“Lanni.”
I tried to pull myself out of the depths of sleep.
“Lanni.” A warm hand touched my shoulder. “Lanni, if you don’t want anyone to see me leaving, I should go now.”
I opened my eyes to find Walsh kneeling beside the bed.
“What time is it?” I whispered.
“Too damn early.” Walsh grinned. “I’ll get into the trees and keep watching from there. I just didn’t want you to wake up to find me gone.”
“Thanks.” I eased my arm out from under Mari’s head.
“Do you want me to conveniently bump into you to walk to school together, or just creep behind?”
“Be a creeper. Gideon said he’d bring me information this morning. I don’t want you to scare him off.”
“Smart.” Walsh went to the window as I slipped out of bed, trying not to wake Mari.
He pushed the window open and planted his hand on the sill, like even though the window was chest-height, he was just going to hop up and through.
“How fast can you run?” I asked.
“Faster than you.”
“I mean it.” I touched his arm. The warmth of his skin felt nice, like I could curl up against him and drift back to sleep.
“I’ve never accurately timed myself. Below a two-minute mile? Faster when sprinting?”
“Fast enough to get to us if something goes wrong?”
Walsh brushed his fingers across my cheek. “And with a bad enough temper to live up to the werewolf name if someone tries to hurt you or Mari.”
“See you in class.” I lifted my hand away from his arm.
He jumped through the window.
I didn’t even hear him land outside. I slid the window closed, got my knife back out from under Mari’s mattress, and went to sit on my own bed.
Walsh hadn’t gotten under the sheets. Or, if he had, he’d perfectly remade the bed.
I curled up against the wall, watching Mari sleep, trying not to think.
There was so much I should be getting done and so many memories I needed to avoid.
I wasn’t a detective or a guard. I had no business prying into why someone had killed Dr. Kain. If I’d found out about something dangerous like that in the city, I would’ve just avoided the mess until things calmed down. But there was no way to skirt around anything in the domes.
Paradise is just a pretty cage.
I closed my eyes, trying to picture Jaime, pretending Alec had never told me about what the Plains Domes had done.
Even if I figure out why the Kains were killed, how am I supposed to find out who did it? I pictured myself saying to Jaime.
He lifted his arm, letting me nestle close to him. He flicked the ends of my short hair until I nudged him in the stomach with my elbow.
Please, I thought. Jaime, help me.
He sighed. Do you even want to find the person who did it? If they want to kill kep and destroy kep property, let them. You don’t have to stop them. You just have to make sure they don’t hurt you and Mar.
Tears rolled down my cheeks.
How am I supposed to do that? I pressed my cheek to his chest, wondering how I could find his scent so comforting when I didn’t even have the words to properly describe it. Something like the streets after a heavy rain.
Find out why they did it and make them think you’re on their side. Jaime tightened his arms around me. You don’t have to be a hero, Lanni. You just have to survive and take care of Mar.
Tears caught in my throat. I tried to swallow the sound. We were supposed to take care of her together.
I know.
My chest started to shake as I lost the battle against grief.
“It’s okay.”
A much smaller hand than Jaime’s took mine.
The bed shifted as Mari crawled up next to me. She knelt beside me and wrapped her arms around my shoulders.
“We’ll be okay, Lanni.” She kissed my cheek. “As long as we’re together, everything will be okay.”
“I love you, Mar.” I picked her up and set her in my lap.
“I love you, too. What’s the matter?”
“Just homesick.”
“I get homesick, too.” Mari looked up at me. “I know things are better here, but I still miss it there.”
“And that’s okay.”
“But you know something I don’t ever miss about home?” Mari grinned.
“What?”
“Breakfast slop.” She stuck out her tongue and giggled. “I’ll make us breakfast.”
She wriggled off my lap.
“I’m supposed to do the cooking, Mar.”
“I like cooking.” Mari dragged a chair to the kitchen. “Maybe I could get a job cooking workday lunches for people when I grow up.”
“I think you’d be really good at that.”
By the time I’d washed my face well enough to look like someone who’d actually slept and eaten the grain cakes Mari had made, we’d managed to dawdle long enough for it to be time to go to school.
She’d gone back to her usual bouncing self, half-skipping, half-jumping down the paths as she told me everything she hoped she’d get to do in school.
I wondered if Gideon had been a bouncy kid, too. Like a rabbit always ready to run from his predator brothers, or if the bounce had come from excitement when he’d grown big enough to defend himself. Even thinking about Gideon made the weird guilt creep back into my stomach.
“We’re going to get to plant actual plants.” Mari tugged on my hand. “We don’t get to choose what kind we’re going to plant, but we get to touch the seeds and everything.” She shivered with delight.
“I can’t wait for you to tell me how it went at the end of the day.”
“You’ll come meet me?” Mari stopped and looked up at me. “I like Miranda and Alec, but it feels best when you come get me.”
“A horde of vampires couldn’t stop me.” I bopped her nose and herded her down the hall, letting my wrist graze the handle of the knife I’d hidden at my hip.
Gideon came into sight around the arc of the corridor, leaning against the wall, clutching his tablet to his chest like he didn’t know what to do with his hands.
“Lanni.” He smiled when he caught sight of me, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Mari.” He gave her a nod that turned into a bow.
Mari snickered.
“Can I walk you to class?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “I have to take Mari to her room first.”
“Absolutely.” Gideon took my hand, clutching it like someone might drag me away. “You should. Let’s head on over. Tardy for school is a bad start to the day.”
“Okay.” Mari wrinkled her nose at Gideon. “But I think maybe you should try to sleep more. You don’t look so good.”
“I’ll take that into consideration.” Gideon gave another smile that looked more like a wince.
He kept his pace quick, almost dragging me along behind him as I tried to balance not dropping my tablet and making sure Mari kept up.
“When does your dad want to restart the training program?” I asked.
“Day after tomorrow,” Gideon said. “No offense to you, but I was surprised they stopped it at all. I think the choice came from the Council, though Dad would never admit to being told what to do.”
“Why did they stop training?” Mari ran to walk backward in front of us.
“Reassessment of priorities,” Gideon said.
“Huh?”
“Here you go, Mar.” I pulled my hand from Gideon’s to grab her shoulder before she could back past her own classroom. “I can’t wait to hear all about the seeds when we get home.”
“You’ll be here to get me?” Mari bounced on her toes.
“I’ll be here.” I kissed the top of her head and shooed her up the stairs.
“You do more mothering with her than either of my parents ever did with me,” Gideon said.
“She’s my little sister. It’s my job to take care of her.”
“It’s a lot more than that, even if you don’t see it.” He took my elbow, leading me down the hall.
“Want to tell me why you’re freaking out?” I whispered, jogging to match his pace.
“Not in the hall.” He cut up a set of stairs and into a classroom that didn’t have any desks in it. He closed the door before looking around the empty room, like he was trying to find someone hiding in the non-existent shadows.
“What did your mom say?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Gideon shook his head and checked the corners again. “She said it was nothing for me to worry about. Totally blew me off.”
“Shit.” I looked toward the stairs, wondering if Walsh was listening. “There’s got to be another way to find out.”
“Oh, there is.” Gideon stepped close to me to whisper. “Whatever was destroyed, there’d have to be a log of it and some kind of communication between doctors, right? I know my mom’s password, so I waited until she was asleep and logged onto her workstation in our house.”
“What did you find out?”
“Bad things, really freaking bad things.” Gideon gnawed on his lips.
“Well, tell me.” I took his arm. “Whatever it is, it’ll be a hell of a lot better than not knowing.”
“They destroyed the DNA bank.”
“What?”
“The”―pink rose in his cheeks―“the DNA bank. I don’t think they have them in the other domes. The Arc Domes have a higher medical research capacity than any of the other locations.”
“Whose DNA were they researching?”
“They weren’t, not like that.” The pink in his face darkened. “The DNA bank had…samples from all the adults in the domes. Preserved in case there was ever a disaster in the Arc Domes that left an unsustainable gene pool.”
“Unsustainable how?”
“An illness, a recessive trait causing a hereditary disease, an incident leading to mass infertility. With such a small genetic pool to begin with, the doctors didn’t want to take any chances. Procreation has to be maintained, so they collected the samples”―the deep crimson climbed to his forehead―“from all the adults to keep frozen. Then if something horrible happened, they could use the saved DNA to refresh the gene pool.”
“And have women carry the children of men who died a hundred years ago.” My stomach disappeared like someone had scooped away all the organs I needed to survive.
“Or the child of a woman who died a hundred years ago. The bank held both types of samples.”
The red in Gideon’s face didn’t seem entertaining anymore.
“And someone destroyed all of it?”
“The bomb was placed on that cooling unit.” Gideon took hold of my elbow like I’d been swaying. Maybe I had. “Dr. Kain was in charge of the project.”
“She wrote that paper, about wanting to control who could breed with who. Talking about people mating like we’re no better than livestock.”
“I wanted to think you were wrong,” Gideon said. “I wanted to think you’d been traumatized and were seeing connections that didn’t exist. But it all fits together too well.”
“Someone wanted to stop Dr. Kain’s work. It could be anybody. It should be everybody.”
“They’d have to be desperate to resort to murder, Lanni. They must know they’ll be caught eventually. If they’re just trying to do damage on their way out, I don’t think you’re safe.”
“I already know that.” I yanked my arm away from him and started to pace.
“The Dome Guard will have made the connection. There’s no way they could’ve missed it.”
“Then why are they lying about the Kains’ deaths?”
“Either because they don’t want to cause a panic, or because they’re afraid too many people will agree with the killer.”
“They can’t just do nothing.” I froze, looking toward the stairs, wondering if I should call for Walsh so someone with experience in plotting to kill people could offer some insight.
“Lanni, I’m scared for you.” Gideon took my hand.
“How secure is your position in the Arc Domes?”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m new here. I punched someone. I only have a little rope to work with. But you’re the captain’s son. If you cause a little trouble, will they hurt you?”
“What kind of trouble?” The color drained from Gideon’s face.
“The good kind.” I kissed his cheek. “The kind that keeps me alive.”