Page 43 of Redstone
“What, you think I’m going to hurt you?” Demarcos laughed hollowly. “I think it’s rich that of all the bad guys you could have picked out, you’ve decided to put the role on me.”
Tamara took a deep breath to settle her jangling nerves. “Sit with me.”
“I’d rather—”
“Let go of my goddamn wrist and sit down with me on that lounge over there,” Tamara hissed, “before you ruin everything for Kyle.”
Demarcos’ eyes narrowed, but after a second he did as she said. They walked over to the lounge together and sat, and Tamara did her best to put a friendly expression on her face while keeping her voice as low as possible. “Listen to me and listen good. I am not your enemy.”
“You haven’t done anything to make me think of you as a friend,” Demarcos countered softly.
“I’m not what I seem.”
“I’m not even sure what youseemto be.” He sounded unduly agitated by that. “You’re a spineless official on a charity loan to the biggest name in Alliance politics, but you’re also sending secret messages via Morse, which is about as antiquated as it gets, to someone else in the prison who, what, is planning some sort of breakout?”
“You got all of that from being an eavesdropper?”
“It’s not eavesdropping when I’m listening inMorse, which I didn’t think anyone off my planet knew anymore.”
“Clearly you never got schooled at the Academy.”
“I had better things to do with my time than learn to be a killer,” he said. “You keep blinking.”
“I’m checking the time.” Her implant had started a countdown timer in the corner of her vision, and Tamara could read it better when she blinked. “Shit. Look, you have no reason to trust me.”
“No, I don’t.”
“But I’m asking you to because Iamplanning to get some people out of here, and one of them is your client. But I can’t do that if I don’t get to the infirmary in the next five minutes.” Shit, time was passing by too quickly.
“Why would you—”
“Ask yourself why a natural would choose to align herself with President Alexander, even out of desperation, when he’s lobbying to have the planet that was given to people like me excised from the Alliance,” Tamara said. “Ask yourself why I would support a man who is willing to let the fallout of his brother’s murder—and that’s what will happen if we don’t act now—come down squarely on me in his stead. Ask yourself who in the hell I could possibly be talking with inMorse code. If it was someone official, why would I bother?”
“You could be here for someone else,” Demarcos said, but some of the suspicion had gone out of his voice.
“And I am, but that person was only here originally to be Kyle’s fallback plan. He’s making sure that Kyle stays alive while the rest of us work on getting him out.”
“Breaking him out of prison won’t make the charges against him go away.”
“Breaking him out of prison before publicizing the heinous crimes his brother perpetrated against him as a child is the only way to keep him alive, though.”
Demarcos’ eyes narrowed. “What crimes?”
“I’ll tell you when this is over. For now, though, please, trust me. Or at least trust the man who’s paying for you because he knows all about this.” It was a risk, bringing Garrett into things, but surprisingly, that seemed to relax Demarcos even further.
“That twisty son of a bitch,” he muttered. “Fine. What do you need?”
“I need to eat something.”
“The cracker?” He glanced over, but a cleaning bot had already swiped it off the floor. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay, I have more.” Tamara popped another one onto her palm. “Just … don’t interfere, all right?”
“Interfere in what?”
“In what happens next.” She bit into the cracker before anything else could go wrong, chewed, and swallowed quickly. The back of her throat tingled. “Oh, yay, it’s working.”
“What’s working?”
