Opposition (Lux, #5)(39)

Something akin to pain flickered across Nancy’s face.

“Either way, they mean a lot to her, and I know where they’re being kept,” Luc explained, finishing up his last cracker. “Tell them what the bigwigs wanted, Fancy Nancy.”

She gripped the edges of the table. “After the arrival of the Luxen, I was told to dismantle the Daedalus project.”

“Dismantle?” whispered Kat, and I already knew what she meant. I think Kat did, too, but didn’t want to believe it.

“I was told to clear out the program, erase everything,” Nancy explained.

“Oh my God,” Kat murmured.

I closed my eyes. Dismantle. Erase everything. In other words, she’d been given an order from someone higher up than her in the food chain to wipe out any proof of the program. “They wanted you to kill them?”

She exhaled noisily as she nodded. “Plausible deniability, they said. That the public couldn’t know that we had not only been aware of alien life-forms but had been working with them for decades.”

“Jesus.” I rubbed a hand across my brow. “Not just the kids, right? Every Luxen who was in there of their own free will? The ones who were allowing you to do tests? And even the ones who hadn’t assimilated to your standards?”

“Yes,” she responded.

“Of course, she had no problem wiping them out. They are expendable after all, at least according to her. But those Origins?” Luc shook his head slowly. “She couldn’t do it.”

My brows rose. Did the woman have a heart somewhere in her chest?

Luc laughed as he picked up on my thoughts. “No, Daemon, she doesn’t have a heart. Not in the way a normal person would grow attached to a classroom full of little freaky, and yet oddly adorable, kids. She didn’t want all of her work to go to waste, so she moved them out of Area 51, and she thought she had them hidden.”

“But she didn’t?” Kat tucked her hair behind her ear.

He shook his head. “As I said, I’m pretty damn well connected. I know where they are and I know how badly Nancy wants to return to them when this is all over, given that any of us are still alive, and cultivate the little freaks into big freaks.”

“Like I did with you?” Nancy asked.

Luc flipped her off. “Nancy knows that if she harms one hair on any of our bodies, even looks at us in a way that I find annoying . . .”

The casual indifference that he always rocked slipped off his face like a mask falling away. He leaned forward, his eyes glowing like purple diamonds, as Nancy turned to him.

In that moment, I was seeing the Luc who caused grown men to piss themselves, the Luc I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of, and that Luc was downright disturbing-looking as his features sharpened.

“She knows I will have every single one of them killed in seconds,” he said, his voice low. “And if my people don’t hear from me, even if I can’t make it to a phone in time, they are all going to die. And then Nancy has nothing.”

Good God.

Kat stared at the kid like she’d never seen him before.

There was no doubt in my mind that Luc was capable of doing something like that. As messy and wrong as it was, he’d do it, but I also didn’t believe that he’d ever let those kids fall back into Nancy’s hands.

And I wondered if she really believed that. Then again, what choice did she have? “Why didn’t you just kill her?” I asked.

“We kind of need her,” Archer explained. “At least, we need the government, someplace safe until . . . well, hopefully there’s an ‘until’ and not a forever. We also needed to get you all out and we—”

“As freaking awesome as we are,” Luc threw out, slipping back into the not-so-disturbing Origin mafioso.

Archer sent him a bland look. “Going up against that many Luxen would prove difficult. Right now, she’s a necessary evil.”

“And boy, do we mean evil.” Luc grinned.

Sitting back, I thrust my hand through my hair. Looked like Luc had Nancy on a leash. There was so much running through my head.

“What now?” Kat asked, drawing my stare. “We need to get Dee away from them.”

That made me want to get her name tattooed on my freaking forehead.

“And we need to find a way to stop what is happening, what—”

And that made me want to lock her in a closet or something.

“What you need is rest and probably something to eat,” Archer jumped in, glancing at me. “Both of you. That is the priority.”

“There are things that are going down. Stuff I’m sure Nancy will be happy to share with you, but that’s for a different day.” Luc reached over, patting Nancy’s hand like she was a small child. “But there’s something else she does need to tell you.”

Nancy’s jaw jutted out.

I smirked. “I doubt there’s anything she can tell me I’ll give a crap about.”

“Actually.” Luc drew out the word. “I think you and Katy will care about this.”

Kat tensed. “What now?”

“Tell them,” he goaded, and when Nancy didn’t speak, he said in a hard voice, “Tell them the truth.”

Oh shit. My stomach took a drop off the deep end. “The truth about what?”