Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,127

and wave.

He doesn't look away from me, which is too bad because I'm pretty sure the figure on the gurney moves in response.

I've been thinking about the gun case and the sight of Phoebe sitting calmly in the car. She knew what was coming. She knew Escobar was going to try to snatch her. Maybe she had even done something to alert both Secutores and Escobar that we were in the hotel. I don't really know, but the end result is that Phoebe got herself to Escobar's laboratory unscathed.

Escobar wanted to create a chimera, a new strain of Arcadian that was resistant to the weed killer, and Phoebe was never going to accept protection from the Grove. So what was she—a self-proclaimed steward—going to do about the weed killer? She was going to get the counteragent spliced into her own DNA.

If all Escobar had done was drain her blood, he hadn't killed her. Not yet. She was going to be incredibly thirsty and quite weak, but she wasn't dead. And whatever was growing in those pods was going to be organic enough for her to feed from. And given that it would be a mix of her own blood, the counteragent, and whatever other genetic modifications Escobar was putting into his clones, she was just going to be getting the equivalent of a highly oxygenated blood transfusion.

Brutally efficient. Just like Phoebe.

“My science is quite exact,” Escobar snaps.

“I'm sure it is,” I say, stepping back from the edge of the rings so that Mere doesn't wonder what I'm talking about and come to look too. “So, what's in store for us?”

“What makes you think I have any plans for you at all?” Escobar asks.

“Well, you got what you wanted.” I nod toward the Incan terrace farm. “You've kicked me around a bit, rubbed my nose in things, and got my head all twisted around. What does killing me now serve?”

“Are you suggesting you might have some use?”

“I don't know what's really true about your relationship with Arcadia, but I know that at least one person there knows what you're doing. That may not have been part of your plan, but they're going to come sniffing around now that they know about the weed killer. Oh, yeah, sorry, I told them about that. They're going to be quite worked up about the humans having a weapon that can actually kill us.”

“You're going to make a deal, aren't you?” Mere says. “You're going to make Arcadia bow to you. You're going to make them beg you to save them, and they'll be so panicked, they'll accept anything you offer. It's a classic scenario. Allow a threat to develop and then swoop in with a perfectly reasonable solution. God, you'd think people would have figured it out after the US government used it on its own citizens after 9/11.”

Escobar raises his shoulders slightly as if the idea is interesting but not enough to fully capture his attention. “What do I need of Arcadia? I have been without them for more than two hundred years. Why would I want them to embrace me again?”

“Because you need their help,” I say.

He laughs. “Their help? The combined umbrella of what my family controls makes more—in pure profit—every year than the entire accumulated wealth that every Arcadian has squirreled away. I could hire every single private military contractor on this planet—today—without making a dent in my cash reserves.”

“You should,” I point out. “At the very least to keep them from being hired by the other guys.”

“Which other guys?”

“The ones you're worried about,” I say. “The ones who developed the weed killer in the first place and gave it to Secutores. I mean, Secutores did wipe out that team you sent to retrieve Phoebe. If it wasn't for the helicopter extraction, you wouldn't have gotten Phoebe.”

“It's a temporary advantage,” he scoffs. “Soon to be rendered useless against me and mine.”

“That might be true,” I admit, “but that's not their only research project, is it?”

His cheek twitches.

Mere spots his nervous flinch too. “They got nervous, didn't they? When they used the weed killer, but didn't capture an Arcadian. Suddenly their secret was out. They've been under everyone's radar for some time, haven't they? You don't develop a weapon like that overnight. That's why you tortured Nigel and taped it. You wanted to show them that you were still willing to play along. That was why you let Silas and me come to the restaurant. You were going to turn Silas