A Rumor of Real Irish Tea (Annals of Altair Book 2)

by Kate Stradling

  Or maybe she was trying to remember whether she’d left the iron on in her dorm room. Either way, Emily only caught the fleeting emotion by studying the woman’s face in the rearview mirror.

  Three weeks of blank walls in a confinement cell had taught her to appreciate her surroundings more.

  When they finally pulled onto the airport tarmac, a small private jet waited, complete with the Prometheus Institute’s crest emblazoned on its tail. General Stone’s sedan pulled in ahead of them, and he exited the vehicle. The airplane staff member who met him saluted. The younger man was not wearing a military uniform. Emily frowned at the show of respect.

  “Here we are,” Maggie said as she put the van into park. “Mind you behave yourselves while you’re gone, children.”

  “Oh, we will, I’m sure,” said Ben, much to her amusement. He exited first and crossed around to the back to retrieve his bag. Alyson and Quincy went next, followed by Emily and Oliver. Airport attendants rolled a cart over to assist with the luggage.

  “I need to use the bathroom,” Oliver said loudly.

  “Hold it until we’re in the air,” Ben advised him. “General Stone’s not the sort of man you ask to wait for you.” He strolled away to follow the general up the stairs into the aircraft.

  “Can you hold it?” Emily asked Oliver, determined to speak up for him if he couldn’t.

  He shot her a disgusted glance. “Of course I can. I’m not some diaper-clad two-year-old.”

  “Well excuse me for asking,” she said.

  Alyson glanced sympathetically her way as she followed Quincy toward the stairs. Handlers were routinely treated like dirt, that look said, so get used to it. Emily, who knew that much at least, lifted her chin in defiance.

  “What are you getting all uppity about?” Oliver scornfully asked. “Come on, or you’re going to make the rest of us late. And General Stone’s not the sort of man you ask to wait for you.” He favored her with a snotty little smirk.

  Emily ruffled his hair as she strolled past him. “Come on yourself.”

  “Hey!” he cried in outrage.

  They had a jostling race up the stairs, with Oliver trying to wedge past her and failing. When they stumbled into the cabin, half-laughing and half-annoyed with each another, they realized that General Stone had seated himself in the very first row and was staring directly at them.

  “Sorry,” Emily murmured, straightening.

  “You should be,” said Oliver, and he slipped past her up the aisle.

  It took every ounce of her self-discipline not to chase after him and thump him on the head. With the general’s steady gaze upon her, though, she maintained her composure and walked between the rows to join Oliver. The interior was identical to the first Prometheus jet she had ridden. Were they one and the same, or did the Institute have a whole fleet?

  Oliver settled at one of the tables on the right, halfway back in the main cabin. Quincy and her handler were on the left, two tables closer to the exit. Ben slouched in the back corner, presumably to sulk.

  They were airborne in no time at all. No sooner did the seatbelt light click off than Oliver unlatched his restraint and bolted for the lavatory at the back of the plane.

  Alyson hissed from two seats up. “Aren’t you going with him?”

  Emily wanted to ask what sort of damage a ten-year-old could perpetrate between an airplane lavatory and his seat, but then she decided that she didn’t want an answer to that question. Alyson and all her experience at Prom-F could probably provide any number of possibilities.

  Accordingly, Emily unlatched her own safety belt and trudged to the back of the plane. She sat in the aisle seat directly across from Ben, who looked up inquisitively.

  “Apparently I need to follow Oliver to a lavatory twenty feet down the aisle,” Emily said dryly. “I’d hate to be a negligent handler.”

  “There are worse things to be,” Ben said with well-controlled bitterness.

  She suppressed a laugh. “You don’t seem excited about this trip. Are you worried that work will pile up too much while you’re away from Prom-A?”

  “If I ever return to Prom-A,” he said darkly. “I can’t figure out whether General Stone was serious about this being a promotion or not.”

  “Oh, were you promoted?” Emily asked, trying to feign surprise.

  His answer was a slant-eyed glare. “Cute,” he said flatly. “For future reference, tell Oliver that if he wants to listen to a computer located in a quiet hallway, he needs to turn the speakers down almost to nothing.”

  Emily had the grace to blush. “I kind of suspected you knew.”

  “Luckily, Principal Jones didn’t notice anything. I’m surprised you would let him tamper with someone else’s computer while they were out of the room.”

  “I told him not to, but he never listens to me. And somehow, I don’t think you’re really that surprised.” Ben Birchard was anything but stupid. He must have known that walking away from a computer rendered the contents of that computer vulnerable, especially when there were other people in the room he vacated.

  He tipped his head in vague acknowledgement, a faint smile pulling at one corner of his mouth. So he’d known that Oliver would jump at the chance to eavesdrop on a secret meeting of Prometheus principals, and he’d allowed that situation to come to pass. But to what purpose? The question nagged at her. Were she and Oliver still being assessed for loyalty?

  “You know,” said Ben abruptly, “I was doing really well at Prom-A. This so-called ‘promotion’ is just about the worst thing that could’ve happened to me right now.”

  “Is it even legal for the military to conscript someone who works for the GCA like that?” Emily asked.

  “When it’s General Bradford Stone doing the conscription, you don’t ask those sorts of questions,” Ben said. “Besides, it’s not like I can protest. He’s the GCA’s military liaison, for one thing, and it’s not like I’m being transferred out of the Prometheus network, for another. But the last thing in the world I ever wanted was to end up at Prom-E.”

  “Prom-E?” Emily repeated sharply. “There is no Prom-E.”

  Ben frowned. “How idiotic would that be for them to skip a letter of the alphabet? The school for geniuses can’t even get its ABC’s right? Of course there’s a Prom-E.”

  “But—”

  “It’s not in the system like the others, I’ll give you that,” Ben continued. “That’s because it’s the military branch of the school, the one for the true delinquents and troublemakers. There are minimum age limits for enrollment, and it extends past high school into adulthood. Our lovely General Stone up there is the principal, and I’m his new administrative assistant, it seems. I suppose he’s just itching to get his hands on Hawk and Hummer West.”

  “They’re not going back to Prom-F?” Emily asked in surprise. Hadn’t Quincy once said something along those lines?

  “They’ve already escaped from Prom-F once,” said Ben. “They won’t get a second chance. Prom-E is the only other place to send them.” He looked like he was about to say more, but their conversation was interrupted by a muffled flush and the lavatory door opening.

  “What took you so long?” Emily asked Oliver.

  He recoiled, not having expected her there. “I was enjoying the solitude. Two blissful minutes where I didn’t have to look at your ugly face.”

  “And here I thought we were going to have to introduce prunes into your diet,” Emily wryly said, much to his horror.

  “Gross!”

  “Back to your seat.” She tipped her head up the aisle and followed with only a goodbye glance toward Ben.

  As Oliver buckled himself into his chair, she leaned eagerly over the table and asked in a whisper, “Hey, did you know that there’s a Prom-E?”

  His face contorted. “Not you too.”

  “Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “My idiot roommate Tyler went off about that last night: the shadow campus”—he wiggled his finge
rs aloft in a farcical pantomime—"where all the Prom-F graduates get erased from the world. He’s got this whole conspiracy theory. I knew you were dumb, but I didn’t realize you were so far gone that you’d believe in something as preposterous as that.”

  “I didn’t,” Emily said. “Ben just told me about it. It’s the military branch of the school, and General Stone’s the principal.”

  Oliver tipped his head in a critical glance. “He’s pulling your leg. You should know better than to believe anything Birchard tells you.”

  “I should know better than to believe anything he tells you, you mean,” Emily corrected, but the doubts he expressed seemed legitimate the more she considered them. Ben could easily be making fun of her, taking advantage of her gullibility to see how many ridiculous stories he could pass as genuine.

  Still, “He seemed serious,” she said, tapping her lower lip.

  “Gullible,” Oliver said with a derisive sneer.

  They landed in Phoenix and deplaned beneath a scorching afternoon sun. Emily could have sworn it was a hundred fifty degrees outside as she stripped her tailored jacket from her shoulders. Never would she understand why people chose to live in such an uninhabitable climate.

  Two cars waited to take them to their final destination. General Stone climbed in one and commanded Ben to join him. Quincy, Alyson, Emily, and Oliver piled into the other, the two children and Emily squishing into a crowded back seat while Alyson sat up front with their stoic driver. The airport was located centrally within the sprawling city, and it was only a ten-minute drive to the GCA office where they would stay. It was the same office that the Wests had ambushed just that morning.

  From the outside, it looked like any other office building. They filed through the front door and the metal detectors under the watchful eyes of two security guards. General Stone commanded for the luggage to be taken to rooms on the fifth floor—probably where the holding cells were, Emily thought sourly—and then he led the small troupe to an elevator. They got out on the third floor, where several guards stood along the hallway with their weapons at the ready.

  “And here is our crime scene,” he said grimly. “Who’s the man in charge here?”

  A harried, middle-aged agent appeared from a room at one end of the hall. “General,” he said as he hurried forward, “I’m Agent Knox. I’m the one in charge.”

  “Were you here this morning when the incident occurred?” General Stone asked.

  Knox shook his head. “I was en route to pursue a lead we received from the national hotline.”

  “The waffle house,” said the general flatly.

  “Eight different calls over a ten-minute period from eight different citizens who had no discernible ties to one another,” said Agent Knox grudgingly. “Not until we went back and traced the location of their phone calls, that is. They were all made along a bus route that led to this city block. Not a single person from the bunch was anywhere near that waffle house.”

  “And that, Agent Knox, is the danger of dealing with a savvy human-projector,” said General Stone.

  “The hotline people didn’t bother to triangulate any specific locations for their callers,” Knox said. “They’re on alert to do so from now on. This won’t happen again.”

  “I highly doubt it would happen again regardless. Those kids got what they came for, didn’t they?”

  Knox shifted uncomfortably. “They got something, but whether it would be of any use to them, I don’t know. If you’ll come this way…” He motioned down the hall, and his inquiring eyes traveled back to the others who accompanied the general, especially to the two children.

  General Stone followed his gaze. “Birchard, you’ll come with me. These other two can be escorted up to their rooms for the time being.”

  No mention of the handlers even being present. Once again, Emily felt like she didn’t exist.

  At least she had a companion in her misery this time, though. She looked to Alyson expectantly, only to discover that the other handler had already turned back to the elevator, careless of the general’s slight.

  Emily glanced unhappily down at Oliver, and he scowled back up at her.

  Yes, things were entirely back to normal.

  XIV

  Insufferable Know-It-All

  August 1, 9:15am mst, GCA Regional Office, Central Phoenix

  If Emily never saw another vending machine pastry so long as she lived, it would be too soon. “How can you eat that?” she asked Oliver as he took a giant bite from a leathery donut.

  “They didn’t have any spaghetti,” he replied through the mouthful. He chewed laboriously and swallowed. “What, am I supposed to starve?”

  She shook her head. “You’d expect a government agency to have something healthier than prepackaged sweetbreads to eat.”

  “Sweetbread isn’t bread that’s sweet,” said Oliver. “It’s animal pancreas. I don’t think they prepackage that sort of thing, and if they did, it would be a pretty smelly vending machine.”

  “Sweet rolls,” Emily corrected herself. “Sweet pastries. Sugar-covered over-processed bread-like foods. Government agencies should be selling healthy things like carrots and apple slices.”

  “Carrots and apple slices are perishable. Sugar-covered over-processed bread-like foods have six months of shelf-life. They’re more cost-effective.”

  “So the one place we save money is the one place we shouldn’t,” said Emily like the health-food fanatic that she was.

  Oliver shrugged. “There’s a cold-food vending machine in the first floor break room. It has yogurt and apples and sandwiches. If you’re so concerned about what to eat, go get something from there.”

  They were sitting in a small communal kitchenette on the fifth floor, just down the hall from their allotted rooms. “You’d have to come with me,” Emily said. The last time she’d left his side on a field mission like this, she’d ended up hypnotized by Honey West.

  Oliver cocked an incredulous look upon her. “It’s a few floors down, not halfway across the city.”

  “It’s more than twenty yards, and I’m not taking any chances this time around.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m busy right now.”

  “Doing what, procrastinating your homework?”

  He lifted his nose in the air and took another bite of donut. She’d hit the nail right on the head, in other words. This time around, no one was pretending that Oliver had any other purpose beyond his null-projection. No one informed him of any updates on the Wests’ whereabouts, no one consulted him for his opinion on their movements, and—above all—no one gave him meaningless busywork to make him feel like he was useful. He and Quincy both had their school assignments, and they were expected to sit quietly and wait until they were needed.

  It was a waste of resources, Emily thought. Oliver and Quincy would probably have insights to the Wests that had escaped the notice of General Stone and the collection of GCA agents that were working this case.

  “Whatever. I don’t care,” she said aloud. “It’s not like I was hungry anyway.”

  In direct contradiction of those words, her stomach let out a loud gurgle. Oliver choked on his donut in an attempt not to laugh, but he recovered almost immediately.

  “Good,” he replied, pretending that his face was not bright red from the indignity of nearly suffocating in front of his handler, “because I don’t feel like going down to the first floor. I’m perfectly comfortable here.”

  Emily looked at the ceiling and lamented that such a selfish little brat got to dictate her movements. Oliver simply polished off the last of his donut.

  A light tap on the open door interrupted their unfriendly solitude. “Hello,” said Ben with a fake smile, and he held up a large brown paper bag. “I brought up some breakfast. Are Quincy and Alyson not up yet?”

  “Haven’t seen them,” said Emily as she suspiciously eyed the bag. It was probably an assortment of crullers and pastries, if it was even breakfast food at all. Every guy she knew
in college seemed to think that pizza and burgers could be eaten at any time of the day or night. Men in general didn’t know what constituted a proper morning meal.

  Ben’s attention moved to the table where Oliver sat. “Looks like you’ve already had a little something,” he said, nodding toward the empty donut wrapper. “I’m surprised your handler would let you eat that.”

  “What’s she got to do with it?” Oliver asked. “I don’t need her permission to eat whatever I feel like eating.”

  “Sure,” said Ben with a slight smile, and he set the brown bag on the table. “I took the liberty of guessing what to get everyone. You two can start while I go round up our missing pair.” Without further ado, he strolled from the room as abruptly as he had come.

  Emily waited until he was gone before pouncing on the bag. It did not, as she had originally suspected, hold an assortment of pastries or a mess of burgers. Instead, there were individual boxes stacked one on top of another, the logo of a Phoenix bistro prominent on their packaging.

  She pulled out the top box and noticed the initials OHD scribbled in one corner. The box itself was warm on the bottom. “This one’s yours,” she said to Oliver, bewildered as she handed it over. “What did he get you?”

  Oliver eyed the package suspiciously, as though he didn’t want to open it to find out.

  “Go on,” said Emily with growing amusement.

  He leveled a sour glare at her but gingerly flipped the box open. Just to be a snot, he tipped it toward himself so the contents were out of Emily’s sight. She resisted the temptation to crane her neck or cross over behind him.

  “Well?”

  “Pancakes,” he said flatly, “with extra syrup, two sausage links, and some scrambled eggs. How am I supposed to eat all of this?”

  “You don’t like it?” Emily asked curiously.

  He made a disgruntled noise and slouched down in his chair, sulking.

  She pulled out the second box and read the initials from the top. “QI. What’s Quincy’s last name?”