THIRTY-THREE
She leads me down a narrow, unadorned hallway into a room that looks out over the front of the villa. The room is spartan—wooden chair, desk, and tiny chaise lounge—and a full-sized laptop, not the tiny netbook I had bought back in Santiago, is the only indicator that we're still in the twenty-first century. Tacked up on the opposite wall from the desk are Mere's charts: another version of the sheet from the hotel, even more byzantine now with its lines and bubbles, and a narrow strip of brown paper upon which she has drawn a crude map of the western side of South America.
I wander over to the maps and start examining them, listening as Mere runs through the highlights of the news over the past week. The fire alarm at Montoya's penthouse turned out to be a fortuitous act on a resident's part as a bomb explosion not two hours later decimated the top floor of the building. The Chilean military wanted to call it a terrorist attack and the local Santiago police were claiming it was an assassination attempt by a industrial competitor of the Montoya family. Either way, most of the city got locked down and the news media was still scrambling to figure out which of the thousands of rumors flying around were true. The entire country was in an uproar over the event, even though no one knew anything specific.
It sounds like a pretty standard cluster-f*ck and cover-up. Montoya blows the penthouse, covering the dead strike team up there, and the resultant confusion allows him to spirit away the mess at the hotel as well. The martial lockdown might have been meant to seal us inside the city limits, but Phoebe did the right thing by getting us out immediately after rescuing Mere. We've done it a thousand times. Go in, do the deed, get out. Don't be there when the local media and police swarm the area. Keep moving as far away as fast as possible. In twelve hours, there won't be enough useful data to track anyone.
Though only a day's drive was a little close to go to ground, and as I decipher Mere's notes on the geography map, I realize why they chose the spot they did. “You're charting Arcadian-friendly spots.”
“Yes,” she agrees. “Phoebe gave me the idea when she said you needed good dirt. During the drive up from Santiago, I realized that was the way I was going to find them.”
“Them?”
“Hyacinth.” She joins me at the map and elucidates some of her squiggles. “You remember Mnemosysia? They're the ones out of Denver, Colorado, who are trying to create memory retention therapies. I thought they were running out of money, and I don't have my notes on hand to be sure, but over the last few days, I haven't been able to find nearly as much data as I had thought I had. I know it's impossible to scrub the Internet, but it certainly feels like someone has been trying. But let's stick with that basic assumption, okay? Let's assume Mnemosysia is having money troubles. They need a miracle to get them to their next milestone, and someone comes up with a shortcut.”
“Whale brains,” I provide, indicating that I remember our previous conversation.
“Right. And so they need a supply of raw material.” Her finger traces along a line on the sheet. “Now, Kyodo Kujira is in similar financial straits. They happen to have a whaling fleet that's ready to go if someone would actually cover the costs of putting them out to sea.” There's a question mark in a triangle next to Mere's notation of Kyodo Kujira. “If Mnemosysia doesn't have the money, then who steps up? And what are they getting out of the deal? And why are they a silent partner?” Mere looks at me and raises her eyebrow.
“Memory drugs,” I say.
“Memory drugs,” she repeats. “I didn't make the connection earlier, but now, knowing you a little better—knowing what happens to Arcadians—it seems obvious. Arcadia would fund this research, wouldn't they?”
“Except for the bit about having to kill whales for the research,” I point out.
“True, but that's the hook, isn't it? That's what gets Arcadia interested. It's not about whaling. Whaling has been going on for centuries. It's about the reason why they're whaling, and that reason is one that Arcadia would be interested in, yes?”
I nod. I wasn't privy to the Grove's decision to send the team—team members typically aren't informed of all the various intricacies of their missions—and, given what has happened since, it's easy to say that I was an idiot for going along without asking more questions. But there's never been a reason to ask questions before. We're good soldiers. Mother takes care of us.
“But it's a trap. It's a way for someone to get their hands on an Arcadian.”
“How is Hyacinth involved?” I ask. “If it is owned by the Montoyas, they already have access to Arcadians.”
“Would you volunteer one of your own for what they did to Nigel?”
I concede that point.
“But that's what has been bugging me these last few days. Aren't there less invasive ways to get tissue samples? If that was the point, then you should be able to find a volunteer. Companies turn to their employees all the time for this sort of thing. Some of them even offer a pretty good honorarium for volunteering. So why the medical drama? Was that all just for us?”
“No,” I say. “That went well beyond acceptable limits.”
Mere nods. “So they were harvesting Nigel, which leads me to the burning question: Who are they?”
I cock my head to the side. “Not why?”
She shakes her head as she runs her fingers over her chart. “The more I dig into Hyacinth Holdings, the more it seems like it has to be a front for Arcadian research, but it doesn't make sense that it would be completely covert from the rest of Arcadia, or that it would be involved in some scheme to trap one of their own.”
“But they're not Arcadian any more, are they?” I realize.
She nods. “You killed Jacinta. You wrecked the garden they were building. The garden that was going to create a place that wasn't beholden to Arcadian rules. You were supposed to bring them home again, but they didn't come home, did they? They went underground and kept working on how to be free of Arcadia.”
How to be free of Mother, I think, trying to process what she is telling me.
“Escobar was trying to convince you that Arcadia is poisoning you,” she continues. “When you go back home and… do whatever it is that happens there… you get injected with some sort of time-release virus—a mimetic agent, I guess—that makes you crave returning to Arcadia. Right? Your brain gets infected with this idea that you're going to die if you stay away. You self-sabotage, don't you? The longer you stay away, the harder it gets for you to stay healthy.”
I don't disagree with her, but agreeing with her puts a lot of what Escobar was saying in a different light. And I'm not ready to make that jump yet.
“But, here's the problem with this theory,” Mere says. “There's no money trail from Hyacinth to Mnemosysia.”
“I thought you said someone was footing the bill?”
“Someone is, but as near as I can tell, it isn't Hyacinth.” She taps the chart. “And here's the thing, why would Hyacinth get involved with Kyodo Kujira and all this mess with Arcadia if they already had access to Mnemosysia's data.”
“They made a deal,” I say, following her line of thinking.
She nods. “This is where Secutores comes in. They're the front for someone else. Their job is to get an Arcadian. They built the framework of the trap—one that would hold up to scrutiny and would tantalize Arcadia to send a team.”
“Hyacinth's job was to make sure a team got sent,” I say.
“Yep,” Mere says. “They may have walked away from the family, but they still have some influence back home.”
“So in return for an Arcadian, they'd get the Mnemosysia data?”
“But that's not what happened, is it?” she continues. “Your team didn't play ball the way they were supposed to, and Secutores's trap failed to catch anyone.”
I shake my head. “No, it failed to capture me.”
Mere snorts. “I thought we covered this. It's not about you.”
“But it is,” I tell her. “Phoebe and I have worked together in the past, and we have a working relationship. I'm point. She's support. That's the way we've always done it. I should have been lead on the processing boat, but I got distracted by the whaling equipment. Phoebe would have waited for me if it had been the two of us, but we had Nigel. We weren't used to working as a trio, and when I fell back, he naturally stepped up. He got the chemical dose that was meant for me.”
And then I understand Talus's role in all of it. “Talus was the plant,” I say. “How did he survive all of this if it wasn't simply by turning the boat over to Secutores? He talked Nigel into attacking the harpoon boat, specifically to force Phoebe and me to do what we did. To separate us.” I cast my mind back and dredge up details about the fight on the harpoon boat. Little things that had been odd, but not so much that I had stopped and looked more closely. But now, a different picture emerged. “They were supposed to catch me, but they hadn't counted on Phoebe and her rifle. That threw things off enough that I was able to engage them. And then…”
I recall the errant grenade and the explosion that had holed the boat. The sound of water, rushing into the breach. The ocean, eager to claim the tender. When the storm rolled in, any chance of reuniting with the Prime Earth boat vanished.
“Escobar wanted to hand you over,” Mere says.
I nod. “Do you see how that fits? Talus came back to shore. Secutores built a new trap—knowing that I'd come find you—and we managed to get away from them again.”
“But Hyacinth had Nigel. Why'd they cut up Nigel?”
“It's like you said: to get us angry. To keep us from looking at the big picture.” I lean against the desk. “What if Talus and Escobar didn't know about the chemical agent? What if all they were told was that Secutores was going to capture an Arcadian. Escobar gave them enough data to create an effective trap. That's why it was out on the water. It makes it easier to keep one of us in one place if we can't flee. But they didn't know about the chemical agent. When Talus saw what Secutores had, he realized what was really going on. Whoever had come to Escobar was playing off his alienation from Arcadia. They hoped he wouldn't think too hard about why they wanted an Arcadian, and maybe he didn't care, but when Talus saw the weed killer, that changed things.
“That compound comes out of defoliation research, and there's no way any Arcadian would have anything to do with that research. And why would Hyacinth create something that is just as deadly to them as it is to Arcadians? It's not strategically useful. However, to an organization like Secutores?”
“They were delivering the means of their own deaths.”
“Right. That's what Nigel's death is all about. It's a big f*ck you to Secutores. You get nothing.”
Mere nods, following my line of thinking “Nigel was harvested for another reason, wasn't he?” she says. “It wasn't just cutting him up to give Secutores the middle finger. He was tainted, wasn't he? He had had a big dose of that chemical agent. Hyacinth was taking tissue samples, because if they can develop something that is resistant to it, they go back to having the advantage. It's an arms race.”
“And Arcadia has no idea that the war has started.”
“Unless you tell them,” she says.
“Unless either of us tell them,” I amend, understanding why Belfast wanted to snatch Mere. Mere nods, eyes downcast, as she accepts the idea of her value.
“So, who was in the Mercedes?” Phoebe asks suddenly.
She's leaning against the doorframe. “The Mercedes,” she repeats. “They're still looking for you two. There's nothing stopping either of you reaching out to Arcadia or any news outlet. But you haven't yet. You don't know who you can trust, which means you're unclaimed assets. Both sides want you.”
“That's why you killed Talus,” I say. “He was the only one who knew both parties.”
“I killed Talus because he betrayed us,” Phoebe says.
“You're right, though,” Mere says. “We're the only connection between Escobar and Secutores. Secutores is still trying to finish their job and deliver an Arcadian; Escobar—”
“Escobar just wants me dead,” I interrupt. “Let's not make it grander than it is.”
“He wants revenge on Arcadia,” Phoebe says. “It really isn't about you.”
Mere coughs, putting her hand to her mouth to hide her smile. “It doesn't seem like Escobar's style,” she says.
“You want to go find out who is in those cars, don't you?” I ask Phoebe.
She nods, her eyes gleaming with excitement.