Zoe read the notes her father had written in the notebook. Each page knotted her stomach tighter. Each word pulled more tears from her eyes. Reading this collection of ideas, stories and warnings was like having him with her once again, just out of reach.
She couldn’t ask any questions, but she could hear his voice in her head. His words both encouraged and frightened her. His drawings sucked her in and made her mind spin at a furious speed in an effort to keep up with his intellect.
By the time she was done, she was exhausted and limp. She barely had the strength left in her to close the notebook cover.
A steaming cup of hot tea was thrust in her field of vision.
“Drink,” came Talan’s insistent command. “You’ve cried so much you’ve got to be dehydrated.”
She didn’t have the strength to argue. The hot cup felt heavy in her shaky hands. The liquid was sweet, and the heat of it eased her raw throat. She shoved out all thought except the mechanics of getting the tea in her stomach without dropping it or burning herself. Even that was a challenge.
Late afternoon sun shone through the windows. The day had passed, but she had no memory of it happening.
She sat on a worn, stained couch upholstered in fabric from the sixties. Her legs were curled up under her and a blanket was tucked around her shoulders. She didn’t know how it had gotten there, but she had a good guess.
Talan towered over her, his fists braced on his lean hips. Concern darkened his eyes and hardened his mouth. “Are you able to talk or do you need to sleep first?”
Sleep seemed like a distant, unreachable land she would never see again. Her head was stuffed too full to even think about closing her eyes. She knew if she did, thoughts of her father would overcome her, and the tears would start falling again.
Her head already hurt from crying. And she’d completely humiliated herself in front of Talan. Radek was nowhere to be seen, but she cared less what the shirtless man thought of her than what Talan did.
She hated that she’d let him see her cry.
“I can talk,” she said, her voice rough from tears.
“Good. Start with telling me what was in the book.”
She felt the hot prick of tears sting her eyes and had to bite the inside of her cheek to hold them back. “Ideas for inventions he wanted to build. Stories of my mother and grandparents. Warnings of war and hopes for my future on Loriah as one of the Builders.”
“Any hint about where we can find the beacon to end all fun?”
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
“Was there anything in there that might help us defeat the Raide? Weapons, defenses, strategies?”
“There were a couple of concepts I didn’t understand completely, but they didn’t seem to be anything that important. Maybe the one to stabilize perishable food might help.”
“Getting supplies to the front lines isn’t as hard as it once was. There are so many fewer warriors to feed. We’ve had to pull back to strategically placed fortified encampments to protect vital areas. Like our colonies of Builders.”
Where she would one day live.
The very concept of living in the middle of a war was so alien she had trouble wrapping her head around it even when she wasn’t exhausted and strung out with grief. It threatened to strip away what little control she’d managed to find, so she simply shoved the thought in a box, closed the lid, and ignored it.
He pulled out his phone and glanced at it. “Radek has found the group that was tracking us. He’s leading them away.”
“How?”
“I gave him the shirt of mine you wore. Your scent will draw them, and Radek will make sure it’s in the wrong direction.”
“He’s buying us time to find the other half of the sphere.” Zoe looked up at him as she uttered her guess. Lines of tension left deep grooves around his mouth. A bleak kind of helplessness hovered around him, making his usually smooth movements twitchy. He kept moving like he wanted to reach for her, but pulled back each time.
Too bad. Touch from a man like him would have gone a long way toward clearing away all the emotional clutter in her head.
She needed to think clearly. She needed to dissect the riddle and figure out what her father had been trying to tell her.
“Are there any Imonite words for beacon, end or fun that might help us figure out the riddle the way we did with balance?”
He didn’t have to answer her. She could see the shadow of failure in his eyes. “You’re exhausted. You should sleep for a while. Maybe then the answer will come to you.”
“What about you? I at least got a couple of hours last night, which was more than you had.”
He patted his vest. “I’m fine. I carry liquid sleep with me.”
“Enough to share?”
“Not with you. After the way you reacted to what was supposed to be a completely harmless tracking element, I don’t dare dose you with anything else. You should just sleep.”
“That’s not likely to happen anytime soon—not with everything that’s slamming around in my head right now.”
“You could try. I prepared an air mattress for you in one of the bedrooms. It’s not much, but the bedding is clean, and I heated the room.”
No way was she going to go lay in the dark and stare at the inside of her eyelids. She knew what she’d see and how it would make her feel. Tonight had already been filled with enough grief for her to spend any more time wallowing in it.
“Thanks, but I think I’m going to work for a while—maybe adjust the reader so that it can scan what’s on the half of the sphere we have. There might be a clue there.”
“You’re too tired to keep going like this.”
“Can you adjust the reader I built?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
“Then I need to. It doesn’t matter how tired I am. Sleep isn’t coming anytime soon, and if there’s something on the part of the sphere we have that can help us, then it’s worth a shot, don’t you think?”
“You push too hard.”
“Work will help level me out.”
“Or make you fall over from exhaustion.”
He moved slightly. It was more a slight shift of muscle than it was an action, but she saw his intent to reach for her.
She went still, unsure what he would do. She could tell from his expression that he wasn’t pleased with her decision to work, and she really didn’t know him well enough to be sure he wouldn’t do something rash, like drag her back to the room he’d prepared for her and lock her inside.
Zoe watched him, looking for the smallest sign of his intent. She didn’t doubt for a second that he had some way to get what he wanted—what he thought was right.
“Are you going to stop me?” she finally asked.
“If I did, I’d hurt you. And that’s not something I can tolerate.”
“Good,” she said. “That was the right answer.”
He turned his back on her and walked away toward the kitchen. She didn’t know what he was doing, and two minutes after she’d laid out her work in front of her, she no longer cared. Curiosity swept her up, consuming her. She welcomed its embrace, flinging herself headfirst into the puzzle.