by Driza, Debra
I waited for him to mention his connection to Clearwater, but he let it pass without comment. While I supposed it was possible he didn’t know where his grandmother was from, I didn’t find it likely.
“Your folks okay with the two of you taking off like this?” Grady said after swallowing.
Hunter shrugged and I said, “Yeah,” with as much conviction as I could muster.
“Grandpa, let them eat already,” Ashleigh said with a roll of her eyes.
“Now, now, don’t you shush me. Just making some small talk with our guests, that’s all.” Grady quelled Ashleigh with a stern look. She immediately focused on cutting her eggplant into tiny, even bites.
Grady took a swig of water before turning back to me. “So, you’re searching for your . . . family member? Something wrong with your parents, they can’t give you more information than a name and the help of this young man?”
My fist balled in my lap. Too many questions, especially when clearly he knew more than he was letting on. Or was he just on a fishing expedition, trying to reel me in? Either way, this interrogation was doing nothing to ease my misgivings.
If only I had a way of knowing if he was on my side.
“Well?” Grady barked, when I hesitated too long.
Hunter glanced at me before frowning at Grady. “Mila’s adoptive dad recently died, so she’s having a rough time.”
Some transient expression flew across Grady’s face. Surprise? Sorrow? Disdain? It was impossible to tell. The next moment his lids lowered, and when he lifted them again, his eyes were shuttered. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said, and if I didn’t know better, I’d believe he was telling the truth. “Heart attack?”
“Fire,” Hunter said.
Grady cleared his throat while Ashleigh gasped, pressing one colorful hand to her mouth. “Oh, Mila, that’s terrible—I’m so sorry.”
Her sympathy, at least, was real. I felt a twinge of guilt, even as sorrow over my loss swept through me. Though my dad was a figment of Mom’s fertile imagination, somehow that knowledge didn’t completely erase my feelings.
When Hunter’s hand reached under the table for mine, I grabbed it, taking strength in his strong, comforting grip.
Several minutes later, Hunter pushed his almost clean plate away. “That was delicious—thank you, sir.”
Grady dragged a napkin across his mouth and tossed it onto the table. “Welcome.” Since Hunter’s explanation about the fire his shoulders had lost some of their rigidity, and though he still exuded an air of caution, at least now I wasn’t afraid he would jump up and forcibly evict me from the house at any minute.
“So, are you retired from the government?” Hunter filled the silence with small talk, and I realized my mistake immediately. I should never have told Hunter my suspicions about Grady’s true occupation. They’d wonder how we knew.
Ashleigh’s cup rattled the table when she plunked it down. “Government? You must be confused. Gramps was an IT guy for a military supplies company, but he didn’t technically work for the government. Right, Grandpa?”
“That’s right,” he said mildly. Not at all the hostile reaction I’d expected. Maybe I’d gotten it wrong, after all.
He leaned back in his chair, folded his arms. “But even working outside the military, we learned a few things about self-protection, too. Ain’t no one getting into my house without me knowing about it—got video surveillance and an alert any time that damned gate opens.”
Those details slipped past Hunter, but not me. He was letting me know that he’d seen us before he’d ever opened the door—which meant—that whole water gun thing had been a ruse.
My stomach lurched, and I straightened in my chair.
“And if they try to take something of mine? Well, they’d have a fight on their hands, that’s for sure. But I’ve always found it’s the people you know who are the most dangerous. You know the statistics—more violent acts are committed by people you know than strangers. That’s why I’m a big fan of the saying: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”
He stood abruptly, grabbing his plate off the table and heading for the sink. And on that ominous note, dinner was over.
I digested everything that had just happened, and uneasiness rolled through my stomach. This man was too volatile to question outright, and I didn’t trust him any more now than I had when we’d first pulled up.
Hunter grabbed my plate and his and followed Grady to the sink, while I sat there and waffled. One thing I had learned was that Grady knew something. More than likely, he was the Grady who Mom had sent me to find. But that didn’t mean he was reliable.
Still, I had to find out what he knew. Which meant I had to get him away from Hunter and Ashleigh. If only for a brief time.
I saw my opportunity when Ashleigh rose and headed for the hall. “I’ll be right back, Gramps—got to check on a homework assignment.”
One down. “Hey Hunter, would you mind grabbing my sweatshirt from the car? I’m getting a little chilly.” I wrapped my arms around myself for emphasis.
“Sure.” He stretched, then pulled the keys out of his pocket.
“Let me get the gate,” Grady said as he walked from the kitchen. He returned a moment later. “Good to go.”
I watched Hunter leave the room and listed to Ashleigh’s footsteps thumping up the stairs, but I waited until I heard the front door close before turning to Grady, grappling with how to approach this. He moved in on me before I could say a word.
I tensed when he grabbed my arm.
Engage?
My muscles tensed, ready to pounce.
“We’ve only got a few seconds, so I’m going to make this quick. I know who you are, and I’m trying to grab what was left for you, but it’s proving a little more challenging than I anticipated. Did anyone follow you here?”
“No,” I whispered, barely able to speak over the giddy rush sweeping up my throat.
“Good.” We both heard a thump overhead. Ashleigh, heading for the stairs. “When they get back, just follow my lead. Real quick—Nicole, is she . . . ?”
His eyes asked the question that he couldn’t utter, and I bowed my head, feeling the burn in the corners of my eyes.
I heard a gruff sound, like Grady had something stuck in his throat. “She told me to assume as much, if you came knocking.”
A pause. And then, “That boy—you vetted him, right?”
“Vetted?”
He scowled. “Check out his fingerprints, search his name? I guess not, based on your reaction. I’d hop on that, if I were you.”
Hop on a fingerprint search? How exactly was I supposed to do that?
His gaze dropped to my throat. To Mom’s pendant. He shook his head. “Damn. I don’t know how she did it,” he said, under his breath.
“Did what?” I whispered at the same time we heard Ashleigh around the corner. He shook his head and stepped back.
“Nothing. It’s nothing. Look, I’m trying to get the files she left for you, but I need a little time—”
Footsteps pounded down the stairs and he stepped away. I wanted to reach out, grab his shirt, and yank him back, demand that he finish what he’d started. But Ashleigh was almost back, and then the front door creaked open, and the opportunity was lost.
“So, good news,” Grady said when they both reentered the kitchen. “Mila and Hunter are going to spend the night. We wouldn’t want to send them back out this late.”
Ashleigh’s mouth fell open a little, and her shocked eyes darted from Grady to me. Meanwhile, Hunter handed me my sweatshirt without saying a word.
“Is it okay with you? You seemed so tired on the way out,” I hastily filled in, and he shrugged.
“Sure, sounds great. Thank you,” he added, for Grady’s benefit.
Grady waved him off. “Glad to help,” he said gruffly. “I’ll leave the gate open for now so you can gather your stuff. Now, Ashleigh, can you show them to the guest room? Good thing we’ve got two twi
n beds. I’ll check back in in the morning.” He raised his cup at us, as if in salute, but his brown eyes caught mine in a meaningful glance, before he turned and headed out.
Ashleigh watched him leave, her expression thoughtful. “Well, you two certainly worked some kind of voodoo. Gramps is a good guy, but he’s not what I’d call hospitable.” With a tiny wave of her hand, she motioned us to follow her to the staircase. “Why don’t you go grab your things, and I’ll wait here.”
I followed Hunter to the front door, waiting inside while he trotted out to the car and returned shortly with our bags. I made a move to rejoin Ashleigh but his hand on my elbow made me pause. “I’m sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for,” he whispered, his eyes a little bloodshot from lack of sleep.
“It’s okay,” I said, taking his hand in mine.
“There’s always tomorrow, right?”
I wasn’t prepared for the sudden stab of pain in my chest, right in the vicinity of my pseudo heart. The last day or two, I’d been swept up in the way Hunter made me laugh or how he looked at me. But it was his hopefulness that kept me going. When I sent him away, he’d take tomorrow with him . . . and honestly, I was afraid of what would be left behind.
* * *
We followed Ashleigh upstairs, to a narrow berth that branched in two directions. She led us to the last doorway on the right.
“So, here’s the guest room.” she said, pushing open a door in the upstairs hall. Inside were two twin beds, decorated with mismatched quilts in a riot of colors. A stripped pine chest of drawers and nightstand were the only other furniture, and a big square window was the only thing on the wall. Hunter and I dumped our meager belongings onto the floor.
“Bathroom is the next door over—feel free to help yourself to toothpaste, shampoo, the works. Towels are under the sink.”
After we thanked her, she paused with one hand on the doorjamb, for the first time looking a little uncertain. “If you guys aren’t tired yet, you should come hang out in my room for a while.”
I didn’t really want to—my time with Hunter was so limited as it was—but I wasn’t sure how to say no. Especially when I remembered how she’d said it got lonely around here, with just the two of them. Hunter obviously felt the same because he nodded. “Sure, why not?”
She led us past the bathroom, to the door we’d passed when we’d first reached the top of the stairs. As soon as he saw what was inside, Hunter stepped forward and spun in a slow circle, his hiss of his indrawn breath filling the space around us. From ceiling to floor, the walls were practically wallpapered in posters and original drawings. Reds and blues, blacks and grays—faces with big eyes and crazy hair peered back at us. Manga.
An easel with a purple tarp underneath took up one corner of the room, but Hunter was already striding toward a massive bookshelf that was against the far wall. “Unbelievable,” he breathed, his fingers reverently tracing some of the spines. “You’ve got so much amazing stuff.”
“I know, right?” Ashleigh said, following him over. “I started getting into it when I was ten, and Grandpa just keeps buying them for me. What about you, Mila—do you like manga?”
I shifted my feet. “I’ve never read it.”
“But we’re going to remedy that soon,” Hunter said, though he was too enthralled to bother to turn back and look at me.
They launched into an animated discussion of titles and characters with foreign-sounding names that I didn’t recognize. Forgotten for the moment, I moved around the room, taking in the rest of her belongings. A fancy-looking bed with a black fabric headboard, brightened by splatters of paint here and there. A desk with the newest laptop and a huge laser printer and boxes and boxes of what appeared to be colorful art supplies stashed underneath, the chemical perfume of paint drifting throughout the rest of the room.
I walked closer to a corkboard, where different-colored fliers and pictures overlapped, competing for space. Painting classes, babysitting jobs, and—
“You compete in martial arts?” I asked, reading the announcement.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, once in a while—Gramps insists,” she said, before turning back to Hunter.
My gaze skimmed over to some shelves, and there, on the middle one, I saw a black belt, neatly folded. More than once in a while, from the looks of it.
I glanced over my shoulder. Their dark heads were bent over the books together, almost like a couple, and I couldn’t help a pang of jealousy. I had no right, though. Ashleigh was exactly the kind of girl Hunter deserved to be with. The kind of girl who not only shared his interests, but didn’t have to lie at every turn.
The kind of girl he might end up with, once I turned him away.
I hated the imaginary females that paraded through my head, unbidden, so I turned away in search of a distraction. Anything to ease the sudden weight in my chest. I latched on to the bookshelf and walked over to the far edge. My fingers dragged across several cracked and worn spines, before pausing on one slim volume with a burst of recognition.
Ghost in the Shell.
I knew this title. It was the same one I’d seen Hunter reading back in the courtyard in Clearwater.
Curious, I wiggled the copy out from between the other books. I opened the cover and when my finger touched the first page, a prompt blinked to life.
Scan images?
This was a new one, but . . . why not? After glancing over to make sure Hunter and Ashleigh were still distracted, I allowed my android abilities to take over.
Yes.
Estimated number of pages: 276.
Approximate scan time: 92 seconds.
Almost three pages per second, I registered, and as I touched the page again, my fingertip vibrated. I felt a flash of heat, and then letters and pictures converted to an information stream, traveling from the page through my skin and exploding up my arm. The pictures reappeared inside my head. I could barely flip the pages fast enough to keep up.
My body tingled with a newfound energy. I had always enjoyed reading. Now I had the ability to learn a limitless number of stories. I could catalog and house entire collections. Experience them at all.
About a quarter of the way in, though, the excitement dissipated. My hand started trembling, just the tiniest bit. Halfway in, the tremble turned into a shake. And then I just stopped and stared. Stared in disbelief while my body went cold, cold, so cold. I lowered the book and swallowed at the huge brick in my throat. Gazed at the back of Hunter’s head while his hands flew in wild gestures, in what I gathered was a reenactment of some crucial manga fight scene. I desperately tried to will away the terror threatening to squeeze me with iron fists, tried to subdue the mad thump-thump-thump of the faux pulse pounding in my ears. Grady’s voice, questioning me.
“That boy—you vetted him, right?”
Out of my memory banks came an image from the past. Hunter, sitting on that bench in the courtyard back at Clearwater High, reading this exact book. His first day at school, yet somehow, he’d found his way to my favorite spot—the one where I went to be alone, where no other students bothered me.
I hadn’t questioned it then, that or the way he’d shown up as the new kid at school shortly after I did, because why should I? Back then, I hadn’t even known what I was. But maybe I should have.
Because that book that Hunter had been reading, back in Minnesota?
That book was about a girl. A girl who was an android.
Beneath the growing stranglehold of fear, of doubt, of disbelief and anguish and denial, a thought was so frantic, it felt like a beating, throbbing pulse of its own, slapping against my skull. That one thought consumed me.
How well did I really know Hunter? How well?
As quietly as possible, I closed the book and eased it back into the vacant slot, not wanting to draw any attention to what I’d read. It was just a precaution, I told myself. A total coincidence, nothing more.
Except—how many coincidences could you have, before a chain of events could no longer
reasonably be construed as random? The events in question flashed through my head with perfect precision. Hunter, showing up that day at the Dairy Queen—when I just so happened to be there. Hunter, in the courtyard—the one place where I could always count on being alone. Hunter, transferring to my English class.
I took one unsteady step away from the bookcase, then two, as the timeline replayed, faster and faster.
Hunter, consoling me in the barn, and asking me out on a date. So accepting of my “prosthetic” arm after a joyride got me tossed from a truck and my circuits were revealed. So willing to travel across the country in an instant when I’d called him.
Across the country to help me, on the strength of one date and an almost-kiss.
My fists clenched, tighter and tighter, and I had to turn away. None of that made any sense, though. I mean, if he’d really been stalking me, why had he let me see the book in the first place? It would have been so easy to have been reading, I don’t know, Huckleberry Finn, or whatever boys liked to read these days. Though he clearly had a genuine interest in manga, based on the discussion he was still having with Ashleigh.
I stared at his tall form and my breath caught around a desperate mix of uncertainty and terror and hope. I found myself shaking my head. No.
Not this kind, sensitive, magnetic boy who’d always been there for me. There was no way, no way he could be teamed up with Holland. Right? His hair was the opposite of military-approved, and besides, he was too young. Unless he’d lied about his age?
I bit my lip and studied his profile. Okay, so maybe he could be seventeen, eighteen max. But doubtful he was older, right?
Then again, Lucas hadn’t been much older, either.
And the military wasn’t the only group after me. I also had the Vita Obscura to worry about.
The Vita Obscura. Who had, coincidentally, shown up not long after Hunter came to town. In fact—and now I was feeling dizzy—hadn’t they attacked our house while Hunter had me out on a secret date?
My mind couldn’t even reconcile that notion. Was I being paranoid? Hunter, part of the group who wanted to dismantle me, piece by piece, and make a fortune off my technology? No. It was unfathomable. I mean, beyond not believing that Hunter could be part of such a terrible plot, surely a member of the V.O. wouldn’t actually go so far as to try and kiss the girl they knew was an android . . . would he?
