“He wanted to admit me overnight for observation.”
“You said no.”
“I have work to do. I don’t have time to be observed.”
Kingston and Amaryllis were in the waiting area when we came out. He glanced from the cast on her arm to the brace on her knee.
“How bad?”
“Functional,” Beacon said.
She didn’t elaborate. She got herself to the vehicle and into the rear passenger seat before either of us could open a door for her.
4
BEACON
The rain had been falling since midnight, and I’d spent the past five hours wide awake, running through the list of what I had to do once I got out of bed.
Last night, I made a commitment. Minerva failed, but I’d vowed that whatever replaced it wouldn’t. I owed it to my family, to everyone who’d died in the bombing and in all the years that came before it. I couldn’t stop now.
But how? I didn’t have any idea what it took to build an organization, and even if I did, was there anyone other than me who’d be willing to commit to help me? And what about funding? That was a subject I could discuss with Lyra.
The question of authority was harder. I had no title, no charter, no institutional backing, and no legal standing to ask anyone to do anything. What I had was a board full of photographs, a broken arm, a knee I hoped wouldn’t need surgery, and thirteen dead colleagues.
By zero four hundred, I’d stopped trying to predict how the morning would go. I knew I was about to ask too much, but I was going to do it anyway.
I wasthe first one in the ballroom at zero six hundred. Blackjack arrived next. He set a cup of coffee on the table beside me without asking if I wanted one, then pinned his site photographs to the board. When he finished, he sat across from me and opened his laptop.
“Can I ask you something?” he asked.
“That depends on what it is.”
“How are your grandmother and Anna connected? I’ve been trying to work it out since I got here, and I can’t.”
I almost laughed. Of all the questions he could have asked at zero six hundred, that was not the one I’d expected. I was about to ask a room full of people to follow me into a war.
“Anna’s husband, Horatio Hyde, was my grandmother’s brother.”
“So Anna’s your aunt?”
“Yes, after my parents died, she and my grandmother raised me.”
He nodded slowly. “And your grandfather. Mikhail.”
“What about him?”
“How did he end up with your grandmother? She’s English. He was Russian.”
I hadn’t told this story to anyone outside the family in years. I wasn’t sure why I was about to now, except that he’d asked.
“They met at a concert while she was at university and he was working as a cultural attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London. Not long after that, Horatio helped him defect. Then a year later, he and my grandmother were married.”
“Your grandmother brought them together.”
“She did, and now, years later, the same enemy came for the rest of us.”
When Amaryllis and Reaper walked in, Blackjack got up and went to talk to them. I was happy for a few more minutes alone to get my thoughts together.
