Page 5 of Amethyst Flame
When he turned back, I smoothed over my smile and lifted my eyebrows in question.
“I like the way your mind works,” he said.
“Yes. We’ve established that.”
A smile flickered on his mouth. “And while I think that we should discuss all the possibilities our new situation presents, that’s not why we’re here this weekend.”
“I’m listening…?”
“Let’s walk and talk.” He opened an arm toward an elevator sign not too far down the gallery. “We can drop off your bag at our room before we head out.”
Our room.All I could do was bob my head and then keep pace with him, my mom’s bag bouncing on my hip, only to discover that the elevator sign was just a sign. We turned to head down what looked like an airport concourse toward yet another sign. The noise of the casino diminished, and with it, the jangling in my head.
Jacob had to have felt the relative quiet, opening an awkward abyss of silence between us, because he glanced over and said, “Okay, so…I did a thing.”
Which sounded to me like the preamble to a confession.Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
The elevator bank came into view. “Uh-huh?”
But Jacob took my arm and stopped us. He leaned into me and lowered his voice. “You know how this molecular hive tech is going to change the world?”
Ominous way to start. I adjusted the strap on my shoulder bag, drawling, “Yeah…?”
His eyes narrowed. “Stop freaking out.”
“I’m not freaking out.” Yet. But I had a feeling I was gonna.
“You are. I can tell,” Jacob said, clearly stalling.
“Maybeyou’refreaking out,” I said with a smirk. “Why are you freaking out, Jackhole?” The moths didn’t make me psychic, but he was acting so shifty that I felt confident he deserved to be tagged with his trusty old moniker.
He looked over his shoulder, and then back toward the elevator. “I’ve been looking a little more closely at all the stuff on Brayden’s data chip.”
Fuck. This was bad. “Yeah?”
I’d filched said data chip, aka the White Wafer of Doom, during my adventure at BantaMatrix HQ, and I’d sent it to Jacob for help hacking into it.
My boy flexed, and holy-fucking-moly, we had the motherload of information on moths. Internal documents, specs, code—it was all there.
We’d talked about taking our info windfall to theTimes. The records Brayden had collected about the human trials were particularly nasty, and we had the receipts that would blow Banta wide open.
But Jackhole here had urged caution. He’d thought we should take some time to learn what we had, what it meant, and what I’d be able to do before making a move that we couldn’t take back.
Okay. Fine. It was true that I usually leaped before I looked, so I decided to trust his judgment.
Had I made a mistake?
He visibly gulped. “Among the files were many different versions of the source code. I chose a stable early version to…tweak.”
There it was. Shit.
Had he gone and fucked me over? Is that what he was working up to?
I already had nightmares about what had happened. And trust issues because just about everyone had lied to me.
Mom said I was traumatized—and, yeah, I was occasionally a little jumpy, like if someone were to creep up behind me and shout, “Boo!” then…well…they might die from a sudden moth blast. But it wasn’t like I could go to counseling. I’d tried to imagine how that would go…
“These evil people—one in particular who might’ve triggered my daddy issues—tried to kill my mom and me, so I used my super purple powers to survive. I don’t know if I can keep my mom safe if more bad guys come after me. Also, my powers may eventually kill me. Jury’s still out on that. But I can change channels on the TV without touching it if I concentrate hard enough. So there’s that.”
