Jin caught the candy and the life drained out of him. It was him. Penn was their weekly visitor who had argued with Jin’s father the night before the fire. Jin made a sound that was half laugh, half sob, and all hope.
You’ve always known they were alive, he chastised himself. But believing his eleven-year-old self had gotten difficult as the years went by.
Do you want to know a secret? his father would say whenever he and his mother were in the thick of their research. They would tell Jin of their findings but make him promise not to tell anyone else because they weren’t proven yet. They’d spoken of coconuts and transfusions, nerve endings and viruses, but he’d never once heard them talk of a silver inoculation.
A hand touched his back. Flick, reminding him to breathe.
“I’m sorry, Jin,” Penn said.
Jin almost laughed. Ten years, and no one had ever expressed their condolences for what had happened. No one besides Arthie even knew, or knew enough to care, really.
“Do we know if they still live?” Arthie asked.
Penn worked his jaw. “Not for certain. They’ve been missing ever since they formulated the inoculation. It’s been years. There’s every likelihood that they are—”
“No.” Arthie thought on it for a moment and shook her head. “The Ram is too smart to waste a resource.”
A resource. That was what his parents had become. Not a mother and a father and a friend and a loved one, but yet another commodity for the Ram to exploit.
Everyone was staring at him.
“Let the poor boy be,” Matteo said.
Jin looked everywhere and then finally at Arthie. He was supposed to be mad at her. “We haven’t learned anything new. I’d always known they were alive, and now I’m just hearing it from someone else. Spindrift first.”
Arthie hid a smile, and he knew then: He wasn’t the only one who’d held out hope about them being alive. Knowing her, she would have kept quiet about it to give him less hope. In case the worst was really true.
“Spindrift first,” Arthie repeated with a nod, then she turned to Penn. “Gathering proof doesn’t guarantee the court will listen.”
Jin tried to focus on the conversation and quell his racing pulse. He was grateful to Arthie for redirecting the conversation, but also selfishly wished they could dwell on it a little more. His parents! Alive!
Arthie was still talking. “We don’t know how many of them work for the Ram.”
Penn smiled. “We?”
Arthie faltered, and Jin saw her uncertainty. In the decade he’d been by her side Jin had rarely seen Arthie hesitate. Nor did she ever involve herself in anything outside of the wrath she wanted to enact. The world was full of suffering, she would say, and it wasn’t her job to fix it.
“Yes,” she said to Penn, meeting his eyes with finality. “This is my problem too now.”
“Our problem,” Jin corrected. “We’re bound to have dirt on some of the officials. We can coerce enough of them to see Penn’s case through.”
“And I might be able to get you a court roster,” Flick offered.
Jin and Arthie exchanged a glance. Spindrift was founded on blackmail and threats. It only made sense that they would save it using the same.