Liquid Lies (30 page)

No. There
had
to be another way. She sat there for what felt like forever, poring over ideas, turning them over and inside out. Agonizing. They all came back to one solution.

The timing for this could never be right, but it was especially awful now, given all that Reed had just said to her upstairs. Gwen drew a ragged breath, anxiety making her insides boil. He would think she was using him. He would assume she was manipulating his feelings to make him go against everything he said he wouldn’t. The thought of it made her dig her elbows into her stomach, and she used the discomfort to keep everything down.

If the prospect of Reed’s reaction didn’t hurt enough, her birthright hung over them like a thunderhead. If she did this, she’d be disobeying one of the most important rules of her people. The same rule that had ordered Griffin to kill Yoshi and his henchman, and who knows how many others. No Primaries allowed inside. Ever.

There was no other way. She had to rely now on the truth—
veritas
, not
mendacia
.

“Reed.” She kept her face averted from the cameras she knew were trained on her, but spoke loud enough so he could hear. “I need to tell you why I’m here.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Reed’s panic came off him in a powerful blast. She didn’t have
to see him to know; she
felt
it.

“No. Do
not
tell me why you’re here.”

She fixated on a lightning-bolt-shaped crack in the rock face before her, despising herself for what she was about to say. “I’m going to talk, and since you have to be where I am, you’re going to listen.”

“I’ll drag you up right now, lock you in your room.”

“Xavier’s grown suspicious. He questioned me about you, about us. That’s what this meeting was all about. Don’t take me anywhere outside of the camera’s sight. You’ll just make it worse.”

He didn’t say anything, and Gwen knew she had his reluctant attention.

“I’m asking you to listen. I didn’t want to do this. Honestly, I didn’t. I held out and held out…but there isn’t another way. I’m asking for your help. Please, Reed. Please listen.”

“Shit.” Then, under his breath, “I knew I shouldn’t have stayed.”

She was not a religious person. She did not subscribe to any of Earth’s faiths, and the devotions of her ancestors had been watered down to myths and fables. The rituals had scripts and specifics, but not much heart. The Ofarians’ original, true religion had evolved into something completely secular, yet at that moment, she found herself praying. Praying that Reed didn’t mean what he just said.

They were only two people. Thousands of Ofarians and hundreds of Tedrans needed her. It was a terrible choice, but the right one to make.

Sweeping his doubt under the rug stabbed her in the heart, but she had to do it to say what was needed. To go on, she couldn’t be ruled by her feelings for him. Because what she was about to say would undoubtedly change his feelings for her.

Or destroy them.

“There are a lot of people in danger.” She pressed her palms to the cold stone bench, locking her elbows. “People I love back in San Francisco, thousands of others I’ve never even met. They don’t know it, but they need me. I’m all they have. Nora thinks she is the answer, but doing things her way would be…disastrous.”

The autumn cold rode piggyback on the wind, shaking browned leaves off trees and shrubs and icing her bones. It didn’t help that she felt that frosty separation slither between them again. She couldn’t allow it to come back. She pushed at it with her words, hoping their severity and desperation would slow the division.

She drew a deep, shaking breath. “You asked me to go home with you. ‘When this is all over,’ you said. This will not end, Reed. That’s why I said no. Not because I didn’t want to.”

“They told me you wouldn’t be hurt.” Threat darkened his tone, and she stole a bit of comfort from that.

She laughed to keep the tears at bay. “They lied to you. I’m as good as dead if Nora gets her way. Technically your agreement with her is valid. The danger to me comes after I’m done doing what she wants and you’re long gone.”

He made a low sound in his throat.

“The world will become dangerous for me and everyone I love unless I can work against Nora. Unless I can put my own plan into play. With your help. You said you stayed for me…”

“Don’t.” His anguish slashed at her with invisible knives. “Don’t you dare use what I feel for you to make me do what you want.”

“I swear I’m not!” She couldn’t help it. She swiveled to get a glimpse of his face and immediately wished she hadn’t. It was twisted with confusion and longing and anger. All directed at her. His eyes flashed in warning, telling her to turn back around.

She pretended to shift positions on the bench and stretched out her legs in front of her.

“I knew you would think that,” she said, “and it’s not true. Please. Just listen to what I have to say, then judge whether you still think I’m using you. But not before. It breaks my heart you think me so callous.”

Even if his silence wasn’t meant to be a prompt, she took it as such anyway. She inhaled through her nose.
Here we go
.

“What I’m about to tell you is the absolute truth. I am not crazy. I am not on medication.” Reed had gone quiet and still as a rock. “That first day, when Nora and Xavier took me away without you, they drove me way out to the middle of nowhere Nevada. There…Nora’s people are being held as slaves. She kidnapped me because she wants me to free them.”

“Slaves.” Disbelief dripped from his voice.

“They’re being forced to create a product sold for more money than you could possibly imagine, to a worldwide clientele that is incredibly guarded and the elite among the elite. This product is sold by my company.”

“The sales job you mentioned?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a
slave
owner.”

As she shook her head, her hair fell across her face, and she welcomed the curtain. “I had no idea. I swear. I thought our product was created by carefully selected, highly skilled people in a legal manner. I really did.” She thought of the last time she’d stood in front of the Board, desperate to sit among them. To help make their decisions, to know what they did. “Maybe I would’ve learned the truth in time. But instead I had to witness it through Nora and Xavier’s eyes. He was one of them, you know. A slave. Nora broke him out. And she made him take me back there.”

She heard the familiar scrape of Reed’s palm against his grizzled cheek. She didn’t realize how much she’d come to love the sound.

“That’s why you were so upset when you got back.”

Oh, thank the stars he was beginning to understand. “Yes. It was horrible. The worst thing I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t—
still
can’t—believe that people I know are responsible for it. That it’s been going on right under my nose. That I’ve naively dedicated my life to keeping it going.”

“Gwen, I shouldn’t know this.”

“You still worried about your paycheck?”

He paused. “I’m worried about a lot of things. Money isn’t one of them.”

She didn’t know quite what to make of that.

“Nora wants me to free her people. But there’s a price. Or else she wouldn’t have had to kidnap me.”

“You’re important within the company,” he pieced together.

She nodded. Important because she’d made it so. Pushed herself to the top. Expanded
Mendacia
’s markets fivefold. Created more jobs for the increased business and enabled the Company’s prosperity to trickle down to the Ofarians who weren’t directly involved.
Keep it together. Do
not
cry
.
Now more than ever, you need your head.

“This product,” he said, “what is it?”

“It’s something that makes people look different than they actually do. Younger. Stronger. Smaller. Healthier. Uglier. Completely disguised. Whatever they want.”

He didn’t react for so long she feared he might have taken off or tuned her out. His boots moved over the path and around the fountain. When he lowered himself to the far end of her bench, facing diagonally away, it took all her power not to turn to him.

He rubbed his hands together. “So this product. It’s makeup?”

I’m so sorry, Dad and Delia and Griffin. I’m sorry, Mom, for betraying all you taught me. This is the only way
. “It’s more like…magic.”

His hands froze mid-swipe. The muscles in his thighs tensed up. He didn’t even breathe. The entire garden paused.

“Magic?” he finally spit out. “What kind of asshole are you playing me for?”

The hostility and doubt didn’t deflate her. Instead, it fed her strength and resolve.

“I’m not playing. Everything I’m saying is real. Everything is true.” The words tasted like sandpaper. “All of Nora’s people are slaves. They are…a different race. They’re called Tedrans.”

Reed forgot where they were and threw a disgusted look over his shoulder. He caught himself, snapped his eyes back to the dying garden. She wished she hadn’t seen it. To know how he felt was one thing. To see it was another. She had no choice but to press on.

“Tedrans have the ability to make what’s false seem like reality. To create illusions. It doesn’t really change things, just alters someone’s perception. And it’s not permanent. When the glamour wears off, so does the illusion. The Tedrans can change anything, not just people and physical appearance, but that’s how my company has been marketing it. We call it
Mendacia
.”

“Latin for ‘lies,’” Reed murmured. “Clever.”

“It’s incredibly expensive. We sell it to extremely wealthy people all over the world, and I’m not talking about C-list actresses. I’m talking about hedge fund billionaires and heirs to fortunes behind some of the largest and most powerful global companies. Royalty, even. You have to sign a pages-long agreement just to open a discussion with us. Iron-clad privacy clauses keep us exclusive and secretive, and no one wants to admit they use it in the first place.
Mendacia
turns them into whomever they need or want to be. It’s made me, and us, very wealthy.”

“Nice sales pitch. You notice you still talk about it in the present tense?”

“
Ah
. So I do.” She dug her thumb into her forehead, where a dull throb had begun. “It has to stop, Reed. The production, the Company, everything. It has to end, and I’m the only one who can do it. But not from in here. Not how Nora wants it done.”

He spit into the bushes, as if to expel the story from his body. But there was much more to go.

“A small group of my people have been holding Tedrans as slaves for generations. They have forced the Tedrans to drain their powers. Doing this drains their life. So to keep up supply, this group forces them to breed.” That did it. She couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. “My people make and steal
children
, Reed. I saw it with my own eyes.”

He wasn’t wholly made of stone. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him shaking his head in disgust.

“You keep saying ‘my people.’ Who the hell are you then?”

Oh, the fear in his voice. She couldn’t talk about the Ofarians yet, so she wiped her nose on her sleeve and veered off course.

“I told you my job in the Company was sales. That’s not entirely true. I’m really a Translator, with a capital T. I advance new markets, learn the language, then bring in my dad to make the sale while I serve as interpreter. I also translate the spells that come from the
Mendacia
Plant into the client’s native language.” She was doing it again, using the present tense. Her throat tightened up. “It’s why Nora kidnapped me and not my dad.”

“Twenty-three languages,” he mumbled. “You did say that before. I didn’t believe you.”

She hadn’t expected him to, but the thought of lying to him, after he’d told her about his tattoos, hadn’t seemed fair. She’d wanted to share something real with him.

“So why exactly does Nora want you instead?”

She could say it in any one of twenty-three languages, but the hardest was English.

“There’s a man being held in that cabin in the woods. He knows how to help the slaves escape and I’m the only one who can speak his language.”

Reed opened his hands, frustrated. “The
only
one? Come on.”

“Yes, the only one. I can speak any language in the universe. All I have to do is hear it, and then I know it as well as my mother tongue. It’s a gift, a rare genetic trait that often skips generations. But I have it. I gave it to the Company and let them use me because I thought it was what was best for my people. I was wrong. And now Nora wants it.”

He bent forward. “What exactly does she want you to do?”

The question came out haltingly. She realized it was probably the first time he’d ever out-and-out asked why his target had been extracted, to use his term. She wished it hadn’t been her.

“Nora gave me two choices. I have to either destroy the Company and many people within it, or I have to help the Tedrans leave.”

“Leave where? The place in Nevada that Xavier took you to? Seems like a no-brainer, Gwen. Escape over death.”

“No.” She stared at a crimson mum, completely numb. “Leave Earth.”

He made a weird strangled sound, started to speak several times, then settled on this: “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to jump up from that bench, act like you’re angry and make a big scene, then run for the door to the garage. I’ll be right behind you. Got it?”

No problem. She sprung from the bench and rounded on him. She faced the cameras now. If Adine or Xavier knew how to read lips, she had to be careful what she said. So she spoke the truth.

“I wish you’d never taken me,” she snarled, then turned and bolted for the door.

She ran as though freedom were on the other side of that door. Reed’s boots scrambled close behind. Though she knew it was all a ruse, those fleeting moments of letting loose, of pounding the earth and bursting into the garage, let her mind fly with possibilities and hope.

She charged into the garage and Reed followed, slamming the door behind him. They faced each other now. His chest pumped, his eyes hard. The dark place smelled of gasoline and garbage.