Sphere - Elise Noble Page 0,1
co-owned along with my husband and Nick Goldman.
“I’m surprised you agreed to come in the first place,” I said.
Ana wasn’t a fan of crowds, not unless she was using them as a cover for something nefarious. Then she’d suck it up and deal.
“Bradley plays dirty. He showed Tabby a video of the big wheel, and now she wants to ride on it.” Another sigh. “I suppose it’ll be educational.”
“Let’s hope there’s a bar.”
“You’re driving.”
“Maybe I’ll make Bradley drive back.”
“You can’t. Sam and I have dinner reservations tomorrow, and if Bradley plays chauffeur, we’ll still be somewhere around Fredericksburg.”
“Fine, then I’ll have to settle for coffee.”
Bradley ran out of the house once more, and this time he was wearing sparkly pink hi-tops and matching sunglasses. I was half-surprised he hadn’t changed his hair colour as well, but that was still turquoise.
“Can we go now?” I yelled out of the Porsche’s window. I’d borrowed my husband’s Cayenne. He didn’t need it today because when Bradley suggested he might like to tag along, he’d helicoptered to the airfield and flown to Barcelona. Coward. Now the Porsche had a custom-made hot-pink leather baby seat installed in the back—courtesy of Bradley, of course—and I had a good mind to leave it there as a punishment.
“Yes, but if you’re going to be snippy, then I’ll ride with Mack.”
Ana settled back in her seat and adjusted her aviators. “Good. Snippiness rules.”
In the rear-view mirror, Tabby mimicked her mother with her own Babiators, and I suppressed a shudder. I loved my niece, don’t get me wrong, but…yeah. She wasn’t a normal child. Kids scared me, I freely admitted that, but Tabby was a weird cross between a mini mercenary and a toddler, and I was never quite sure how to handle her.
Half of my little group of friends had kids now. I had a feeling Mack would soon join the club as well. That would leave me and Sofia as the only two non-moms, but Sofia had just connected with her long-lost brother, and he lived overseas, so she was travelling quite a bit. Which left me a little…not lonely, exactly, but I felt as if people were moving on without me. We’d always be there for each other, of that I was certain, and of course I was happy that they were happy, but still… Perhaps that was the real reason I was going today. I didn’t want to get left behind while their lives changed for good.
CHAPTER 2
AT THE PARK’S main gate, a bored-looking teenager in a SciPark baseball cap charged us a fortune, then issued us with paper maps.
“There’s an app too,” he told us in a monotone speech he’d obviously given a thousand times. “Your Wi-Fi password’s printed on your ticket, and the audio tour’s available in thirteen different languages.”
Thirteen? Couldn’t they have added one more to avoid bad luck? If I’d known what was to come, perhaps I’d have taken that as a sign. But since I’d left my crystal ball at home, I trailed into the park oblivious, hanging back as Bradley bounded on ahead in a silver jumpsuit that probably cost me a thousand bucks.
According to the map, the park was laid out in a series of concentric circles, nine of them, kind of like Dante’s Inferno except the middle was dominated by a giant silver sphere rather than a lake of ice. There were over six hundred exhibits. No way would we get through everything in one day, but I wasn’t about to mention that to Bradley because he’d probably check us into a hotel and then we’d be stuck there forever.
“What do you want to do first, guys?” Dan asked, her question aimed at her three boys. When she adopted ten-year-old Race not so long ago, his two older buddies had come as part of the package. Nobody minded. Before the trio crossed paths with Blackwood, they’d spent most of their time getting into trouble on the streets, the result of parents who just didn’t care. Now Trick, the eldest at fifteen, spent most of his spare time hanging out in Dan’s boyfriend’s recording studio, Vine had recently discovered baseball, and Race—or Caleb if one was to use his actual name, which Dan tended to—liked to come to the office. We’d given him a desk next to Dan’s, and he must have had the best grades in school considering the amount of help he got with his homework. They’d turned out to be good kids, even if their morals