“Before that though, I’d like to see the wizard,” Gus announced, well aware of the irony in a wizard—as humans called the Tuann—asking to see another wizard.
It was a joke of Kyle’s.He’d taken the name from an old story.Or so he said.Gus had a feeling it had more to do with his character in one of the virtual reality worlds he preferred to real life.
The woman dropped her false geniality like a bad habit.
Gus stayed calm as the woman eyed Gus and Caius with a predatory gaze.
“Would you now?”she asked.
Gus nodded, pretending not to notice the woman reaching for the weapon hidden in her bulky top.“The gardener sent me.”
The woman’s shoulders relaxed, her expression warming as she removed her hand from whatever weapon she had concealed.“You should have said so from the beginning.You almost got yourselves killed.”
She beckoned them to follow as she headed toward the back room she’d come out of earlier.
“We’re not the ones who almost died,” Caius grumbled under his breath.
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that.”Gus nodded at the wall to their left.“See that—those are boomers.”
They looked like speakers, but Gus recognized them.Part of her training was familiarizing herself with all kinds of weaponry.Tuann.Human.And otherwise.
It was a habit she’d kept up with in the years since her escape.
“Not to mention the sparklies in the floor.”
Boomers were primarily favored by law enforcement.They were usually deployed against large groups for crowd suppression.The sonic wave they emitted caused extreme vertigo.
Sparklies were a more technologically advanced form of the flash bang grenade.Except the flash they triggered could sear a person’s retina, blinding them for up to weeks.
Both weapons worked just fine against Tuann anatomy.
Once Gus and Caius were incapacitated, Kyle’s mom—because that’s who Gus was coming to realize they’d been talking to this entire time—would then use the weapon concealed on her person.Or maybe she’d call some of the lookouts in the hall outside to drag them to the nearest airlock.
Either way, Gus and Caius would be dead.
Kyle’s mom looked back at them with a questioning glance.Gus smiled at her to indicate they would be just one second.
“Underestimating humans is how you wound up in this situation in the first place,” Gus told Caius.
Humans might not be as strong or innately powerful as the Tuann, but they were creative.And persistent when they wanted to be.Those two traits coupled with their ability to procreate at a rate that far outstripped the Tuann made them a dangerous foe.
Not that the Tuann recognized that.To them, humanity were mere nuisances to be kept in line.
Gus and the forty-three knew the depths to which humanity could sink when there was something they wanted.Evil was too light a word.
Then again, that was something the Tuann had in common with them.
Gus met Caius’s gaze with a hard look.“I suggest you fix that habit of yours before you wind up dead.”
And took Gus with him.
Caius caught Gus’s arm when she would have swept past him.“With all that you just shared, do you think it’s wise to swan into the lair of a woman with such stringent security measures?She may not let you walk back out again.”
“It may not be wise.”It definitely wasn’t.“But it is necessary.”
Sometimes you had to choose between the two.Gus was a pragmatic soul.As much as she would have preferred solving this issue alone, she knew she couldn’t.They needed the person considered Titan’s brain.He was the only one who could do what she needed.
She didn’t expect Caius to understand that.As someone from a great House, he probably didn’t know what it was to struggle.To scrape and crawl and beg.To be so desperate that sometimes you had to choose between two evils.None of which were the lesser.Just two sides of the same coin.With the one you could live with a little better as your only option.
