“Why couldn’t you do that at Monticello?”
He looked at her, searing her with his eyes. “No, you’re not suspicious at all, are you?” he said sarcastically.
“It’s just a question.”
“There’s a higher altitude here and a better angle. Besides, I like the exercise.”
It seemed like a reasonable enough explanation. “You said to find any weaknesses. Weakness against what?”
He paused before responding, considering his words carefully. “The others are considering action, if worse comes to worst. You heard the boy, Owen. The dish could call something from space, and bring it to orbit around earth. It could be dangerous. Although it sounds like a bit of a fairy tale, especially given the retcher problem.”
“Maybe they have a solution for that.”
Mehta laughed. He opened his mouth but then held his tongue for a moment, becoming thoughtful. “I suppose it’s possible, but I doubt it. It may be they only need to use it once. Maybe that’s enough to send whatever message they are trying to send, and then the retchers will destroy it.”
“How could we possibly have enough people to attack that thing?”
Mehta returned to looking through the scope. “Well, there are the bandits Madison and Owen are recruiting from Yorktown. Madison also talks about some sanctuary where there’s a trove of weapons that the original Seeville founders have stashed away. Sounds like a lot of malarkey to me. Either way, I doubt it will be enough. The dish looks heavily defended. They have regular patrols, and they’ve built a substantial wall around the place.”
“What about you? Are you going to help?” Flora asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Why not?”
“Like I said, I’m not sure they can be trusted.”
“What is so wrong with them? It’s pretty clear to me they have the best interests of Seeville in mind. Someone needs to keep the railroad in check.”
Mehta nodded, wrote on his pad, and then looked back through the scope. “Yes, the railroad needs to be kept in check, sure, but be careful. This Madison, she has been living with bandits for much of her life, and most bandits I’ve met are scoundrels or traitors at heart. No amount of fancy words can change who she is. No number of Old World books can change someone’s true temperament.”
“I disagree. She is better educated, polite, good-natured—more so than any typical bandit you would come across. Same with Benjamin and the other Yorktown folks I’ve met. Besides, she originally came from Seeville. In fact, she’s probably less a bandit than you or I. Technically, if you weren’t a merc, you’d be a bandit.”
He glowered at her and then returned to his scope. “But is she being truthful? Is she being evasive?” he asked.
“Why would you ask that?”
“Well, for one, this sanctuary she speaks of. She tells us enough to keep us interested but gives us no details of any consequence. It could very well be a feint, to keep us here, working for her. Then there are the letters she writes, that she won’t let us see. Some of them I’ve seen written with an old cipher—one no longer used. Why has she not been upfront about these letters?”
Flora did notice Madison stow away paperwork at times, but she hadn’t known about anything being written in cipher. It did give her pause.
“Once I saw her skulking by your room at night, spying on you,” Mehta said, his eye still in the scope. “She was listening with interest as you did your ritual.”
“What ritual?”
“Come now, Flora.”
“I don’t remember ever saying any ritual.”
“During the sessions… you may not remember everything, but you said many things. Your ritual was one of the most coherent. Peers Lindberg, Axel Kelemen, Tucker Kelemen… their strength is why I am alive. I honor them when I thrive…”
It was the second time she’d been caught in a lie with Mehta. She felt haughty, defensive. “If you saw Madison outside my room, it means you were spying on me as well. How does that make Madison any better than you?”
“I was watching her, not you. And there’s more. Doesn’t it concern you that Madison asks you all these questions about Granger, about your family, and about the Essentialists? How could it benefit her? How do we know she doesn’t have another agenda? She could be planning a coup with her bandits. She could even be in league with the railroad, using you for intelligence.”
It was ironic that Mehta harbored suspicions about Madison working for the railroad, when Madison had the same suspicions about Mehta.
“Using me for intelligence?” Flora asked cynically. “They already chewed me up and spat me out in these sessions you keep talking about, sessions you helped with. Why would they need Madison’s help? Is it so hard for you to believe Madison simply wants to know more about me? Maybe she’s not worried she’s going to have to kill me, like you are?”
She saw his knuckles whiten around the scope, then he slowly lowered it from his face. His eyes seemed to have closed momentarily. “It’s time to go,” he said. Then he put his note pad in his pocket and walked back over the roof to the siding he’d climbed up earlier.
Flora tried to quell her rising temper. It infuriated her that he wouldn’t see her point, that he wouldn’t give her straight answers. She followed him down the wall and hurried after him across the overgrown field.
By the time she caught up with him, her dander was up again. “If you don’t trust Owen, if you don’t trust Madison, why are you still here? Why don’t you sign another one of your precious contracts so you can move on to your next bloodbath?”
He stopped in his tracks and turned to her. He was breathing heavily, his eyes dark. She could tell he was trying hard to dispel his own frustration, his own anger.
A momentary flash of fear took hold of her. Maybe she had pushed this homicidal man too far. She imagined his gnarly hands wrapped around her head, crushing her skull. She imagined him throwing her corpse unabashedly down the steep Montalto slope. She imagined peering through slits between her fingers as Mehta hit her throbbing hands.
But he did none of those things. Instead he continued to stare at her, the tension hanging in the air. Slowly, his breathing moderated, and he said, “I have signed another contract.”
“I knew it!” she said, stepping back from him and pulling a knife from her belt. “Who with—with the railroad, with the curator?”
“Neither,” he said, looking at her knife with some confusion. “I don’t think you’re going to need the knife.”
“Then with who!” she asked, waving the knife at him.
“None of your business,” he said, turning his back on her. “But don’t worry, you’ll be rid of me when the contract is over.”
It was confounding, and it only infuriated her more. She sheathed her knife and ran ahead, jumping in front of him to cut him off.
“None of my business?” she said, some spittle flying off her tongue. “None of my business? You fucking moron, of course it’s my business.”
He stopped, his brow once again furrowed in confusion.
“Yes, that’s right, asshole. Listen to me. Your contract with the curator screwed me over, your contract with the railroad subjected me to weeks of torture, but the best one was your Monticello contract. You bring me here, to this place as a slave, and then you get the one person I cared about killed in cold blood. The whole reason I came to this fucking place was to find the only one I truly loved, the one who’d been stolen from me, and you killed him. I know Euclid pulled the trigger, but you signed the contract, so you killed him. You fucking asshole, your contracts are my business.”
His eyes darted back and forth as she spoke. Then, when she finished, his knees seemed to give way, and this ox of a man’s body folded down, as if encumbered by some foreign gravity. He put his hand down to steady himself, and then sat back on his buttocks. A flash of anguish traversed his face, creasing around his eyes. Then his face lost emotion, and he pulled up his hands, looking at them with the wonder of a child.
She couldn’t bear the sight of this ignorant animal. She ran past him, down the hill. She knew she’d gone too far, she knew her words were more emotion than truth, but the conversation was making her head spin. More than that, she had evoked the memory of Granger, and it made her think of that fateful day in the palisade garden when he was murdered.
Once a beacon of longing, Granger had become a black hole, a place she dared not venture with her thoughts. She had tried to comfort herself with the knowledge that she was able to see him one more time, that they were able to connect lips. On the day Ember died, it was all she’d asked for.
But after his fickle demise, one that could be attributed to her own imprudence, she wondered if it would’ve been better if she hadn’t come to the Spoke lands at all. She wondered if it would’ve been better if she had killed herself in the confrontation with Bartz on the train. Then at least he could have lived. Even as a slave, his life was worth so much more than hers.
So she ran away from Mehta, she ran away from her own spiteful words and she ran away from the memories of Granger, lest they take her down the dark recesses of regret where should could no longer tread.