Page 62 of Amethyst Flame
His attention flicked to my finger then back to me. “I’ll cook. You talk.” He reached past me to grab a jug of orange juice, the good not-from-concentrate kind. He poured a glass and put it in my hand as if that finger couldn’t blast him like a pomegranate. “Sit.”
My hand shook just a little, but I sat.
And even though I was loving punishing them, now I wanted their input even more. I started talking.
While I told them about Ruskin’s trap—“Shit,” Jacob said while Dane just whisked some eggs—I drank three glasses of orange juice and then started devouring the giant omelet Dane put in front of me, talking around mouthfuls. I worked my way through hash browns, three biscuits with extra butter and honey, and my very own fruit platter, telling them about Ruskin’s offer to work with her and the tests we’d started to run.
“I was too nervous to try to inject my moths into the systems while she was right there,” I told them. “But I’m sure I can get back there eventually.” I took the last bite of omelet and then looked down at my plate. “Hey. That was good.” The omelet he’d made me was like the one I’d made him but with more of those expensive red peppers; he’d taken good notes on my preferences.
I glanced at him. Probably he just wanted to keep me at peak operating efficiency, like oiling his gun or whatever. Still… “Thanks.”
He nodded, though his gaze looked troubled.
Jacob shifted restlessly on the counter stool beside me. “So you think you fooled her that you’re a lone wolf?”
“Maybe?” I shrugged. “Adley is a genius, but she genuinely seems to care more about the pure science than the possibility that I had a team waiting outside.”
“Adley?” Jacob sat back with a snort. “So you’re on a first-name basis now?”
I smiled at him sweetly. “Longing for your Jackhole days?”
Dane ignored our banter. “She can’t ignore the implications for the future when they are so dire.”
I chased my finger through a drizzle of honey on the plate. “Not everything has to be a weapon, Raymon.”
Jacob swiveled his gaze over. “Raymon?”
With a little zing of returning energy, I swirled my finger in the air. The honey drifted upward in a tiny golden spiral, leaving my hand clean. I leaned forward to lick the sweetness right out of the air.
Jacob coughed. “Did you just swallow your bugs?”
“They don’t mind.”
Dane was staring at me with a different sort of disquiet. “Anything can be a weapon. In the right hands, that honey bear could kill.”
“I’m finding that a little hard to imagine,” Jacob muttered. “Kinda like I didn’t even think that you might have a first name.”
My turn to ignore him, focusing on my would-be handler. “Adley—Ruskin isn’t some clueless academic. She understands the implications if this work gets out of control. I’m just saying I think she might be willing to collaborate. If we told her—”
“No,” they said simultaneously. Dane followed up saying, “And that’s an order.”
I scowled at him. “You can’t order me around. I have power too, you know.”
Jacob cut a glance at me. “If you have to tell people you have power, you probably really don’t.”
“Don’t make me zap you to prove it.”
“In the right hands,” Dane repeated. “Ruskin already lost control of her technology once. She doesn’t get a second chance.”
I huffed. “Everyone should get second chances.” Because if they didn’t, where would that leave me at the end of all this?
“You want a second chance?” He shook his head. “Go over the entire day again from the time that you headed to the basement. Only this time, write it all down.”
I grumbled but went back to the top.
After that, he had a list of questions, making me review some of my interactions with Ruskin. Although most of the demonstrations I’d given her after we’d gone upstairs had been things I’d already tried for myself—little bursts of power, simple housekeeping functions like map and search, a few minor manipulations like I’d done with the honey—she’d asked me about energy blasts too. In the months since my infection, I’d made a few purple fireballs, but I preferred to think of the moths as creative, not destructive. And while Ihadtried to blast the containment shield when it dropped over me in the basement, that ineffectual attempt probably hadn’t looked so different from my equally pathetic effort to map the shield.
“When she asked about blasts, what did you tell her?” Dane prodded.
