Scarlet

Five

Scarlet’s thoughts seethed as she hauled the empty crates out of the back of her ship and through the hangar’s yawning doors. She’d found her portscreen on the floor of the ship and it was now in her pocket, the message from the law enforcement office burning against her thigh as she mindlessly traipsed through her evening routine.

She was perhaps most angry with herself now, for being distracted, even for a minute, by nothing more than a handsome face and a veneer of danger, so soon after she’d learned that her grandma’s case had been closed. Her curiosity about the street fighter made her feel like a traitor to everything important.

And then there was Roland and Gilles and every other backstabber in Rieux. They all believed her grandma was crazy, and that’s what they’d told the police. Not that she was the most hardworking farmer in the province. Not that she made the best éclairs this side of the Garonne River. Not that she’d served her country as a military spaceship pilot for twenty-eight years, and still wore a medal for honorable service on her favorite checkered kitchen apron.

No. They’d told the police she was crazy.

And now they’d stopped looking for her.

Not for long though. Her grandma was out there somewhere and Scarlet was going to find her if she had to dig up dirt and blackmail every last detective in Europe.

The sun was sinking fast, sending Scarlet’s elongated shadow down the drive. Beyond the gravel, the whispering crops of cornstalks and leafy sugar beets stretched out in every direction, meeting up with the first spray of stars. A cobblestone house disrupted the view to the west, with two windows glowing orange. Their only neighbor for miles.

For more than half her life, this farm had been Scarlet’s paradise. Over the years, she’d fallen in love with it more deeply than she’d known a person could fall in love with land and sky—and she knew her grandma felt the same. Though she didn’t like to think of it, she was aware that someday she would inherit the farm, and she sometimes fantasized about growing old here. Happy and content, with perpetual dirt beneath her fingernails and an old house that was in constant need of repair.

Happy and content—like her grandmother.

She wouldn’t have just left. Scarlet knew it.

She lugged the crates into the barn, stacking them in the corner so the androids could fill them again tomorrow, then grabbed the pail of chicken feed. Scarlet walked while she fed, tossing big handfuls of kitchen scraps in her path as the chickens scurried around her ankles.

Rounding the corner of the hangar, she halted.

A light was on in the house, on the second floor.

In her grandmother’s bedroom.

The pail slipped from her fingers. The chickens squawked and darted away, before clustering back around the spilled feed.

She stepped over them and ran, the gravel skidding beneath her shoes. Her heart was swelling, bursting, the sprint already making her lungs burn as she yanked open the back door. She took the stairs two at a time, the old wood groaning beneath her.

The door to her grandma’s bedroom was open and she froze in the doorway, panting, grasping the jamb.

A hurricane had come through the room. Every drawer was pulled out from the dresser, clothes and toiletries had been dumped onto the floor. The quilts from the bed were piled haphazardly at its foot, the mattress at an angle, the digital picture frames beside the window all pulled from their brackets, leaving dark spots on the wall where the sunlight hadn’t managed to fade the painted plaster.

A man was on his knees beside the bed, tearing through a box of her grandmother’s old military uniforms. He jumped up when he saw Scarlet, nearly hitting his head on the low oak beam that spanned the ceiling.

The world spun. Scarlet almost didn’t recognize him—it had been years since she’d seen him, but it could have been decades for how much he had aged. A beard was taking over his normally clean-shaven jawline. His hair was matted on one side, sticking up straight on the other. He was pale and gaunt, like he hadn’t had a proper meal in weeks.

“Dad?”

He clutched a blue flight jacket to his chest.

“What are you doing here?” She surveyed the chaos again, heart still pounding. “What are you doing?”

“There’s something here,” he said, his voice rough and unused. “She’s hidden something.” He peered down at the jacket, then tossed it onto the bed. Kneeling, he started digging through the box again. “I need to find it.”

“Find what? What are you talking about?”

“She’s gone,” he whispered. “She’s not coming back. She won’t ever know and I … I have to find it. I have to know why.”

The smell of cognac swirled through the air and Scarlet’s heart hardened. She didn’t know how he’d found out about his mother’s disappearance, but for him to just assume all hope was lost, so easily, so quickly, and to think he would be entitled to a single thing that belonged to her, after he’d abandoned them both. To go so many years without a single comm, only to show up drunk and start tearing through her grandmother’s things—

Scarlet had the sudden urge to call the police, except she was mad at them too.

“Get out! Get out of our house!”

Unfazed, he started to pile the mishmash of clothes back into the box.

Face burning, Scarlet rounded the bed and grabbed his arm, trying to yank him to his feet. “Stop it!”

He hissed and fell back onto the old wooden floorboards. He scurried away from her as he would from a rabid dog, clutching his arm. His gaze was stark madness.

Scarlet drew back, surprised, before planting clenched fists on her hips. “What’s wrong with your arm?”

He didn’t answer, just kept nursing the arm against his chest.

Setting her jaw, Scarlet stomped toward him and grabbed his wrist. He yelped and tried to pull away, but she held firm, shoving his sleeve up to his elbow. Scarlet gasped and let go, but the arm continued to hang in midair, like he’d forgotten to retract it.

The skin was covered in burn marks. Each one a perfect circle and placed in a neat, perfect row. Row upon row upon row, circling his forearm from wrist to elbow, some shining with wrinkled scar tissue, others blackened and blistering. And on his wrist, a scab where his ID chip had once been implanted.

Her stomach turned.

Back against the wall, her father buried his face in the mattress, away from Scarlet, away from the burns.

“Who did this to you?”

His arm fell, curling against his stomach. He said nothing.

Scarlet pushed herself off the wall and ran to the bathroom in the hallway. She returned a moment later with a tube of ointment and a roll of bandages. Her father hadn’t moved.

“They made me,” he whispered, his hysteria fading.

Scarlet eased his arm away from his stomach and began to dress the wound, as tenderly as she could despite her shaking hands. “Who made you do what?”

“I couldn’t get away,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “They asked so many questions and I didn’t know. I didn’t know what they wanted. I tried to answer them, but I didn’t know…”

Scarlet glanced up from her work as her father tilted his head toward her and stared blankly across the tousled blankets. Tears had pooled in his eyes. Her father—crying. It was almost more shocking than the burns. Her chest clamped and she froze, the bandage wrapped halfway up his forearm. She realized that she did not know this sad, broken man. This was only a shell of her father, her charismatic and selfish and worthless father.

Where anger and hatred had flared before, there was now an aching sense of pity.

What possibly could have caused this?

“They gave me the poker,” he continued, his eyes wide and distant.

“They gave you—? Why—?”

“And they brought me to her. And I realized, she was the one with the answers. She was the one with the information. They wanted something from her. But she just watched … she just watched me do it, and she cried … but they asked her the same questions, and she still wouldn’t answer them. She wouldn’t answer them.” His voice hiccupped, his face flushing with sudden anger. “She let them do this to me.”

Struggling to gulp, Scarlet finished off the wrapping and leaned against the mattress, her legs beginning to tremble. “Grand-mère? You saw her?”

His attention flashed back to her, crazed again. “They had me for a week and then they just let me go. They could tell she didn’t care about me. She wouldn’t give in for me.”

Without warning, he pushed forward and clambered toward Scarlet on his knees, grasping her arms. She tried to shrink away but he held her firm, his fingernails digging into her skin. “What is it, Scar? What’s so important? More important than her own son?”

“Dad, you have to calm down. You have to tell me where she is.” Her thoughts stammered. “Where is she? Who has her? Why?”

Her father’s eyes searched her, panicked and shimmering. Slowly, he shook his head and dropped his attention to the floor. “She’s hiding something,” he mumbled. “I want to know what it is. What is she hiding, Scar? Where is it?”

He turned to rustle through a drawer of old cotton shirts that had clearly already been riffled through. He was sweating now, his hair damp around his ears.

Scarlet used the bed frame to hoist herself onto the mattress. “Dad, please.” She tried to sound soothing, though her heart was thumping so hard it hurt. “Where is she?”

“Don’t know.” He dug his fingernails into the space between the molding and the wall. “I was at a bar in Paris. They must have drugged my drink, because next I woke up in a dark room. It smelled damp, musty.” He sniffed. “They drugged me when they let me go too. One minute I was in that dark room, then I was here. I woke up in the cornfield.”

With a shudder, Scarlet pulled her hands through her hair until the curls knotted up around them. They’d brought him here, to the same place they’d kidnapped her grandmother. Why? Did these people know that Scarlet was his only family—did they think she would be the best person to take care of him?

That didn’t make any sense. Clearly they weren’t worried about her dad’s well-being. So what else? Was leaving him here a message to her? A threat?

“You must remember something,” she said, her voice taking on a tinge of desperation. “Something about the room, or something someone said? Did you get a good look at them? Could you describe one of them to a profiler? Anything?”

“Was drugged,” he said, quickly, but then his brow drew together as he struggled to think. He made to touch his burn marks, but then let his hand fall into his lap. “Wouldn’t let me see them.”

Scarlet barely resisted the urge to shake him and scream that he had to think harder. “Did they blindfold you?”

“No.” He squinted. “I was afraid to look.”

Frustrated tears were beginning to sting her eyes and Scarlet tilted her head back, gulping down patient breaths. Her worst fears, those sneaking, horrible suspicions, were true.

Her grandmother had been kidnapped. Not just kidnapped, but kidnapped by cruel, brutal people. Were they harming her as they’d harmed her son? What would they do to her? What did they want?

Ransom?

But why hadn’t they asked Scarlet for anything yet? And why had they taken her father too, but then let him go? It didn’t make sense.

Terror clouded her thoughts as all the possible horrors streamed through her imagination. Torture and burning and dark rooms …

“What did you mean, when you said they made you? What did they make you do?”

“Burn myself,” he whispered. “Handed me the poker.”

“But how—”

“So many questions. I don’t know. I never knew my father. She doesn’t talk about him. I don’t know what she does here in her big ancient house. What happened on the moon. Don’t know what she’s hiding—she’s hiding something.” He pulled weakly at the blankets on the bed, glancing halfheartedly beneath the sheets.

“You’re talking nonsense,” Scarlet said, her voice breaking. “You have to think harder. You have to remember something.”

A long, long silence. Outside, the chickens were clucking again, their scaly feet scratching across the gravel.

“Tattoo.”

She frowned. “What?”

He placed a finger over one of the burns, on the inside flesh of his arm, just below his elbow. “The one who handed me the poker had a tattoo. Here. Letters and numbers.”

Her vision prickled with bright lights and Scarlet gripped the rumpled quilt, for a moment feeling like she could faint.

Letters and numbers.

“Are you sure?”

“L … S…” He shook his head. “I can’t remember. There was more.”

Her mouth ran dry, hatred overtaking the dizziness. She knew that tattoo.

He’d pretended to be kind. Pretended he only needed honest work.

When—days? hours?—before, he’d tortured her father. Kept her grandmother prisoner.

And she’d almost trusted him. The tomato, the carrots … she’d thought she was helping him. Stars above, she’d flirted with him, and all the while, he knew. She recalled those moments of peculiar amusement, the glint in his eyes, and her stomach twisted. He’d been laughing at her.

Ears ringing, she peered down at her dad, who was turning out the pockets of a pair of pants that probably hadn’t fit her grandmother in twenty years.

She stood. The blood rushed to her head, but she ignored it. Marching to the corner of the room, she grabbed her grandma’s portscreen from where her father had tossed it onto the floorboards.

“Here,” she said, throwing the port onto the bed. “I’m going to the Morel farm. If I’m not home in three hours, comm the police.”

Dazed, her father reached out and grasped the port. “I thought the Morels were dead.”

“Are you listening to me? I want you to lock all the doors, and don’t leave. Three hours and then comm the police. Do you understand?”

Again he succumbed to that frightened, child-like expression. “Don’t go out there, Scar. Don’t you get it? They used me as bait for her and you’ll be next. They’ll come for you too.”

Clenching her jaw, Scarlet zipped up her hoodie to her chin. “I intend to find them first.”