“I already am. We both are, now. We can go our separate ways if you want, but odds are they’ve got us both on camera, and they’ll find at least one of us before long.”
“I’ve got no real reason to trust you, Gideon,” she points out, raising an eyebrow. “For all I know you could be working for them, trying to find out what I know.” She shakes her head again, the movement tight and restrained, tension singing through her. It’s going to take more than my best charming smile to get her to talk, and watching the way the life’s drained out of her at the mention of what happened today, I know I can’t afford to walk away without understanding what I witnessed.
“Fine. You want trust?” I set down my own drink and walk across to sink down onto the couch beside her. “I’ll go first. I don’t know what swept through those people, but I’ve seen a metal ring like that before. The one with the blue fire, that was meant to be hidden by the projectors in the holosuite.”
She swallows hard and I force myself to sit perfectly still as I wait her out. “And I’ve seen eyes like that before,” she whispers eventually. “Eyes like darkness. People whose minds have been stolen, turning them into those…those husks.”
Husks. The word whispers through my mind, a perfect fit. I couldn’t see their eyes, but I saw the way they turned to the rift in the middle of the room, like compass needles pointing north. They were husks, emptied of themselves. I have to bite my tongue to keep from blurting out more questions, my pulse kicking up a notch, pounding in my temple.
Despite my relentless pursuit of the former Commander Towers—the woman who helped LaRoux hide everything that happened on Avon—so far my best lead has been the conspiracy theory forums, the devoted few on the hypernet trying to figure out what LaRoux’s game is, based on the Avon broadcast. That’s where I found Kumiko, the retired soldier hiding out in the south of the city, leading her network of Fury survivors in her quest for revenge, full of wild secondhand stories. After all the hours I’ve spent trying to make sense of Kumiko’s tall tales, now…this girl, she’s actually witnessed what Lilac’s and Tarver’s whispers can do. I keep my voice calm with an effort. “Where?”
She opens her mouth, but then her eyes flick toward me and she stops. “It doesn’t matter where. But LaRoux Industries was there too. In secret.”
My mind is turning over what I’ve gathered since Lilac LaRoux’s request for security assistance first pinged on my radar and put me on the path I’ve been following ever since. I know LaRoux shipped his experiments to three planets: Verona, Avon, and Corinth. Alexis would’ve only been six at the most when the uprisings on Verona happened—but this panic in her gaze, the tension in her frame, they don’t come from something that happened ten years ago. This wound is fresh. Which leaves only one option.
Avon.
I reach for her hand, casually letting my eyes sweep across her forearm. No sign of the genetag she would’ve had as an Avon native.
The documents from the site of the Icarus crash flash up before my eyes—the schematics for the rift at the outstation, the medical reports on the researchers gone mad. Far more than Lilac LaRoux and her major ever knew I dug into. That’s the risk when you take on a pet hacker. “I saw the ring somewhere LaRoux Industries wasn’t meant to be either,” I say quietly. “Well, I didn’t see it—but I found files on it. I know it was there.”
“Do you know what it’s for?”
Now it’s my turn to steady myself, the reports flooding back into my mind. Dr. Eddings was found to have impaled herself on a sharpened length of pipe originally intended for external plumbing.…I can’t tell her the truth. A prison for creatures from another dimension? Perhaps a few Avon Broadcast believers would buy that story, but Alexis will just think I’m dangerously insane. A liability.
Unless she really is from Avon herself. I settle for a half-truth. “From what I read, I think it’s connected to what we saw today. To those people you called husks, the ones you saw who lost their minds. The fact that there’s one of those rifts here, on Corinth—that scares me. We have to find out more about this.”
She lifts her hands to scrub at her face, raking her hair back and leaving it disheveled. “Look, I know what you’re trying to say. But I don’t work with a partner. I’m glad you’re okay, and I’m grateful for the information, but that’s it.”
“But we’re after the same thing. LaRoux Industries. The enemy of my enemy—”
“Is just another enemy, Gideon.”