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Tristan shook his head as the light turned green. “I don’t believe that. We should go and see what she has to say.”
“What about Oskar?”
Lila saw the struggle cross his face. “It’s only a fifteen-minute drive. We’re halfway there already.”
Lila eyed the clock, remembering Oskar’s face onstage.
“I don’t like this.”
“I don’t either.” He fiddled with the air conditioning again. “You never told me about that before.”
“Never told you what?”
“What the oracle’s mother said when you were a kid, about you holding a child and wearing the whitecoat.”
“I’d mostly forgotten, Tristan. The oracles likely tell every prime the same thing. Yes, you’ll be prime. Yes, you’ll have heirs. They’re con artists and charlatans. They tell people what they think they want to hear.”
“What did she tell Alex?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t say. Do you actually believe in the oracles?”
“I never thought about it much. Slaves don’t get much of a chance to visit them, much less the children of slaves. I would have had to get permission from my mother and my matron, then bribe someone to drive me to the temple and bring me back. Even then the oracle might not have seen me. How many slaves do you think want to waste a day off waiting for something that might never happen?”
“So slaves don’t believe?”
“Oh, most do, they just don’t often visit the temple. Can’t say that I blame them.”
“What about Dixon?”
“Funny you should mention that. I saw him with a book a few days ago. Apparently, he asked Samantha to fetch it for him. It was a book about the oracles and the gods. A few more have turned up since.”
“Is that odd?”
“He’s never shown an interest before. I think what happened last weekend shook him up.”
“What about your parents? Does your mother believe?” Lila turned down another street. They passed shop after shop, lowborns and servants carrying packages and sweating in the heat.
“Yes. Who knows what my father thinks, though.”
“What do you mean? How can you not know if your father believes in the oracles?”
Tristan just shrugged. “When he came around, he only had eyes for my mother.”
“So he ignored you?”
“Not exactly, but it wasn’t like he could take me out. He’d married into the Holguíns. If he had acknowledged me publicly, his marriage would have been ruined and his matron never would have accepted him back. You know how your kind are, always believing the fallen have come back as spies, especially from a family like the Holguíns.”
“It depends on how long they’ve been gone and the circumstances they married under.”
“He left the Vargas family under less-than-ideal circumstances. He’s little more than a pet to Chairwoman Holguín’s youngest sister, thrown in to seal the deal on wine grapes. She’s in love with him, though. He could have said no, but that Sangre you enjoy has to come from somewhere.”
“Is he in love with her?”
Tristan shook his head. “My mother always kept his identity a secret in the BIRD, but when she was arrested and he arranged for our placement in Beaulac… Well, you can bet everyone on the Holguín compound knew exactly who my father was. The fact that I look like him never helped. Whenever he slipped away to visit, which wasn’t often, he’d spend twenty minutes or so catching up with me, shove some new toy in my lap, then spend the rest of his night with my mother. By the time I was ten, I started disappearing before the visits.”
“Your mother let you?”
“How could she stop me after I was already gone? I knew when he was coming by. She never knew how, but it was obvious. The smiles, the long shower, the perfume, the extra care with her hair and a bit of makeup. Sometimes I think she was relieved to find me gone. It meant they could be together longer, since he didn’t have to waste his time with me.”
