Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,97

it's easy to say that I was an idiot for going along without asking more questions. But there's never been a reason to ask questions before. We're good soldiers. Mother takes care of us.

“But it's a trap. It's a way for someone to get their hands on an Arcadian.”

“How is Hyacinth involved?” I ask. “If it is owned by the Montoyas, they already have access to Arcadians.”

“Would you volunteer one of your own for what they did to Nigel?”

I concede that point.

“But that's what has been bugging me these last few days. Aren't there less invasive ways to get tissue samples? If that was the point, then you should be able to find a volunteer. Companies turn to their employees all the time for this sort of thing. Some of them even offer a pretty good honorarium for volunteering. So why the medical drama? Was that all just for us?”

“No,” I say. “That went well beyond acceptable limits.”

Mere nods. “So they were harvesting Nigel, which leads me to the burning question: Who are they?”

I cock my head to the side. “Not why?”

She shakes her head as she runs her fingers over her chart. “The more I dig into Hyacinth Holdings, the more it seems like it has to be a front for Arcadian research, but it doesn't make sense that it would be completely covert from the rest of Arcadia, or that it would be involved in some scheme to trap one of their own.”

“But they're not Arcadian any more, are they?” I realize.

She nods. “You killed Jacinta. You wrecked the garden they were building. The garden that was going to create a place that wasn't beholden to Arcadian rules. You were supposed to bring them home again, but they didn't come home, did they? They went underground and kept working on how to be free of Arcadia.”

How to be free of Mother, I think, trying to process what she is telling me.

“Escobar was trying to convince you that Arcadia is poisoning you,” she continues. “When you go back home and… do whatever it is that happens there… you get injected with some sort of time-release virus—a mimetic agent, I guess—that makes you crave returning to Arcadia. Right? Your brain gets infected with this idea that you're going to die if you stay away. You self-sabotage, don't you? The longer you stay away, the harder it gets for you to stay healthy.”

I don't disagree with her, but agreeing with her puts a lot of what Escobar was saying in a different light. And I'm not ready to make that jump yet.

“But, here's the problem with this theory,” Mere says. “There's no money trail from Hyacinth to Mnemosysia.”

“I thought you said someone was footing the bill?”

“Someone is, but as near as I can tell, it isn't Hyacinth.” She taps the chart. “And here's the thing, why would Hyacinth get involved with Kyodo Kujira and all this mess with Arcadia if they already had access to Mnemosysia's data.”

“They made a deal,” I say, following her line of thinking.

She nods. “This is where Secutores comes in. They're the front for someone else. Their job is to get an Arcadian. They built the framework of the trap—one that would hold up to scrutiny and would tantalize Arcadia to send a team.”

“Hyacinth's job was to make sure a team got sent,” I say.

“Yep,” Mere says. “They may have walked away from the family, but they still have some influence back home.”

“So in return for an Arcadian, they'd get the Mnemosysia data?”

“But that's not what happened, is it?” she continues. “Your team didn't play ball the way they were supposed to, and Secutores's trap failed to catch anyone.”

I shake my head. “No, it failed to capture me.”

Mere snorts. “I thought we covered this. It's not about you.”

“But it is,” I tell her. “Phoebe and I have worked together in the past, and we have a working relationship. I'm point. She's support. That's the way we've always done it. I should have been lead on the processing boat, but I got distracted by the whaling equipment. Phoebe would have waited for me if it had been the two of us, but we had Nigel. We weren't used to working as a trio, and when I fell back, he naturally stepped up. He got the chemical dose that was meant for me.”

And then I understand Talus's role in all of it. “Talus was the plant,” I say. “How did he survive all of this if it wasn't simply