Page 60 of Amethyst Flame
“Because the future depends on technologies that can expand with our imagination?”
She laughed. “Yes. That’s what it says on the posters downstairs. In the beginning, I was only interested in pure research, and I would’ve been happy to never leave the lab. But no one else would give me the space to pursue what I wanted, and so I had to start my own company to find the freedom to explore, to make my dreams come true.” She tilted her head again, the lights making her hair a crown of gilded steel. “I think you more than many others understand what it’s like to have no one in your corner, to feel alone in chasing your dreams.”
Her sharp green eyes pinned me in place like I was a butterfly. Ruskin was the only one who could help me learn what I could do and what I could become. No other person in my life, not even those who loved me, could help me figure out what was happening to me. She knew my moths like no one else—no one else alive anyway—and her motives were clear.
Dane and Jacob…not so much.
What did I have to lose with Ruskin?
I lifted my chin. “Where do we start?”
“There’s a lot to do and know,” she said. “We’ll have to get some baseline tests done. But nothing more painful or invasive than a blood draw, I promise.” She gave me a somber look. Yeah, apparently she had some sense of what Alling had done to me. “Once we have a reference point for your hive—its density, energy requirements, the number of iterations since the origin load and how that compares to the initial infection—then we can get into some more practical assessments and quantitative analyses. But I’m just wondering…” She bit her lip again, and this time she looked about Brianna’s age. “What’s the coolest thing you’ve done with your moths?”
I almost laughed. No one had asked me that before. “Like I said, I haven’t had a chance to do much fucking around… Er, fooling around. Plus I didn’t want to end up getting tagged and bagged in some clandestine government warehouse or something, you know?” I gave her a look, and she nodded with great seriousness. “Since no one really knows about me and I wouldn’t want to get in any trouble”—ha ha—“I’ve only used them for little things: to recharge my phone, scare the cat off the kitchen counter, and…um, trigger the fire alarm to get down here.” I cast her an apologetic squint.
She chuckled. “All very interesting, although perhaps your cat would disagree.” She continued to gaze at me expectantly, and I realized she wasn’t going to be put off with my playing too dumb. Nothing I’d said explained how I’d managed to slip into the internship program at the last minute.
I scrambled to come up with something impressive enough to be distracting but nothing too suspicious. “Also, this.”
I gathered my moths and sketched a figure in the air, more elaborate than any of the hand gestures in Legendelirium that I’d repurposed as my instinctive interface with the hive. I drew a butterfly, as big as my arms would reach, outlining the wings with twiddles of my fingers. At my command, the moths filled in the contour and ignited in glorious purple hues.
I set it free with a nudge, sending it toward the ceiling in a swirl of amethyst contrails. The butterfly circled our heads once and then burst into a mini Fourth of July grand finale.
“Ta-da,” I said as the purple glitter drifted down everywhere.
Ruskin stood with her hands clasped together under her chin, eyes wide and sparkling even without the violet shimmers. “That was wonderful. Of course I knew they were beautiful. From day one, I admired their perfect simplicity under the microscope. Seeing it like this is even more lovely.” She smiled at me.
I smiled back and rubbed my temple as if I were a little tired. “There’s some other stuff,” I told her, setting up plausible deniability for anything else she might discover. “But those are the highlights, I guess.”
She turned that gleaming stare on me again. “Oh, there’s so much more, Imogen.”
For an instant, my breath caught as I tensed. Was she saying she knew I could do more?
But she spun away, the flare of her pantsuit hastening to catch up. “We need to get you set up with your own lab suite. Only trusted senior researchers and staff, of course; no more Garys or Braydens. And we need to leave plenty of flexibility for your own experimentation since in some ways you are the foremost expert on the first synergized hive.” She gestured for me to follow.
This was so surreal. Ruskin, of all people, was leading me out of the hellhole basement.
I glanced back at the faint haze of my fading moths. My gaze landed on the dragon vial I’d set down. “Should I bring the other hive?”
“Leave it. It’s a decoy. If you’d managed to steal the vial and open it outside this containment, the consequences would’ve been unfortunate.”
I jerked my attention back to her, but she was already striding toward the exit. Unfortunate how? Should I ask…?
No. I didn’t want to know.
* * *
When the elevator doors opened,people were streaming back into the BantaMatrix building and firetrucks were pulling away out front. Oluwa, Teller, and others were on their phones, so once I was in the mix, I sent a quick message to Swann about picking up pizza for tonight, which was code to Dane and Jacob that I was okay.
They’d just have to wait until later for me to tell them what happened.
Letthemstew in anxious agony for a while. Served them right.
Later that afternoon, as I walked out of BantaMatrix with the newest swag—a sleek white lab coat with my name already embroidered on the pocket—the sun was setting and my phone was blowing up with messages. I settled into the car to scroll through them.
Swann from earlier in the day:Got lil sis she’s a kick
And then a little later:NM i’m gonna kick her
