“Spies,” I say.
“Spies.” He nods. “I mostly just monitor what we pick up through their feeds, alert them to anything that could pose a threat to the Wolves’ authority—the silk lens film installed on your eyes is equipped to transmit digital information, like Pell said before, video as well as audio. And to be clear, your lens film isn’t transmitting now, given that we never finalized your activation.”
He’s quiet now; they both are. We sit for a while in silence as I try to piece all of this new information together. It’s hard to figure out where to even start.
“If you were just going to shoot Gray”—finally I am able to tear away at the layers of my raw confusion, finally able to sort it into words—“why would you put me through all of this?”
“It’s complicated.” He sighs. “You know me, sweetheart. You remember who I am, right?”
I search his eyes and find that I do. I remember everything—that’s part of the problem.
“I’m still in here,” he says. It’s true, too. It’s just a little hard to see through all of my shattered illusions. “I would rather die than allow the Wolves to win this war.” There is a long pause. He glances at Pellegrin. “It’s required more than a few excruciating sacrifices to land myself—and keep myself—in a position where I can actually do something about it.”
“Where we can do everything about it,” Pellegrin chimes in.
I want to know more about their plan, badly in fact, but I’m stuck on the notion of sacrifices. I understand them—I do. It’s just hard when people focus on the so-called greater good without setting aside a piece of their hearts to grieve. I nearly became one of those greater-good sacrifices, despite the fact that neither of them can bring themselves to admit it.
But is that really what’s happening here? Dad is not that cold: he loves life more than anyone I’ve ever, ever known. He loves for others to have life. He looked truly sorry when talking about the guys he’s lost to the project.
Dad’s coffee mug. His colored pencils. His refrigerator full of my favorite snack foods. It is starting to sink in that he’s been grieving his losses every bit as much as I have. Maybe more, even. I know, know, he would not let me believe him dead for no reason—and I know it is true when he says he’d rather die than allow them to win. So if it is his choice to be here, he must have one hell of a reason.
“You still haven’t told me what kind of deal you made,” I say.
I’ve seen my father cry a handful of times. The day of his accident, when we visited him in the hospital, was the first time. The last was at barracks, on the day he told me goodbye. “Your life.” It is barely a whisper. “They’ve agreed to let you live, in relative peace, if I work with them on all of this.”
It isn’t only the world he’s been trying to save.
It’s me.
I am small again, curled up in his lap as he reads to me. I am older, picking wildflowers from the backyard and bringing them to him in a vase. I am crying into his shoulder when Emma and I have our first big fight.
I am not the orphan I feared I was. Not even a little bit.
SEVENTY
THE HAZE CLEARS: If I take the fall for shooting Gray, I live. If it comes out that Dad turned against another Wolf, they’ll kill me to punish him.
“So . . . at what point do you stop turning people into spies? When do we get to cure them?” I slide off the stool and check out the wall of surveillance screens. “Is Lonan—did you do the procedure on him, too?”
Neither of them says a word. When I turn back, they wear sheepish I’m sorry to have to tell you this looks. “What?”
I start to worry when they still don’t answer. “What happened to Lonan? Is he okay?” I’ve taken too long, so long. It was unwise to get this comfortable—if you could even call it comfortable.
“Oh, no, sweetheart—he’s in a recovery area, and he made it through the procedure just fine,” Dad says. “Most people do.”
Most.
“So, what, then?”
Pellegrin is the one to break the news. “Lonan has been our endgame all along,” he says. “It’s why we pulled Sky Cassowary from New Port Isabel, Eden—we knew it was the only way to draw Lonan out. He’s quite the elusive pirate, if you weren’t already aware.”
“And I’m sorry to tell you,” Dad chimes in, “but there is no cure. Pell has a formula, but the kingpins haven’t sanctioned its testing or development yet. It was just a lie told by the crew on Cassowary’s ship to draw Lonan in.”
Well. This is quite the predicament. It’s like a blow dart, a nuclear one, to our entire plan.
“But—I thought the Wolves wanted to use Lonan to take down the Resistance?”
“Oh, they most definitely do,” Dad says. “We were pretty convincing on that point.”
“Not that it took much convincing,” Pellegrin adds.
The three of us stand for a minute, in sticky truths and awkward silence.
Dad takes a sip of cold coffee. He hasn’t changed a bit on that front. “Oh,” he says. Like his magic elixir of understanding was in the sludge at the bottom of his mug. “You’re confused because you believe Pell and I plan to use Lonan, and all the spies we’ve created, to take down the Resistance. Which, yes, you’re right. That doesn’t make sense.”
A grin spreads across Pellegrin’s face. “We really are convincing, aren’t we, Will?”
“Apparently,” he says, but his grin is a shadow compared with Pellegrin’s. “Eden, Lonan’s influence will tip this war; that is one thing we can count on. The kingpins have been insistent that Lonan receive the procedure, ever since it got in their heads that we could use him against the Resistance—they’re obsessed with him, want to admire their pet weapon as soon as possible. You know now what would have happened if we’d refused.”
“So,” I say, piecing things together, “if you’re secretly anti-Wolf, that means you’re going to use Lonan to help the Resistance in the war?”
Now my father smiles, and it is radiant. “We’re going to use him to win it.”
SEVENTY-ONE
DAD MOVES TO the wall of display screens, adjusts a few of the controls on the tech board just below it. “Lonan, you there?” he says quietly into a long, thin microphone.