Chapter 11
11
HER
“ L oulou, I need you to check on your mother, please,” my father whispered from a few places down.
Fuck. Mom’s cocktail hour had started around eleven this morning, so it wasn’t surprising that halfway through dinner, she’d gone missing from the table. That meant as usual, Daddy wanted me to go look for her and make sure she hadn’t passed out on the floor of the powder room in a disgusting puddle, especially not during a party with our entire family fortune on the line.
It likely also meant going into the garden, which was why I wasn’t, yet. Not until I’d spoken to my boy. Not until we’d figured out a plan.
But how? Time was running out. If I didn’t find the gardener, he would find us. And the video would find Daddy. And then it would be too late. And worse, I didn’t know if my boy had even seen my message yet. I didn’t know if he would .
Twilight swallowed the sunset’s final glow. Candles flickered in tall glass holders, the firepit crackled, and the pool shimmered, reflecting the firelight and the darkening azure sky. Roasted tamales, peach salad, and chile-crusted branzino with squash puree all made their appearances, the housekeeper no doubt seizing the chance to remind everyone that her master had once had enough money to send her to a high-end culinary academy.
The terrace helpfully had its own bar and kitchen, which meant the slaves didn’t have to go back and forth to the house every time someone wanted something. It also meant I was acutely aware of his whereabouts every single second of the evening but still couldn’t risk saying any more to him but a thank you , even when he’d served me another champagne cocktail as I stood amid a group of my father’s friends’ kids, or when I’d watched that bold handshake with a man rich and powerful enough to be an effective supervillain was one of the most reckless—and dare I say, sexiest—things I’d ever seen. But it wouldn’t matter how sexy it was when my father opened his phone to see a softcore porn video starring his daughter and his slave.
One thing was clear: this couldn’t go on. Now that dinner was in full swing, my boy was as rapidly in and out of the kitchen as the other slaves, and I couldn’t exactly go chasing after him, pulling him away from his duties and myself away from the table. Come to think of it, had he—or the other slaves, for that matter—had a moment’s rest all evening, or anything to eat? And why the fuck had that never crossed my mind at a party before?
So yes, that was all agonizing, but surely it couldn’t be more so than having to store all the lovely Santa Fe art you’d just bought while waiting for your 1.2 million-dollar home remodeling job to finish, which was the one currently bedeviling the woman sitting next to me, totally oblivious that my focus was completely and entirely elsewhere. I made polite noises and pushed back my chair. But before I could leave, I stopped.
“I mean, who would have thought that the most expensive part of a rocket would be the part you throw away?” asked Langer, who had hardly touched his branzino, the plates for which the slaves—except for one—were now quietly clearing away from the dining table. The glow of the soft tabletop candles and overhead lanterns obscured Langer’s icy blue eyes as he held forth. “When I decided to invest in Orbital Dynamics, they told me they thought they could make spaceflight affordable by reusing those parts. Problem is, they sent up five of them and only two of them came back, and the ones that came back had their fuselage gutted like a herring by space debris. Now they tell us it’s going to take months to repair, which you have to admit kind of undermines the whole concept. And the other partners are talking about cutting their losses, after twenty years and billions invested.”
“So what you’re saying is that it’s not economically feasible to send up these rockets?” asked one of Daddy’s colleagues in dismay.
“Not if you want them to come back,” said Langer, leaning back in his chair.
“It’s pretty obvious,” said Corey a few places down, prompting some heads to turn. Much to my relief, he was expending most of his effort that evening sucking his boss’s dick and had temporarily left off worrying about his own. “If we can look at the data from the rockets that came back intact, we can see where the holes were made. If the fuselage is destroyed, logically that’s the part whose structural integrity should be reinforced.”
It sure sounded smart. All across the table, more heads spun to look at him. And at the very end, one of the slaves—guess which one—had paused with three plates balanced in his hand and was clearly listening, too.
“What do you think, kid?” asked Langer, noticing immediately.
“What would he know about it?” snapped Corey. “We’re talking about rocket science, not how to load the dishwasher.”
His boss ignored him and nodded at my boy.
I sat down.
Every other slave I had ever met, at this point, would have given him the Oh, it’s not my place to say, sir routine.
But if it wasn’t clear already, we were not dealing with every other slave.
“With all due respect, sir—I mean, Max—your intern here has a fantastic idea,” he said. “For losing both all the rockets you have left and your remaining stockholders.”
Corey’s face turned an unattractive shade of eggplant. My father practically choked on his wine. “Excuse me?”
Langer held up his hand, shutting my dad up yet again without a word. Holy shit, did money ever talk.
My heart pounded as I reached for my glass of ice water and downed it in a gulp, not daring to look. But it didn’t matter. I could have stared right at him if I wanted to. Everyone else at the table was staring at him, too. They were mesmerized. Even the slaves had stopped, whatever they were carrying juggled precariously in their hands.
Even the gardener’s threats now seemed minor compared to what was happening. Desperately, I tried to catch his eye, but the glare from the lanterns and candles made it impossible. I had to tell him to stop, to be careful, to have some instinct for self-preservation. Jesus, we were already fucked enough tonight. But still balancing the plates, his gaze remained fixed on Langer, the only one there who’d permitted him to speak to him normally. But that wasn’t the only place he was looking.
“Go on.”
No, no, no ? —
But wait. Did he have a plan? He usually did. And maybe this was part of it. Maybe?—
I stared at the bones of my cold, half-eaten branzino, and listened closer, heart pounding, trying to figure it out.
“Well, first, let’s assume the lost rockets actually did get hit and didn’t just run out of fuel and fall out of the sky because some boy genius on your payroll forgot to carry the one,” he said with another veiled glance at Corey, the look on whose face would have been hilarious if it weren’t so homicidal. “Forget about the fuselage. You know it can take it. You look where the holes aren’t . Think about the rockets that didn’t come back.”
Beside Corey, his parents—how ironic to have such a dyspeptic-looking mother when his father owned an empire of high-end restaurants—began to murmur angrily. His father pushed back his chair.
“Nine times out of ten,” my boy continued, “that’s going to be where they broke up. Reinforce those areas next time, and they might survive long enough to meet your revenue goals next quarter.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Corey said. He was a ticking bomb and clearly, the only thing preventing him from detonating was that his would-be-billionaire boss was sitting next to him, rapt. “We get the idea.”
My boy didn’t even have to wait for Langer this time to signal to him to carry on. “But here’s the thing,” my boy continued. “Even if by a one-in-a-million chance you get lucky enough to reinforce every single critical portion of your remaining rockets, you still have to face the fact that space is a vast, scary, unpredictable place and you’re trying to blast your way through it on the calculations of scientists just out of school, who are probably regurgitating everything they know out of textbooks written decades ago to feed some C-list professor’s drug habit.”
I couldn’t help but giggle at this, horrified as I was.
“See, at some point, whether it’s a solar flare, radiation, or killer green space blobs from Mars, you’ll find out eventually that the numbers and formulas can only take you so far. They say, follow the science, but eventually, it’s not about science anymore. It’s a gambit. And it’s your move,” he finished. “Max.”
The table was silent as everyone took a second to pick their jaws up off the floor. His poker face was excellent, though, except for the hand through the hair: his tell. Nobody besides me could have possibly known it, of course. But I couldn’t imagine how nervous he must have been; how fast his heart was pounding; the knowledge of what could happen if this plan—whatever it was—went wrong had to be unbearable. But what could I do to help?
“He’s right,” I said. No, you idiot, not that, the smart part of my brain scolded me. The stupid part just went right on talking. “I mean, I study pre-med, not physics or engineering, but speaking from that point of view, if you go into a medical tent during wartime and look at the soldiers recovering, you’re going to see a lot of gunshot wounds to the limbs and hardly any to the chest or head. But that doesn’t mean you should wear Kevlar on your legs. It’s the same principle.”
At last, he turned, meeting my eyes dead-on. And there on his face was that beautiful, life-affirming smile I’d been trying to coax out all night. Turned out, making a fool out of his asshole rival and impressing a billionaire hadn’t done it for him.
I had.
I smiled back before looking down at my plate again, face aflame.
“Well said, Loulou.” Daddy nodded at last.
“All right, then,” Langer said slowly. “So then what do we do to fix the holes?”
“I don’t know,” my boy replied, quickly tearing his eyes away from me. “Slap some duct tape on them? I mean, I’m not a rocket scientist.”
That got Langer laughing, and seconds later, my father and most of his friends and colleagues joined in. He used the opportunity to slip back inside the house with the plates. It was all I could do not to run after him and either hug him, kick him in the nuts, or both. It was a miracle that he’d made it away from the table with any skin left on him, talking to free men like that.
I sure couldn’t laugh. But at least I could finally breathe.
Corey, however, was barely doing that. He was seething, his knuckles so white on his glass it was astonishing it wasn’t already in smithereens.
Langer, for his part, turned to Daddy again. “And all you’ve got this kid doing is serving drinks? Come on, man. You’re breaking my heart. I’ve told you this over and over. How do you expect buy-in from investors, buy-in from your team, if you can’t buy in yourself?”
Meanwhile, my father’s eyes were as wide as if a dinosaur had walked through the backyard or a flying saucer had just landed on the roof. He cleared his throat.
“Well, Loulou,” he said, “for starters, maybe the boy should be tutoring you in more than just chemistry.” He lowered his voice, and for a second, my heart twisted in my chest. Had he noticed how I’d looked at the boy? Or had the gardener gotten to him and?—
But no. He was only repeating his request from earlier. “Your mother, please.” He looked genuinely worried.
Now I did have the urge to start laughing hysterically as I pushed back from the table, but not because anything was funny.
Okay. It was fine. Mom would be upstairs. The gardener wouldn’t be up there. He wasn’t allowed up there. I’d find her, tuck her into bed, and get the hell back to the party as soon as I could. By that time, Rocket Boy would have seen my message, and then we’d come up with a plan to deal with this. He was the smart one. Fuck, he’d just solved a major engineering problem for a Fortune 500 company in five goddamn minutes. He’d know what to do about this.
Ducking behind a mesquite, I pulled out my phone and, heart pounding, tapped out another message to Albert Einstein. Pressed send.
No. What was I doing? For fuck’s sake, he didn’t have enough on his plate already? He’d barely escaped being chained to a post and flayed alive, and I wasn’t even sure he had escaped it. Daddy’s wine might be calling the shots right now, but it wouldn’t be tomorrow. And what about Maeve?
I deleted the message.
I couldn’t do it.
He had enough battles to fight. He’d spent his entire life fighting.
It was my turn.
I swallowed. My heart was pounding in my ears, but my mind was made up, and I started down the Mom Trail, trying to breathe normally and mostly failing. I had just until I found her to come up with a plan to save us.
Or just save him .
I hesitated, glancing at my phone one last time. Was I really going to handle this on my own? Not to mention, I still had no clue what the gardener had meant by keeping his word .
But that wasn’t enough to stop me.
Tracking Mom was like tracking a wounded animal sometimes. A dropped napkin by the sliding doors led to an abandoned glass of chardonnay on an end table, giving way to a pair of strappy cork wedges lying on their sides by the open pantry door, next to a half-eaten packet of saltine crackers. I went inside, then pushed open the exterior door.
“Mom?” I called, rounding the corner, following a scuffling noise on the lava rocks. “Is that you?”
Nothing.
After darting through the garden, in through the sliding doors, and upstairs, I finally discovered Mom leaning woozily on her bathroom vanity, trying to powder her face but mostly powdering the basin instead. She protested when I arrived, insisting the party was still going and she had to get back to it. After pouring her a glass of water, guiding her to the bed, and settling the covers around her, I started down the stairs. So far so good. I took another deep-as-I-could breath and started back down.
That was until I smacked into a tall form standing silently in the doorway of my father’s study, skin translucent and alien in the light of the moon.
“Looks like I wasn’t the only one making deals tonight.”
HIM
What?
Something must have been lost in Maeve’s translation. The SLA had tried freeing all slaves, thirty years ago, and failed epically. All those poor bastards—save for Louisa’s professor, apparently—were in the mines, or dead, or most likely both. No one had tried since.
Mistranslation or not, this Resi woman knew something . Something about what Max Langer—and maybe my master—were plotting with the microchips. Something she was trying to stop. Something that Max Langer knew she was trying to stop. And now she was in his crosshairs. And also thanks to me, so was my sister.
And so was I.
But I didn’t serve causes. I served science and logic because those were the only ways to win. Think several moves ahead, boy, not just the one in front of you. This was about Maeve and only Maeve.
Back on the terrace, the announcement was official. The deal between Wainwright-Phillips and Langer had been cemented. The toasts had been made. It was time for more expensive liquor and cigars around the outdoor firepit. The men were congratulating themselves on being captains of industry; the slaves were inside washing dishes, except for me.
Me? I had saved billions of dollars in rocket fuselage, humiliated the biggest douchebag I knew, criticized and even outright insulted several rich, powerful free men, and lived to tell the tale. More importantly, my plan had worked. I may have no skin left on my back tomorrow, but I’d kept Louisa safe at the table for five minutes, five minutes where the gardener couldn’t touch her, and she couldn’t touch him.
But now as I exited the kitchen expecting to see her face, my eyes flitted to every corner of the terrace, and a cold knot of panic twisted in my gut. She wasn’t in any of them. Where the hell was she? My breath hitched, heart thudding as if I’d been sucker punched. In the five seconds I’d taken to check her message, she must have slipped out.
So fuck the housekeeper. Fuck this party. Fuck cleaning up and fuck being a good, obedient little slave.
Only one thing mattered: finding her before he did. Or before she found him .
I shot down the dimly lit garden path, darting between the mesquites and palo verdes and the distant hooting of a desert owl, nearly drowned out by my heart drumming desperately in my ears. I knew exactly where I was headed.
But before I could even reach the garden shed, the door creaked open, and I nearly dropped the phone. The gardener’s bulky shadow fell over me, his body blocking off the doorway, his presence thick with a kind of sludgy, satisfied calm that made me want to retch. “Whatcha doing, boy?” he drawled, leaning casually against the frame, bracing himself on a spade. “Looking for candy?”
“Where the fuck is she?” I growled as I slammed him into a wall full of garden tools, sending spades and shovels clattering to the ground, my veins pumping with bloodlust for this motherfucker. For good measure, I grabbed the nearest tool and drove it into his filth-covered shoulder hard enough that he yelped like a prey animal. “And where’s the evidence? You’ve got two seconds to tell me before I gut you with your own pitchfork.”
He just chuckled and shrugged, even as I drove the rusty prongs in further. “Don’t got it no more.”
“What?”
“Gave it all up,” he rasped, gurgling now. “To Mr. Langer, that is. To get myself a much better deal.”
I froze.
The cold whisper. The icy blue eyes. The lean-in. She might find herself exposed.
I’d had it all wrong.
The gardener was still wheezing like a demented hyena in my grip. “Looks like you got your lines crossed, boy.”
I wrenched out the prongs and tossed him aside like a perforated garbage bag, gaping down in horror at my phone, then back up at the sleazy idiot’s grin oozing across his face as I took off running back toward the house at full speed. “Don’t get too comfortable in there, asshole,” I shouted before I left. “I’m coming back.”
But amazingly, he was only my tertiary concern now. Because Langer was onto me, and he had made a threat, and he did know everything.
But not about Maeve.
About Louisa and me.
HER
Max Langer’s icy blue eyes raked me up and down like shiny blades as he opened the patio door and ushered me outside. He wore a faint smirk on his pale lips, which still looked cool and almost otherworldly in the blue moonlight.
I swallowed hard and crossed my arms in front of my chest as if I had anything to hide in my high-necked dress, and forced myself to stay calm. “What are you talking about?”
Langer raised an eyebrow, clearly amused by my attempt at composure. “Just that you and dear Rocket Boy won’t be seeing your dentally challenged friend again for a long time, and by that, I mean ever. So you can enjoy each other’s company unmolested, if you’ll forgive the expression.”
My knees practically buckled.
He knew. Max Langer knew. How? Why? I?—
“What did you do, kill him?” I gasped.
“Oh no,” he replied, waving dismissively. “I mean, I’m not opposed to killing people, but the messy stuff isn’t usually my first resort.”
“Did you buy him, then?”
“Oh. I forgot you weren’t there when the whole ‘disrupting slavery’ thing came up. Nah, not interested. No, really, we just had a nice little chat in the garden over a glass of some of his artisan, small-batch, triple-distilled spirits, where I convinced him that there might be a better use for his talents than blackmail. He’ll be gone by tonight.”
“What are you two up to back here?”
I inhaled and whirled around, only to see my father emerge from the other side of the house holding a glass and a smoldering cigar. I took a step back dizzily, my heart screaming in my chest hard enough to topple me. I was trapped. We were trapped.
Meanwhile, Langer just grinned casually. “So I found out something about your daughter tonight, Keith.” He threw an arm around my shoulder, though I was shaking so hard it was probably making him vibrate. “Something I found very interesting. And no doubt something you’d find even more interesting.”
Here it was. Over as soon as it started. That boy who had held me like I was the only good thing he’d ever found in this world was about to find out that with one touch, I’d destroyed that world. That I’d destroyed him . That he’d be cursing my name for the rest of his short, brutal life toiling at the bottom of a mine shaft in chains and?—
“She has a very shrewd business mind. In fact, I think medicine might not be her true calling.” Langer turned to me, shamelessly looking my body up and down again while distracting my father by talking about my brain. “Never too late to switch to the school of management, you know.” He winked.
Daddy chuckled and puffed his cigar.
What?
“Well, Max—” Daddy began before looking up in surprise at a noise from deeper in the gardens. And just when I thought this little confab couldn’t get any weirder, a fourth member sprinted up the manicured garden path, launching it from weird clean into Bizarro World.
My boy had finally found me.
While Langer looked alien in the moonlight, he looked like some translucent, ethereal creature of the mist, except for the wild look of sheer terror in his eyes and the way his broad shoulders heaved as he tried to catch his breath, reminding me that he’d been bearing the weight of the world on them all night—and long before that, too.
And that was all before he saw his master standing there.
“Sir.” He took an instant step back from the rest of us and bowed his head as he visibly probed his brain for an appropriately slavish explanation for why he was here. “I was just—uh—tidying up the garden paths before the guests noticed.” For a split second each, his eyes darted to me, then to Daddy, then to Langer, then down again, his gears turning as the poor guy tried to figure out just what the hell was going on and whether it would in any way involve him being put in chains and dragged off to die in a mine.
Daddy opened his mouth, an unmistakable remember-your-place-boy look on his face, but before he could say anything, Langer smoothly interjected. “A rocket scientist and a landscape engineer? Keith, you’ve hit the jackpot with your daughter and your slave. You’re a lucky, lucky man,” he said with an awed shake of his head. “The three of us were just going to meet back here to talk about the best ways to improve the irrigation system on that Central American banana farm I inherited. I mean, with little Loulou’s studies in biology and your boy’s familiarity with physical sciences and groundskeeping, I thought they were just the minds for the job.” He glanced at my father with a disarming smile.
“But—” my father stammered, befuddled, smoke wisping around his head.
For fuck’s sake, Daddy, just stop saying things. Please. I’m begging you.
Langer stepped in again, though. “Why don’t you go grab another glass of that Anejo I suggested?” Langer nodded at Daddy’s glass, releasing me and almost bodily redirecting my father back toward the terrace. “In fact, tell the maid I’ll take another, too. We’ll just finish up back here.”
And Daddy left. Miracle of fucking miracles. What was happening ?
Only Langer could answer, so it was no surprise that both me and my boy were now staring straight at him, waiting for him to do just that.
“What?” he asked innocently. “Oh. You’re probably wondering what happened to that charming little device Big Toothless Joe was using to blackmail you.” He reached into the silken inner pocket of his crisp, perfect cerulean suit jacket and removed the grubby, taped-up tablet. He casually tossed it to me.
“Ew,” I said as it flew toward me. Instead of catching it, I kicked it onto the lava rocks. “I don’t want that thing anywhere near me.”
“Yeah, I don’t blame you. I plan to burn this suit,” he said, wiping his hand on the side of his pants in disgust. “Oh, and”—he pulled out a crumpled piece of paper in his pocket and uncrumpled it: a map printout—“this belongs to you, kid.”
“Thanks,” my boy said in a daze, accepting it and shoving it in his pocket.
It was now shockingly, alarmingly, disturbingly clear: This man had just saved our lives.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
Langer took a step closer, his glacial eyes studying me. “Call it a tip for the top-notch dinner entertainment,” he said with a mild smirk at Rocket Boy. “Plus, I just have a soft spot for people in trouble, especially when they’re trying to do the right thing. I shouldn’t. I’d be twice as rich as I am now if I didn’t. But I do.”
“But—” my boy started.
“There’s no strings attached, by the way, and no, I didn’t watch the video. I like my porn sets a bit classier. Just a personal preference.” He held up his hands. “No offense.”
“None taken,” said my boy in a daze.
“Well,” Langer added with finality, dusting off his hands with a white-hot glint in his cold blue eyes, “I’ll let you guys go at it—sorry, get to it. If you ever need anything else, you know where to find me, kid.” He leaned in low and murmured something in what sounded like German, something that made my boy’s eyes widen under his long lashes. And to my surprise, he responded —in the same language.
Straightening up, Langer chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder, then turned to leave, pausing just long enough to throw us a final glance before dissipating back into the moonlight. “Stay safe,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to see you two end up right back here.”