Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,124

the side of the road—ringing the bell one last time—and climb into the car.

“What's with the bell?” she asks as I move the gun out of the way and settle into the seat.

“When was the last time you rode a bike with a bell?” I ask.

“Fair point.” She drops the car back into drive and puts her foot down on the accelerator. She watches the road while I examine her more closely. Some of the blood is coming from a gash in her neck, and there's a couple of bruises forming under her right eye. Her knuckles are scraped, and there's another gash along the outside of her right forearm.

“What's the other guy look like?” I ask.

She glances over at me. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“I killed Alberto Montoya.”

“What? I thought you said you killed him in Santiago?”

“I did. I took his head off, Mere. That should have done it. But he was on the helicopter, almost as if he was waiting for me. And he looked, well, he looked perfect. As if nothing had happened to him.”

“How is that possible?”

“As far as I know, it isn't. Tissue decay starts as soon as you separate the head from the body. You can't grow—” I stop. I was going to say that you couldn't grow them back together, but I suddenly wonder if that's worth the effort. What do I know of Mother's process. We go into the ground and we come out again, but who is to say that what goes in is the same that comes out again? What if Escobar's efforts to grow his own Arcadians is exactly what Mother does? She grows an exact copy of each of us.

“What?” Mere asks.

“We thought that Escobar was growing his own, right? What if that is exactly what he did? What if he's grown more than one grandson?”

“Clones?”

“Every piece of fruit from a tree is a clone, Mere. As is every flower. Nature's been doing it for centuries.”

“How long does that take?”

I think of strawberry plants, shooting out runners that double and even triple the size of a harvest every year. “Not as long as you think,” I say.

“Here's something else that has been bothering me,” Mere says. “How old do you think Escobar is?”

“Several centuries,” I say, thinking of the Incan sculpture in the lobby of the Montoya building.

“How is Alberto his grandson? Either Alberto is as old as Escobar, or he's been making babies.”

I think of the familial resemblance between the two men and I shake my head. “Neither,” I say, recalling something Escobar said. “Both.”

“It can't be both,” Mere says.

“I saw it right away and said as much to him, but he laughed it off, but I was right. Alberto is a younger version of him.”

“Jesus Christ,” Mere whispers.

“Yeah,” I say, my hands tightening around the butt of the gun. “Where did you get this?” I ask, shaking off the enormity of what Escobar is doing.

“Our mutual friend,” she says.

I pop out the magazine and press down on the top round. “It's been fired a few times,” I note.

“Yep,” she says grimly. The car bounces across a series of potholes, and I wait until it settles down again before I put the magazine back in the gun.

“Did you get him?”

She shakes her head, her eyes straying to the rearview mirror. I twist in my seat and look out through the back window. “Did you wing him, at least?”

“Definitely.” She grins.

I set the safety and put the gun, barrel down, in one of the cup holders in the center console. “I guess we don't need to have a talk about how to use a handgun, do we?”

“No,” she says, “I got that covered.” The grin comes back. “Much to Belfast's surprise.”

“Escobar has Phoebe,” I tell her. “That's who his team was after. That's who they've been after all along.”

“So it really wasn't about you?”

I shake my head, smiling a little even when I see that she's giving me a hard time. “Escobar wanted tissue samples from Nigel to create a counteragent, right? He wants Phoebe for the same reason. You saw how she managed to survive exposure to sunlight and sea water. If he can figure out how to replicate the genetic coding and modify it to be resistant to the weed killer, his Arcadians will be immune.”

“And it's going down at Moray,” she says.

I nod. “Or it's a big hole in the ground that Escobar has filled with enough high explosives to atomize