Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(80)

A shower. That’s what she needed. Worry damn sure wasn’t going to fix anything.

As she stepped into the hallway, she almost bumped into her mom.

“Oops. Sorry, Mom. Didn’t mean to run you over.”

“I was just coming to wake you for breakfast.” Mrs. McFarland smiled, the early morning light accentuating the lines in her face. It seemed to Heather that her mother had aged ten years over the course of these last few months.

“Do I have time for a shower first?”

“Sure, but not a long one. The Smythes will be over in half an hour.”

“Okay. I’ll hurry,” Heather said as she stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.

By the time she had washed her hair, letting the pulsing showerhead massage the back of her neck, Heather finally felt ready to mix with other people. Throwing on some faded jeans and a summer blouse, she made her way down to the kitchen.

Although the pancakes and bacon were fabulous, the jovial atmosphere of their weekend get-togethers failed to make an appearance. Their parents’ conversation turned to the assassination of the president, leaving little room for pleasantries.

Heather caught Mark staring at her left hand, although he quickly averted his gaze. It was stupid to let something that trivial upset her, but it did. Their attempts at conversation evaporated, leaving the adult discussion unchallenged. By the time breakfast ended, Heather could hardly wait to leave the table.

As she made her way to put her dishes in the dishwasher, Mark moved up beside her.

“Can you come over for a while? We need to talk.”

Heather looked into his eyes, but failed to see any hint of the disapproval or worry she had been expecting.

“I guess I can stop by for a few minutes.”

“Good. Jen and I’ll be waiting.”

Heather found the twins in their garage, standing in the corner they had come to call their workshop. Jennifer leaned back against the tool bench, her arms folded across her chest. From her smug expression and the thunderclouds gathered behind Mark’s face, Heather could tell that she had interrupted an argument.

Mark’s face lightened as he saw her.

“I didn’t come over here to get involved in another fight,” Heather said as she walked toward him.

Mark swallowed. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Just with me,” said Jennifer.

“That’s not fair, and you know it.”

“Do I?”

Heather held up her hands. “I don’t care. Lately it seems like all we do is argue. I’m sick of it.”

Mark took a deep breath and Heather noticed the muscles in his face relax.

“Point taken.”

“So what did you want to discuss?”

Jennifer leaned forward. “He wants us to hack into the Rho Project.”

“What?”

“That’s not what I said.” Mark glared at his sister. “But we do need to talk about what is happening over there and what we should be doing about it.”

He pointed at the laptop computer that sat on the workbench. “Ever since that damn science contest, we’ve only done one thing. Leave that computer up and running so Jack and Janet could access it using the quantum twin link to their laptop. We’ve been so involved in our own problems that we’ve had our heads stuck in the sand, hoping that Jack and Janet would work a miracle and stop the Rho Project.”

Heather felt her heart rate tick up a couple of notches. “I don’t know what else we can do?”

“Besides nothing? We can get back in the game.”

Jennifer laughed. “You seem to have forgotten that we already played that game. That went really well. Head of the NSA dead. FBI director dead. President Harris dead. Jack’s team destroyed. Jack and Janet on the run. Dr. Stephenson more powerful than ever. Face it, Mark. We lost.”

“Not to mention,” said Heather, “we don’t have the Second Ship anymore. Stephenson has it.”

“I’m not saying things don’t suck. But I know this. Every second that goes by, Stephenson is making progress on that Rho Ship. And that scares the crap out of me.”

Heather stared at him. Never, in all the years she had known him, had she heard Mark admit that he was scared of anything. She could feel the probabilities swirling in the back of her mind. Something had happened to him that he wasn’t sharing.

“So what are you suggesting?”

Mark’s eyes locked with hers. “I don’t know why, but we were the ones who found the Second Ship. We were the ones it chose to change.”

“Yeah,” said Jennifer, “us and the Rag Man.”

“Mark,” Heather interrupted, “the ship probably would have changed anyone who tried on the headsets.”

“Okay. Doesn’t matter. Right now, we are it. And I think that if we don’t fight this thing, the whole planet is going to get flushed right down the toilet, just like all those worlds we watched being destroyed in the imagery on the Second Ship.”

The air of smugness left Jennifer’s face. Heather could see that, for all the bluster from her friend, Mark had struck a nerve in her too.

He moved in closer to Heather, invading her personal space in a way that focused all her attention back on his face.

“So what do your probabilities tell you?”