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“Fine,” Élise said, banging her gavel. “Let the record show that the Park family will be admitted into our ranks during the first High Council meeting of next year’s legislative session.”
Just like that, Ms. Suji Park and her entire family became highborn.
Chapter 19
After sweeping her bedroom for bugs, Lila changed into her comfiest pair of cotton pajamas pants and a worn t-shirt with the words Randolph Militia scrawled across her chest. She tended to do her best work in her pajamas, and the High Council meeting had drained her, as had replying to Tristan’s message.
Or not replying.
He’d missed her. Again. And he wanted her to know it.
She’d fumbled for several moments after receiving it, unsure how to answer. When they’d first started up, she hoped things would become less confusing. Unfortunately, the opposite had occurred. Everything was more and more confusing the more they saw of one another. Tristan wanted a great deal from her, and all the messages about how he missed her were pressing down on her chest, suffocating her.
Her thumb hovered over Delete. Instead of tapping it, she moved the message to Tristan’s folder. She’d not yet been able to get rid of any of them. To make matters worse, she almost wanted to back up the folder on her desktop computer, because if anyone else picked up her palm and didn’t enter her code properly, her palm would erase itself.
She didn’t care about most of her data, but she cared about Tristan’s. His messages seemed important somehow. Perhaps that was what suffocated her—not necessarily Tristan’s declarations, but that his words held power over her. They spurred her to do things she didn’t want to do, like keeping a host of messages due to sentimentality.
She sent Tristan a message that she’d see him soon, then tossed her palm onto her desk. It slid, nearly falling off the other side. Seconds later, she found herself grabbing it again and backing up the damn folder, slamming the small device on her bed afterward.
Her cheeks warmed as she glared at her desktop computer, but at least she wasn’t an obsessive idiot any longer.
Sipping on a mug of hot chocolate, she checked the search for Natalie’s brothels. Since it hadn’t finished, she pushed it to the background and pulled up the results of the blood tests. The numbers meant very little to Lila, but Captain Randolph had attached a brief voice message explaining them. Natalie had not had been under the influence of alcohol or drugs when she died. Neither had her guards. But the lab director had found something infinitely more interesting. She’d discovered a substance that might be a tracer in Natalie’s blood, as well as the blood of several of her guards.
Tracers?
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” Lila said, leaping from her seat as though she’d been burned, her hand covering her gaping mouth while she fumbled for her palm.
Tracers were a Roman technology the Allied Lands hadn’t figured out yet, though not for lack of trying. Once they’d been injected or ingested, the target could be located for the next thirty-six hours, so long as they were within a few kilometers. Though GPS bugs might be more lasting and comprehensive, even lowborns had developed ways to detect and deactivate them.
No such counters existed for tracers. If you had a team large enough to murder almost a dozen thugs, then you had enough people to canvass all of New Bristol in a day and a half, searching for a tracer’s signal.
“You stupid woman,” Lila whispered as she typed Captain Randolph’s ID into her palm. “You should have known better than to drink with mercs from the empire.”
Tristan had been right. German mercs were involved. Not even the highborn families had ever been able to get their hands on tracers. The Germans had stolen Oskar, and they hadn’t even been subtle about it. Perhaps they’d assumed that Bullstow wouldn’t find the tracers. It wasn’t as if the Allied Lands had a blood test to detect them.
“Walk the sample to the Burgess Building,” Lila told Captain Randolph as soon as she picked up. “Personally.”
Captain Randolph laughed. “No need. I’m in the lobby as we speak. I told Director Randolph to stay at work until you called her. She already knows something is up.”
“Good. Share nothing except the sample, not even a hint of where it came from.”
“Of course. I nearly beat down the door of Villanueva House until a footman told me you were at a High Council meeting,” the captain said in a rush, the giddiness palpable in her voice. “I wouldn’t even have suspected if my snoop programs hadn’t caught a whiff of something strange when I scanned the lab. This is serious, chief. And seriously time sensitive. The sample will degrade substantially after thirty-six hours. How old is it?”
“Best guess? Around twelve hours old. Tell no one else about the sample. No one.”
“You didn’t procure it legally, did you?”
“I have to call Director Randolph.”
Lila disconnected and called Viola Randolph, the director of her bioengineering R&D department, quickly explaining what the sample would contain. She’d barely gotten the words out before she heard frantic button-pushing and the dings of an elevator in the background.
The director made quick promises to rouse her entire team, assuring Lila that they’d spend the next twenty-fours working on the sample. Then she made the usual vow to not ID-test the blood, and quickly disconnected.
If Lila knew the group at all, they’d run to the lab and get started immediately without complaint even if stopped mid-orgasm. She’d just handed them the best Winter Solstice gift of their lives, nearly two months early. They’d talk about it for years, and they’d be famous throughout the Allied Lands if they managed to replicate the tracer.
No one would know where it came from, so long as no one ran a DNA test. The way she’d given the instructions would leave little doubt in anyone’s mind. The sample was the product of corporate espionage. Running DNA tests would effectively incriminate the entire lab team, making them accessories. Neither lab director had gotten their jobs by being stupid, and both knew better than to move against the heirs.
No scientist had any desire to end up a slave. Slaves didn’t win science prizes, and they certainly didn’t end up in the history books. They’d do whatever it took to duplicate the tracer quietly. Once her people figured out how it worked, they’d figure out how to counter the stuff so it wouldn’t affect the Randolph family.
