“What are you doing here?” he asked her. “How did you find me?”
“I . . .” Sue cleared her throat. “The piggy bank.” Her voice was raw, like she was struggling to speak through tears.
“Sugar snacks, I should have known,” Josh said, scowling and snapping his fingers. He quickly raised his hands again, glancing at Eva’s pistol.
Eva snorted. Sugar snacks. Yeah, definitely Sue’s brother.
Before she could cut in with more about how she needed him to go with her, Sue stepped forward, trembling with what Eva realized was rage.
“How could you?” Sue shouted. “All this time, you were here, and not . . . not . . .” She sniffled, and Eva mentally willed her not to deactivate her isohelmet to wipe the snot no doubt forming.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Josh said, shrugging. “It seemed like the safest thing for all of us. If you had seen where The Fridge was keeping me—”
“I was there!” Sue shouted. “I was at their base! I saw the labs, and the cryo storage, and the big Proarkhe artifact, and—”
“Wait, you what?” Josh frowned, lowered his hands and pointed at Sue. “How did you . . . What were you doing there?”
“Hi, that was me,” Eva said, waving with her free hand. As she did, she realized she shouldn’t have a free hand; she was no longer carrying Mala, who was trotting cutely toward the wall of Pod Pal capsules. Eva mentally cursed, but she couldn’t leave Sue alone now.
“I’ve been trying to find you,” Sue said, her voice cracking. “I robbed a bank for you, to pay your ransom. Do you know how many Fridge people I’ve . . .”
Killed, Eva thought, when Sue couldn’t finish the sentence. It was a nonzero number, starting at the very Fridge base Sue was talking about now. Pink had spent weeks helping Sue deal with it afterward.
“Oh, no,” Josh said. “No, no, don’t tell me they were making you pay, too. I thought I was earning my own freedom by working for them voluntarily, under excessive NDAs of course.”
“Yeah, well, they’re fucking liars,” Eva said. “And speaking of The Fridge, if you really want to screw them over, trust me when I say you want to come meet the people we’re working for.”
Josh waved his hands dismissively. “No, see, I’m already doing that here.” He gestured at the wall of capsules, his expression hard. “Once these are distributed throughout the universe, I’ll have the most advanced surveillance system ever created. I’ll be able to find Fridge agents wherever they’re hiding, and—” He paused. “Well, let’s say it won’t be very nice.”
Eva thought of the exploding recycler and considered how very not nice indeed that would be. “Does your boss know what you want to do?” Eva asked.
Josh gave a nasty laugh. “She has more creative ways of ruining people with whatever we get from our psychic traces, and that’s fine by me. Might as well make some money from the trash who wrecked my life.”
“You should have told us!” Sue shouted, throwing a wild punch at her brother. It glanced off his arm, but Eva had been helping Sue practice, so it sent Josh stumbling backward, clutching himself in surprise.
“Hey, ouch!” he exclaimed. “I was busy with other stuff. Take it easy!”
“Take it easy?” Sue replied. “I’ll give you easy!” She kicked him in the shin, and he hopped on one foot, scowling.
One of the xana monitoring the holoscreens had stopped and was staring at them, the faintest of concerned psychic emanations coming from their general direction. They apparently hadn’t noticed Mala, though, as she was clambering up onto a random piece of equipment.
“Sue, hey, we’re attracting attention,” Eva said. “We don’t have much time here, and if we leave without Josh, we don’t get paid.”
“I just . . . I . . .” Sue stuttered, then shouted, “Shit on ten!” She threw up her arms and turned around. One of her bots climbed out of her backpack and patted the back of her neck awkwardly.
Eva stalked closer to Josh, who once again raised his arms. “Listen, mijo,” Eva said. “There are other people out there trying to stop The Fridge, and more importantly, doing super-weird science that they need your help with. Something to do with what you stole from the Fridge base when you escaped. So I need to drag your happy little culo back to them, and you can all sort out whatever it is that’s such a big fucking deal that they’d pay me truly exciting amounts of money for. Do we understand each other?”
Josh blinked. “Not really?”
Eva huffed out a breath. “What were you working on for The Fridge, and what did you steal from them when you left?”
“Information, mostly,” Josh said. “I was working on reproducing . . . technology the Proarkhe used.”
Eva thought of the energy source inside the Pod Pals again, which was the same as the Gate-creating cannons she’d found at the Fridge base, and the strange ruins where she’d found Vakar after she escaped cryostasis. “Technology they used to make super-dense portable energy cubes, maybe?” Eva guessed.
Josh flinched. “Yes, that, among other things.”
Mierda, mojón y porquería. That was a hell of a tech to add to the universal pool. It was wild enough that energy sources existed that could power FTL drives, but ones that could power a Gate, to open a hole from one end of the universe to the other? A lot of people would pay a lot of credits—or kill a lot of other people—to get their respective appendages on something like that.
Not to mention that, by BOFA law, it was incredibly illegal. If her mom found out, Josh and everyone else working on this project would be toast. Garilia might even be ejected from BOFA, depending on how things shook out.
Ah, politics, Eva thought. Where all the players are assholes and all the prizes are bullshit.
“And you were working with Miles Erck?” Eva asked, eager to avoid that trail of thought.
“Yes, and Emle Carter,” Josh replied. He was looking more skittish by the moment, less self-assured, his fingers wagging almost uncontrollably. “Look, I’m sorry you came all this way for whoever is paying you, but I’m not leaving.” He shot a stricken look at Sue, who still wasn’t facing him. “You have to understand. Lashra is keeping me safe from The Fridge, and my work here is too important.”
“I am pleased to hear you say so, Joshua,” a voice chimed in, psychic authority emanating from its source. Lashra Damaal strolled across the platform, her loose clothing billowing in the wind, pale as starlight. She was flanked by four Watchers, including Rakyra, as well as several Attuned.
Behind her, in restraints, marched Pink, Nara, Jei, and Sapri, along with three of the xana resistance members who had been breaking into the first lab pod. Hopefully that meant the others had escaped, unless they had been apprehended as well and left below. Either way, Eva’s stomach sank like a rock in the sea.
“I am less pleased to see the Hero of Garilia engaged in such violent, clandestine activities,” Damaal continued, drifting toward Eva, as tall and imposing as ever.
“I’m nobody’s hero,” Eva said bitterly. “Certainly not Garilia’s.” She still held her pistol, but she didn’t dare use it, and the Watchers seemed to know that implicitly.