Chapter Thirty-One

 

We find the opening at the back of the cave, follow a trail of dark smears through a maze of tunnels to where Chestla has busted open a door. It’s a finished, air-conditioned room, incongruous with the rest of the space.

One wall is taken up with computers, and a large holofield. Near the opposite wall there’s a tall counter inlaid with Bunsen burners and scattered with test tubes – some of them filled with dark substances. There’s even a microscope set up with a slide in it. It feels like we’ve stumbled into the lab in a cheesetastic mad scientist flick.

Chestla’s laid Ball on the floor. We walk in just as she wrenches open a metal box that’s attached to the wall, next to an emergency eye-washing station.

“What is this place, chica?”

“Don’t know. Looks like some kind of research facility. Maybe somebody trying to escape regulation. They could be cooking drugs.”

She pulls out a gun filled with healing foam and a roll of gauze. I move to try to help her, pero she’s reconstructing a person with foam and papier mâché. I don’t have the skill to assist.

Brill digs through the first aid box. He hands me a pouch filled with clear liquid, and a syringe of something deep amber. Mi vida taps the syringe. “Don’t give him that unless his heart stops beating.” Then he turns away to explore the room, which is filled with old computers and lab equipment. “They have to be hiding something, to have set up shop somewhere this dangerous. And isolated.”

I kneel next to Ball, on the opposite side from Chestla. He’s stopped breathing. I still can’t get over the certainty in mi corazón that seeing a still chest means he’s dead – even if mi cabeza knows he’s got book lungs. I feel Ball’s wrist. There is a pulse, slow and faint. I release the short tube tucked up against the clear pouch, and try to figure out how to insert the needle.

Chestla’s muttering in Evevron as she works, and she’s got healing foam smeared across her face.

I rip Ball’s sleeve, revealing a granite-muscled forearm with visible veins. That – and the pictures printed on the pouch’s side – make it easier than I anticipated. The fluid looks thick. Considering Evevron biology, it’s probably super-saturated saline.

The medics should be down here soon, to help us.

“Babe,” Brill says from across the room, his voice high and nervous. I look over. He’s sitting in a chair at a computer station. There’s a floor-to-ceiling holofield next to him, and he’s staring at the image in it.

It takes me a long time to figure out what I’m looking at. It’s a giant 3D floating brain, made of an intricate grid of colored light.

My handheld rings. It’s Tawny. I’m a bit surprised she hasn’t checked in sooner. It’s been a while since the snake-hippo ate her camera drone. If I don’t answer, she’ll just keep calling. And then, if I still don’t answer, she’ll assume the worst, and I don’t want to be responsible for giving her a heart attack.

Before I can even say hola, Tawny says, “Can you take a couple of steps back? I can’t tell what that thing is. And stop crossing your arms. You keep ruining my shots.”

How did she manage to get a camera on the outfit Chestla gave me this morning? I haven’t even seen her since yesterday.

“Only if you trade me whatever gritfeed you got today of Kaliel.” Which she wasn’t supposed to have taken. Pero, I know she did.

She hesitates, her face set in mild disgust. “I’ll send it to you if you want. But I warn you, it’s disturbing.”

“I can handle it.” My voice sounds confident, though inside I’m cringing. Did they hurt him, after all?

Tawny nods. “After what I saw you do today, maybe you can.” She points at me. “You surprise me sometimes, Bo. When I first met you back on Larksis – well, I doubt that girl could have taken down a dragon.”

“It wasn’t a dragon,” I splutter. “It was a spuck. It’s half bug. They don’t breathe fire, or hoard gold, aren’t super-intelligent–”

“Yeah, well, Bodacious Babe the Spuckslayer doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?”

I groan. She’s already written the headlines. What’s Mario going to think, reading about his hermana the dragonslayer? Ay-ay-ay. I change the subject. “Mija, what you’re looking at is a giant brain.”

From where he’s sitting at the bank of computers, Brill adds, “I think these researchers are trying to make people immune to the brain parasites. It must have been quite an epidemic. Why didn’t the Evevrons broadcast it, asking for help and warning others?”

He looks over at Chestla. She’s intent on her work, doesn’t seem to notice what we’re saying. Pero, it feels extraño talking in front of her like this, about what her people ought to have done.

“They must have been trying to contain the outbreak.” Tawny sounds like she’s really thinking about something else.

“That’s loco. This isn’t ground zero.” I fight the urge to cross my arms again. Then I almost do it, just to annoy Tawny. But I don’t. Not with Ball dying on the floor twenty feet away. “Ekrin explained at length about how nobody knows what planet these mindworms came from, or what they want. That’s why the Evevrons wanted to study Kaliel.”

Tawny laughs. “They know something they’re not telling. I could get that just from the way they were questioning your pilot friend. They were trying to get something very specific. But they never did, and they were unhappy about it when they gave him the dewormer.”

“They already did it?” Brill looks startled – and his rose eyes say he’s upset. “Shtesh!”

Chestla looks up. “What’s wrong?”

I figure out why Brill’s unhappy before Tawny even asks, “Is it a problem?”

“They killed Kaliel’s mindworm.” Brill shrugs. “There were just some questions I wanted to ask.”

“Because,” I say, “if it was part of a hive mind, there was a good chance it knew what happened to Kayla.”

Brill nods. “Among other things.”

“Maybe Kaliel still knows,” Tawny says. “They are treating him to a massage and facial down in the float spa.”

“What’s a float spa?” Brill asks.

“It’s down in the complex under the city buildings. Back past the freshwater pool we saw yesterday, there’s a saltwater hot spring.”

The bottom drops out of my stomach. I blurt out, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

I study Tawny, trying to see the real person beneath the fake smile and namedropping façade. I have no reason to think the Evevrons would hurt Kaliel, pero, I can’t shake the horrortastic weight in the pit of my stomach. If I ask Tawny for a favor, I’m going to wind up owing her forever.

Doesn’t matter.

“Por favor. Will you go check on Kaliel?”

She smiles, and for once it looks genuine. “I’m sure he’s fine. But if it will make you feel better, I’ll go have a facial.” She reaches into her pocket and throws something into the air. The holo shimmers, and now we’re looking down at her. She points up at the drone that’s filming her. “Make sure you keep monitoring this feed, so if there is trouble, you can call me some backup.” She slips her phone into her pocket.

I search for the bug Tawny’d been using to listen in and find it on my shirt, a circle the size of a flea. I smash it.

A few minutes later, Ball gasps in a single breath.

Chestla leans over him, her words fierce as she examines him for more gashes to caulk with healing foam. “That’s right, you damn Duracell. Breathe. You don’t get to confess your love and then die.”

He takes in another breath, then his chest starts to rise and fall more naturally.

I turn to Brill and whisper, “She’s got him breathing again by sheer force of will.”

“You did that once for me,” Brill says. Pero, he’s still studying the computer display. His eyes have taken on that troubled color of sand again. “Look at this.”

He does something to the screen in front of him, and the brainpic in the holofield dissolves, replaced by an equally large, equally complicated representation of a molecule, with each element neatly labeled in indecipherable Evevron. Brill points at it. “That’s Pure275. They’re not calling it that, but Babe, they developed it here.”

Pure275 keeps coming back up.

Someone was trying to poison everyone with it aboard that SeniorLeisure tour vessel that Kaliel was set up to destroy.

A woman known only as Jane Doe was looking for a warehouse full of Pure275-laced chocolate on the day mi papá died. I’d followed that trail and found out that Pure275 had been weaponized to kill people, back during the First Contact war – and without it, HGB probably wouldn’t have come out on top. Earth might well now be run by a coalition of independent chocolate producers, instead of a power-hungry mega-corp.

Eugene just told us someone came into the rainforest in Rio and took all the Pure275-tainted chocolate we had found there.

Pure275 keeps coming back to HGB. And now Brill’s saying it wasn’t developed on Earth, pero here on Evevron.

My brain balks. “Which means what?”

His eyes shade to deep purple. “I’m not sure. But when HGB came out with it, wasn’t Pure275 a jump ahead of everything else, selective in what plants it killed and relatively harmless? Genetically engineered to contain cacao from breaking out of the plantations… and geneflipping is a tech Evevron specializes in. Just look at those hunting beetles.”

I can see where he’s going with this. Forty years ago, in the middle of the First Contact War, Earth came close to ripping itself apart. Pero, there had never been aliens involved in it.

Or had there?

“So you’re saying HGB got whizbangs from someone here to win the war?”