Илона Эндрюс - Emerald Blaze (Hidden Legacy)

She was trying to hijack the conversation. I smiled at her. “What’s your opinion of Mr. Kazarian?”

She pursed her lips for half a second. That’s right, I ignored your question and asked my own. You don’t get to drive this car.

“An extremely hardworking man, dedicated, and an excellent father.”

“Can you tell me about Stephen Jiang?”

“Dedicated,” Cheryl said. “He comes from a wonderful family, steeped in tradition, very respected. A very smart young man. I’m not sure why you’re asking me these questions.”

“It helps me understand the interactions between everyone.”

“In that case, what did Marat say about me?”

“He wondered if you are applying for sainthood.”

Cheryl raised her hand to her mouth and laughed softly.

“Tatyana Pierce?” I prompted.

“My niece went to school with her. They used to call her Tatyana Fierce. The nickname still applies. Tatyana is direct and excellent under pressure.”

“And Felix?”

Cheryl’s face turned sad. She sighed. “Felix was everyone’s favorite. He was like a brother you wish you had growing up. Our leader, if you will. I feel so terrible for his children.”

“Can you tell me about your day on July 15 th? Starting with waking up.”

Cheryl frowned. “Some days you remember and some days you don’t. This was an ordinary day. I woke up at seven, drank my coffee. Anna, my housekeeper, bought pomelos the previous evening, and I had one for breakfast.”

She spoke softly. Her tone wasn’t meek; rather, it was conciliatory and gentle enough so that raising my voice would have immediately branded me as an ass and a bully. Interesting.

“I spoke to my son, Sander, before he left for school. He keeps trying to convince me that a neck tattoo would make a good birthday present. Evan, my chauffeur, picked me up at half past eight and took me to the family workshop. I spent the day there.” Her frown deepened. “I don’t remember if I went out for lunch or if I ordered in.”

She had ordered in, a strawberry salad with salmon in a balsamic maple glaze. Augustine’s people had confirmed it with her secretary.

“I stayed at the workshop until five or six.”

She’d left at 4:42 p.m. Castellano’s workshop was roughly the same distance from the Pit as the Morton building. If they were going to the Pit, she would beat Felix by twenty minutes. Enough time to disable the security equipment.

“Where did you go after work?” I asked.

MII’s investigator assigned to the case confirmed that Cheryl was home by seven, but MII couldn’t account for two and a half hours of Cheryl’s time, starting from her leaving the office and ending with a traffic camera picking her up as she took an exit off I-69 on the way to her house in the Memorial Villages.

“I had a light dinner and some cocktails with a friend at Masraff’s.”

“The name of your friend?”

“Gloria Neville.”

I hid a smile.

Gloria Neville came from an old and powerful House. Like Bern, she was Magister Examplaria, a pattern mage, but her specialty lay in economics. She analyzed market patterns and predicted global economic shifts. She was in her sixties, and in the course of her life she had made a lot of money for a lot of people. In the eyes of the Texas magical heavy hitters, she was an unimpeachable witness. They trusted her with their money.

Cheryl had just made a mistake.

“Where did you go after?” I asked.

“Home.” Cheryl sighed. “It’s difficult for me to admit, but despite our best efforts, the Pit Reclamation Project stalled. It causes me a great deal of anxiety.”

“We all have those projects,” Alessandro said.

She acknowledged him with a grateful glance. For a moment they were alone in a room, two wealthy entrepreneurs sharing an understanding of difficulties with running a business. Something pinched me and I realized it was jealousy. I buried it.

“You’ve seen the front room of this office,” Cheryl continued. “The name of our House is synonymous with reliability. We are problem solvers. I will solve the problem of the Pit, but the solution to it demands every ounce of my attention. After a full day of concentrating at the workshop, I can barely put two words together. Gloria was too kind not to mention it during our dinner, but I’m sure I looked like death warmed over and likely sounded the same. I barely got home, fell asleep, and woke up around nine, because my son became concerned that my back would hurt from sleeping on the couch.”

She was giving a lot of detail.

“Your dedication is commendable,” Alessandro said. He sounded impressed.

“I do what I can.”

Modesty, Cheryl, is your middle name.

“This matter doesn’t just concern me,” she said. “It concerns our family legacy.”

“What was the nature of the construct you released into the Pit?”

The helpful expression on Cheryl’s face gained a slightly injured quality, as if I had insulted her, but she was too good to acknowledge it. “It was an experimental model under the working name Kraken. It’s designed to assess its environment and eliminate biological threats.”

“Marat mentioned that you lost control of the Kraken.” I had chosen my words very carefully.

Cheryl leaned forward, but her voice remained gentle, patient, and bordering on patronizing.

“No, I lost contact with the construct. I assure you, none of my creations have ever escaped my control.”

There it was, a featherlight touch from Rahul. He was a dual—not just a shrieker, but also a telepath, probably a lower Significant in both. The duality made him dangerous. He was trying to pick up my surface thoughts. Cheryl had just breached protocol. Scanning another mage’s mind was grounds for retaliation. It was like being groped by a stranger.

I sent my magic out. It grew from me, its tendrils twisting like grapevine shoots, subtle, barely detectable, winding around Rahul.

“So where is the construct now?” I asked.

“Lost to the Pit.”

“How big was it? I didn’t see a model of it in the front.”

“We only display constructs that have passed the prototype stage.”

The tendrils of my magic slipped through Rahul’s defenses. Mental mages guarded against what they knew, especially their own brand of magic. Rahul built a shell around his mind, hiding his thoughts and protecting himself against a direct assault. He had expected a battering ram. But vines didn’t batter, they grew, and curved, and found purchase in the smallest crevices. They went over and around, and eventually they slithered in.

Cheryl tapped the keyboard of her laptop. A digital screen on the wall flared up, displaying a construct. It had a long, sharp head armored by a metal carapace followed by a segmented body, like that of a millipede, and ending in a powerful finned tail. It reminded me of some alien shrimp.

“The Kraken was twelve meters long from the tip of the head to the end of the longest appendage,” Cheryl said. “It could collapse its width to one and a half meters in circumference, but it reached maximum efficiency at a circumference of two meters.”

Thirty-nine feet long and six and a half feet in circumference. A monster.

The construct turned its head toward me. Metal slid aside, opening a huge maw lined with rows and rows of serrated metal teeth.

The tendrils of my magic touched Rahul’s mind. He didn’t feel it. I fed a little more power into it.

“It had several operating modes and could alter its shape.” Cheryl pressed a key. The construct re-formed itself. The body coiled under the head and released eight long, segmented, metal spider legs. A nightmare.

“Does it have self-replicating capabilities?”