I won’t tell anyone. I swear.
I didn’t mean to see that.
Please don’t. Oh, God, no. Please don’t. Please don’t kill me.
Three different Primary voices. All saying essentially the same thing. There’d been nine more who’d never gotten a chance to say or plead for anything before Griffin had taken their lives.
“No, thanks,” Griffin managed to get out, trying to seem as casual as possible. “Hey, can you turn that off for a second?”
Distracted, Henry kept playing, the sounds of death and dying stabbing into Griffin’s brain. His hand shot out, knocking the game to the bedspread. Henry slowly turned to Griffin, and the look on the kid’s face was nothing like the playful defiance Meg had given him. He looked petrified, and Griffin felt guilty.
“Sorry.” Griffin ran a shaking hand through his hair. “I, uh . . .”
“’S’okay.”
Brothers born to such different generations. Henry gazed up at him with nothing but pure adoration and his own heartfelt apology, though he’d done nothing wrong. Griffin sank to the bed and wrapped an arm around the shoulders that had yet to widen into the Aames shape. The boy was still pretty scrawny, all knobby knees and long limbs, but he was on the verge of change. About to come into his body—and his water powers.
The first of the Aames family who didn’t have to become a soldier because the Ofarian class system dictated it.
Be an advertising executive, Henry, Griffin wanted to tell him. Be a writer or an engineer or a janitor. Be something no one tells you to be, and don’t be afraid to go into the Primary world to do it.
Griffin held his brother tight, sending his dreams and wishes through the embrace.
“Um. Griff?” Henry’s voice was muffled, and Griffin realized he’d wrapped his other arm around the kid and had curled Henry’s face into his shoulder.
He let Henry go. “Sorry,” he said again.
The answering grin was pure joy, pure pride. Henry stood up, then dropped into a fighting stance Griffin recognized from Ofarian-sanctioned practice sessions, meant to prepare kids for soldier testing and training. “Want to help me on something? Captain Hansen says I’ve got promise, but I need help on my form and I need to practice, and Meg and Eve just ignore me, even though they’re both really good already. Please, Griff. You’re the best fighter we have.”
Maybe once upon a time.
Sliding his hands to his knees, Griffin said, “I’d rather help you with—”
“Math.” Henry heaved a great sigh as he came up out of the stance. “I know.” He went to his desk and fiddled with a familiar orange textbook. “It’s kind of embarrassing, you know, to be Griffin Aames’s brother and be one of the worst in training.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.” Griffin tried not to let this revelation mess with the filter he’d applied to this boy who had such incredible promise. “I know someone who could make you a genius, though. You’re already smart, but she could send you to the top of your class in math, teach you things about computers you never even knew existed.”
Griffin had been looking for ways to bring Adine, the half-Secondary tech wizard, further into the Ofarian world, and he saw instruction as a possible natural progression. Henry seemed to brighten for about one-point-two seconds, then his face fell, because when you’re twelve, how could math or computers ever compare to being able to throw your opponent and disable his weapon?
Henry shrugged, dejection making the corners of his mouth turn down. He started to throw some punches at an invisible foe that did indeed need some practice.
Griffin rose to his feet. “Dinner’s almost ready.”
“Pop says you’re going back to the Senatus tomorrow.”
Griffin’s eyebrows lifted. Pop had told Henry that? Probably with a side of opinion and a whole helping of doubt. He heard the skepticism in Henry’s voice, echoed straight from Pop’s words, and vowed to change that attitude toward the positive. When Henry’s future—and that of all the Ofarian kids in that generation—shone brighter than any Ofarian’s before him, Griffin would finally lean back and exhale in satisfaction. But not until then.
“I am,” Griffin replied.
“Pop says—”
Griffin’s phone rang, and the vibration made him jump. So few people had access to his personal number, and those who did knew he had dinner with his family every Sunday and that it was cherished time. He pulled the phone from his jeans pocket, stared at the unfamiliar number, and warily answered. “Yeah?”
So strange, to recognize someone’s breath, the light, sharp inhalation before speaking. Even the pause was achingly familiar.
“It’s me.”
As though she were standing right there turning on her magic, a wave of heat washed over him. He fell sideways into the wall, realizing he’d been longing to hear from her these past two months and dreading it at the same time.
Behind him, Henry took up the video game again, and Meg cranked up the volume on the same song she’d played a million times already. In the living room, Pop shouted futilely for silence over the TV.
“Just a second,” he murmured into the phone, pushing off the wall and weaving back around the living room furniture toward the front door. Pop threw him a worried, questioning look and Griffin waved him off, miming that it wasn’t anything. When really, it was everything.
Out in the stairwell, Griffin shut the door on the noise. His toes stuck out over the edge of the very top step and his heart was clobbering the hell out of his ribcage. He closed his eyes and just listened to her breathe on the other end, waiting. It sounded like it was raining where she was, raindrops hitting glass.
“Keko,” he finally said, opening his eyes.
“I always liked the way you said my name.” When they’d been wrapped together in wrinkled, damp hotel sheets, talking until daylight, her voice had sounded much the same. Wistful. Gentle. Feminine. He’d liked the way she said his name, too.
Odd that in the timeline he was running through his head right now, he skipped right over the last time they’d seen each other—two months ago when she’d bolted from that house in Colorado, believing that he had been behind her kidnapping. Hating him.
“You destroyed one of my trucks,” he said, referring to her escape, how she’d spewed a fireball at one of his vehicles and then stolen the other.
“I also tried to start a war.” So matter of fact. Still the trademark Keko confidence, but with a layer of sadness underneath. A twinge of regret.
It unsettled Griffin to hear something so unlike her. He lowered himself to the second step. “I know why you did it.”
She laughed, a short, bitter sound. “So sure of yourself, are you? That you were the face that almost launched a thousand ships?”
He plucked at a stray carpet fiber between his shoes. “You were still angry with me for what happened with Makaha. You felt I hadn’t paid for it, that I wasn’t sorry. You wanted to make me sorry.” When she said nothing and let the rain in the background provide the soundtrack, he added, “And you were as angry as I was about the way things between us ended.”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
Then what? he wanted to ask, but didn’t. A long silence followed, but he would’ve sat there all night, as long as she didn’t hang up.
“Do you still talk to Gwen?” she asked, the question surprising him as much as her abruptness.
“Of course.”
“I’m not . . . jealous . . . of her anymore.”
His heartbeat picked up speed. His head tried to wrap around the fact that Kekona Kalani had used the word jealous.