“The soil?” I closed up the controller box and started back to the truck. “Why would I? As long as I can grow food and drink the water, I don’t care what’s in it.”
“Also, testing would draw attention to your farm.”
“A girl likes her privacy.”
“I checked the records.”
“So?” I got back in the truck. He followed.
“This place isn’t registered House Green. You’re House Brown, aren’t you?”
I didn’t want to answer that. I’d rather he assume I was House Green, and therefore had legal voice and House influence behind me.
I started the engine and gave it some gas. The big engine roared. “Hold on. Road gets a little bumpy here,” I said over the noise.
He held on as I took the road hot, rattling over holes and ditches.
When I pulled up alongside the field where Pony was pastured, I had made up my mind. If he had really checked the records, he already knew only Grandma was registered House Green.
“Look.” I turned off the engine. “There are things I’d rather not discuss with you, and I suppose there are things you’d rather not discuss with me. But I need information to help some people I know.”
“House Brown people?”
“Friends.”
“All right,” he said. “Friends. What do you need to know?”
“Which House is moving heavy equipment into the middle of the Nevada desert.”
“That’s . . . specific.”
I got out of the truck and walked around to the back. “Not far from Red Butte.”
“What kind of equipment?”
“Looks like digging. Drilling.”
“Looks like?”
I pulled two pitchforks out of the back of the truck. “No marks on the trucks. No colors.” I tossed him a pitchfork, and he caught it like he’d been working a farm for years.
“What’s out there? Minerals? Water?” he asked.
“I think geothermal.”
“That falls under House Red, Power.”
I ducked the fence, started off toward the hay chute down the field a bit. “Keep an eye out for Pony. It’s a little skittish, so mind the horn.”
He scanned the field as we walked.
“Do you know if House Red is tapping geothermal?” I asked.
“It’s possible. There was a shift in House Red a year ago. Aranda Red stepped up and her father stepped down. She’s been acquiring unclaimed land faster than any other House.”
A geothermal claim would secure that land as House Red without much of a peep from other Houses. Which meant there was no conflicting House to call upon to stop this. The Fesslers’ homestead would be demolished.
There had to be a way to stop them.
