Being reunited with one’s family after eleven years should be different, better. Not so. It’s been three days with no Anamae, no Drew, no one but Beau and another lousy lockdown. Despite my lazy sprawl across the hard sofa, my stiff back aching, my kicked up legs a display of false ease, because here I am again.
Waiting.
Muffled voices echo outside the open door. That would be the guard. An actual armed man standing watch over me, despite the fact Beau and I were once friends. That I was once a trusted member of his team.
Yet, here he comes again.
To ask the same questions again.
There’s not much to do other than wait. Focusing on the lone branch swishing against the window pane, I drop my head onto the couch’s backrest, the picture of indifference.
“Shut the door.” Gruff, curt, to the point. He’s taking the hard road today.
After all these years the same crazy hat covers his balding head, its bright colors now faded to match his long shorts. He drags an armchair right up in front of where my feet rest on the low table and sits back, his arms forming a bar across his broad chest.
“Why was Manvyke holding you?” Here we go once more.
Dragging one leg over the top of the other, I answer in the best way I can. “To lure in my daughter.”
Not the absolute truth, but I’m not about to get into Sander’s and my long, personal history.
“The man clearly finds you interesting . . .”
I shrug. “The man is insane.”
“Yes, well, we have two of the keys, so once we find the third, his fanatical plans will be wiped off the table.”
Always so cocky. Pity he has no idea.
“You don’t understand how passionate we are about—”
I drop my feet to the floor, leaning forward to look my one-time friend in the eye. “No, Beau, what you don’t understand is that he already has the third key.”
If I didn’t know the man as well as I did, I wouldn’t have noticed the slight widening of his eyes, the fade of color from his dark cheeks.
“The Lazereth is the most powerful of the three. With it and the tech at his disposal Lysander Manvyke could crumble this building, this city, bring about the downfall of your entire resistance, time and again.”
“Then why hasn’t he?”
“That, I don’t know.”