in and out of her home.

Finally Gloria, the Kewa woman closest to Lena, had tired of Lena’s temper and sharply told Lena to wait at Gloria’s adobe house. As the afternoon melted into evening, a trio of young women appeared at Gloria’s door. They had gone to Lena’s home to retrieve clothing for her, as well as her knitting and needles.

Her mind worked as her fingers threw the yarn and moved the needles at a furious pace, everything soothing and meditative about the activity gone. She had turned her focus down to her hands, but instead of yarn and needles she saw Reyes and Lucas standing in her doorway and agents darting in and out like wasps. Could she reclaim her home?

It’s done. It’s done. No going back.

The rage built. It beat in tandem with the violence of her feedback headache. She needed to ground, but she couldn’t trust the agents were truly gone. Instead, she knitted.

What about Danny? If they’d made the appointment through him, would they arrest him now? Had another Gracey man been put in danger because of her? The memory of the night the men had come to tell her mother that her father’s body had been found, and the devastated, blaming eyes of her sister, rose up like dark water. She fled from it, as she always did, blinking away from her thoughts before the memory could suck her back down into the drowning depths of grief.

Her head jerked up. The light inside the little house had dimmed with evening, and Gloria entered through the front, a basket of eggs in one hand and an earthen jug in the other. She caught Lena’s attention.

“Light the lamp,” she said. “My hands are full of your dinner. Then we’ll talk.”

At home, Lena would simply spark it, but she couldn’t spark anything until she’d grounded. She rose to use tongs to pull an ember from the little round-bellied stove and lit the wick of the fat lamp on the table in the middle of the room. When she was done, she returned the ember to the stove.

“Put water on to boil. And heat the comal,” Gloria told her, referring to the large flat frying pan. She dipped out blue cornmeal and mesquite flour and mixed it in a chipped bowl. While she dropped spoonfuls of batter onto the hot comal and used her strong fingers to break apart pinon nuts and scatter them over the cakes, Lena set the table.

In moments, Gloria had flipped the pancakes onto the waiting plates and they were sitting together, a covered bowl of honey on the table between them. The crunch of the bits of toasted pine nuts and the distinctive tangy sweet flavor of the mesquite flour improved Lena’s mood.

Of course, her bliss might be related to her terrible sweet tooth. She pinched the last bite of the delicious cakes between her fingers, swirled it in honey, and shoved it into her mouth. She licked her fingers.

Plenty of mesquite flour and honey in storage up at the house. I should barter for more baking powder and cornmeal.

The realization that she didn’t have plenty of anything anymore hit like a slap in the face. How could she plan her cooking? It wasn’t even safe to return home. The delicious dinner settled like a hard ball in her stomach.

Gloria spoke to her in English now, the words coming in the odd, jerking cadence of a native speaker of Keresan. “It is hard to think of making a choice now, but you have to decide whether you are staying or going.”

Lena swallowed. “Am I allowed to stay here?”

Gloria made a small shrug. “It’s not for me to decide. Before you ask, you should think about what you ask of us.”

Lena stared at her. “I’m a hard worker. I would never be a burden, and I can help—”

Gloria shook her head. “It isn’t food and shelter that will cost us. It will be defending our friend from those who return for her.”

Lena’s shoulders slumped again, and her gaze returned to her empty plate with the bits of cake and nuts sticking in honey.

“They will return for you, Lena. You shine as bright as the Sun, and they want your light. They would do anything to possess it. They will come.”

Lena jumped at the faint knock at Gloria’s door. At a Keresan word from Gloria, a boy of about twelve entered from the deep of night. Lena recognized the Keresan words for
one man
, “ishk hachtzeh.” Reyes? Back again already? Was she already bringing unwanted guests to the Kewa? Gloria and the boy spoke for a moment before she turned to Lena.

“There is a man who says he is a friend come to warn you of danger. He says it’s important that he speak with you.”

Lena waited. One didn’t just get up and go when Gloria was speaking. Gloria held her gaze for a moment. When the woman spoke again, she spoke quietly, like always.

“You have to make a decision soon.”

“I know,” she said. “And I know I should go away somewhere. But this is my home. It’s all I know.”

“Fear of the unknown is a reason to go, not stay.” Gloria’s voice had taken on a chiding tone. “If you stay, it should be because you love a place, not because you’re afraid to move on.” She slid her hand along the tabletop. “If you’re going to stay because you’re afraid, then you might as well go live with them in their city. Everyone there stays because they are afraid.”

“I won’t go back to the city. Life isn’t worth living under their rules. I’d rather die.”

“So. You would die for freedom. What would you live for?”

Lena stared at Gloria. She could feel her brow furrowing. “I don’t—for the same thing?”

“No. You said you would die to be free. If you are given a choice, if you must choose between freedom in death and the life they offer, what would make you choose to live? Figure that out, and you will know what is really at stake. You will know why you must return.”

Lena’s brows rose almost to her hairline. She wouldn’t return to the city. She opened her mouth to say so, but it was too late. Gloria pursed her lips in the direction of the door.

She rose to her feet as Gloria nodded at the boy. Lena followed him out, giving herself a moment to allow her eyes to adjust to the dark. The boy waited for her in the middle of the narrow road. When she moved forward, he trotted off into the night. She quickened her steps to keep up, arms going around her own body to ward against the cold. When they turned onto the Pueblo’s main road, she could see the twin beams of a car’s lights, the silhouettes of armed Kewa warriors to either side. She shook her head at the waste of energy.

It wasn’t the Volt. Not Reyes. She hissed silently at the quick flit of disappointment through her belly before the man behind the wheel leaned out.

“Ace!” She sped up, jogging the final distance to the car. He unfolded himself from the front seat, relief spreading across his face with his smile.