“Okay. Thank you. But, you should know, this homeless guy is in there. Watching the place.”
“I’ll try not to scare him.”
“Thanks.”
Another pause. Why was she letting this continue? Why was she just waiting for him to talk? They had nothing to say to each other, really.
“They miscalculated, Hwa. We’re going to use this against Silas. We are going to show this to the board and get him demoted.”
Demoted. That had a nice ring to it. It was something, anyway. “Well, you’d better take some sample kits, if that’s your plan,” Hwa said. “There’s enough DNA there to convict most of Silas’s division. Maybe not Beaudry or the others who came with us to Terra Nova, but all the other lackeys.”
“DNA?”
“You’ll see when you get there. I apologize in advance. Bring some, uh, gloves. And maybe an allergy mask.”
She was talking just to prolong the conversation. She knew that. The drug was in her, now. Its progress spread easy warmth all through her limbs. It made him easier to talk to. Made her less nervous.
“I’ll call you when I’m finished there,” he said, as if having read her mind. “We’ll talk again. Tonight.”
“We always talk again.” Why was she saying this? Why make this admission? What good could it possibly do? “You’re like the last person I talk to at night and the first person I talk to in the morning.”
Silence.
She’d overstepped. Said the wrong thing. Or maybe just said too much. Made too sharp an observation. Pointed out one of those things that was so obvious that nobody ever mentioned it, because they didn’t really want to.
“Sorry,” she started to say. “I took a pill, and it’s kicking in, and—”
“I’ll call you before you go to sleep,” he said. “I can see it, when your heart slows down. That’s how I know when to call. I keep your heart—the icon of your heart—in one corner of my vision. All the time.”
Her stomach flipped over and tried to exit through her fingertips. Adrenaline jangled down her arms like music. Her mouth went dry and all she could taste was the burn of the drug in her throat.
“See, there? It skipped.”
*
Hwa slept through the ping. The pill and the wine and the food were too much for her, and she passed out halfway through a film named, ironically enough, The Big Sleep. Rusty insisted she hadn’t really missed anything—the story was secondary to the flirting.
“And the fashion,” Séverine said, over breakfast. “Speaking of which. You mentioned Homecoming?”
“Oh, fuck.” Hwa covered her face with her hands. “Sorry. Yeah. Yes. I have to go.”
“Do you have anything to wear?”
Hwa shook her head.
“I thought as much. But! I have just the thing. Nail, please fetch me my pearls.”
This conversation was uncomfortably similar to the one she’d had with Layne, the night she died. It didn’t bode well for Séverine. Hwa was about to tell her so, when she got a ping from Joel.
“We have lunchtime appointments set up with those two Krebs developers,” he said. “They’re back to back this afternoon, before my science club meeting. I still have to make it to that, because Mr. Branch has this movie he wants to show us. It’s supposed to help us with our ship design. So Diane scheduled our other meetings during school hours, but that’s okay because Daniel said we weren’t going in today, anyway.”
Technically, she could have gone. Her uniform was right where she’d left it, in her locker. She could go and get it at any time. But Síofra probably didn’t know that. “Okay.”
“Daniel said your place got broken into. He’s very angry about that.”
“Well, I’m not too pleased about it, either.”
“No, I mean, he’s furious,” Joel said. “Dad and I were having breakfast, and Daniel walked right in and told me we weren’t going to school because of what happened to your place, and then he asked to see Dad in his office right away. He wouldn’t even take any coffee.”
Well. That was saying something. “And then what happened?”
“He shut the door, and Daniel started yelling, and my dad told him to calm down, and then things got really quiet, and Daniel said something about Silas.”
“Silas. He told your dad about Silas.”
“Yeah. I know they don’t like each other, but … do you know what’s going on?”
Hwa wondered how much to tell him. It seemed wrong to share her suspicions of Silas and his goons without any proof. Sure, Silas was an asshole, but he was also Joel’s brother, and their father was dying. The kid would need his whole family around him, soon enough. Best not to alienate him from them any further.
“Yeah,” she said. “I have a pretty good idea what’s going on. Stay where you’re at, and I’ll come to where you’re to. I’m in Three, but I can be at Five soon.”
“Hwa, are you and Daniel in trouble?”
“Me and Daniel? No. No more so than usual. I guess.”
“You slipped. You called him by his first name.”
Hwa rolled her eyes. “Just wait for me. I’ll be there soon.”