CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER TEN
The Ghost
By the time Summer and I met for breakfast on Saturday, it was nearly lunchtime. We’d both worked late the night before and were a little slow to get going. I even got to the diner before her, which almost never happened. She must be exhausted. So was I, but I reminded myself that talking about her work was important. The more we did that, the less we talked about my work. That would be hard, though. The DOD contract dominated my world right now.
Summer rolled into the lot with the doors off her Jeep and her blond hair flying. It lifted my spirits just looking at her.
I met her outside the door. “Hey.”
“Hey.” She smiled, but didn’t kiss me. Evidently we were still unofficially fighting.
“No Riker?” I opened the door for her and followed her in.
“I couldn’t get him out of his crate.”
We made our way to a booth in the back corner. The server approached us right away to introduce herself. “Anything to drink?”
“Coffee,” Summer and I answered. We looked at each other and laughed.
“That bad, huh?” I asked.
“These clients are going to kill me,” she said.
The diner had decent food, but it was the coffee that kept us coming back. It had a unique flavor that I’d tried countless times to replicate at home. It was strong, too; we split the available French vanilla creamers, three each. It reminded me of the coffee with the DOD officers, and how Nakamura had taken it straight black. Two cups even, without so much as a wince. I almost shared it but bit my tongue.
“Are you up for a geocache today?” I asked instead.
She took a gulp of hot coffee. “I don’t know if I have it in me.”
“What if I said that Jojo and Prickly Pete logged another cache yesterday?”
“On a weekday? Damn.” She took another drink of coffee. “Fine. But let’s make it a short one. I have a million things to do today.”
“What about Red Rock Run?” It was one of our favorite caches, and quick to finish once you got there. A straight shot out into wild desert country. Granted, it was a bit of a drive to the parking lot, but if Summer drove we’d get there fast enough.
“Yeah, I could do that.”
Yes. I didn’t want this to be my only time with her.
It was almost midday by the time we reached the trailhead for Red Rock Run. Hot like usual, and very little wind. After a few minutes on the trail, I hardly noticed because I was simultaneously trying to find the first waypoint and keep an eye on six dragons.
“The marker isn’t far,” Summer said, after checking her watch.
“Half a mile,” we both said at the same time.
“Jinx!” she said.
“You can’t jinx me out here,” I protested.
“Why not?”
“Because I need to be able to yell at the dragons.”
“I can do that.”
“Psh.” I waved her off. “They’re not going to listen to you.”
“Is that right?” she asked. Her voice sounded a half octave higher, and that worried me.
“It’s not your fault.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“They’re just imprinted on me, you know? It’s a domestication thing.”
Summer cleared her throat. “Octavius!”
My little dragon broke off his glide and swooped down to land on her shoulder. I stared. “What the—”
“Good boy.” She stroked his snout, and then gave me a sassy look. “You were saying?”
It shouldn’t have been possible. Octavius had imprinted on me, and he should have been loyal. Most dragons were, unless their owners died or abandoned them. I supposed that Octavius and his siblings were unique. It still felt like a betrayal, though. “Judas,” I muttered.
Octavius cocked his head to one side, then lifted his snout. His pink tongue flicked out, but not at me. He looked around wildly. Then he hissed. The primal sound raised the hair on the back of my neck. Instinctively, I moved closer to her. Gravel skittered against stone behind us. Something big moved around the corner. It was long and slender, with the scales and gray-brown coloring of a desert dweller. A dragon. It moved with a predator’s grace. I hadn’t made this particular one, but I knew the Guardian instantly. That was Marketing’s name for the first dragon ever designed, the one that hunted feral hogs.
Another Guardian followed behind the first one. It had slightly darker coloring but was just as wild. They bared their teeth as they approached.
Octavius hissed again.
“Hold on to him!” I whispered to Summer. Octavius was fierce for his size, but I had no illusions about how he’d fare against one Guardian, let alone two. His siblings wheeled overhead, chirping and hissing; I hoped they wouldn’t attack unless Octavius did. They usually followed his lead, but they were visibly disturbed. The two Guardians ignored them. They split up and made a circle around us, tasting the air all the while. I pressed myself close against Summer and tried to keep an eye on both of them.
“What are they?” she asked.
“The first prototype. The hog hunters.” Thank God Riker stayed home.
“Dangerous?”
“Very.”
A shrill whistle sounded from somewhere. The Guardians gave us one last unblinking stare before melting away into the scree.
“Thank God,” I whispered. I knew what this was now.
“Who whistled?” Summer still clung to Octavius’s legs. He’d given up trying to escape and now chirped at his siblings, probably telling them to watch where the Guardians went.
“Someone who knows how to make an entrance.”
She was surprised when Simon Redwood stumped around the corner. If possible, he’d become even more of a legend after his recent “death” in the fire that consumed his home. Summer and I had watched a two-hour special on him and all of his wild inventions and start-ups—most of which, admittedly, never really found success. Build-A-Dragon was the one that finally hit big, but he’d lost it to Robert Greaves. I imagine that Evelyn would welcome him back, but he’d assured me at our last meeting that death suited him.
“Hey, kids!” he called. He wore dungarees and worn hiking boots. He scrambled toward us with a spryness that belied his age. On a guy with a shock of white hair, it was downright uncanny. “Sorry to show up unannounced.”
“Ghosts tend to do that, Mr. Redwood,” I said, grinning in spite of the shock. Simon Redwood had been a hero of mine for as long as I could remember.
The same went for Summer, who stared at him with a starry-eyed expression. Is that how I looked? Probably so.
“Needed to talk to you,” Redwood said, drawing my gaze back to him.
“What about?”
“I’ve got a warehouse where I keep some things away from private eyes. Bits and pieces of old projects and mothballed experiments.”
“Go on,” I managed to say. All I could think was I would kill to get a look inside that warehouse.
“Thought no one knew about it, but there was a break-in the other day. They took something.”
“The jetpack?” I asked.
“No. Something more valuable,” Redwood said.
Summer looked at me and mouthed the word jetpack. Funny thing was, at least two commercial airline pilots had reported a man with a jetpack flying thousands of feet above Phoenix. Most people had written off the reports as pilot error or a simple hoax. And in my mind, Redwood had practically confirmed it just now.
“What did they take?” I asked.
“Prototype of the Codex.”
“Prototype of the . . . wait, the Redwood Codex?”
“I don’t call it that, but sounds like you know what I’m talking about.”
“What’s the Redwood Codex?” Summer asked.
“Part of the biological egg-printer,” I told her.
“Back in my day, we used to call it the God Machine.”
I opened my mouth, closed it, and raised my eyebrows at Summer. See? “Was anything else taken?”
“Nope,” Redwood said. “And that alone is telling because of what else is in there.”
“Could someone use it to build another God Machine?”
“Reckon so.”
That worried me, but I also had to know something. “Why are you telling us all of this?”
Redwood shrugged. “Figured I should tell someone. Unofficially.”
“You should, but that someone is Evelyn. She’s running the place now.” Despite my recent promotion at the company, I still felt miles below her and the board.
He shook his head. “The fewer people who know about my resurrection, the better.”
So this is my problem now. “I’ll run it up the chain, I suppose.”
“Good. I don’t like thinking about what he’s going to do with it.”
“Yeah, me neither,” I said.
“You said he,” Summer said to Redwood.
“What?” I asked.
“What he’s going to do with it,” she said.
I’d missed that part, but she was right. I looked at Redwood. “Do you know who stole it?”
“I have my suspicions.”
“Who?” I asked, but at that moment, I had a feeling I knew. “Oh, no.”
“Yes. My old partner.”
Robert Greaves. Former CEO, dog killer, and all-around asshole.
“Aw, what the hell? What is he planning for it?”
“Not sure, but I’ll say this,” Redwood said. “It’s nothing good. Robert Greaves never does anything on a whim. And I’m guessing that, after how things went down at the company, he’s not your biggest fan.”
“No, he’s not.” And the feeling was mutual.