Page 101 of Amethyst Flame
I gave a bitter laugh. “Believe me, if Dane could use anyone else, he would. I’m not his first or second or evenfiftiethchoice.”
“Donotdo this, Imogen. I can’t lose you. I’m asking you to turn around. Will you turn around for me?”
See, I’d do anything for my mom. I quit art school for her. I stayed in Arbolito at the Freeze for her. I didn’t want to go into what would probably be a life-and-death fight without her in my corner. But then who would I be?
“I can’t,” I told her. “You raised me better than that.”
“Imogen!”
I couldn’t talk to her anymore. It hurt too much. “Love you, Mom.”
I ended the call on her, “Love—”
And looked up at Dane, awaiting his inevitable rebuke.
“It’s kinder to them if they just don’t know,” he said.
My eyes burned. I was gonna cry. Everything hurt.
“And for the record,” he added, “you would be my first choice, Imogen. You’re a little green, but you’ve proven yourself. You know you have. Now you just have to trust yourself.”
Jacob returned with his snacks, and Dane made a pit stop (no snacks for him) before we got back on the road. US Route 93 between Phoenix and Vegas had a whole lotta nothing—literally, it had a ghost town named Nothing—and it held the dubious honor of being one of the most lethal stretches of highway in the country for crashes, but at least we had a couple more hours of driving to figure out…um, something.
I just thought about my mom. And the end of that call.
I lifted my phone and almost called her back, but I remembered what Dane had said. It was kinder not to. Damn.
“I got nothing here, folks,” Jacob muttered a half-hour later. “Total fail.” He slumped dramatically sideways in his seatbelt.
I slung my arm over the back of my chair to thump his knee. “Call your MIT friend.”
He scowled. “I’m not calling St. Croix. Besides, he’d never answer me after we shut his ass down.”
“He might not know the moths as well as you do,” I said, mostly to soothe his ego, “but maybe he has figured something out on his own.” Without Jacob’s bastardized, tweaked code. I shrugged. “Can’t hurt to ask.”
“We don’t want more complications,” he objected. “Right, Dane?”
Only silence for another quarter mile. “We need all the help we can get.”
Before Jacob could argue, my phone pinged. “BantaMatrix,” I told them.
“Put it on speaker,” Dane said.
Which was my own fault since I said we were sharing and trusting now.
I connected the call.
“We’ve been trying to track Adley’s implant and onlynowhave gotten a spurt of information. She’s in Boulder City, but her vitals are confusing and low…similar to what we see when one of our collaborators rejects symbiosis.”
Rejects symbiosis. Those blue veins. Will’s bugs were killing her. “How long does she have?” I asked.
“Every subject is different,” Oluwa told us, “but at best, hours.”
I huffed out a shuddering breath. “What happens then?”
“The hive expands, not just in size, but in magnitude and capability, like a simple balloon blown up inside of a complex canister, conforming to its host’s unique contours along multiple axes. So far, despite our best efforts, we haven’t found a way to reclaim a hive without…breaking the container.”
That I could translate. “Killing the host.” Since we were collaborating—and since it seemed like we were going to be very, very alone—I spontaneously asked, “Will you loan me the security team you have following me? If we work together, we might have a better shot at getting Ruskin out and containing Will. They can’t help you at all if they are just standing around waiting for a chance to grab her or me or your precious dragons.”
