A Sea of Blood and Magic

Chapter Five

The man in the suit and Ms. Scholey were waiting for me in the commander's office after I showered. The commander himself was absent.

I sat in a chair uninvited and said, "Yeah?"

Neither of them betrayed any surprise at my attitude. The man said, "Well? Thought over our offer at all?"

That bit of ingenuity deserved a dirty look. "You already know I have."

"And?" Ms. Scholey seemed unaffected by my tone.

I almost called her by name before reining myself in. She couldn't know I had overheard it. "I'll cooperate. Can you answer one question before we start, though?"

"What's that?" the man asked.

As I'd reviewed my strategy during the night, I had arrived at some conclusions, but I had to speak carefully to try to get them to tell me what I needed to know. "How did you realize I had been planted by my father?"

A subtle relaxation of tension followed my question. They both exhaled a bit and exchanged a look. Ms. Scholey replied, "The deposits."

I crinkled my forehead in confusion. "The deposits?"

"The money that came to your parents' savings account every quarter. We traced the deposits to their source and found they came from an account affiliated with one of Pramantha's cover operations."

Pramantha. I barely choked back a gasp. Pramantha was one of the most militant of the theolatres' subversive groups. Everybody knew they'd been behind the June 21 attacks, after somehow rousing the Hydra and Karkinos. My thoughts flew, but I managed to say, "Oh, I see," in a passably normal tone of voice.

Ms. Scholey nodded. "So, let's talk."

This was going to be the tricky part. "What do you want to know?"

"For starters, what is the money for?"

Considering I'd just found out about it, this hadn't been one of the possibilities I'd prepared for. "Um... mostly for upkeep, like child support and stuff. My parents—my adoptive parents—they never trained me to do anything terrorist...ish. The money they got must've been just to keep quiet about my birth parents, or maybe to pay for college." Which would explain Dad's insistence on me going... No. That was just because he was a Toledano. Everybody in my family had been talking about when I went to college since I was an infant.

They both had notepads out and scribbled furiously. The man asked, "How did you stay in contact with your birth father?"

Emma's experience with hiding the existence of her boyfriend in Rio de Moraga for two years had helped me with this one. "I used a store at the mall to set up a secret mail account using a box and contacted him only in code."

They questioned me for an hour, and only stopped listening to my increasingly silly stories when my stomach growled. For a moment, I worried that they would feed me in the commander's room rather than lock up their information source for the day, and thereby deprive Nik of his share of my meal. Instead, they put away their notepads and called the guards.

"Thanks for helping out," the man said as I stepped over the threshold. I barely restrained myself from telling him to do something anatomically impossible.

When I got back to the brig, Nik lurched to his feet, relief clear on his face. "Hannah!"

"It's okay. I'm okay," I soothed, walking to sit on my mattress. The guard behind me set the tray down on the floor and then locked the cell door before leaving the room. "They just questioned me a lot."