The reminder was not welcome.
Wu, who must have noticed the shift in my mood, redirected our conversation. “Have you been able to locate War?”
“No.” Miller was hot on her trail, but she was covering her tracks well. “We’ve shifted our focus onto anticipating Famine’s breach. We hope to reach her before War sinks her hooks in her.”
“Are you hoping to reason with her?” Curiosity spiked his tone. “Do you think you can win her over?”
“There’s a chance she might come back like me, right?”
“There has never been an Otillian like you,” he said with utter conviction. “Expect treachery. Famine might come into this world blind and deaf to its facets, but she’ll learn them fast. Any weaknesses she senses in you, she will exploit.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“One bolt of lightning contains enough energy to toast one hundred thousand slices of bread.”
“You did not just say that.” A surprised laugh bubbled up in me. “Are you serious? Is that a real thing?”
“Yes, I did. Yes, I am. And yes, it is.”
The rest of the drive passed in a flurry of animal trivia that would have bored another man to tears. Wu, however, appeared to have a near-eidetic memory. He also seemed to have filled his brain vault with a crap ton of useless informational tidbits that made me wonder how he spent his downtime.
We arrived at our destination, a rustic lodge-style restaurant located three towns north of Canton. The line backed out onto the wraparound porch, and music poured through the parking lot from speakers mounted under the eaves. Wu opened the car door for me, and the air smelled delicious. While I was starting to drool, he grabbed a thick folio from the trunk.
“It tastes even better than it smells,” he promised. “Come on. I have a reservation.”
“Of course you do.”
Wu cut straight to the front of the line, and I followed with my head ducked to avoid the glares cast in our direction. Oblivious to the disturbance he’d caused, Wu bent the ear of the hostess exchanging names for pagers at the door. Her eyes brightened at the attention, and she honest-to-God giggled at whatever line he dropped to convince her to seat us on the spot.
We ordered drinks, both of us opting for sweet tea, no alcohol lest this seem date-like, and she returned thirty seconds later with chilled glasses filled with amber liquid and a silver tray of lemon wedges with a small mesh strainer for catching errant seeds.
Once she left, I cocked an eyebrow at him. “You had a reservation, huh?”
“Yes.” He lifted his menu, flicked it open. “I made it under another alias.” His lips twitched. “Benjamin Franklin.”
“You dropped a hundred dollars on a table? Here?” I surveyed the cozy dining area, the overall décor that of a bait shack on its last leg. It was an illusion, of course, and you didn’t have to stare hard to see through to the pristine tabletops with their pressed linen napkins stuffed with polished silverware. The vintage advertising signs hung on the walls weren’t reproduction. They were originals, a little rust-eaten, just enough to fit the theme, but gorgeous with their bright pops of color. “What do you like about this place?”
“Their snow crab legs.” He noticed me soaking up the ambiance, and what I hesitated to label as approval suffused his features. “The surf and turf isn’t bad either.”
“No, it’s not the food,” I decided. “You like that this place is one thing masquerading as another.”
Fine dining in a dilapidated cabin. The caliber of diners spoke to the quality of the food and the appeal of the environment. The more I studied the staff in their pressed tees and starched shorts, casual but not, and the drinks breezing past, craft beers with hand-printed labels, no household names in sight, the more certain I became that it had cost Wu more than a C-note to charm his way past the head of the line.
After selecting a perfect wedge, he squeezed lemon into his tea. “Is that so?”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re wrong.” His smile blossomed at my immediate scowl. “I was only following orders, Ms. Boudreau.”
“Cute.”
“Thank you.”
I counted backward in my head from ten. “I didn’t mean —”
“I know what you meant.” He sipped his drink and deemed it worthy of his taste buds. “Do you want to talk now or after dinner?”
“Now is good.” I didn’t want to give him a reason to linger over coffee and dessert.
“As you wish.” He produced the black folio and flipped it open on the tabletop between us. “I believe this is all the information you requested.”
Several pages of printed material, including photographs and X-rays, had been paperclipped together, and a clear evidence baggie the size of a Post-it note had been stapled to the top sheet. I rubbed my fingertip over the plastic, rolling the tiny cylinder inside to get a better look at the device. About the size of a grain of rice, I had a good idea of what it was before I flipped it out of the way and read the first page of the report.
“These results didn’t come from the lab.” I kept skimming page after page. “The NSB is microchipping charun like animals. I’m guessing that happens during the mandatory examination. They’re already digging around in us, so who’s going to notice an extra lump?”
When Wu didn’t contradict me, I knew I was on the right track.
“You’ve got a mole on the White Horse cleanup team.” That made the most sense. “All they had to do was use one of those handheld scanners you see in animal shelters to read the chip. After they located the registration number, the data was at your fingertips.”
Wu sat back and let me stumble through the rest.
“The ubaste we hunted wasn’t a recent breach. It was part of a litter born to a female who was brought here during the last Otillian reign of terror.” I scratched my nail on the paper. “This information clears Famine. The creature was either sick, or someone set it on this path.”
“Ubaste are low-level charun. Their cognitive function is on par with a pig or similar animal. It’s smart enough to figure out how to survive, and it’s trainable, but it has very little agency outside of meeting its basic needs.”
“You ruled out sickness quickly. Is that not a possibility?”
“Unlikely. Charun are hearty. We’re immune to most human viruses and diseases.”
“So either this guy developed a case of agency or someone set him up with a hunting ground and told him to go hog wild.”
Thom’s idea that the ubaste might be a distraction seemed most likely. We already knew War had been here far longer than the coterie had realized. There was no telling how she had spent her time outside of the procreation required to fill her coterie’s roster. This seemed like just the type of red herring diversion she would favor, a confusion tactic, and it’s not like she didn’t have plenty of time to plan. She was no doubt several steps ahead of us.
Wu read far too much into my silence. “What are you thinking?”
“This guy was a gift from War.”
“You believe she used the ubaste to distract your coterie.” He figured it out so quickly I had no doubt he had already been thinking along the same lines. “What would she gain from that?”
“Other than distracting us from the search for her and Famine? I’m not sure. White Horse got involved thanks to a small contract set up by distraught pet owners – Crap.” I dug my phone out of my pocket and started texting Miller. “We need to send someone to check and make sure those concerned citizens weren’t actually members of War’s coterie dressed in human skin suits.”
“I’ve been following the arson investigation in the papers.”
Done with my warning, I set the phone aside to play attentive co-diner, and that meant replaying what he’d said to catch the change in conversation. “Santiago thinks the fires are portents of Famine breaching.”