Page 62 of Never Broken

I hesitated, glancing at my phone one last time. Was I really going to handle this on my own? Not to mention, I still had no clue what the gardener had meant bykeeping his word.

But that wasn’t enough to stop me.

Tracking Mom was like tracking a wounded animal sometimes. A dropped napkin by the sliding doors led to an abandoned glass of chardonnay on an end table, giving way toa pair of strappy cork wedges lying on their sides by the open pantry door, next to a half-eaten packet of saltine crackers. I went inside, then pushed open the exterior door.

“Mom?” I called, rounding the corner, following a scuffling noise on the lava rocks. “Is that you?”

Nothing.

After darting through the garden, in through the sliding doors, and upstairs, I finally discovered Mom leaning woozily on her bathroom vanity, trying to powder her face but mostly powdering the basin instead. She protested when I arrived, insisting the party was still going and she had to get back to it. After pouring her a glass of water, guiding her to the bed, and settling the covers around her, I started down the stairs. So far so good. I took another deep-as-I-could breath and started back down.

That was until I smacked into a tall form standing silently in the doorway of my father’s study, skin translucent and alien in the light of the moon.

“Looks like I wasn’t the only one making deals tonight.”

HIM

What?

Something must have been lost in Maeve’s translation. The SLA hadtriedfreeing all slaves, thirty years ago, and failed epically. All those poor bastards—save for Louisa’s professor, apparently—were in the mines, or dead, or most likely both. No one had tried since.

Mistranslation or not, this Resi woman knewsomething. Something about what Max Langer—and maybe my master—were plotting with the microchips. Something she was trying to stop. Something that Max Langerknewshe was trying to stop.And now she was in his crosshairs. And also thanks to me, so was my sister.

And so was I.

But I didn’t serve causes. I served science and logic because those were the only ways to win.Think several moves ahead, boy, not just the one in front of you.This was about Maeve and only Maeve.

Back on the terrace, the announcement was official. The deal between Wainwright-Phillips and Langer had been cemented. The toasts had been made. It was time for more expensive liquor and cigars around the outdoor firepit. The men were congratulating themselves on being captains of industry; the slaves were inside washing dishes, except for me.

Me? I had saved billions of dollars in rocket fuselage, humiliated the biggest douchebag I knew, criticized and even outright insulted several rich, powerful free men, and lived to tell the tale. More importantly, my plan had worked. I may have no skin left on my back tomorrow, but I’d kept Louisa safe at the table for five minutes, five minutes where the gardener couldn’t touch her, and she couldn’t touch him.

But now as I exited the kitchen expecting to see her face, my eyes flitted to every corner of the terrace, and a cold knot of panic twisted in my gut. She wasn’t in any of them. Where the hell was she? My breath hitched, heart thudding as if I’d been sucker punched. In the five seconds I’d taken to check her message, she must have slipped out.

So fuck the housekeeper. Fuck this party. Fuck cleaning up and fuck being a good, obedient little slave.

Only one thing mattered: finding her beforehedid. Or before she foundhim.

I shot down the dimly lit garden path, darting between the mesquites and palo verdes and the distant hooting of a desertowl, nearly drowned out by my heart drumming desperately in my ears. I knew exactly where I was headed.

But before I could even reach the garden shed, the door creaked open, and I nearly dropped the phone. The gardener’s bulky shadow fell over me, his body blocking off the doorway, his presence thick with a kind of sludgy, satisfied calm that made me want to retch. “Whatcha doing, boy?” he drawled, leaning casually against the frame, bracing himself on a spade. “Looking for candy?”

“Where the fuck is she?” I growled as I slammed him into a wall full of garden tools, sending spades and shovels clattering to the ground, my veins pumping with bloodlust for this motherfucker. For good measure, I grabbed the nearest tool and drove it into his filth-covered shoulder hard enough that he yelped like a prey animal. “And where’s the evidence? You’ve got two seconds to tell me before I gut you with your own pitchfork.”

He just chuckled and shrugged, even as I drove the rusty prongs in further. “Don’t got it no more.”

“What?”

“Gave it all up,” he rasped, gurgling now. “To Mr. Langer, that is. To get myself a much better deal.”

I froze.

The cold whisper. The icy blue eyes. The lean-in.She might find herself exposed.

I’d had it all wrong.

The gardener was still wheezing like a demented hyena in my grip. “Looks like you got your lines crossed, boy.”

I wrenched out the prongs and tossed him aside like a perforated garbage bag, gaping down in horror at my phone, then back up at the sleazy idiot’s grin oozing across his face as I took off runningbacktoward the house at full speed. “Don’t get too comfortable in there, asshole,” I shouted before I left. “I’m coming back.”

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