Page 86 of Amethyst Flame
“So I keep looking. Which is where I was when Jacob was extracting you this morning.”
Oh. I wasn’t done with the lying-trust issue, but I couldn’t wait through the rest of his scolding for information on when my life was over. “Did you find anything?”
“It’ll take time,” he told me. “But I have someone on the inside at the Palm Springs compound. I used some…leverage to force them to get me info on the subjects of the Artemisia Protocol.”
I kept my face blank so Dane wouldn’t know I already knew about the Artemisia Protocol from Jacob’s hack.
Okay,fine,everyone had been keeping secrets. I was the pot…or the kettle…or however that line about hypocrisy went. We all sucked.
Did that mean I had to cut Jacob some slack? Ugh. Hehadcome to rescue me out in the desert without knowing how bad the situation was. Will could have easily zapped him.
“Artemisia Protocol,” I repeated to cover my thoughts. It was fun to say. “What’s that?”
“A possible way to keep you alive.” Dane worked his jaw side to side for a moment. “But you should know, Jacob is right. If my superiors knew that I’d recruited you, that I was housing you, that I’d revealed protected information to you… they’d take over. Fast. And, Imogen,theywould find a way to control you. The implications of this technology are too profound to permit any security lapse.”
“Is that your spy-garbled way of saying that you’ve been trustingmeall along?” And that I should reciprocate.
“Yes, and my trust was vindicated again last night,” he went on. “Upon learning such bad news, you could’ve done any number of bone-headed things, but you got as far from people as you could—ensuring their safety—and made peace with it on your own.”
Protecting others hadn’t been my intention, and I hadn’t made peace with it. Not remotely.
“You have,” he said, reading my mind. “Because you’re back and ready to do something about it.”
“Uh…do you know what that something is?” Because I didn’t. Were my butterflies planning to hijack me already?
“You need to inform Ruskin about William Teller and ask her if it’s happening to you.” He stood again as if he had too much restless energy to stay in one place for long. “Maybe she can help stop what’s happening with your hive in time, and maybe she can help him, too.”
Which made—count ‘em—two potential lifelines: BantaMatrix and the Artemisia Protocol.
Loosening my grip on the pillow, I gave him a reluctant shrug. “So my meltdown was premature.”
“Prematureassumes we won’t find a solution, and we will. You’re going to live, Imogen. And in five…no,tenyears, you’ll make an excellent field operator.”
“Oh hell no.” I got up to go to the kitchen to find something to hold me over until Jacob got back. “I never wanted to be a spy. I’m just here to, you know, not die. You can have Jacob.”
“We’ll see.” Dane headed to his dining room set-up. The man never stopped working. Maybe he could keep me alive long enough for Adley or Artemisia to design a cure.
* * *
Monday morning,Mr. Finding Solutions Dane had a rental car—a boring blue Civic—waiting in the driveway for me to temporarily replace my Fiesta. I arrived early to work and began my day by drowning my only plant in my mostly bare office. The plate under the pot had overflowed with water, which was dripping on the carpet. “Shit!”
Adley leaned in my open door. “Your message said you needed to talk?”
“Yes, uh…” Just… “The pot’s peeing everywhere.”
Her brow furrowed. “I’ve never quite heard it put like that.”
Fuck it. I twitched my fingers to [gather] the fluid the same way my EldWitch used to snatch up gold coins. The droplets suspended mid-air with a faint amethyst twinkle of refracted moth lights as I sucked the excess out of the plate, and I directed it all back into the coffee mug I’d used to get water from the bathroom tap.
This was not the impression I wanted to make with Adley. Especially today when I needed her help.
I cast an embarrassed look her way to find her lips parted in wonder, her eyes alight. “Amazing. That’s just everything I ever hoped for.”
“I promise I’m not trying to kill it.”
“You’re not. I can teach you how to care for it.” She came over, lifted the pot, which dripped furiously into the plate below it. Yeah, maybe I’d been overzealous with the water. She flicked a quick little glance at me, and I [gather]ed the excess—with a few specks of floating dark brown soil—and directed it back to my mug.
And while she fussed with the leaves—one had already curled toward death—I took her proverbial leap of faith. “Something happened this weekend.”
