“Wait, first I must ask you …” She swallowed. She had the sickening feeling she knew the answer already. All she could manage was a tremulous, “Rosemarie?”
“Dead,” he choked out. “Morse.”
“Oh,” she said, legs buckling, chest constricting, her body folding in on itself. Peter helped her to the floor, arranging her in his lap, wrapping his arms around her as she shivered convulsively.
The image of Rosemarie running headlong at the wizard—and her own death—circled through her head in a loop until she forced it out with other memories.
Rosemarie holding her back after class at age six (six!) to tell her that she could go to college if she applied herself, and was she going to do that or not? Rosemarie carrying her into the classroom at age seven with a badly skinned knee, surprising her by saying not a word about “unladylike behavior” and plucking out the gravel with exceeding gentleness. Rosemarie rapping her knuckles at age eight because she was whispering to another girl—whispering, she remembered, something ugly about Peter.“No,” Rosemarie had said, fire in her eyes. “I expect better from my students, Miss Harper. I expect better fromyou.”
Rosemarie, her lifelong guide. Rosemarie, whom she loved so much that grief buffeted her from all sides, making it hard to breathe, to think, to go forward.
Rosemarie, embracing her at her mother’s funeral, saying, “Work will help. Take it from me, Miss Harper: For a while, work is the only thing that will interrupt this pain.”
Get to work.
“We have to stop them,” she said, voice raw.
He held her tighter. “Yes.”
“They’re going to use your weapon.”
“What have you heard? They haven’t told us anything except to hurry up and finish.”
“I overheard Morse talking to Whitaker,” she said, a fresh wave of misery crashing over her. “When I destroyed the weapon, I left tiny pieces of it in the forest, and Morse found them—he figured it out—he knows what that explosion in January was powered by. He knows what he needs to produce another five-mile radius is a wizard.”
“Oh, fuck,” he whispered.
“They’re going to set it off on Friday.” She grasped his arms. “I don’t know where or why, but Friday—Friday around noon.”
“Hey,” Martinelli said, voice sharp. “Call me crazy, boss, but I’m thinking there are a few things you need to tell me. Right now.”
CHAPTER 30
As he unspooled the facts about his mishandling of Project 96, Peter was grateful they were all still invisible. It saved him from seeing Martinelli’s expression.
When he finished, Martinelli’s response was a simple, “I see.” No inflection.
“So, to recap,” Peter said, “I tried to fix a mess I caused, and instead I made it far, far worse.”
“That about sums it up.”
Peter tipped his head back, leaning it against the wall. “If I’d left well enough alone, Draden’s people wouldn’t have kidnapped you.”
“Probably.”
“You’ll never forgive me, and I deserve it.”
Martinelli sighed. “Well—we don’t always get what we deserve, do we.”
He suddenly wished hecouldsee Martinelli’s expression. How did he mean that? “Uh …” he said.
“Look—you screwed up. Youreallyscrewed up. You’re also my best friend, and life’s too short, and anyway, we need to move on to the problem-solving stage of this disaster, so… whaddaya got?”
Beatrix gave a rueful laugh. “I like him.”
“Me too,” Peter said over a lump in his throat. “Very much.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Martinelli said. “Well? What do wedo?”
