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“Never.”
She scoffs.
“You’re fresh fish stew.”
“I don’t know which is worse, but thank you.” She laughs. “Now work. But before we start the list, I have someone else I want to look into.”
“Who’s that, Sunshine?”
“Calvin Degree, I want to know where he lives and if we can go talk to him.”
A quick search finds an address in Braesen. They have crazy names for their apartments. Goblin Shark is the name of his apartment.
“Goblin Shark? Sounds spooky.”
“Yeah, weirdly, there’s not much else about him. But I think we’re right. We need to pay Calvin a visit.”
She’s disappointed, and I am too. “All right, then which of the names are we going to investigate first?”
“How about this merman from Seolfor? I don’t know anything about him.” And after thirty minutes, I decide I’m better off than I thought. I know I was reckless in my youth and am paying for it now, but if I could go back and do things over, I wouldn’t have taken any of the safe paths this snooze-fest took. I need a good, long, twenty-hour nap after reading up about him.
“There is no way this male has anything to do with anything. Good or bad.” Sunshine purses her lips.
“Agreed. Next up is a Vitrom male. This should be more interesting.”
“There’s nothing here either,” Sunshine says after reading his entire military record.
“But I learned something.”
“What?” Sunshine’s eyebrows raise.
“That not every Vitrom male is evil.”
“You didn’t really think they were, did you?”
“Of course not.” I nod convincingly to her. “Okay, here’s one, a Glyden clerk.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
Like we’ve been doing, I start with the schooling while she works on the trail of employment records. I can’t help taking stolen glances at her over my tablet.
“You’re paying attention, right? Just because someone is Glyden or Zaffiro doesn’t make them innocent.”
“Yes, I’m paying attention.” I stare at her a little longer.
She makes a face at me and points to my tablet. “Eros, to your tablet, not me.”
“You didn’t mention what the letter said.”
“No, I guess I didn’t. I want Nico and Holter to be able to read it in private. It’s hard enough knowing that their mother was assassinated, but knowing that she suspected it was coming? I want them to hear it in her words, not mine. But she loved them, and that’s the best part. Having the written proof. I mean, I have memories of my mother, and I know she loved me. But I would give anything for a letter like this. Then again, my mother didn’t die because of some large conspiracy but rather a drunk driver at a stoplight. So I suppose she had no reason to stop and tell me in writing what she felt. She thought she had years left—my whole life. I’ve spent weeks, maybe a few months full of hours, wondering what she would have done about my uncle. If she would have stood up to him where my dad didn’t. If she would have found a way to extract Marlee and Blair from his clutches and get him off the farm, away from us all. But we’ll never know.” She shakes her head. “We need to work.”
“I am working.”
“Right, well, prove it. What have you learned about him so far?”
“He’s boring like all the others.”
“What’s his name?”
