If it mollified her, he couldn’t tell. She stood completely rigid except for the deep rise and fall of her chest.
“They lost me,” he said. She’d seen his humiliation so the best he could do was use it to make her hear everything now. Maybe then he wouldn’t feel it. “They lost me and they hate it. I was their prize, Gwen. I could get any woman pregnant they brought me, even the ones who’d had problems. Do you know how many kids I have? Because I don’t. Wouldn’t know them if they came up and shook my hand. My first time was at fourteen. Fourteen.”
She was crying now. Full-on crying. She clutched her arms at her waist and bent over, the sobs jerking her whole body. But he wasn’t about to let her off now.
“All of a sudden it got worse about six, seven years ago. It was constant. All the fucking time. They had to build more nursery space. The women were constantly pregnant. The men were dying faster. Your people did this to me. To us.”
“No,” she wailed, her head shaking at the ground. “Not all of us. We didn’t know.”
Every word of hers repulsed him.
He pinched his own arm. Hard. Pain might take away the urge to breed. Pain and getting the hell out of there.
He glanced at his watch. “The guards will change again in five minutes. My glamour is starting to slip. Let’s go.”
He jerked the chain. She’d called it a leash, and at the time he hadn’t appreciated her anger. Now he enjoyed it, controlling her.
He pulled her back out of the breeding Circle and almost ran right into a small group of four Ofarians huddled in the dimmer spot between wall sconces. He veered on one foot, stumbled, and took Gwen down to the ground with him. She fell right on top of him and he kneed her off as though she were a rabid animal. He jumped back to his feet.
Gwen remained sprawled on the floor, frozen and staring up at the Ofarians. Two Ofarians were dressed in Plant blue. A woman whom Xavier recognized as head of breeding wore medical scrubs. A fourth Ofarian wore a sleek black business suit, his silvery hair polished, his face authoritative and stern.
“Gwen,” Xavier warned, jerking on the chain. “We need to go now. If we miss our window, the guards won’t change for another hour. Nora can’t hold the van illusion that long and I can’t hold the two of us much longer.”
“Wait.” She dug in her heels. A new brand of terror washed over her face. “That’s Jonah Yarbrough. The Company’s Vice Chairman.”
“We weren’t expecting you,” the woman in scrubs said to Yarbrough. “I apologize for the mess in the—”
“I didn’t expect to come,” Yarbrough interrupted. “There’s been a security breach. I need to move the Plant again.”
SIXTEEN
Only an hour earlier, Gwen would have done anything to get the Ofarians to know she was alive and inside the Plant. Now she sprinted across the parking lot as though she were being chased. Every pounding footstep stabbed a new shard of terror into her heart.
“Hurry,” Xavier called over his shoulder. “It’s getting harder to hold. If I’m straining, so is Nora.”
They reached the van, its back doors open and waiting. Gwen threw herself inside without being told. Xavier snapped off the chain and slammed the doors shut. Seconds later, Nora pulled the van out of the parking lot in a tight curve.
Gwen felt like she’d polished off an entire bottle of nelicoda and had been pushed into the Arctic Ocean. Frigid numbness surrounded her body. The world moved like water just about to freeze. She could see it, sense it moving slowly around her, but she could not touch it or taste it or smell it.
Only one thought ran on a loop through her mind. I am not a monster. I am not a monster. I am not a monster.
When the van stopped, she wondered if she’d fallen asleep, because they hadn’t been traveling long and they’d yet to climb up and over the mountains that surrounded Lake Tahoe. Nora opened the doors. A highway roared behind her. A sign on its shoulder proclaimed: CARSON CITY 34 MILES.
Xavier loomed behind Nora. “If he takes the cuffs off,” she said, “will you behave?”
Gwen met Xavier’s eyes. Now she understood all the anguish and embarrassment and wrath in that familiar hard look. It had taken more courage than she knew how to define for him to step foot in the Plant again. Every time she blinked, she saw the way he’d reacted in the breeding block. Hating his body’s reaction. Hating her people. Hating her.
She held out her arms. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Hesitantly he came forward, slid his watch through the handcuff lock, and stepped back as the metal fell away. She slid out of the van and took in her surroundings.
They’d brought her to a roadside rest stop, a dilapidated, sixties-era rectangle plopped into the dreary Nevada landscape. Nora led them past cobwebbed restrooms and a vending machine blinking an outdated Pepsi logo, to the picnic table farthest from the lot. The Tedrans took the bench facing the cars. Gwen sat on her hands to keep them from shaking, and her fingers gripped decades of travelers’ carvings in the wood.
“I had no idea.” Better to speak first, to take control of the situation. One of the first things she’d learned from watching her dad. “You have to believe me.”
Nora gazed back at her, composed and chilly. “That can’t be true.”
“It is.”
“The Ofarians who work in the Plant know. Your leaders know.”
“No! Oh, my God, no. There’s no way my father would agree to this. Not knowingly. Not willingly.”
Impossible. Her father couldn’t know the intricate, disgusting details of Mendacia’s production and still sleep at night. This was the man who’d withdrawn from the Company and from life for months after his wife had died. This was the man who’d cried when he gave the order to have his own daughter stripped of her powers and exiled.
He’d spent his entire adulthood guiding Ofarians in their problems, helping them find futures within the Company. He led their culture’s rituals with solemnity and openness. He loved serving others, and Gwen had fashioned her goals after his example.
Was slavery the action of a man who valued life?
“My dear,” Nora said, “he didn’t have to agree to anything. The Plant’s been running for generations. He didn’t start it; he inherited it. And believe me, he didn’t accept his chairmanship without knowing full well what atrocities he was endorsing. Everyone on the Board knows.”
Gwen’s head swam. How did Nora know so much about the Company’s inner workings? It was a security threat a thousand times greater than Yoshi’s little cell phone stunt.
“Look.” She stabbed her fingers into her hair. “My father depends on Jonah Yarbrough to run the Plant as he sees fit. The Chairman delegates, the same as for all corporations. It’s Jonah who’s responsible. Jonah. I even saw him in there. Ask Xavier.”
Nora’s hard glare was shatterproof. She leaned forward ever so slightly. “Every one of you is guilty. Every. Single. One.”
“You can’t place the blame on Ofarians who have no idea what’s going on. The janitors in our building? The secretaries? Me?”
Xavier bristled and looked away.
“But you’re part of them, no? You sell the magic they’re forced to make. You profit from their despair, their lives. Ignorance doesn’t make you less guilty.”
It was the first time Nora had raised her voice, and it made Gwen sit up.
She looked directly into those dark, hard eyes. All the eyes of the Tedrans in the Plant had been silver—Mendacia silver—but Nora and Adine’s were nearly black as coal. “I had no idea how Mendacia was truly made. I swear.”
Gwen saw her mistake the moment she’d made it. Nora wanted such strong emotion from her. It was her winning card.
“So fix it,” Nora said, like she was telling Gwen to tighten the screw on a wobbly chair.
How? Gwen wanted to scream at the sky. Instead she chewed on the inside of her lip. “Obviously you have a plan.”
“Obviously,” Nora said with a dry grin.
&nbs
p; “And it started with kidnapping me. Bringing me here.”
“No, it started before that.” Nora turned her head slightly. “Xavier?”
He’d inched to the very edge of the picnic table bench, as far away from Gwen as possible. He nodded. “It worked. They’re moving the Plant again. Heard it with my own ears. Gwen did, too.”
A few stray pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. “The bar,” Gwen said to Xavier. “You wanted me to see you and warn the Board.”
“This whole thing didn’t just happen overnight,” he said. “We’d been following you from a distance for a long while. We knew you liked that bar, that you never went in there with any of your…people.”
“It was the first step in a long plan,” Nora added, drawing Gwen’s attention back.
“How’d you know they’d move the Plant?”
“Because of Xavier. A year and a half ago, after I broke him out, they panicked and moved the whole operation to remote Nevada from the Central Valley.”
A year and a half. Gwen’s mind circled back. She recalled a period of a few days when the Board had sequestered themselves behind waterglass. When they’d emerged, they’d tried their best to hide the spooked looks on their faces, but she wasn’t stupid. Her father had been in Palm Beach at the time, schmoozing a media heiress, and when she’d asked him about it, he’d told her vaguely that Jonah had it all under control.
Within days, everything seemed to go back to normal and she’d filed the scenario under “Things to Find Out Once I’m a Member of the Board.”
Now she understood. One of their slaves had gone missing.
She eyed Xavier. “How’d you know how to get around this Plant then?”
He sneered. “The basics are the same. Same structure, same organization of cell blocks and death rooms. They could have lifted the Breeding Circle from the old Plant and dropped it into this one.”
And they’d done it in a matter of days. Great stars above.
“Your chairman is clever. Swift,” Nora said. “But now he’s scared.”
“I told you”—Gwen stabbed a finger into the table—“my father doesn’t know.”
Behind her, car doors slammed. She turned to watch a family pour out of a green minivan. Three children squealed excitedly at the sight of the sorry vending machine. Their parents called for them to walk, not run.
Xavier half rose, ready to tackle her if she attempted to run toward the Primaries or call out. No glamour shielded them and she knew the two Tedrans were drained from their earlier efforts; if Gwen wanted, she could end this all right here. Or start something else entirely. But exposure wasn’t in either of their best interests.
She turned back around and laced her fingers on the tabletop. “What do you want from me?”
Nora was so still Gwen thought she might have died sitting up. Then she took a deep breath and replied, “Return us back to the stars. Get us back to Tedra.”
Gwen shook her head, sure she hadn’t heard right. Neither Tedran’s expression faltered. “That’s impossible.”
Nora’s lips puckered around an invisible lemon. “Is it?”
“We have no connections in NASA or any other country’s space program. We deliberately avoid anyone or anything involved in government.”
“We don’t need NASA.” She mimicked Gwen’s hand clasp. “We already have a ship.”
If she hadn’t just witnessed the destruction of an entire race at the hands of her own people, Gwen would have easily discounted the Tedrans as insane. “Explain.”
“The ship that brought the Ofarians and Tedrans to Earth a century and a half ago is still here. Hidden and trapped. We need to know how to get it out, how to fly it again.”
She almost fell off the bench. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“So where is this supposed ship?”
The Tedrans shared a look. Nora answered, “At the bottom of the lake.”
“Which lake?”
“Tahoe.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry. You have me confused with someone else. I have no idea how to bring up a spaceship that’s been lying at the bottom of Lake Tahoe since the mid-eighteen hundreds. And I can assure you that I wouldn’t know how to fly it.”
“But we know someone who does, and we want you to speak with him.”
Gwen opened her mouth. No sound came out. Were those tears in Nora’s eyes? No, couldn’t be. But when Nora spoke next, her voice was reedy.
“I’ve been waiting so, so long for a Translator to be born. And here you are.” She cleared her throat. “You will speak with Genesai, learn his language. He knows how to retrieve the ship. He knows how to fly it.”
“So this Genesai is not Tedran?”
“No. He’s…something else. Something else from the stars.” Nora’s eyes swung skyward.
“Does he look like us? Is he human?”
“Now he is. Well, humanoid, like all Secondaries.” Nora narrowed her eyes. “When the Ofarians arrived here, they forced him into a human body. The new form didn’t agree with his mind and fought with his spirituality. He is, for lack of a better term, insane.”
Fascinating. “After all this time, he doesn’t speak any English?”
Nora shook her head. “He doesn’t speak any of Earth’s languages, doesn’t understand a word anyone says. He just babbles in his own tongue. We’ve never been able to decipher it. But a Translator can. You can.”
Gwen pressed fingers to her aching temples. Something—a lot of things, actually—wasn’t adding up. “How can you possibly know all this? How did you know about Genesai and the ship? And if all Tedrans are…slaves…how come you aren’t?”
Xavier was gazing at Nora again with that strange look hovering between wonder and admiration. The old woman traced a graffiti heart with a gnarled finger. “Because I survived the crash into Lake Tahoe.”
“Wait. You were in the crash?”
Nora evenly met Gwen’s gape. “Tedrans live much longer than Ofarians.”
“How old are you?”
Nora shrugged. “I can only start counting in Earth years. Time is…different up there. And I’ve had very little reason to use my glamour since I came here. I don’t age as fast.”
The quick peek at Xavier was not meant to be seen, but Gwen noticed. She remembered what he’d said in the Plant, about the draining of glamour aging and slowly killing the Tedrans. How old was he, if that was true? And how much time did he have left if they stole bits of him day after day?
Gwen shuddered. “They” were Ofarians. Her people. She’d take care not to forget it so easily next time.
She stared at the table for a long time, letting its splintered vandalism blur into her thoughts. Wind raced down the highway corridor, mingling with the constant whir of the passing vehicles. It was the only sound for quite some time.
When Gwen finally raised her head, Nora patiently regarded her.
“Tell me.” Gwen’s fists clenched. “You’re dying to spill. All that talk yesterday about everything I knew about Ofarian history being a lie. If it’s all a lie, tell me the damn truth.”
Nora began to slowly roll up her sleeves. “Ofarians went to Tedra looking for a new home, that much is true, but they didn’t settle peacefully. They weren’t humble and grateful for the space we generously gave them. They thought the native Tedrans were simple and inferior. They thought us undeserving of our planet. So they tried to take it from us.”
“But—”
“I was there, Gwen. I saw. I remember.”
The animosity in Nora’s tone and composure rivaled that of Xavier’s. But whereas Xavier wore his hatred on his sleeve, Nora’s boiled just under her skin and came out in her tightly controlled words. Gwen didn’t know which she feared most.
“How did you get off planet?” she managed to ask.
“There was an uprising. It turned into an all-out war. The Ofarians thought us simple, but it was our planet and we knew it better than they did
. Even though they were more advanced technologically, we outnumbered them, and we destroyed their crafts. We weren’t going to let them get off our world and go destroy another. We wanted to kill them all.”
Gwen sucked in a breath. How was that any better?
“I don’t know how they found Genesai,” Nora continued, “or where. All I know is that I was taken hostage, along with twenty or so other Tedrans. The Ofarians forced Genesai off Tedra and ordered him to find a new, habitable world. He crashed here.”
“A crash. What happened?”
Nora’s concentration drifted far away. “There were casualties on both sides, Tedran and Ofarian. So much death, so much confusion. What few made it to land overtook a small settlement of Primaries. That’s when they destroyed the Genesai I knew and kept the handful of living Tedrans enslaved. Within days I saw an opportunity to escape. It was run then, or never live free again. So I took Genesai, cloaked us both in glamour, and fled. We watched his ship sink.” She gazed to the west. “I’ve been protecting him ever since. Waiting. Wanting to return home.”
“Why didn’t you leave before?”
“Besides the fact that it was 1852 and there was no way to get down to the bottom of the lake?”
Gwen resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
“By the time the technology came around, the Ofarians had already melded into Primary society and had established their Mendacia empire. The twelve surviving Tedrans had been bred into ten times that number. The early machinery they used to extract the magic makes today’s draining rooms look like playgrounds. As the last Tedran who’d known freedom, it was my responsibility to get them out. Can you at least understand that?”
It was too fantastic to believe. Even for Gwen, who was Secondary and, by nature, fantastical herself. No Ofarian would ever believe that story. Gwen wasn’t even sure if she did. She’d been taught about her ancestors’ suffering, and her mother had been taught before her. And her mother before that.
He said, she said. It made her brain burn.
Except that mere miles from here, she’d witnessed the enslavement with her own eyes.
Liquid Lies Page 13
