Day Eight
(age twenty-four)
Kelli’s plans weren’t much, but she repeated them in her head as she disembarked the Wildfire. Run. Fight. Find Ting. In a few minutes, either she’d be on her way home with a lot of ill-gotten money and a lot of explaining to do, or she’d be fighting with everything she had.
The Quixadas met them in the shiny atrium in front of the warehouse, next to the big commemoration plaque.
In spite of the circle of benches, everyone stood.
Conchita Quixada stood tall, statuesque, perfectly suited and impassive; beside her, Rosaura bounced on the balls of her feet, livid with excitement.
A whole squad of suited men lined the edges of the room.
The warehouse behind them was dark; the party was over by now.
The colors were still garish and iridescent, and it still smelled like eggs. Kelli tried not to wrinkle her nose.
“Welcome back,” said Conchita. “It went well?”
“Without a hitch, boss,” Rowan said confidently.
“Give it here.”
Kelli stepped forward and dropped the data chip into Conchita’s palm. Her hand made a little flinching movement so that it wouldn’t risk touching her. Conchita noticed the flinch and chuckled.
“You’ll learn,” she said.
Whatever she’d been about to say next was interrupted by someone running into the room—not one of the suited men, but someone younger like Kelli and Rowan, dressed in jeans and a scuffed leather jacket. He was panting like he’d just run all the way here.
“Boss,” he said, “incoming ships, unauthorized, headed to the main pad.”
“What?”
“They look like Inspiration ships. Don’t know what division yet. Nadiia said shoot them down, but there are a bunch of them, and they’re big—”
Conchita silenced him with a look. Rosaura’s eyes had gone very wide, but her mother’s face was utterly, preternaturally calm. “Do not shoot Inspiration ships down. Curtain protocol; announce it. I’m sure this can be sorted out with professional decorum, between businesspeople.”
“Yes, boss.”
The leather-jacketed minion rushed out again.
Kelli stared in the direction he’d gone.
She thought she heard the rumble of the ships even now, over the flying platform’s background thrum.
Was she imagining that? Maybe it was Baz, but at this point Kelli almost didn’t want to get her hopes up.
It might not be Baz. It might be something else entirely.
Conchita’s beady gaze crawled back across the room and fixed on her. “Inspiration,” she said. “Now of all times. It’s you, isn’t it? Even knowing what the consequences would be for you and Rowan, you told them something.”
Kelli didn’t know if she had. She didn’t know if Baz had ever read a single one of her messages. And even if she had known, she presumably shouldn’t say so.
“N-no,” she said, thinking frantically. “I just—I mean, I don’t know—I don’t know who these are.”
It wasn’t even a lie—she had no idea if this was Baz or not—but the instant it left her mouth, she realized it sounded that way. Not just a lie but a stupid, implausible one. She didn’t know what to do. Where was Orlando’s glib way with words when she needed it?
One of the suited men grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back. “You want it beaten out of her, boss?”
“No. Kelli’s employers will be in this room in five minutes or less.
Don’t harm her. She is here of her own free will, for a civil conversation with a fan.
As our guest, she may speak with whom she likes.
If her unstable mind and wild imagination inspired her toward any criminal acts in the process, then that’s unsurprising, for a girl with her criminal past, but it’s no business of ours. ”
The suited man did not let go of her.
But Conchita wasn’t done. She turned, with a cold stare, to Rowan.
“You, though,” she said. “You were responsible for her. How did she contact Inspiration?”
“I don’t know.” Rowan had gone very pale. “I had my eye on her the whole time, I swear.”
Kelli started to shake. She’d been so na?ve, yet again. She’d thought so intensely through all the possible consequences for herself. But it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder what Conchita might do to Rowan.
“Your eye, yes. But you yourself described Kelli Reynolds as a liability, and you’ve worked for me long enough to know we are careful about our liabilities here. Did you search her? The bags, the pockets? Did you monitor her access to your own devices?”
“She’s a guest!” Rowan said desperately.
“The whole plan was to treat her like a guest, to make her comfortable, so she’d do the thing willingly.
The whole other plan was that she wouldn’t do this because blackmail.
Boss, we don’t even know that this was her.
Maybe somebody planted a tracker on us back on Ganymede.
Maybe all kinds of things. But Kelli wouldn’t do this; you don’t understand.
” He squeezed his eyes shut, desperate. Were those tears he was fighting?
“You didn’t see her ten years ago. When she set the fire.
And afterward. It scared her to death what she did.
It’s why I didn’t want us to blackmail her in the first place; it’s the cruelest thing you could possibly do to her.
She’d do anything to stop it from coming to light.
She’d never do this. It was something else; they found us some other way. ”
Conchita considered this with a tilted head. The rumbling of the nearby ships was growing louder.
“You have failed me twice now,” she said at last. “I treated you as my son. I paid for your spaceship and your medical bills. In return I asked only for your loyalty. I wanted to trust you. But you have kept secrets from me, and you have been so careless with your trust in this woman you haven’t seen since high school that you put the entire family in danger.
You are no longer any son of mine.” She flicked her wrist. “Put him in the trash.”
Two of those suited men, each a head taller than Rowan, had already come to grab him. He struggled frantically. “No! Please, I’ll—”
One of the men punched him in the mouth and rendered the rest of the words unintelligible.
Kelli didn’t even know what put him in the trash meant. What did people do with their trash in a place like this? Shred it? Crush it? Burn it? She didn’t think Rowan would be panicking like this if it were survivable.
She struggled, too. She shrieked, before she even realized any words were coming out of her mouth: “Don’t hurt him! Don’t hurt him, it was me, I—”
But of course that wasn’t going to help.
Conchita already knew it was her, and she was punishing Rowan for not stopping her.
No matter what Kelli had done, how secretly or how cleverly, Conchita would still blame Rowan for not knowing.
Or else Conchita did blame Kelli, and she knew that this was the worst thing she could do to her while still delivering her body back to Inspiration, in five minutes, unhurt.
Dimly, Kelli noticed that Ting had said “No!” too, and started forward.
None of the men in suits grabbed Ting, though.
Instead it was Zhaleh who put a hand on their shoulder and fixed them with an unreadable look.
Ting didn’t look happy, but they relented.
Meanwhile Rosaura just smiled apprehensively, hands clasped, riveted by the drama.
Kelli didn’t know what to do. Was this the moment to start fighting in earnest, grabbing at weapons, jabbing eyes, kicking groins? Zhaleh seemed to think it was not. If Kelli fought now, it would be her against an awful lot of bigger, stronger people. It wouldn’t do much to help Rowan.
He fixed her with a disbelieving stare as they dragged him off. A moment later, the rumbling stopped.
“Your friends have landed,” said Conchita, as calm as before. She turned. “Zhaleh, take Rosaura to the safe room. If anyone so much as makes her nervous, it will be on your head.”
“Understood, boss.” Zhaleh gestured to Rosaura and escorted her out with total professionalism, without any expression at all, like it was a normal day and she hadn’t just watched her ex-boyfriend get dragged off to his probable death.
But then, hadn’t she said before that she was one of Conchita’s good daughters?
Maybe Conchita had so much leverage on Zhaleh that she’d do anything at all.
Rosaura looked back with an odd expression, like she was wishing she could watch the action.
Virtually as soon as she was gone, a group of about two dozen community standards enforcement professionals marched into the room.
Kelli’s eyes widened as she took them in. These were the real deal—they wore black, armored uniforms, the kind that people on television wore when they expected serious mass violence. And in their ranks, dressed in plainclothes and looking embarrassed, walked Baz.
Kelli stared at him, frozen, her stomach doing flips. He stared back.
But it was the stocky, clean-cut man at the front of the group who spoke first. “Conchita Quixada, is it?”
Conchita looked unimpressed. “You know who I am.”
“Sorry for the intrusion,” said the cop at the front, not sounding sorry at all.
“We received a distress call regarding a theft of confidential intellectual property from Inspiration’s data vaults on Ganymede.
The call indicated the thieves in question had returned here.
I hope you don’t mind us having a look around, asking a few questions. ”
“Have you got a warrant?” Conchita asked, as calmly as if she was asking about groceries.
“Yep. Hot off the presses the morning we launched.” The cop at the front gestured, and one of the other professionals pulled out a tablet with an official-looking e-signed document already loaded, like they’d known she’d ask. “First, is there a Kelli Reynolds on the premises?”