Chapter Twenty-Three

 

Once he’s conscious, Brill takes over flying the Fois Gras. Chestla and I take turns telling him what happened.

Tawny, who’s come out of her room for once, says, “You should just let him watch the holo. It’s not like anyone else can see it.”

Because, of course, it’s showing more Earthlings behaving badly.

Tawny crosses to the galley, grabs a bottle of wine and takes it back to her room.

When he sees the clip of Chestla leaping off that roof, Brill’s eyes go blue-green. He whispers, “I should keep sparring with her, only I still feel like a kek trying to hit a girl.”

Chestla says, “I’m taking that as permission.”

Once we get to the part where Kaliel escapes, Brill lets out a noise of frustration. “Jack’s a kek. If he’d waited until we’d captured Kaliel, we wouldn’t still be doing this.”

“Mi vida,” I say softly. “If he’d done that, then we never would have gotten away.”

Pero, Brill’s right. We’re volver a empezar desde cero. Starting over from scratch. And we have to wait for Kaliel to show up again. If he ditches that ship now that he knows we’ve seen it, it’s going to be even more complicated to find him.

“What was in the bags?” Brill asks Chestla.

She shrugs. “Couldn’t tell. It was all smashed up. Whatever it had been involved glass and copper.”

“Glass and copper and two black somethings,” Brill muses. “Ven. What does that add up to?”

My handheld rings. It’s Tyson. Brill and I look at each other. After leaving him unconscious, neither one of us are particularly fizzbounced to answer it.

The Myska and I may be friends, pero on some levels I’m still terrified of him. I’ve always feared snakes, even before he bit me. He had delivered a mostly dry bite, intentionally holding back the full intensity of his venom. I had still nearly died, running from him before I’d gotten the antivenin.

And now, he’s bound to be angry.

“Fine, mi vida. It is my phone.”

Tyson’s smiling in the image. “Tank you for te gift, Bo. I’m not sure I should accept it, but I appreciate te gesture.”

I smile back, though I’m confused. “Que?”

Chestla moves into the capture field with me. She puts a hand on my wrist. “I put your name on the paperwork when I turned in Jack Wolfe and his crew, crediting Tyson for assisting in the capture. Do you know how much the bounty on those four was worth? You guys get to split it fifty-fifty, in case you need to buy anything to catch up with Kaliel.” She looks over at Brill. “Keeps it fair. I got the idea from your text draft.”

Tyson smiles, his lips stretching wide. “Just so it’s clear, you’re not buying my loyalty. I support te law. In fact, I should hang up. I have a criminal to catch.”

Brill asks, “What would you spend it on, Babe? If your part of the bounty was going to poof away if you didn’t?”

He means for it to be a fun question. Pero, I look down at my nails. The polish has chipped, leaving parts of the puce green visible. Recovered health. Peace for my world. “The things I want you can’t just buy.”

His eyes shift through half a dozen colors, settling on a light green. Flirtation. Then before he speaks, a shift to gold. “You can’t buy what I want either.”

Giddy little bubbles float through me. He’s hot. He’s smart. And he loves me. “Que? What do you want?”

He looks so serious. My heart starts flutter-beating and my hands turn to ice. Is he going to propose?

Pero, the gold clouds a little. “If anything were possible? I want us to grow old together.”

“Mi vida.” He’s cut me to the heart, and my chest is caving in around the empty space. An average Krom lifespan tops three hundred years. Three times mine. He’s asking for the one thing I can’t give.

“I’m serious. Wal, it might be fun to blow all that cash on a speedboat or a balloon trip through the alps, but I’ve heard rumors of anti-aging treatments that actually work.” I’m not sure he understands the exchange rate to Earth currency. With what we’ve been given we could do both of those things, twenty times over. “And rumors the grain called the Fountain of Youth might still exist. With the kind of money you just got – we could go looking for it.”

“And if we did all that and it didn’t work, wasn’t real? What then?”

“Then at least I would have tried.” The gold in his eyes has enough upset brown bleeding in to turn them mahogany.

He’s so focused on our relationship being fair – first wanting to end his own life early to pair with mine, now wanting to find a way for my life span to match his – will he be able to deal with something that ultimately won’t be fair?

If I had been Krom, he would have proposed just now, no?

The fact that I’m not is not something either of us can change.

So I say, “Let’s take whatever is left after we get back to Zant and go looking for this Fountain of Youth… or if you change your mind, we can blow it on some loco fun while we’re both still young.”

Brill laughs, and some of the brown does fade out of his eyes.

Frank must be watching for hits on my name, because he calls too. I start to hand it off to Brill, pero he pulls back his hands. “Ga. That one’s not for me.”

I answer the holocall. “Hola, viejo.”

Frank looks behind me, sees Brill and Chestla watching and gives each of them a small nod. “Where’s Tawny?”

“She’s in her cabin. You want to talk to her?”

“Good God, no. I just want to know what the heck is going on out there. Are you and Tyson working together now?”

“Not exactly,” I shrug. “It just sort of happened.”

“I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.” Frank waits for me to add detail, pero when I don’t, he clears his throat and says, “Your mom asked me to thank you for getting her that interview.”

“De nada.” I hadn’t been able to get her the Krom involved in the cultural exchange, pero Brill had found a Krom family who had been rescued by Earthlings when life support on their ship had gotten fried. It had been a touching interview. As far as diplomacy goes, it probably has had more of an effect than anything I said on Minda’s cooking show.

Now that the set’s back together, they’re still doing cooking segments, pero they’ve changed the format to allow for more variety.

“I spoke to Stephen, and to some Zantites who were there the night Kayla disappeared. The timing’s all wrong. Kayla must have called Stephen when she left the club, not from the spaceport. I’m beginning to doubt she ever left this planet.”

As his words sink in my heart sinks too. “You think she’s dead?”

“Not necessarily. Leaving her phone at the spaceport and booking her a ticket is not the act of a mugger or random criminal. Is she worth anything to anyone?”

“There hasn’t been a ransom demand, Mr Sawyer,” Brill says.

I nod. “Her papá’s a doctor, pero her mamá’s a poet. They don’t have the kind of dinero that would make something like that worth it.”

Frank shakes his cabeza. “I don’t mean money. I mean skills, information, anything worth taking her and keeping her alive.”

My brow crinkles. “Like if they need a chef or a linguist? Same double-major like me. She’s also good at sewing, and she reads a ton.”

“Linguist, huh?” Frank rubs his chin. “I’ll keep looking into it.”

“Why are you doing this?” I can’t help but ask. “Isn’t it a little outside of your job description?”

“Ninety-seven percent of what I do is research and talking to people. I recover and protect things – and at times people. This is exactly my job description.” He sighs. “I’m doing it for you because I always seem to be taking things away from you. And for once, maybe I can give you something back. Lavonda wants us to talk, but I don’t want to come to you without an olive branch.”

I look over at Brill, who nods. I tell Frank, “Why don’t we talk now.”

I head into the galley.

Frank says, “Lavonda says you want to get to know me. What do you want to know?”

I snort a laugh. “She wants me to get to know you. I don’t think you’d like my questions.”

“Try me.”

My stomach fills with anxiety, even as I steel my resolve. There’s one question I’ve been wanting to ask for a long time. “OK, viejo. What were mi papá’s last words?”

Frank’s cheeks and nose blush red. “He asked me not to hurt his family. He said, ‘Mi familia knows nada about chocolate except how to eat it.’ I’m sorry I couldn’t even give him that much.” He pauses. “I’m sorry I hurt you. But this whole mess – it’s bigger than us.”

There are tears in my eyes. I wipe them away. No lo sé what I expected Papá to have said, don’t know why I’m so floored by it. “And you’re still sure it was the right thing?”

Frank nods. There’s no hesitation. “I’m not saying HGB is perfect. But there are things that have happened – things in Earth’s past that very few people ever got to know about – that have proved to me that without strategic control of chocolate to give us allies and leverage, we’re all going to wind up getting hurt.”

“What kind of things?” I ask.

“The very fact you have to ask that question means I’ve been doing my job.”

There’s a loud thump from the main living area.

“What was that?” Frank asks.

I poke my head around the galley wall. Brill’s on the floor again, and this time Chestla’s got the broom poking at his back.

“Nada, viejo.”

“I talked to that Aidan kid,” Frank says.

My heart lurches. “Ay Dios mio.”

I try not to picture the chef prodigy lifeless, though surely Frank’s telling me he put a bullet in him.

“Good kid,” Frank says. “Smart. A bit of a troublemaker, but bright enough not to cross any lines that would make his co-workers at the club want to eat him. You were right that he has nothing to do with Jimena. He could have quite a future.”

Aidan Ace met Frank and is still alive. I let out a breath that is half-sigh, and Frank snorts a laugh.

“You really do think the worst of me, don’t you? Sometimes a chat is just a chat. Most of the time, actually.”

After I hang up, I sort through Brill’s fridge, trying to find comfort by bringing order to my surroundings. Everything’s been picked through, and the fresh stuff isn’t going to last much longer. I start pulling out vegetables to make a soup. I still can’t decide if anything Frank just said changes the way I feel about Mamá and him. Could I sit next to him at a family dinner? Dance with him at una fiesta? All the while knowing he once tried to shoot me?