Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
“… hyrt argadi…”
Daughter. Argadi meant daughter. I saved a female child.
“…Argadi dzal to na yen sah-dejjit…”
Sah-dejjit. Friend. They considered me a friend.
“Dzer meq dzal bekh-razz danur. Bekh-razz danir.”
Safe passage for now and forever. Oh.
The spider herder pointed at my left arm. I stepped forward and held it out. The light on his staff flared into a needle-thin green beam and hit my arm. Pain lashed me. I gritted my teeth.
The light died. A narrow scar marked my arm, twisting into a flowing symbol. My talent focused on it.
The vision burst in my mind. Groups of spider herders, one after another, different landscapes, different times, all nodding and parting to let me pass. I had been given a great, rare honor.
The words formed on my lips on their own.
“Adaren kullnemeq, Sindra-ron. Sadrin issun tanil danir.”
Thank you for the priceless gift, children of Sindra. I shall be forever grateful.
The spider herders moved aside, and the sea of spiders behind them parted before me.
The weight room at the Elmwood Park Rec Center was small, but it did have a bench press. The gym stood empty. The gate was considered high risk now and the residents in the immediate area had been evacuated long ago. Elias loaded four plates on each side of the bar. Four hundred and five pounds. He would need an extra two hundred pounds to really get going, but there were no plates left. A light workout it is.
Elias slid onto the bench, took a close grip with his fists nearly touching, lifted the bar off the rungs, and slowly lowered it to about an inch off his chest. He held it there for a few breaths, slowly pushed it up, and brought it back down.
The workout wasn’t planned, but sitting on his hands was getting to him. He had to let off some steam or he would explode.
Thirty minutes later, he had finished with the chest press and the leg press machine and was on the dip bars, with four plates chained to him, going into his second set of fifty dips, when Leo walked into the gym carrying his tablet. The XO looked like a cat who’d caught a mouse and was very satisfied with his hunting skills.
Elias nodded to him. “Good news?”
“In a manner of speaking. Malcolm has a brother.” Leo held up his tablet. On it a man strikingly similar to Malcolm smiled into the camera, poised against a forest. Same height, same lanky build, same dark hair and brown eyes. If you put him into tactical gear, Elias might have mistaken him for the Elmwood gate assault team leader.
Elias kept moving, lifting his body up and down, the plates a comfortable weight tugging on him. “Are they twins?”
“No, Peter is two years younger.”
“Is he a Talent?”
Leo shook his head. “He is a biologist. He spends most of his time in Australia.”
“What is he doing there?”
“Trying to contain an outbreak of chlamydia in koalas.”
Elias paused midway into the lift and looked at Leo.
“Apparently koalas are highly susceptible to chlamydia,” Leo said. “The latest strain is threatening to make them extinct in New South Wales.”
Elias shook his head and resumed the dips.
“Interesting fact,” Leo continued. “Dr. Peter Nevin can apparently be in two places at once. Here he is speaking at the National Koala Conference in Port Macquarie in New South Wales.”
He flicked the tablet and a picture of Peter Nevin at the podium slid onto the screen.
“And here he is in Vegas after losing three hundred thousand dollars at the poker table on the same day.” Leo swiped across the tablet, presenting a picture of Malcolm exiting a casino, his face flat.
Elias ran out of dips, jumped to the floor, and began to unchain the weights. “Malcolm gambled under his brother’s name.”
“Oh, he didn’t just gamble. When someone like Malcolm lands in Vegas, a siren goes off and they roll out the red carpet from the plane all the way to the strip.”
“How deep is the hole?”
“Twenty-three million.”
Elias took special care to slide the weight plate back onto the rack. Breaking community equipment would not be good. Except that whatever pressure he’d managed to vent now doubled.
Twenty-three million. Over three times Malcolm’s annual pay with bonuses.
Malcolm was a gambler. Everything suddenly made sense. If the motherlode of gold wasn’t an exaggeration, Malcolm could’ve walked away with a bonus of several hundred thousand.
The casinos had to know who they were dealing with. Nobody would allow a koala scientist to carry that kind of debt, but a star assault team leader from a large guild was a different story. If they had any decency, they would’ve cut Malcolm off, but then they weren’t in the decency business.
“He is on a payment plan,” Leo said.
“Of course he is.”
And they would let him dig that hole deeper and deeper. Why not? He’d become a passive income golden goose. And all of this should have been caught during his audits. Those payments had to have come from somewhere, and Malcolm would’ve been at it for years. Any bookkeeper worth their salt would’ve noticed a large amount of money going out.