Page 60 of From the Noblest Motives
Hillary's expression crumpled, though she did her best to blink back tears. "We were supposed to meet him. The instructions were in the little skimmer I was supposed to pilot."
With a muttering growl, Blaze strode toward the vehicle-hangar side of the coach house, returning after only a quick look. "No one's piloting anything that was in there." He held up a hand when Hillary opened her mouth to protest. "And no. That skimmer's smashed to hell. No way the comp survived for you to pull off any messages."
Maia scurried over and threw her arms around Shudder's waist. "You were so scared."
"I was." Shudder's smile tried to surface, cracked, and sank. "Scared you were hurt under there. Scared we weren't going to be able to get all of you out."
"What are we going to do?" Deshaun's voice broke as he looked to Hillary. "Cyril…"
"Cyril needs us." Hillary nodded. "I don't know… I don't know how to find him. What if they've caught him?"
Damien exchanged a dark look with Blaze. "He'll get away. He'll find a way."
"Yeah. And when he does, whichever fuckers were on that Guild craft? They're coming right back to search the house." Blaze pointed to the truck. "You've got a choice, kids. Stay here and get picked up for questioning or climb in the back of the truck, and we all get the hell out of here."
"We can't just—" Danilo began, but Damien held up a hand.
"Something's very wrong. That was Sledge's voice on the house intercom. You'll be… It's not safe to stay."
"Isn't he one of the good guys?" Shudder leaned over to whisper to Blaze.
"Never liked the bastard. Don't trust him as far as I can throw him, and he's freakishly heavy, so not far." Blaze gave Shudder a little push. "Get the kids in the back, Shuds. You ride with them. For semi-sort-of-adult supervision."
Shudder's jaw dropped in a dramatic approximation of shock. "What happened to being nice to me?"
"You're feeling better." Blaze windmilled an arm toward his still-running vehicle. "We've got to go. Now."
The kids still hesitated, but Shudder's unsuccessful attempt to climb into the back of the truck finally got them moving, as all four of them helped him up and clambered in with him.
"We're the adults?" Damien asked as he heaved himself into the passenger seat.
"No. Me. I'm the adult." Blaze turned his head to yell. "Hang on back there!"
The truck sped away from what had been Cyril's safe house, no longer safe at all. In the truck's mirrors, smoke curled up from the vehicle shed, and Damien suspected a fire would soon destroy what was left of the coach house.
A knot of fire snakes coiled and twisted in Damien's gut as he watched the property recede behind them—a place that had so carefully cultivated an illusion of safety. The frightened-child part of him had wanted desperately to believe it. Safe. With his own father. Something he had dreamt about after beatings from his uncle.
My own father would be kind and proud of me and wouldn't want to use me.
The reality had, of course, fallen far short of childish imaginings. Not at all a surprise, though it still hit Damien like a skewer to the gut.My father… is scum.
He let a kilometer speed by in silence, then another, as Blaze gripped the wheel and scanned the horizon with grim determination and Shudder told the kids a story of past civil disobedience gone wrong that had them giggling.
When the distance traveled rolled over into the third kilometer, Damien had finally replayed conversations enough times to form a cohesive whole. He turned in his seat to face Blaze.
"We have to talk."
13
BLAZE'S STAND
"Okay, so we knew your dad has his grubby little fingers in lots of pies." Blaze ran a hand over his face after Damien had finished laying out Cyril's Grand Plan. He began holding up fingers. "But one—he's been criminalizing government officials. Two—he's been stealing people's babies and replacing them. Three—he's been engineering these babies so he gets therightkind of variants. Four—not part of what he said, but a good guess—he's been working on genetic crap with the Guild, both legit and not so legit, and he's double-crossed the not-so-legit ones for ourFlee For Your Livesportion of the program."
Damien's expression, which had become so much more animated in the past couple of weeks, had shut down completely when he talked about his father. In a voice dry as cinders, he said, "To be fair, the criminalized government officials are already criminals. The discredited ones are just unethical."
Fuck Cyril. Fuck him sideways and backwards and inside out with rusty barbed wire for everything he's done to Damien. Out loud, Blaze settled for, "Fucking hell."
"Yes." Damien slid down in his seat until he was staring at the dashboard. "He needs to be stopped. But he's everywhere. This is all so… much."
