FORTY-FOUR
“What do you think of my little project?”
Mere jumps at the sound of Escobar's voice, but I had heard him coming. He's wearing a light gray suit with a lavender shirt. His tie is a deep burgundy—quite close to the same color as the fronds down on the fifth ring—and the tiny detail stitched into the silk is a pair of interlocked circles. The chimerae sigil.
“We're going to stop it,” Mere says, raising the pistol she got from Belfast and pointing it at Escobar.
“Stop what?” he asks as he strolls to the edge of the rings and looks down. “It's already done.”
“What? What do you mean?” she asks.
“Your friend has already contributed to the project,” he says. “I've drained all of her blood, and it's being passed to the seedlings as we stand here. There's nothing you can do. She's already gone.”
I stare down at the still figure on the gurney. “I can take her back to Arcadia,” I point out. “Mother can bring her back.”
“Arcadia is closed to you. Both of you,” Escobar reminds me. “They won't let you in.”
I shrug. “Maybe I can get them to reconsider.”
“Maybe,” he muses, “but it will take some time. Time she doesn't have.” He purses his lips. “You failed, Silas. You failed in every way.”
“I killed your grandson a couple of times,” I point out.
“I will grant you that,” he admits. “And it looks like you have survived a visit to the salt baths. That's quite impressive. They've been a most effective place to dispose of certain… aborted experiments.”
“‘What doesn't kill you makes you stronger,'” I offer.
“Yes, that hoary aphorism of Nietzsche,” Escobar sighs. “One he didn't subscribe to himself.”
“Happens to be true in a couple of cases,” I say. “Me and Phoebe, for example.”
“Yes,” he says. “She was a most perfect specimen.”
“Is,” I correct him.
He looks at Mere and shakes his head. “Even for one of her soldiers, he's quite single-minded, isn't he?”
“It's one of his most annoying traits,” she admits. She is still pointing the pistol at him, though her arms are starting to tremble.
“Put the gun down, my dear,” Escobar says.
Her only response is to tighten her grip.
“I don't mean to be so pig-headed about this,” I say, looking down at the figure in the pit. “but I'm just trying to be helpful.”
“Helpful? How?” He swivels his head around to look at me.
“Well, are you sure she's dead?” I lift my arm and wave.
He doesn't look away from me, which is too bad because I'm pretty sure the figure on the gurney moves in response.
I've been thinking about the gun case and the sight of Phoebe sitting calmly in the car. She knew what was coming. She knew Escobar was going to try to snatch her. Maybe she had even done something to alert both Secutores and Escobar that we were in the hotel. I don't really know, but the end result is that Phoebe got herself to Escobar's laboratory unscathed.
Escobar wanted to create a chimera, a new strain of Arcadian that was resistant to the weed killer, and Phoebe was never going to accept protection from the Grove. So what was she—a self-proclaimed steward—going to do about the weed killer? She was going to get the counteragent spliced into her own DNA.
If all Escobar had done was drain her blood, he hadn't killed her. Not yet. She was going to be incredibly thirsty and quite weak, but she wasn't dead. And whatever was growing in those pods was going to be organic enough for her to feed from. And given that it would be a mix of her own blood, the counteragent, and whatever other genetic modifications Escobar was putting into his clones, she was just going to be getting the equivalent of a highly oxygenated blood transfusion.
Brutally efficient. Just like Phoebe.
“My science is quite exact,” Escobar snaps.
“I'm sure it is,” I say, stepping back from the edge of the rings so that Mere doesn't wonder what I'm talking about and come to look too. “So, what's in store for us?”
“What makes you think I have any plans for you at all?” Escobar asks.
“Well, you got what you wanted.” I nod toward the Incan terrace farm. “You've kicked me around a bit, rubbed my nose in things, and got my head all twisted around. What does killing me now serve?”
“Are you suggesting you might have some use?”
“I don't know what's really true about your relationship with Arcadia, but I know that at least one person there knows what you're doing. That may not have been part of your plan, but they're going to come sniffing around now that they know about the weed killer. Oh, yeah, sorry, I told them about that. They're going to be quite worked up about the humans having a weapon that can actually kill us.”
“You're going to make a deal, aren't you?” Mere says. “You're going to make Arcadia bow to you. You're going to make them beg you to save them, and they'll be so panicked, they'll accept anything you offer. It's a classic scenario. Allow a threat to develop and then swoop in with a perfectly reasonable solution. God, you'd think people would have figured it out after the US government used it on its own citizens after 9/11.”
Escobar raises his shoulders slightly as if the idea is interesting but not enough to fully capture his attention. “What do I need of Arcadia? I have been without them for more than two hundred years. Why would I want them to embrace me again?”
“Because you need their help,” I say.
He laughs. “Their help? The combined umbrella of what my family controls makes more—in pure profit—every year than the entire accumulated wealth that every Arcadian has squirreled away. I could hire every single private military contractor on this planet—today—without making a dent in my cash reserves.”
“You should,” I point out. “At the very least to keep them from being hired by the other guys.”
“Which other guys?”
“The ones you're worried about,” I say. “The ones who developed the weed killer in the first place and gave it to Secutores. I mean, Secutores did wipe out that team you sent to retrieve Phoebe. If it wasn't for the helicopter extraction, you wouldn't have gotten Phoebe.”
“It's a temporary advantage,” he scoffs. “Soon to be rendered useless against me and mine.”
“That might be true,” I admit, “but that's not their only research project, is it?”
His cheek twitches.
Mere spots his nervous flinch too. “They got nervous, didn't they? When they used the weed killer, but didn't capture an Arcadian. Suddenly their secret was out. They've been under everyone's radar for some time, haven't they? You don't develop a weapon like that overnight. That's why you tortured Nigel and taped it. You wanted to show them that you were still willing to play along. That was why you let Silas and me come to the restaurant. You were going to turn Silas over. Fulfill your part of the deal. Meanwhile, they had no idea that the one you really wanted was Phoebe.” Mere's figured it out too. “But we kept getting away from you, and Secutores kept getting closer. And now you've moved against them. They know you're not going to play nice. You need friends. You need to get that counteragent in place and you need to show Arcadia that it works.”
Escobar snarls at her, and Mere responds by snapping her arm up, pointing the pistol at his forehead. “Don't,” she says quite clearly, “I'm really on edge right now. I might not be the best of shots, but you're going to be pretty hard to miss standing right there. And I'm willing to bet you haven't received the genetic therapy yet.”
“You need someone to help you smooth things over with Arcadia,” I say, pulling his attention away from Mere, “That was supposed to be Talus, but Phoebe went and splattered his brains all over your penthouse floor. Which leaves me as the only Arcadian who knows enough about what is going on to help you. I'm Mother's favorite, remember. You need me to convince the Grove.” I nod at Mere. “And you need her to keep me in line.”
“Excuse me?” Mere sputters.
Escobar composes himself and offers Mere a pleasant smile. “I will need assurances that he will do his job properly,” he says. “Otherwise, he could simply sell me out to the Grove. They would be taking a risk, but Silas has been a member of Arcadia for a very long time. Many will feel his words resonate within them.”
“So you're just going to leave me with him?” Mere's hand drifts, moving the pistol in my direction. “What's to stop him from killing me the moment you walk out of here?”
“Not much,” I admit.
“Oh, that's fantastic to hear,” Mere snorts.
“Think of it as detente,” Escobar says.
“Which is just a fancy French way of saying, ‘Relax, this won't hurt a bit when I slip this knife in your back,'” Mere says.
“It does always hurt more than you think it will,” I say gravely.
“Silas!” Mere stares at me, her eyes big and round.
We're interrupted by a shout from the lab building behind us. Escobar looks; I don't. I grab Mere's hand, reestablishing where her gun should be pointed, and mash my finger against hers and the trigger. The gun goes off, but Escobar has already moved, ducking and slamming his palm against the base of her fist. The gun barrel goes up, the round misses, and as he tries to strip the weapon from her hand, I backhand him in the face.
In the tunnel, the metal door explodes inward in a gout of flame and smoke.
Belfast and his cavalry.
It took him long enough.