Good thing for me that he did.
I shut off the light, jogged the stairs, closed the hatch, and traded the dampness and memories for the warming light of day.
The whine of a drone engine high above made me walk a little faster.
That wasn’t good. The farm wasn’t on any of the flight paths of low-level crafts or drones. We were a pocket of nowhere surrounded by the bustling cities of everywhere.
I knew it wasn’t a coincidence to hear an engine up in the blue above me today, of all days.
Whoever this man was, he had troubles following him. Which meant I needed to get him patched up and off my property before those old enemies of my father became new enemies of mine.
2
HOUSE ORANGE
Slater Orange preferred to walk, taking the long, narrow hallway and stairs down fourteen flights, deep into the earth. House Orange, Minerals, controlled the mineral resources in the world, and he had been the head of that house for seventy years.
Over those years, he had refined the treaties and deals held between his House and all the others to his benefit. Minerals were, after all, limited and desired. That scarcity placed his House firmly in the highest ranking among Houses, though there were those who saw themselves as above him.
But all the deals he had secured had not given him the one thing he desired: immortality.
His body, which appeared to be only forty years old, was nearly one hundred. The youth treatments developed by House White, Medical, and House Yellow, Technology, had stalled the advancement of age for him, and for most of the heads of Houses.
But it could not stall the disease that had been eating away at his body for decades.
Death ended all mortal men. This was a truth even the heads of Houses could not bribe, innovate, or deal away.
But not all men were mortal. The galvanized, six men and six women, were more than three hundred years old. Nothing short of violently destroying their brains could kill them. There had been extensive experiments on the first galvanized to prove out that theory. Arms and legs could be removed, organs destroyed, but the brains of these twelve strange people remained active, their bodies easily repaired, stitched together, and made whole.
It had made them unholy terrors on the battlefield—foes that never fell and never forgot.
And it had made them the thing he most wanted to tear apart to understand.
He had assumed Dr. Renault Case and his wife would know why the galvanized were immortal. That question had been the center of Dr. Case’s research when he was at House White. But the capture of the Cases had not gone according to plan. They’d been killed, and the brightest minds had confirmed that their research seemed to be nothing but nonsense full of antiquated theories and abandoned experiments.
His hope of applying the galvanized technique to his own failing body had ended with them.
Until three years ago, when the existence of an intelligent and overly curious man by the name of Quinten Case had been brought to his attention.
Slater Orange reached the bottom of the stairs and paused, pulling the cuffs of his silk shirt straight beneath his copper brocade vest and burnt orange frock jacket, and then adjusting the ascot at his neck. He was, after all, civilized.
Today he and his House would offer a deal he knew Mr. Case would not refuse.
He pulled a silk cloth out of his pocket and dabbed away the sweat that slicked the top of his lip. Better Quinten Case think this just another day in the long string of days that had constituted nearly three years of employment.
Better he not know today would be the day everything in his life changed.
Assured his personage was in order, he walked the softly padded hall down to the huge library and research room that served as a place of study for Mr. Case.
He held up his hand, and a door-sized section of the wall faded from sight.
“Good day, Mr. Case.” Slater stepped into the room. “How are you?”
Quinten Case was a lean man in his thirties with a mop of messy brown hair and a tightly trimmed beard and mustache. His eyes were glints of navy blue that missed no detail. He’d been contracting himself out from House Gray, People, to a variety of Houses, and had landed in the possession of House Silver, Vice, before being loaned to House Orange in lieu of a large debt between House Silver and House Orange.
He was a brilliant, restless man. Perhaps even more brilliant than his father. Slater Orange knew Quinten had agreed to be loaned to House Orange only in the hopes of gaining access to his data, as he had found a way to gain access to the data at each House where he had worked.
Slater believed he was looking for his father’s research. And he had made sure he found it.
