Secret Worlds (563 page)

He covers his face with his hands and rocks, a sure sign of his terror.

I get up and stare out the window, watch the Reds rampage in the violet-streaked sky. “Why are your Reds flying all over the place? They normally stay in the Fireseed field, in their perches.”

Thorn slowly rises to a sitting position and props himself up with his hands. “Reds. No more listen to me.”

“Why not?”

He shakes his head, clearly as baffled as me.

“What should we do then?”

“Clean my head, Rube.”

I frown at him. “What on earth do you mean by that? Wash your face?” He only repeats the request. We need a trip to Dr. Varik’s whether or not Thorn approves. “I’m going to let you sleep while I think about what to do.”

“Stay near,” he murmurs, his eyes still wide. “Dream of blue ships. Take me away.”

My heart stops with a thud. “Blue ships?” Holy effing fire! Like the ones in my own sickbed dreams? I scramble out of the room, and crash straight into Armonk. “Did someone come here and mess with my brother when we were in Vegas? Someone in a pearl blue ship?”

“No,” says Armonk, “I’ve kept my eye on him the whole t—”

“But you may want to see what Jan has in his desk drawer,” Blane cuts in as he marches up behind Armonk.

We step over the mess on Jan’s floor: socks stiff with dried sweat, Nevada’s pistol manual, spent bullets and two crusty sea apples in a bowl. Inside Jan’s pants drawer is a wad of cash, as thick as a Fireseed stalk. Blane counts it out, while Armonk stands lookout in the hall.

“Frying hell! This is close to 2,000 Dominions,” Blane exclaims. He has a hard time gripping the cash in one hand there’s so much of it.

I don’t bother to ask what Blane was doing snooping around in his bureau drawer. In fact, I start to unearth pants, shirts, Jan’s lone jacket stinking of gun metal, and old papers, crumpled and refolded to shreds. Nothing notable, though, until my eyes fix on a familiar image in his sock drawer: a card with the pearly globe logo. “Hold on, I know that.”

“What, Ruby?” Blane leans over me, scanning the card.

I shout, “This logo was on the Stream implants that George put in us. But there’s no address on this card, no nothing.”

Armonk peers out of the window. “Ask the culprit, Jan’s coming in now.” Reaching for his bow, Armonk slips behind a dresser. He nods to Blane, who stuffs the bills in his pants pocket and ducks behind Jan’s door. Are they really going to make
me
deal with him?

The clatter of Jan’s boots and the sight of his acerbic face glowering at me as he stomps in make my insides curdle. “What are you doing in my room?” he accuses. Glancing around, he notices that his things are strewn even farther afield than he tossed them, because he says, “What’d you do with my stuff? I asked you a question, Cult Girl.”

“What did you do to my brother?” I growl, and hold up the business card. “And where did you get this?”

Without answering, he stalks toward his drawer and yanks it open, rifles through the pants. “You stole my cash!” He grabs me with his sinewy arms, and squeezes hard as he shakes me. “Where’s my frying money, witch?”

Armonk slinks up behind him and puts an arrow to his neck. “Let her go,” he warns. “Or I’ll put this point through the back of your throat.”

“Oh, you think?” Jan sneers, not moving. “What if I don’t feel like it?” His hand inches steadily to his hip. Jan ducks as the arrow flies into the air and thwacks into the wall. Whirling around, Jan lifts the gun he just grabbed to Armonk’s face.

“No!” I crouch and then dive into the hall, as Blane leaps from behind the door and tackles Jan. They plunge down together as a gunshot explodes, piercing my eardrums. Impossibly loud, its bullet blasts a ragged hole in the floor near the window. The pistol slides toward me and I seize it, stuffing it inside my sock. I don’t want to use it, ever. Just need to keep it from Jan.

Blane and Jan continue to wrestle. Blane is burly, but Jan is wiry and fast, with legs that wind around Blane in and chop him with karate jabs. They’re both grunting and cursing. Meanwhile, Armonk has gotten back to his feet. He lets loose an arrow, which sinks into Jan’s arm. Jan yelps, his other arm yanking the arrow out and clutching at the wound.

Blane gains the upper hand at last. “Ruby, get me something to tie him with!”

Running into my room, I hide the gun under my mattress and Bea and I return with two dress belts. Blane winds one securely around Jan’s wrists and I bind the other around his ankles for good measure. We drag him to a chair by his bed and prop him there. Bea uses another piece of fabric as a tourniquet for his bleeding wound.

With Armonk’s arrow leveled steadily at Jan’s forehead, we finally get him talking. “They came one day and asked me for Thorn. I said hell no. I asked why they wanted him.”

“Who? Why?” I press.

“They said for some test, that’s all. I said I couldn’t just fork the kid over, that Armonk was playing chaperone with him.” Jan snickers as he eyes Armonk. Then he glares at the floor.

Blane prods him hard in the ribs. “Go on.”

“They told me they had money. Money talks.” Jan’s snort turns into a long, acidic laugh.

How dare he! I slap him in the face. “So if money talks, what does it say? Get on with it.”

He purses his lips as if he’s poised to spit in my face, but since Armonk’s arrow is still poking into his forehead and Blane is still hovering over him, Jan goes on, begrudgingly. “I told them they’d have to come here at night. They said to leave the bedroom window open.” He stops. “Don’t know what they did with the kid. They said they’d keep him sleeping. That they only needed to take a blood sample or some crap.”

I get up in Jan’s face, so close I smell his vinegary breath. “Who are they, and where do they live?”

He averts his face, as if he can’t stand my breath either, or my presence so close, pressuring him. It feels dangerously good to have the upper hand with this bully, and I can see how someone could easily get carried away with that feeling. I quash my urge to give him another hard slap just because I can. “Who’s
they
and where do they live?” I ask again.

“I don’t frying know, doesn’t it say on the card?”

“No.”

“Nevada knows. She was talking to that lady, Stazzi.”

“Stazzi? The Axiom judge?”

“That’s who gave me the card, Cult Girl.”

My stomach drops as I remember Jan talking to that pilot one day, to the transfer of what I thought was money. I’d assumed the pilot was a guy but he, or she, was wearing a helmet. So, that was Stazzi under the helmet? Did she come back again? I guess so! I gape at Bea, who’s cowering in the door, then at Blane, who’s staring back at me. Finally, I look over at Armonk.

“What does Nevada have to do with it?” Armonk asks Jan.

“She took half the money, fool.”

“I don’t believe you.” Armonk prods the arrow into Jan so sharply it puckers his skin.

“I know you hate to think of your favorite teacher that way,” Jan chides. “But the woman’s out for the money. She’s broke, greedy and weak.” Jan plays a confidence game, but sweat is trickling down either side of his neck.

My mind fixes on Nevada’s strange behavior at Dr. Varik’s and how she never told Armonk the doctor had come to Skull’s Wrath. I remember how she wasn’t so welcoming at first, and how she only had a feeble hold over Blane and Jan. She was awfully excited when Axiom was describing the prize money too. Nothing in those memories provides a shred of comfort.

“Let’s go talk to her then,” Armonk says quietly, fiercely.

“Talk to who?” Vesper appears in the doorway like some forgotten apparition. “What the hell, Jan?” Quicker than a flash sandstorm, Blane and Armonk bind her hands as well.

“Who the hell do you think you are, Peg Leg?” she hisses at Armonk.

“Where’s Nevada?” he asks, ignoring the slight.

“Out spending money no doubt.” Vesper sniggers. “She got a killing from giving those people in the pearly blue ship access to your freaky brother. Hell, she got so much she probably blew this dump and moved up north to Land Dominion. I mean, who’d stay down here if they had the scratch, right Jan?” Vesper and Jan launch into a laughing fit and it’s all I can do to keep my clenched fists by my side.

We dash down to Nevada’s study, her private sanctum, which we now have ample reason to breach. This breaking in is all so new, and forbidden. I remember how Nevada gently washed my back after Stiles attacked me. I remember her coaxing me to eat.

God only knows who the villains and heroes are anymore.

All I know is that I need my brother to get well and I need answers. In her desk we find Stazzi’s address on the letterhead of a note. It’s a company called NanoPearl, and it’s listed as Pacific Ocean 3, in Vegas-by-the-Sea. Pacific Ocean? How is that possible? Is it underwater? Stazzi’s scribbled a note for Nevada on it:
Come see me and we’ll talk business.

Business, huh.

Nevada’s desk looks rifled through—uprooted papers, and files in a mess. I do see a wad of cash stuck inside the frame of a holo calendar. I count it out—a mere 200 Dominions—not an impressive cache if it’s payoff money.

Thorn has padded down. He’s mumbling, clutching his head. “Clean me out. Please, Rube.” My own head erupts with harsh, nonsensical sound when he comes close. This doesn’t seem like the stromanet or the Fireseed, whose voices are always so clear, so harmonious. What then?

A handful of the Reds have managed to get into the compound and they’re flying wildly, bouncing off the rafters, yeeping and careening near us. Unlike all of the other times I’ve seen Thorn with them, they pay no attention to him whatsoever. This fills me with a nameless dread.

“Let’s take Thorn to Dr. Varik’s now,” I whisper to Armonk.

“I may be able to help,” Blane says. “My father was a doctor.”

“Sure he was.” Armonk scoffs.

I’m tired of the tension between them, and it makes me feel guilty as if I encouraged it somehow. “I believe Blane,” I say quietly. “Besides, we need all hands on board.”

Armonk nods, his lips fixed in a grim line. He may not trust Blane, but he trusts me.

Radius enters the office with Bea, and we quickly fill them in on our plans.

“Can you hang tight and keep watch over Jan and Vesper?” Blane levels his gaze on Radius, no doubt to detect any wavering of his friend’s loyalty.

Radius puts an arm around Bea. “Sure, just keep us posted.

“Hope you feel better fast, little man,” Bea says to Thorn.

I jog up to third tier to fill my latchbag with elixirs and tools we may need on the road. On my way down Vesper yells from Jan’s room, where she’s bound to a wall pipe, “That doctor of yours sold out too, you know.” Nevada has him twisted around her fingers.” Vesper cackles. “You’re all so damn clueless. Whenever you were away, Nevada had the doctor over for soirees.” She laughs hard and Jan joins in.

I want to tell her that I’m shocked she even knows the word soiree but it’s so not worth it.

Even before we land, Thorn is crying—silent tears streaming down his face. He’s my weathervane so I know that something’s horribly wrong. I feel it too, in the pit of my stomach, in the discordant howls in my head, that I know Thorn also hears.

We scramble out of the glider and hurry under the awning toward the house. The front door is cocked open.

“Dr. Varik never leaves the door this way,” Armonk says, “even when he’s in the yard, loading the glider for a house call.”

“Or when he’s picking his medicinal crops,” I add. As generous a doctor as he is, he’s also guarded about thieves.

We stand motionless. None of us have the nerve to go in. It’s like the night I escaped. Once I walked toward that pyre with Stiles and later that night to The Greening I sensed that I could never return to innocence. But we’re bound by the need to help Thorn, and by allegiance to this doctor who took the time to explain what we’ve become.

Stepping over the threshold, I gasp. We’re faced with chaos. Thorn lets out a rare cry. Dr. Varik’s furniture’s been upended in some sort of raid, or fight. His prized antique medical books have been tossed carelessly on the floor with covers splayed. Blane sets the chairs upright, I dust off books and return them to the shelves.

Armonk calls out, “Dr. Varik? Are you here? What’s going on?”

Thorn ventures into the doctor’s adjoining office. He returns, tugging at my arm, new tears blotting his eyes. In there, someone has thrown Dr. Varik’s holo files across the table, their diamond and octagonal jewel shapes spilled for the poaching. Whoever was here didn’t want these files, though who knows how many others are missing. His monitor’s still on, and when Armonk presses return, it blinks alive, onto a medical report.

I read it out loud. “Subjects display chimeric aspects upon testing. The variety of symptoms and transgenic response is stunning. Subjects have less need for food and more for photosynthesis. Each displays weight loss and heightened energy, with the blood thinning and mixing with sap. Unlike my side effect of the plants throwing off new roots, subjects Ruby and Thorn are each self-contained in one plant chimera, having no root system.”

“Chimera,” Blane says as he clenches and unclenches his jaw. “A genetic splicing of two very different beings.” His brows shoot up as he turns toward me. “That’s you!” he exclaims. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“I … I guess I was scared to.”

A glint of satisfaction plays on Armonk’s face, no doubt because unlike Blane, I trusted Armonk with my secret the whole time.

Armonk continues reading where I left off. “Each form of mutation or contamination, if you will, foments a different variety of chimera. This is an improvement on my transgenesis, as in my case, the need to cut off constant new growths has been a source of pain and embarrassment, and has rendered my skin a woody texture that must be treated with special—”

“So the doctor’s part Fireseed too?” Blane murmurs. “This just gets more bizarre.”

“I knew it,” I blurt. “I saw those nubs.”

“We need to find him,” Armonk interrupts. “We’ll talk about the details later.”

“You’re right.” I scan the room for a clue to the doctor’s whereabouts.