“Where’s Nevada?” he asks, ignoring the slight.
“Out spending money no doubt.” Vesper sniggers. “She got a killing from giving those people in the pearly blue ship access to your freaky brother. Hell, she got so much she probably blew this dump and moved up north to Land Dominion. I mean, who’d stay down here if they had the scratch, right Jan?” Vesper and Jan launch into a laughing fit and it’s all I can do to keep my clenched fists by my side.
We dash down to Nevada’s study, her private sanctum, which we now have ample reason to breach. This breaking in is all so new, and forbidden. I remember how Nevada gently washed my back after Stiles attacked me. I remember her coaxing me to eat.
God only knows who the villains and heroes are anymore.
All I know is that I need my brother to get well and I need answers. In her desk we find Stazzi’s address on the letterhead of a note. It’s a company called NanoPearl, and it’s listed as Pacific Ocean 3, in Vegas-by-the-Sea. Pacific Ocean? How is that possible? Is it underwater? Stazzi’s scribbled a note for Nevada on it: Come see me and we’ll talk business.
Business, huh.
Nevada’s desk looks rifled through—uprooted papers, and files in a mess. I do see a wad of cash stuck inside the frame of a holo calendar. I count it out—a mere 200 Dominions—not an impressive cache if it’s payoff money.
Thorn has padded down. He’s mumbling, clutching his head. “Clean me out. Please, Rube.” My own head erupts with harsh, nonsensical sound when he comes close. This doesn’t seem like the stromanet or the Fireseed, whose voices are always so clear, so harmonious. What then?
A handful of the Reds have managed to get into the compound and they’re flying wildly, bouncing off the rafters, yeeping and careening near us. Unlike all of the other times I’ve seen Thorn with them, they pay no attention to him whatsoever. This fills me with a nameless dread.
“Let’s take Thorn to Dr. Varik’s now,” I whisper to Armonk.
“I may be able to help,” Blane says. “My father was a doctor.”
“Sure he was.” Armonk scoffs.
I’m tired of the tension between them, and it makes me feel guilty as if I encouraged it somehow. “I believe Blane,” I say quietly. “Besides, we need all hands on board.”
Armonk nods, his lips fixed in a grim line. He may not trust Blane, but he trusts me.
Radius enters the office with Bea, and we quickly fill them in on our plans.
“Can you hang tight and keep watch over Jan and Vesper?” Blane levels his gaze on Radius, no doubt to detect any wavering of his friend’s loyalty.
Radius puts an arm around Bea. “Sure, just keep us posted.
“Hope you feel better fast, little man,” Bea says to Thorn.
I jog up to third tier to fill my latchbag with elixirs and tools we may need on the road. On my way down Vesper yells from Jan’s room, where she’s bound to a wall pipe, “That doctor of yours sold out too, you know.” Nevada has him twisted around her fingers.” Vesper cackles. “You’re all so damn clueless. Whenever you were away, Nevada had the doctor over for soirees.” She laughs hard and Jan joins in.
I want to tell her that I’m shocked she even knows the word soiree but it’s so not worth it.
Chapter 27
Even before we land, Thorn is crying—silent tears streaming down his face. He’s my weathervane so I know that something’s horribly wrong. I feel it too, in the pit of my stomach, in the discordant howls in my head, that I know Thorn also hears.
We scramble out of the glider and hurry under the awning toward the house. The front door is cocked open.
“Dr. Varik never leaves the door this way,” Armonk says, “even when he’s in the yard, loading the glider for a house call.”
“Or when he’s picking his medicinal crops,” I add. As generous a doctor as he is, he’s also guarded about thieves.
We stand motionless. None of us have the nerve to go in. It’s like the night I escaped. Once I walked toward that pyre with Stiles and later that night to The Greening I sensed that I could never return to innocence. But we’re bound by the need to help Thorn, and by allegiance to this doctor who took the time to explain what we’ve become.
Stepping over the threshold, I gasp. We’re faced with chaos. Thorn lets out a rare cry. Dr. Varik’s furniture’s been upended in some sort of raid, or fight. His prized antique medical books have been tossed carelessly on the floor with covers splayed. Blane sets the chairs upright, I dust off books and return them to the shelves.