I deliberately look up to one of the cameras angled toward us. “Then if anyone questions it, you have it all on video.” I will the camera to pick up my image, for more than one reason. “But no one will question you about it.”
The clerk pulls four different one-dollar scratch tickets from the display, lowers the lid, and slides them toward me.
I reach for them. Essence shifts under my hand, under my fingertips, as I lightly touch the back of his hand. “Good luck,” I say simply, allowing the wish to settle on him as it wills.
Being that he’s a null, it might not do anything at all. Or in the moment he really needs to take one path over another, make one choice over another, it might steer him in the direction he needs to go.
“Good luck to you!” He flashes me that big grin again.
I take the tickets, more of my essence sinking into them without any intent on my part as I step back from the counter and cross out of the store.
Jewels and Angie have pulled the trucks back into the side parking lot to join Lou and Trixie in the playground area. Sara Ann has Trixie’s toddler strapped into a swing — trust California to mandate safety measures on swing sets — even though she’s barely big enough to push him. The other three still-nameless kids are arrayed around a patio table, sipping sodas and eating sandwiches that must have been premade. I’m not certain how Jewels could have otherwise obtained them so quickly.
Despite the kids’ uniformly dark hair and the various shades of tanned skin that their birth mothers matched as carefully as possible to the Cataclysm’s features, I don’t have to look at the threads of essence surrounding them to know they aren’t his get. Jewels and the others have been playing a deadly game, risking more than just their lives. I suspect that if the Cataclysm had much contact with the children at all, it would have been the clear signs of Cal’s parentage keeping him from looking too closely at the others. And that reprieve wouldn’t have held for much longer.
Cal sits sullenly on the bottom of the slide, facing me but watching the group of women with narrowed eyes. “You said you were going to feed me, Zaya,” he says loudly, and not just for my benefit.
Lou and Trixie actually flinch, then spin so their backs aren’t to me as I approach. Jewels smiles, almost gently apologetic. Angie looks exhausted, but still … wary. Even more than she was at our first meeting.
I brush off a weird sense of rejection. I’ve spent hours with them, gotten them to safety, yet they’re still huddled together trying to figure out what to do with me.
Jewels starts. “Zaya —”
“You’re heading out. Without me,” I say preemptively. “We already settled that.”
She flushes. “Not if you —”
I hold the four tickets fanned out in my hand, arm stretched between us. Jewels hesitates, which just pisses me off further.
“When your future is so easily offered to you,” Angie says, admonishing her daughter, “you grab it with both hands and you hold on as hard as you can.” She takes one of the two tickets in the center of the fan, sliding it into the pocket of her skirt. Then she bows her head and reverently taps three fingers over her heart. “You bless us this day, Conduit. May everything you give to others come back to you threefold.”
There’s that number three again. The universe is not playing around today. Or maybe it thinks I’m just stubborn, willful. I’m not, really. Not until it’s over something important, like rescuing Presh.
But what if I don’t want all three? What if one of them is a real fucking asshole who set me up to die, like, more than once?
My gaze shifts to Lou and Trixie, and I speak without thinking about it — apparently because the universe is feeling pissy itself. “The thread is woven alongside choice and misdeeds.”
“Indeed,” Angie murmurs, looking pointedly at Jewels.
“Thank you, Zaya,” Jewels murmurs.
“Thank you for doing what you could,” I say.
“I’m … I’m not sure I had any other choice,” she says a little stiffly. Apparently, once she was done with the terrified and then joyful tears, she started thinking everything through. Or now that they feel relatively safe, Lou’s whispering in her ear has gained a little more hold.
They’re all worried I’ve manipulated them. They’ve watched me as I burned down the Cataclysm’s compound or had a berserker kneel before me, and then passed through two borders without question. They think they truly understand me now as I stand before them with the lotto tickets in hand and my bright-violet eyes hidden behind dark glasses. They think I’m fucking with them too.
“That first glass of water,” I say evenly. “That was all you.”
Jewels looks at me intently, trying to meet my eyes through my sunglasses.
“I haven’t touched your threads,” I add, not certain why the fuck I’m justifying fucking rescuing them when I could have just gone home.
“And the ticket?”
“Don’t take it,” I say, almost tauntingly.
Jewels stiffens her shoulders. “I owe you nothing more.”
