A Taste of Ice (42 page)

The radio rustled. He’d picked it up again. She could hear the angry hiss of his breath, in and out, in and out. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then…“If this isn’t love, then I don’t know what is. I won’t ever know.”

It’s love. It’s love. It’s love.
“It’s not love.”

The pause that followed weighed three tons and lasted an eternity. “Well, if you’re not willing to fight for us,” he said, “then neither am I.”

There was another crash, a high-pitched screech, then silence, and she knew he’d thrown the radio against the wall.

She could barely see Colfax through her sheen of tears. All sound went muffled, tuning to some bland frequency. She could no longer feel the chill of the windowless room or the hard planes of the plastic chair under her thighs. The whole world had been drowned and she didn’t care if she’d ever surface.

Griffin lunged for the door.

“Uh-uh!” Colfax’s voice cut through the buzz in her ears. “Don’t move until your man comes back with word that 267X is gone. You leave, my mouth stays shut. Same goes for you, Cat.”

They might have sat there, locked up with the most hideous man on the planet, for an hour or a minute. Time meant nothing. When the hesitant knock finally came at the door, Cat didn’t even move. Griffin opened it.

“It’s done, sir,” David said. “He’s gone. Took him out myself and locked the door behind him. Security said he headed straight across the parking lot and then disappeared.”

Glamour
, thought Cat.

“Thank you.”

“What the hell was that all about?” David asked.

Griffin stalked to the table and braced his hands on it, leaning toward Colfax. “You heard the man. It’s done. Now give us the Chimerans.”

In the doorway, David gasped.

Cat heard none of the rest. Heath Colfax talked but his rocky voice bounced off her. He talked forever, it felt like. Vaguely she was aware of David carting in a tablet computer, his hands flying furiously across the touch screen. Griffin was asking questions of Colfax and scribbling something on a notepad simultaneously. Other Ofarians drifted in and out of the conference room. They were always in a hurry.

Cat sat in the same place, staring at the same chip of yellow-revealing-gray.

Someone touched her shoulder. Spoke her name.

She blinked, looked up. “Griffin.” Her stomach growled. “Are you done?”

Colfax’s seat was empty, the chair askew. She was glad she hadn’t seen him get up and leave.

“Yeah. We’re done. I’m getting ready to head out.”

“Right now? Right away? What time is it?”

“Well, as soon as we get everything together. I want to meet with Reed still.” He ran a hand over his head. Though he kept his dark hair short, enough feathered between his fingers. “No time to lose.”

“Are you going after Kekona?”

He pulled on a vest over his black Ofarian shirt, started to buckle it. “No. I’m going to find the Chimerans. I’m going to try to talk with their chief. Make him hear my side. Again.” He shook his head. “Straighten this out before it explodes.”

“How many are going with you?”

He frowned. “Just me. If I take any more it could be construed as an act of aggression.”

She watched him test the zippers on his vest, then start in on the side buckles. “What happened between you two?”

He paused mid-yank, then gave the strap an extra hard tug. “Too much. Not enough. Take your pick.”

Smart man, to know she wasn’t talking about the Chimerans as a whole. He finished encasing himself in gadgetry and took Cat’s upper arms in a gentle grip. “I promise you, I’ll make what you did worth it.”

Had she sacrificed? Or was her relationship with Xavier doomed to begin with and she’d just put it out of its misery before it got too ill and just lay there gasping for breath?

“Does it matter? He believed me. He left.” And she couldn’t help but feel a little pissed off she’d been placed in this position, by the Ofarian leader no less.

He ducked his head, looking at her from under eyelashes that cover models would die for, and moved his hands to her shoulders. “So go after him.”

She blinked, at first not understanding. It seemed so simple, to take the loss because she’d convinced herself that it was what Xavier truly wanted deep down—this separation. Except that he’d fought for her—chased after her—
after
he’d learned what she was.

She reached up, gripped Griffin’s forearms. He gave a single, firm nod.

She nodded in return, pushed his hands from her shoulders. She shoved past him, burst out of the conference room, and sprinted back down the corridor. This time she remembered the way, the old nursery wing and the hall to the Circle passing by in a blur. She ran and ran. The cell block opened up and she raced through it. There was nothing outside the building, nothing but a weed-filled concrete parking lot and frozen Nevada ground. He couldn’t have gotten far.

There. At last. The exit.

A shock of bitterly cold air slammed into her as she charged outside. Wind fought her as she ran for the parking lot. She reached the asphalt and swiveled in a circle, scanning the area. To the west, soft hills covered in snow. To the east, the giant, gray box of the Plant. To the south, flat nothingness. To the north, far in the distance, a stretch of highway and the zip of an occasional car trailing white exhaust.

No sign of a tall, beautiful man carrying rejection and anger and sorrow in a heavy load on his back.

“Xavier!” Her bones rattled inside her skin, her throat aching from the scream.
“Xavier!”

No answer. He could be cloaked in invisibility glamour, standing there, watching her. But then he’d know that she’d come back for him, that she was here to apologize, to tell him the truth. He wouldn’t just stand there. Would he?

She jogged along the perimeter of the parking lot, casting out the net of signature awareness Gwen had taught her to use while they’d been waiting for the cleanup crew back in White
Clover Creek. Sensing signatures had nothing to do with sound, and the sharp gusts of wind couldn’t whip it away like a plastic bag or a swirl of leaves, so if he was anywhere close by, she would feel him.

She must have spent an hour outside, but what he’d said over the radio was true. He wasn’t fighting for her. He was gone.

The Nevada wind snapped at Cat’s clothing, making sure she
knew she was surrounded by emptiness. As she turned back to the Plant, a black Jeep pulled around from the back and sat, idling. Griffin’s ride to wherever he was going to find the Chimerans. By himself. To “try” to convince the Chimerans to stand down. To “try” to make up with the woman he called Keko. To “try” to persuade the entire Senatus that his race shouldn’t be judged and punished for Lea’s actions…or his.

“Try” just wasn’t good enough for Cat. She didn’t just destroy the only good thing in her life for a “Gee, I sure do hope this will work because I got nothing else.”

She refused to lose Xavier for nothing. And damn if she knew what she was going to do about it, but she was through with having forces act upon her and her having to dodge and react. She stalked across the parking lot. The cold wind punctured her thin shirt and pants, and slid across the fine sheen of nervous, furious sweat covering her whole body. The guards at the main door buzzed her through.

“Where’s Griffin right now?” she demanded.

“Uh, he’s in prep to—”

“I know that. Where is he?”

After a long look, the guard punched a few keys and stared at monitors she couldn’t see. “Front offices. Just down this hall, past the potted plants.”

The front offices made a rectangle around a central station with a low counter manned by more black-clad Ofarians. Movement everywhere: talking, typing, pointing, planning. A din of conversation and orders and arguments. As she passed
one desk, the computer screen showed a scene that made her shudder.

War preparation. In a big warehouse somewhere. Rows upon rows of weapons being loaded into nondescript vehicles. A few hundred Ofarians rushing about.

All in case Griffin should fail. Or, in their minds,
when
Griffin failed.

A few hundred Ofarians against how many? And where exactly would this stupid war take place? Where could the Secondaries possibly fight one another without bringing down any sort of attention from the Primaries? Weren’t the Secondaries all about secrecy? Absolutely none of this made sense.

Across the central station she caught sight of Griffin. He was with Reed in a side office, hunched over a table, his finger sweeping over a giant touch-screen computer. It was a map, a big blob of green and red sitting in a field of blue. Reed nodded shallowly then replied, slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other. Two men of action, radiating tension. Thinking about mechanics but not about emotion.

Gwen and David stood just outside the office, and as Cat approached she heard them talking about Gwen’s dad and the sister she called Delia, but whom Cat would never think of as anyone but Lea. They’d found the mole, who’d been feeding Lea information and
nelicoda
, and who’d overnighted to her the Tedran neutralizer. He was an elected member of Griffin’s cabinet who’d shared Lea’s ideas about using the Senatus to tame the Ofarians. Gwen had learned he’d been in contact with Lea for years, after she’d secretly contacted him with her plans. Soldiers had been sent to apprehend him in San Francisco.

Gwen looked wan and upset, completely different from the focused woman who’d put her arm around Cat so easily in White Clover Creek. But as she looked up and saw Cat, the desolation on her face vanished.

Cat hadn’t mastered that ability to mask emotions. She was fairly certain that she looked every bit as drained and heartbroken as she felt. She stood there, completely immersed in the scene but still separate from it. Her mind was filled with this familiar, muted hum, a constant reminder that she was surrounded by people exactly like her…but not. Because blood was supposed to create this impenetrable connection,
and Gwen had done everything in her power to strengthen that connection, but she still felt like she stood outside of it.

And she was okay with that.

The realization came to her so sharply she gasped. She recalled all those agonizing days spent wondering what it was inside her that consistently pressed water to the forefront of her mind. All that frustration. She remembered how her awe over the spiral around her arm had so quickly shifted to panic.

What exactly did it mean, to belong? Was it blood or magic or water that bound her to her people? And did she
need
to be bound? Or had that frustration arisen from something else entirely?

She covered her face with her hands, closed her eyes, and searched inside herself. That agitation—that constant churning of the unknown making her distracted and ill and lonesome since she was twelve—had disappeared. It didn’t exist anymore because she now knew what she was. She
knew
. That knowledge had been the key. Not the magic, not the whole of the Ofarian race standing at her back.

She went to Gwen. “Can I talk to you? You and Griffin?”

Inside the office, Griffin glanced up at the sound of his name. His eyes pulled down at the corners, making him look tired. Unsure. “You okay?” he asked as she stepped into the office, Gwen at her heels.

“You can’t go to the Chimerans,” Cat said, laying it all out.

Griffin sighed deeply and started to tap a pen on the table. “It’s not a choice I have.”

“No, I mean
you
can’t go.”

The pen stopped. “What do you mean?”

Cat took a deep breath.
Here we go
. “It’s not going to matter what you say to them. From what I witnessed, just the sound of your name raises Kekona’s defenses. And she’s in some position of power. Am I right?”

Griffin’s jaw made a stiff circle and he nodded. “But it’s not just about…her. Keko and I, three years ago…we were a secret. The fact that you all know about it now is…” He waved a hand. “That doesn’t matter anymore. I fucked things up with the Chimerans and the Senatus in other ways. I thought I was offering them help; instead I gave offense because I didn’t know their customs. I mistakenly thought they should conform to
ours, when it was the other way around. They think us even more arrogant, even more power hungry than before the Board came down. Everything I tried to do backfired.”

“Okay,” Cat said. “So if that’s the case, if you show up to the Chimerans, they’ll immediately turn their backs. You can’t reason with that side of a person. Not unless you can get them to turn around. To listen.”

Reed started to rub his bottom lip with his thumb, regarding her under his lashes. He nodded almost imperceptibly.

Griffin’s hands slid to his hips. “There’s one thing I haven’t done yet, and that’s beg. I tried arguing. I tried reasoning. I tried ignoring. I’m the one who screwed it all up. I should be the one to prostrate myself and grovel for mercy. What else would you suggest I do, Cat? Send in a random Ofarian to say, ‘Hey, our self-important prick of a leader couldn’t make it, but he’s sorry for the serious cultural faux pas three years ago. And, by the way, he never kidnapped Keko Kalani.’ Yeah, I don’t think that would go over so well.”

“So don’t send a random Ofarian,” she said.

He rubbed at his face. “You’ve just been introduced to this world, so I know that you can’t possibly understand the silly politics, just as I didn’t three years ago, but let me be clear that the Chimerans—and the vast majority of the Senatus, by the way—won’t listen to
any
Ofarian.”

“Then don’t send an Ofarian.”

Griffin let out a huff of exasperation and opened his mouth to refute her again.

“Send me,” she added.

“What?” Gwen said at her side.

Reed was eyeing Cat like he suspected where she was going with this, but Griffin’s patience had snapped and now he glared hard at her.

“I have news for you,” Griffin said. “You’re Ofarian. If you want to see what Chimeran backs look like, go right ahead.”

She raised her chin. She felt every beat of her heart like a punch against her ribs. But she knew she was doing the right thing. “What if I wasn’t?”