“What will you do?” he asked. “Will you quit? Again? Tell the world? Tell Joel?”
Joel. She remembered his weight on her shoulders. His back to her back, in the ventilation shaft. The way he could laugh away what was happening around him, claiming that it was just an accident or just a mistake, because he’d never truly been hurt. Never lost anything. Not yet. His family of murderers had kindly insulated him from tragedy. And it was very likely, Hwa realized now, that one of them was trying to take him out. It was one of the first things she had taught Calliope and the others in her self-defence class: The people most likely to hurt you are the ones closest to you. The stats bore it out—marital rape, child abduction, domestic violence. Murder, too. And if the Lynches were willing to blow up an oil rig full of workers to score a deal on a ruined city, what was one more life?
“There is someone after him,” Hwa said. “Someone wearing invisible armour attacked us, today. The same person on the footage from the school. Joel won’t tell you about it. But someone means to kill him. And I mean to stop it.”
*
By the next Sunday dinner, most of her bruising had faded. Síofra was not there. “He had a conference in Toronto,” Joel told her, when she arrived. “Sorry. Now you’ll be bored.”
There might have been a message to this effect in Hwa’s account. There was something with Síofra’s name on it. She had not allowed herself to look at it. If she read it, she would have to start taking his pings, and then she would have to hear his voice.
“I won’t be bored. You’re here.”
Joel grinned. He led her in. There had been some sort of brand strategy meeting, so much of his immediate family was there: his father Zachariah, his brother Silas, his sister Katherine, and a set of fraternal twins named Paris and London.
“Paris is my brother,” Joel reminded her quietly. “His husband is over there. And that’s London. Her wife and their girlfriend are by the champagne bucket. Paris and London share that girlfriend, actually. She’s really nice. And you know Silas. His wife left him last year. I think he’s with my cousin’s ex-girlfriend now, but she’s not here. Then Katherine, from Dad’s third marriage. She doesn’t see anyone seriously. Then me.”
“How come they’re all white?” Hwa asked.
Joel shrugged. “Dad only married white women, up until my mom. She’s Eurasian? I guess? Sort of like you! She still lives in Singapore. And he wouldn’t marry her.”
Zachariah had given up on marriage by the time he’d conceived Joel. Or had him conceived. “Too expensive,” the old man had said, once.
Whatever the reason, it meant there was a wide gap in the ages of his children. Hwa had never really considered the gap between her and Tae-kyung—she had certainly never talked about it with Sunny—but realizing that Joel’s cousins had children who were still older than he was threw her for a loop. Part of it was Zachariah’s age: the old man acted like he was going to live forever, and so far none of the women in his life had cared to disagree. In practise, it meant that Joel’s middle-aged brothers and sisters looked at him like he was a new puppy their father had adopted in his dotage. Cute, but bound to make a mess.
No wonder they wanted him gone.
“I like your suit,” Joel said.
“Thanks. I forgot how much I liked it, until recently.”
“I’m sorry about your friend.” Joel grimaced. “Do they know what happened to her, yet?”
Hwa felt a prickle of pain in her arm, thinking of that night under the Acoutsina. She needed to pay Dixon Sandro a visit, and see what he’d built with the machines pulled from Calliope’s sample. “No. Not yet.”
The chime rang for dinner. The dining table was a huge slab of pink salt supported by two whalebones. It sat under a chandelier of bleached antlers. Unless they were eating soup, or some form of dessert (which Hwa always shoved over to Joel), they ate without plates, scraping food directly off the salt.
“It’s very healthy,” Zachariah had insisted, the first time she joined the family dinner. “Healthier than plates. Bacteria gets in there, you know. In the micro-fissures made by knives and forks. This is much more sanitary. Nothing can grow in all that salt.”
“Sure,” Hwa had said, and he laughed and laughed, and Katherine poured more wine for everyone.
Now they sat down to an amuse-bouche of oysters on the half-shell. It should have bothered her, breaking bread with the architects of New Arcadia’s destruction, her brother’s murderers. Maybe she should have found a way to poison them all. Maybe if they let her keep coming to dinner, she would. She contemplated the dinner knife at her place setting. Like everything else at the table, it was well-made, blade and handle fashioned from a single piece of steel. It was certainly sharp enough to do some damage. She could probably jam it in Zachariah’s neck before anyone wrestled her to the ground.