Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(109)

“I thought I didn’t have the clearance for this,” she said, only partly joking.

“No more secrets,” he said gently, his craggy face sad. “I kept too many, for too long. Now I can’t remember half of them.” He pushed buttons on a security panel, then opened the door to a stairwell and held it for her. “My office is up here.”

The second floor was a warren of high industrial shelving loaded with outdated equipment and seeping car batteries and crumpled golden drone skin and cracked propeller blades and plastic crates holding fractured shards of failed parts. Maybe there was a system of organization, but if so, she couldn’t discern it. The smell here was of burned electrical insulation and dust, the whole place a fire just waiting for a point of ignition. While she stared at the accumulated detritus of years of experiments, her dad walked into the maze ahead of her. She hurried to catch up.

Rounding a corner, she saw an open space at the end of the barn. Her dad stood at the wide windows, looking out at the pocket valley spread out before him. He turned at her footsteps, his expression that of a man whose thoughts were elsewhere, his piercing blue eyes looking inward.

June knew that look. It was the look of her childhood.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What were we doing?”

“We were trying to get control of the drone,” she said gently.

“Oh,” he said. “Yes.” He sat at a makeshift plywood desk, something intended to be temporary that looked like it had been there for years. It held a barricade of computer monitors and a tangled scatter of hard drives and cables. “Give me a minute.” His hands clattered on the keyboard. The central monitor lit up, new windows appearing.

She looked above the monitors and saw, held to the wall with pushpins, the watercolor of a frog she’d made when she was eight.

She remembered thinking it was the best thing she’d ever made, and knocking on the door of his old lab to show it to him. He’d opened the door and taken the paper from her hand, frowning down at it, saying, “Now isn’t a good time, Juniper.” She’d never seen it again.

Her other watercolors were there, too, trees and frogs, a few landscapes, her attempts at capturing the ridges that contained the valley. Pencil drawings of the house they’d lived in, the old shed that was his first lab. Scribbles in crayon and bright Magic Marker, construction paper, notebook paper, legal paper, scraps. They covered the wall completely. June was not a gifted artist. But here they were.

She turned to look at the rest of the room. Photos of June and her mother, a row of Father’s Day cards she’d made, a half-dozen computer renderings of the evolving drone, and on the other side of the room, on a small wooden table, a thirty-gallon terrarium. It held a few sticks and rocks, some bark, and a plastic pan in which lay a snapping turtle.

Absurdly, June recognized the turtle. Her name was Mrs. Turtle. She had a distinctive marking on the center of her shell, three lighter green triangles in a dark green circle. The terrarium was one of June’s home-school projects when she was eleven, after her mom had left. June had put all kinds of things in there, frogs and insects and worms, and Mrs. Turtle had eaten them all. She blinked up at June, deadly perfection after 300 million years of evolution. She’d gotten bigger since June had left, maybe too big for the terrarium.

June walked back to her father sitting at the computer and put her hands lightly on his enormous shoulders. Somehow it felt okay to touch him now. She wasn’t scared of him anymore. Maybe it was Mrs. Turtle, still alive. “How’s it going?”

He shook his head, still focused on the monitors. “The new security protocols are pretty robust. I can’t get a toehold.”

“I don’t get it,” said June. “If you’re not in charge of this, who is?”

“You haven’t guessed already?” He turned to look at her over his shoulder. “Who stepped in when your mother left? Who was always running the show around here?”

It hit her like a slap. She shook her head. “That can’t be true. I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t want to believe it,” said the Yeti, turning back to the monitor. “I didn’t want to, either. Now I think she always worked for them. She came as an agricultural researcher as an excuse to see what else we were doing. She’s the reason they offered the funding. To take us over.”

June thought of the slender young man with the pitchfork. “Who’s Oliver?”

“I don’t know who you mean. One of the security men? I don’t know any of them anymore. Maybe it’s my memory, or maybe they rotate people in and out more often now. They do some farm work and some carpentry, but they also run patrols in the valley. A few came in just a few days ago. That’s when the encryption changed.”

His voice got louder. “And I’m getting nowhere.” He hit the plywood desk with his giant clenched fist. Everything on the desk jumped six inches in the air. It took an act of will for June not to jump, too. This was more like how he used to be. Scary, a force of nature. The Yeti.

But she was an adult now. “Relax, Dad. Maybe I can help.” She hooked the leg of a spare chair with her foot and pulled it over, opening her laptop. “Do you have Wi-Fi?”

He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, and visibly calmed himself. “Of course. You want to go online?”