Copper Veins(44)
“Please, eat,” she said, indicating my untouched food. Since I was starving, and those sausages couldn’t possibly be as bad as the cookies we’d been provided with in our cell, I selected the smallest one and took a bite. It was pretty good.
“You must understand, we did not mean to confuse the issue,” Aregonda continued, picking up our prior conversation while I chewed. “It is difficult for humans to journey to the Otherworld, and the scroll we sent traveled by a most circuitous route.”
I nodded, then I grabbed two more sausages from her platter and wrapped my bread around them. “So everyone here is an Elemental?”
“Yes,” Aregonda replied.
“Everyone except me,” Jerome muttered.
Aregonda looked at Jerome, her eyes softening. “You know we consider you one of us,” she soothed.
“Are you the only Peacekeeper?” I asked. The last thing I needed was to hear Aregonda stroking Jerome’s ego.
“No,” he replied. “We have operatives at every level.”
“How do you all keep in contact?” Sadie asked, and Jerome launched into an explanation of rendezvous points and elaborately coded messages. I left the two of them and made my way over to Max.
“No sausage for you?” I asked, eyeing his coffee-soaked bread.
“No sausage for me,” he replied. “That crap will sit in me like lead for a month. I’ll stick to bread and coffee.”
He didn’t say anything further—mostly because he hated discussing his lingering digestive issues that were a result of the Institute’s experiments on him and the accompanying mostly-liquid diet he’d been forced to adopt—but I knew he wasn’t going to last long on just bread and coffee. I made a mental note to ask Aregonda if someone could make him some broth. Maybe we could crumble the sausage and boil it down to a thin soup. Somehow, we had to get a healthy portion of protein into Max.
However, I knew better than to say such things to my brother. “So what did you dream about last night?”
“Nothing,” he replied, “absolutely nothing. You?”
“Same.”
Max’s eyes darted back and forth, then he murmured, “I guess the cell wasn’t just warded.”
It figured that the drugs that turned off our affinity with metal had affected our dreamwalking abilities as well. I squinted at the tin cup in my hand and tried to collapse the sides. The cup vibrated a bit in my hand, but retained its form. “What are we going to do about this?” I asked.
“Drink a ton of water, try to piss out the drugs,” Max replied, then he gulped the rest of his coffee. “Until then, we stay quiet.”
I nodded—telling these people, resistance fighters or not, about our temporary lack of abilities probably wouldn’t go over well. Lopez was already suspicious of us, as if he suspected we weren’t really the Corbeau children. As if anyone in their right mind would want to impersonate us.
Speaking of Lopez, he picked that moment to stride toward Max and myself, Sadie and Jerome trailing behind him. Max turned his back and refilled his coffee. Lopez noticed the affront, but kept quiet. I guessed he was smarter than he looked.
“Have you both eaten?” Lopez asked.
“We have,” I replied. “So, what does the resistance do all day?”
“Plan, mostly,” Lopez replied. “We collect and sort information, determine what’s credible from the government’s attempts at blowing smoke up our asses.”
That answer was Lopez’s attempt at blowing smoke up our asses. I drank a bit more coffee, just to make him wait. “What are you planning to do about Mike’s army?”
“You told them about the army?” Aregonda demanded, coming to stand beside Sadie. “When did you do that?”
“Oh, a few months ago,” I demurred, then I turned back to Lopez. “Remember, at the rally, you wanted us to learn our history? Well, tell us the history of this army.”
Lopez stared at me for a moment, his mouth a slash across his face. “Do you always ask the Inheritor’s questions for her?”
“No, I ask my own.” When he didn’t reply, I demanded, “What, don’t you know what they’re up to?”
Lopez’s eyes narrowed and the cords in his neck bulged, but he replied, “I can do more than tell you. I can show you.”
Once we’d finished our bread and sausages, Sadie, Max, and I hopped into the back of a truck, and Lopez and Aregonda took slid into the cab. Just as we were pulling away from the camp down what was little more than a dirt path, Jerome ran to catch up. He grabbed the tailgate and vaulted himself into the bed.