Attention: ALL
Subject: Evening Menu
Entrees: Coconut curry with sweet peas, fried rice
Sides: Steamed edamame, roasted sweet potato, fruit salad
*Dessert* None
My family quarters were dark and empty when I bounced in, high from the very public moment with V despite her evasion. It was dark, except for the ambient light that was always on above the lone shelf. Empty, except for Faraday in her urn, sitting under that lone light in silent, shiny judgment.
“Stop staring at me,” I told her, and I wandered through our rooms restlessly, alert to the wheezing air filters and the low droning of the generators, letting the automatic lights blink on as I entered each room, then turn off as I left. I hated feeling this useless and stuck, especially when my brain kept repeating that the RC would be here soon, soon, soon.
She watched me come and go, the lights blinking over her as steadily as if she were shaking her head.
I hid on the couch from her disapproval for a while, staring up at the ceiling. I shouldn’t have kissed Viveca. V. Not yet.
“I’m sorry,” I said, peeking over the back of the couch. “I have the worst timing.”
Faraday’s urn sat under its light, defying my apology. She must have gotten so bored on that shelf. I brought her to Andrek’s room, because at least in here we had the projector. I set it to a panorama of the trust’s exterior since she’d never gotten to see it for herself.
“Listen,” I started, flopping onto my stomach on Andrek’s bed and gazing into the urn as if it were a crystal ball. I was about to launch into an explanation about catching feelings and timing, how she should understand because it had happened to her too once. Maybe more than once. She’d had a whole life away from me that I never saw.
You could look now, she reminded me, and my attention flicked to the open door, to the tablet screen on the living room wall. Viveca had sent me files days ago, and so had Chef. I’d told myself I’d been too busy and overwhelmed. I tried to tell myself that now, but Faraday was humming like she used to when we baked. A silly tune that my mind overlaid the words “Faraday Day” on top of.
“I promise we won’t call it that,” I told her, but she hummed on, reflecting the lunar landscape coldly. “That’s why you’re mad at me? Because I’m using your memorial as a cover?”
She stopped her song. Yes.
I guessed right.
The unfairness of it all was worse than a slap in the face. There was no point in honoring her if I didn’t fight for the dream she’d valued most. Shouldn’t that be my priority? Saving the trust from her murderer had to be the best way to keep her memory intact.
In the history of me and my dreams, Faraday argued, did you ever know me to lie about anything that I cared about?
“Actually, yeah,” I returned immediately. “About mentoring a monster’s daughter and playing like you were a one-woman witness protection program!”
My elbows dug into the mattress, sending her rocking. Sibling squabble was in full swing now.
I didn’t lie.
“Neither have I!” I yelled.
Except I had. To my parents. To Chef. My parents might literally have been the worst, but Chef had done nothing but offer encouragement and support. No wonder my sister was upset with me. She was fine with me being unambitious and flighty, with me being a goof-off and a slacker, because—no matter what—I was always honest.
That was the me she’d known, the me I was supposed to be.
If I didn’t do something to change the course I was on, right now, I’d be lying to a kitchen full of potential spy suspects tomorrow afternoon.
Get to work, dove, Faraday pressed sweetly.
I returned her to the shelf, regret stinging my throat and guilt knocking around my empty stomach. My breath sounded raucous and strange as I opened the comm screen.
Viveca had only sent one message, with the subject line “Memorial Research.” The attachment file was a hundred times the size of everything Chef had sent me. She had said it had all of Faraday’s correspondence. A veritable treasure trove. What better way to listen to my sister than to read her own words?
I reached for the screen, but I couldn’t make myself select the message.
Earn it, the urn said.
“You’re not funny,” I told it.
Eeeeeearn itttt.
I wanted to open the message. I did. It was right there.
But so was the rest of her, glaring into my back, while the rocks inside me rumbled like my everything was downhill.
I couldn’t read any of this here. And if my parents wouldn’t help me get my own tablet, then I’d find someone else who would.
It took me forever to find the communications department, which was tucked below the center of the dome, past the cafeteria. It was accessible only through an unmarked side hallway that wound back around the way I had come and dead ended into wide glass doors. I went through these to find a ring of living quarters surrounding a gently sloped spiral walkway leading down into a vast open room. It was easily as big as the cafeteria down there, though the walls had jungle print wallpaper and there were very few tables. Instead they had bean bag chairs, whiteboards on wheels, long, padded benches, and random color blocked screens. I felt like I’d entered an entirely different world. Even the gravity felt different.
“Oho, Lane!” Milo saw me coming down the slope and beamed. “Meat Team, come meet my friend from therapy.”
People emerged from every direction as I reached the bottom floor. A few were little people like Commander Han and Cheese, but they weren’t using wheelchairs now. Most were women, I guessed, two with obvious prosthetics. They seemed more relaxed than anyone I’d seen in the trust the last few days.
“Is this the baker?” someone asked.
“Yup, this is Lane.” Milo laid an arm over my shoulder. “And you know Cheese, but this is the rest of my family. Roast, Steak, Turkey, Tenders, and Buffet.”
I must have been doing something weird with my face, because they all looked like they were about to break into collective laughter. This was a gag. They were messing with me. “Come on.”
Milo patted my back. “We know it’s weird. When we moved to the moon a decade ago, we were worried we’d miss meat, so we changed our names.”
“All except you?”
“Lifelong vegetarian,” Milo answered smoothly.
I noticed one white woman at a corner desk ignoring us. She had the only real desk in the room. “Who’s that then?”
Milo laughed loudly, and Cheese answered, “That’s Karen. She’s not with us.”
“My name’s not Karen,” she said, annoyed. “It’s Christina.”
The team rolled their eyes, and several whispered, “So Karen.”
“We don’t have much patience for strangers,” Cheese explained. “We’re enough for each other.”
In a weird way, I understood without asking. There was a palpable energy between them all. More than family.
Milo ran a finger over their jeweled eyebrows. “Did you come to hang out, or…”
I cast around to remember what I came for, but everything about the room, the journey here, and the barrage of meat talk had gotten my brain feeling emptied out. There was so much information everywhere I looked that I could only stand there with my mouth open.
“Got a problem with your tablet or something?” Cheese asked. “That’s why most folks swing by.”
Milo held out their palm to take my imaginary broken tablet, and it came back to me.
“I don’t have one,” I admitted, relieved. “I hoped you all might have an extra I could borrow.”
Milo, Cheese, and Roast shared a look, and the rest of the team dispersed to whatever they were doing before I arrived. Milo lowered their hand and started shaking a finger, their face morphing from their easy smile into one about to rage.
“Even here,” Milo began. “Here! I knew, knew, this would come back around to hurt us all. It’s not like we don’t have the resources. And then some!”
I shuffled my feet and wondered if I should find a bean bag to plant myself in until they were done. Cheese and Roast mimed behind Milo as they gestured emphatically.
“There’s no reason everyone shouldn’t have one! And you, Lane, you’re this trust go-getter, with your desserts and holiday planning—what, do they expect you to stand in your living room for hours every day?” Milo spun and caught Cheese mid-air-punch.
“This cramp in my hand is really something,” Cheese said. “I should—yeah.” Cheese darted away from Milo’s line of sight with Roast on her heels.
“Aaagh!” Milo roared at their backs but wore a smile when they turned to me. “Save your mocking for people with ridiculous complaints. Like herding cats, I swear.”
“Aw,” Cheese sang as Roast said, “We strive to be much worse than cats.”
I loved this crowd. “So, you do have extra tablets? The standing around my living room part is true, and I hate it.”
“Of course you do.” Milo shook their head. “Hang on a bit. Joule!”
Joule? This wasn’t his department.
“Hey man, do you know Lane? She needs one of those spare tablets, if you haven’t taken them all apart.”
I squinted past Milo at some ruckus past the bean bags. The forest wall rippled and peeled as Cheese and Roast slipped through. It was a curtain. And there was Joule behind it, in all his gorgeous glory, elbows deep in a crate and surrounded by a landscape of electrical parts. Turkey and Tenders squatted on floor pillows nearby, sorting parts like they were preparing for an epic Lego project.
“Hi!” I said, and Joule looked my way. He stared unblinking for a moment as if the last few minutes were only now catching up to him. That was probably exactly what was happening.
“Oh, hey. Yeah, I know Lane,” he said coolly. “But I thought you were avoiding me since our date.”
“Y’all had a date?” Milo’s face shined with curiosity, and they whispered to me, “You could’ve mentioned that nugget in group, little red.”
I walked closer, trying not to appear too eager or too hesitant. “I’m not avoiding you. I swear! It’s just… You know. Stuff’s happening.”
Joule’s brows drew in. “Stuff. Sure.”
“So… I am decidedly not walking into young lovers’ drama today. Outside my wheelhouse,” Milo said, shrugging like they were brushing off our “stuff” with their shoulder. “But get her that tab, will you?”
“No problem,” he answered, his eyes still hard set on my forehead, then fluffed the bean bag chair nearest him. “Come on over, if you’re not avoiding me, that is. I’ve got them under here somewhere.”
Cheese and the others were gone by the time I slipped past the curtain and flopped into the chair. I thought this room was huge when I mistook the curtains for walls, but now I saw it was even bigger than I’d realized, at least half the size of the dome.
Joule rummaged through crates, mumbling to himself as he named the items he found and eyed me in his periphery.
“I’m not avoiding you,” I said, keeping my voice as soft as I could. I’d had no idea he’d been stressed about me. “There’s been so much going on with—”
“You’ve hung out with V every day since.” He said it without judgment, but it sliced into me.
“I mean, yeah, I have, but—”
“Did I do something? Was it the g-jumping? I thought we had fun besides your meltdown, except you haven’t said a word to me since. I keep looking for you at dinner, but you’ve been skipping meals all of a sudden, and I worried.” He pulled another crate in front of him so forcefully that it tipped over onto his feet. “Is it because Andrek’s staying over with me so much? I don’t understand what I did to upset you.”
Another slice. I hadn’t realized Andrek had been staying with him, let alone “so much.” I thought he’d been working late when he wasn’t home at night.
V’s words came to me in a rush: They’ll be lost in each other for weeks, right when I need Joule the most. Between the RC’s fleet, the spy hunt, V opening up, and Faraday’s holiday planning, it’d been all I could manage to make it into work with my jumpsuit on correctly.
“I wanted us to be friends. Whatever I did, I’m sorry.” He tapped the tips of his fingers with his thumbs, back and forth, his arms hanging stiff by his sides, the spilled crate parts ignored. “You don’t have to tell me. You don’t owe me anything. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Stop a moment and let me think,” I said. It came out far more exasperated than I wanted it to, but he’d gone full freight-train forward, and I was still trying to catch up to the platform. “I had no idea you were worried about any of this. The date was awesome, even with, especially with, my meltdown, you know? You haven’t done anything wrong! I’ve been all over the place since, and that’s on me, seriously. I’m trying to do too much and not doing anything well.”
I couldn’t tell if I was explaining myself right. If I were him and I’d been muddling through everything he just poured out of his head, I’d need to hear a lot more.
He faced me but didn’t raise his attention from the floor. “It’s not me. It’s you.”
“Right.”
“Because you’re busy and stretched too thin.”
“Exactly!” He got it. I gave myself a mental high five.
“Oh.” He gritted his teeth. Tap, tap, tap, tap.
I thought he’d understood, but he seemed to feel worse. “I want us to be friends too. Honestly. I’m not sure how to fit more in yet.”
“Even sex?”
“What?”
“It’s just that, if you’re very stressed, I could help,” he said. “With your projects but also, you know, relief.”
My jaw dropped, and my cheeks went chili pepper hot. “I’m not going to use you like a stress ball, Joule.”
“I’m saying that would be okay with me, even if we’re only friends. Whatever you want.”
Words failed me. This must have been the strangest come on in the history of ever. He was so sweet, and I felt rotten. Tell me what’s wrong or take what’s wrong out on me, whichever.
I wasn’t crafty enough to lie. The truth was the best plan. As long as I skirted the rim of everyone else’s secrets, I could let him in. I wanted to.
“I mean, you could help in other ways, I suppose. I’m swallowed by problems, afraid the trust’s about to collapse in a steaming pile of RC smoke. I’m only holding it together by pretending I can save the trust somehow by throwing my sister a holiday.” Fuck. I dove right in. “I didn’t expect to catch feelings so fast. With V.”
“Oh!” He was through with tapping. Instead, he rubbed his square jaw with that mad glint in his eyes that happened before surprises poured out his mouth. “So, if I help you save the trust, we can hang out again?”
I squirmed. That wasn’t precisely what I’d meant. “I don’t actually know how to save the trust.”
He drew back. Squinted at my mouth. “That’s what people want me around for. Not saving worlds, obviously, but solving sticky, unsolvable problems.”
I laughed, as much to break the tension as in response to his shift into troubleshooting mode. “But first I need a tablet so I can work on the memorial.”
“Yes. Right. It might take me a while to find it, though.” A light blinked on inside him. He grinned and lowered his chiseled face like we were in a soap commercial. The forest-covered curtain shivered, watching. “I actually designed a program for V to keep all her memorial files organized. If you want, I can load that on yours too.”
“That would be great, thanks!” I settled into the bean bag chair as he searched for several quiet seconds. He and V were so different, but both were completely disarming in their own ways. I’d never imagined people as accomplished as them would want to be friends with someone like me.
“By the way,” Joule said slyly, as if he heard my thoughts, “I notice you’re calling her V now.”
I didn’t answer, because it occurred to me that her nickname meant something important, and I’d missed the significance entirely. She’d told me that he didn’t know about her dad or her mission to stop him, but it seemed absurd to me that Joule the genius wouldn’t have solved some of her puzzles on his own.
“She kissed you?”
I startled. “I kissed her!”
“No judgment. I’m simply letting you know I think it’s cool. One step closer to a happy hand.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what the Meat Team call a romantic family of five,” he said, then made a joyful whoop noise and lifted a tablet. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
He danced away, flapping with abandon through the curtain. In his wake, Cheese and Turkey zipped in with more bean bags, and, in seconds, the whole Meat Team had me surrounded. They played at sorting parts, though mostly they chattered to each other about things over my head. They were the least stuffy grownups I’d ever met, so I tried to help. Along with circuit boards, couplings, and alligator clips—the only parts I could name, I found a palm-sized flat device with three terminals.
“What about this one?” I asked. “I don’t see any others like it.”
“The bipolar junction transmitter! Milo!” Cheese cried, cupping it between her hands like it was too precious to behold. The others gasped and squealed then dragged me and my chair further into the vast room where there was, in fact, a Lego-style construction project. It took up more square footage than my whole family’s quarters.
Cheese placed the transmitter thing into a wire cage of some kind, and Roast shushed everyone as he clapped.
The lights dimmed dramatically, and everyone’s quiet anticipation sent a shiver up my back.
Milo approached with a switch of some kind that looked like part of a remote-control toy I’d had as a kid. “Let there be life,” they said and flipped the switch.
Faint lights, barely more than a candle’s dying flicker, trickled and pulsed from one spot to another, and I saw, at last, that their creation was one I should have recognized immediately. It was a map of the moon’s human spaces. After months of living here, I’d already forgotten what the models looked like.
Blocky rectangles for the first military bases, trails of short domes for the early research stations built by the former USA, and larger domes for the newer bases, including all four of the domes planned by the trust. Between each major site ran skinny colored lines of power, teaching me more in a glance about shared lunar resources than anything I’d ever learned on Earth.
Milo stood next to my chair and explained in a hushed tone. “Blue’s for water, yellow is energy, and red’s for fiber optic cables. The big white ones show where we’ve got tunnels for transportation, though only the ones that blink are finished. When those are completed though, we should be able to travel between stations in under three hours, with the trust at the center, of course.”
I felt weirdly emotional seeing it all laid out like this. Not one of these bases would have existed without my sister’s gravdrive. It was overwhelming to imagine her second big invention, the trust itself, becoming the pumping heart of a massive lunar city. I supposed it could still be that, even if the RC took the whole moon.
For all their carefree play, the Meat Team was obviously thinking something similar. A dozen or more toy ships encircled one of the rectangular bases. I only recognized one, Guanghan, the Chinese base, because it was the largest and someone had placed a figurine of the moon goddess herself on top of it.
“Which base is that?” I asked, pointing to one that had a pirate flag toothpick stuck to it.
“Blackstone Research Facility,” Milo answered, their voice cavernous. “A collaborative station run by Free Brazil and Argentina. They’ve been doing field tests on a new engine for our ships.”
“We haven’t heard from them since the invasion,” Turkey added sorrowfully, though it earned her a smack from Cheese. “My brother works there.”
V had said there were two others transmitting without authorization, and I thought they’d told me their department was one of those. I dismissed the knowledge out of hand. The Meat Team weren’t traitors. If they were, the RC’s toy ships wouldn’t be painted poop brown with “Evil Fuckers” written across the wings.
Still, I couldn’t connect their easy banter and carefree smiles with how the rest of the trust had been acting. Like the way I had, like the world was almost over. “But you all seem so…”
Milo barked a hot laugh, and the others followed.
“Well,” Cheese said, “it’s nothing new, is it? Nowhere is safe forever. At least we’re together.”
“And you’ve probably noticed,” Turkey interjected, waving her prosthetic arm, “we’re disabled. Safety’s an illusion. And comfort passes like gas. What good will it do to stress over things we can’t control?”
Milo cleared their throat. “We can control only one thing, finding ways to be valuable. Hating who feeds us is nothing new.”
“Wait, are we hating our president again? I thought Faraday was supposed to—” Roast started, but Cheese shot him a hard glare, and Roast’s attention flicked to me. Realization slumped his shoulders.
I wasn’t offended. She was supposed to do a lot of things, Roast. I got it.
“We only resent this one so far,” Tenders offered. “Bet we’ll keep her once she’s bought.”
Roast laughed from his belly, which was soft and round and poked from his unzipped jumpsuit. “Plenty of time to learn to hate her then, I’ll remember now.”
I tiptoed toward our own dome, careful not to step on any pieces. The lunar expanse between facilities—though mostly empty—held clusters of odd trash, with labels that read things like iron, precious metals, and regolith. I thought regolith was used for fuel somehow.
Our dome, the main one for the trust, was like the center of a compass, except it was smaller than its southern third arm, Dome 3, which was the only other one I’d visited. Models had never quite clicked in my brain, but staring down at the glittering roof, I was tempted to peek underneath to see if a tinier me was in their comms department. I felt weightless, detached from my skin, when Joule walked up beside me, like I’d been caught in outer space.
“I guess I made more tweaks than I realized. Took longer than expected to load all my updates, but here. I registered it under my discretionary code, except with your login. Should work like a dream.” He shoved the tablet forward awkwardly, but softened the move with a proud smile. “Oh, and I also put on my favorite scheduler, for tracking different projects.”
“Wow, thank you so much!” I said, taking it from him and sliding it into the front pocket of my jumpsuit. It fit snugly, hand in glove, and it was lighter than I’d guessed it would be.
He went to talk with Milo and the others swarmed around them, pulling up chairs and jumping into a heated discussion. Joule hadn’t been kidding when he said his assignment was to be on loan to whoever needed him.
The model was so much more than a toy, no matter how it looked to me. They were problem-solving.
I wandered through the curtain and found another seat where it was quiet to dive into my sister’s emails. I opened them, marveling at the ease of using Joule’s smart program. On loading, it recognized and organized each correspondence by timeline and parties involved, with sectional tabs for frequently used words to get a summary without delving deeper.
Wonderful technology, but it still didn’t do anything to prepare my heart for reading, so I started skimming through other files V had sent, allowing the program to sort as I meandered. I ended up with an array of icons for each concept—memorial research, holiday research, early life, education, public service, publications and documentation, personal correspondence, business correspondence, miscellaneous.
Miscellaneous, which sparked my browsing mood most, had nothing but locked folders inside. Joule, once he had a moment, told me he’d look into it right away.
“I’ll ask V, don’t bother,” I said, worried that I’d set him on a trail of something V didn’t want him to see. “Maybe they’re supposed to be locked.”
He looked incredulous but didn’t argue. As he walked away, I was left wishing I could bring our entire unhappy hand into one room and make everyone talk. Together, we made at least half of a Faraday. If we could stop working at cross purposes, the trust might stand a chance.
I started with V, because Andrek was mysteriously hard to track down again. She was in her quarters with Halle, like the first time I’d visited. Except V had a setup similar to Andrek’s, with a projector connected to her tab, and the readings she was doing for work were arranged over the ceiling in a grid.
This time I didn’t let up until I got the truth about her Plan B.
And, this time, she told it to me straight.
“We’re trying to resurrect Faraday’s war crimes accord by retracing her steps with its original supporters,” V said. “And before you wonder, I’ll admit that it’s the reason I first thought of planning a memorial, to get access to her files and correspondence.”
“I—V, are you for real?”
“Follow my thinking for a moment. Which is more important, throwing a big party for your sister or rescuing her legacy on the moon and Earth?”
“Obviously, it’s—”
“Tell me something I don’t know about the great Faraday Tanner.”
If I hadn’t been waiting all my life for someone to say exactly these words to me, I’d have been annoyed at her for interrupting, but I knew this answer, even if I didn’t know how it connected.
“Her feet stank like raisins.”
Halle burst out laughing until V shot her a look, and she clamped her mouth shut and lifted her tablet higher.
“Be serious, Lane.”
“I am. They were rank. Sour, sweaty raisins. That’s why she wore sandals everywhere, to let them breathe.” She’d tried rinses and creams, vitamins and herbal cures, and a full year in special socks that were supposed to rejuvenate her circulation and eliminate the odor. It had all failed her. Her, the world’s sweetheart scientist with the stinkiest feet. “That’s my earliest memory. Her stank ass feet. I must’ve been a toddler, because her feet were all I could see, dangling off the couch in my face. Big girl feet, full adult stink.”
“...Okay.”
“And that’s where it all began,” I explained. “Her interest in science. She was teased about it so much in grade school that our parents pulled her out. And in trying to solve the problem of her natural smell, she fell in love with the natural world, with solving problems. That’s the part of the story nobody else knows.”
“Feet,” she repeated quietly.
“You hoped the unknown thing would be some revelation? Nope, just good old-fashioned vanity.”
“Vanity.”
“Yep.” I’d stumped her, which gave me a fizzy sense of pride alongside a gnawing dread for what’d follow when she moved past single word responses. “Why, though? Why did you ask that, and what does that have to do with the war crimes accord?”
She straightened on her bed. Instant poise. She was finally going to let me in deeper. I could hardly breathe through my anticipation.
“Your sister made friends everywhere. Powerful ones. That’s who I’ve been talking to since we got here.” V’s lips, a shimmery brown today, slid into a smile. “With the accord or something close to it at least, we can do what should have been done years ago to stop the RC. Charge and convict Brand as a war criminal.”
I shook my head. “But how? And if that’s even possible, why hasn’t it happened already?”
Halle leapt off the couch and beamed, tossing her tablet to V. “Finally. Okay. V, you got it?” She waited for V to adjust the screen’s view to the wall beside her, replacing her pages of text with a map of Earth’s nation states, each color-coded to show which were incorporated, free, RC, or other. “You see how the RC, in red, is all over the map, but it’s spotty. Strategic. V says that’s because Brand is making sure to cover himself legally, weakening the strength of any region that can challenge him.”
“Alliances have been stretched thin for decades already,” V said, clicking her tablet to shift the map slightly, highlighting areas which, I assumed, had some kind of political pact. “Without a strong governing body that’s global, like there used to be with the United Nations, there hasn’t been a way to address what Brand’s doing.”
I stared at the map as Halle pointed out several areas with large Xs over them.
“These are states that have already signed on to reinstate a global court and hold him accountable. So far, thirty state leaders have agreed to commit, privately, but we need at least eighteen more to make it concrete. Then we can go public, which means we, the trust, can call for Brand’s arrest and send him back to Earth for a trial and sentencing.”
“And with him arrested, the RC’s reign of terror will stop, so long as we can get enough support from Earth. It’s no small task, since we’re having to slip messages through coded packages within official communications,” V added. “Still, we’re close, but I can’t get these holdouts to respond. It’s like they’re mad at me for not being your sister, and nothing I say gets through.”
“Sounds like my whole life,” I said. “But how is knowing more about Faraday going to help get them to talk? And excuse me, but why would they talk to you?”
“Knowing more might not help, but I’m hoping it will. Logically, it should, because all of the original parties had personal ties to her, close enough that she could call them up if she wanted and not get a runaround.” V turned off the map. “She coordinated the whole thing, and she had fifty states ready to sign and move on Brand immediately, but…”
Something in my stomach cracked. “He killed her first.”
V hung her head sadly. “And without her keeping everyone talking, it fell to pieces. I’ve been working with a contact on Earth to patch it together, but—I’m not her. The only reason anyone talks to me at all is because I tell them who I am and why this matters so much to me.”
“That doesn’t end things right there? That’s a huge risk to admit.”
“When I explain what he’s done to me and my mom, they realize no one is more committed to seeing his downfall than I am. So if there’s anything you can think of...” she let the question linger between us.
“Faraday did have a way of making people agree to do impossible, scary things to make her happy, I guess.” I said. “And you want to know how she did it.”
“Exactly.”
I ran my hands through my hair. How many times had I wondered the same thing about my sister? She’d had that magical effect on people all my life, and it was as consistent as it was baffling. I’d always assumed she was made that way. Lucky. Pretty, white, smart, and optimistic. It hadn’t hurt that she also talked like a little professor.
My parents didn’t have the same effect on people.
I certainly didn’t.
If I hadn’t made sense of her magic in twenty years, I probably wasn’t going to figure it out in the next few minutes. “The others who’ve agreed already, did you ask them why they decided to?”
Halle belted out a laugh, but V only shook her head.
“I’m not in any position to ask that. These are leaders who called her a ‘friend,’ and I’m just Brand’s kid,” V said testily. “A kid who seems to annoy them no matter what I say.”
“Why do you say that?” Faraday was actually a kid when she met most of the people who worked with her, not a degreed professional like V.
“Well.” She and Halle shared a look. “It’s that sometimes, when a state agrees to sign, they always word it like…”
“Weird,” Halle tried.
V glared. “Like I’m not the only one they’re talking to about signing.”
“Okay, yeah, that is weird. What does it mean?”
“Who knows,” V said. “But weird or not, if someone else is out there doing the same thing, maybe one of us will get it done.”
“But even if it’s done, what would that mean? The RC will still be everywhere. Sounds like it’ll just make more problems.”
Halle choked another laugh when V shot her a stern look. There was more then that they weren’t telling me.
“Not if the rest of my plan works out,” V answered. “When Brand comes, I’ll have one last thing to deal with. But that’s it. So long as the accord’s formalized by then, we can end the RC for good.”
“Do you think…” I hesitated to ask, because I had enough to juggle already, and she was still holding back details, probably the ones I’d needed to know to understand. “Maybe I can help somehow?”
“Like what?” V asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m her sister. I’m not famous for anything besides that, but at least people know who I am. Maybe they’ll talk to me.”
V studied my face, and though I couldn’t see what she found there, she said, “Okay. It’s worth a try.”
I risked one more question, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to function unless I knew the truth. “Before, when I asked, when we…”
“Kissed?” she offered, rolling her eyes when Halle snickered.
“Did you let me, because—” Why was this so hard to talk about? “Was that only to distract me? So you wouldn’t have to tell me the truth?”
“No.” She looked me straight in the face. “I let you because I wanted you to kiss me. And if it didn’t happen before I told you, I was afraid it never would.”