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“Are you making sport of me?”
You should eat your muffin.
Blair turned back to her spreadsheet. “Don’t nag, else you’re just as bad as Kenna.”
“Oh, say it isn’t so,” Kenna said.
“Well, at least he’s not yammering away in my ear. Why don’t you just start writing down everything for me?”
“You’d just lose the paper. What do you even have the telescope pointed at?”
“A star.”
“Which star?”
“Ooka Pooka Looka in the Zoink Boink Nebula. Why do you ask? It doesn’t matter what I say. You never remember any of it.”
Dixon peeked in the eyepiece, then scribbled on his notepad. Bellatrix. Orion.
Blair cast her eyes over her papers. “How did you know that? Did you see it somewhere?”
Dixon grinned and tapped his head.
“You knew it already?” Blair asked, barely pausing for his nod. “I’m going to prove Bellatrix isn’t one star but two. Some damn Spaniard is trying to do the same thing. He always tries to snag my observation time at Krek, but he only goes there so he can get drunk and party. Fool doesn’t know his ass from a—”
Kenna’s palm vibrated in her pocket. “Thank the gods. Kara has your computer ready. I’ll take you to your cabin and get you settled in.”
Chapter 11
Lila stretched under her blankets as someone knocked on her bedroom door. Her eyes shot open, then opened wider at the strange surroundings, at the queen-sized bed, at the thick woven rugs covering the floor, at the chest of drawers and matching bedside table, at the painting of horses rushing across the dusty plains above her head. She’d woken up in strange places for a month now, feeling like some wandering refuge from her matron’s wrath, staying in the cottage by the lake, in Dixon’s bedroom, and now in the oracle’s compound.
She should have been used to it. She’d have to get used to it. This would be her life. A life that would be made easier after her mother returned her money—if she returned it. Lila had checked her accounts before trundling off to bed.
She’d found them empty. Again.
“Come in,” Lila said, sitting up with effort.
Dixon strode over the rugs, wearing nothing but a pink robe loosely belted at his waist. It billowed as he plopped beside her and scanned the furniture and the painting.
He pointed to his mouth.
“Please tell me you didn’t wake me up for breakfast. Wake me up for lunch and not a moment before.” She dug under the covers. “On second thought, make that dinner.”
Dixon dug under them too, flashing her in the process.
He pointed to his mouth again.
“No, I only went to bed a few hours ago.”
Dixon had gone to bed early after meeting with Kenna and Connell to review the bios of the matched children. None of the matches from the empire had been valid, but forty-six missing children from the Allied Lands had passed through their compound. The pair had assured Dixon that none would have collaborated with the empire.
Lila had been busy all evening and most of the night, working on a program to scout through the compound’s logs. Since she didn’t know what she was looking for, she’d cast her net wide, pulling anything from the logs with telltale marks of subterfuge.
Unfortunately, people being what they were, she’d pulled a great deal of data. Too many budding hackers sold snoop programs these days, guarant
eeing their clients invisibility on the web. Fortunately, none of them could provide it, but that didn’t stop people from buying them.
She’d skimmed through the hidden and fairly innocent search records of curious, horny schoolchildren, the loss records of gambling addicts, the love letters of several cheating spouses, the comic book purchases of several middle-aged women, the obsessive profile-stalking of ex-lovers, and one very bold and secret love affair between two women in a BDSM relationship, neither of whom could stop fighting over who would get to be the top in their next interlude.
