Burn for Me (Hidden Legacy #1)(19)

Forty-five minutes later, when I finally pulled in front of the warehouse, I was tired of the question marks and thinking in circles. And I was really hungry. The moment I stepped into the hallway, the scent of freshly baked biscuits, barbecue sauce, and spicy meat swirled around me. Cinnamon, garlic, cumin . . . mmmm. I pulled my shoes off and let the scent carry me into the kitchen. A note and two plates with pulled pork and biscuits waited for me on the island. The note said, “Nevada, I called it an early night. Help yourself and please take a plate to your grandmother or she’ll forget to eat again.”

My mother called it an early night when she missed Dad and didn’t want us to see her cry. I understood. It was five years, but I missed Dad, too. I could close my eyes and imagine him rummaging through the pantry, complaining that someone ate the steak he’d been saving and he was now reduced to eating unnatural things like salad and croutons. Mom was always the hard one. When Dad was around, she laughed. She still laughed now. Just not as often.

I gobbled up my food, rinsed the plate, stuck it into the dishwasher, and took the second plate and a glass of iced tea to the back of the warehouse. Once you passed through the main wall, no hint of our living space remained. It was all motor pool: sealed concrete floor polished to a shiny dark smoothness, tools on the walls, armored vehicles, some with small guns, some with tanklike barrels, crouching in the gloom, and the Grandma smell: gas, engine oil, and gunpowder.

A midsize armored track vehicle sat in the middle of the floor, bathed in the glow of the floodlights. Grandma Frida’s skinny legs in jeans stuck out from under the vehicle. To the right, Arabella lounged on the gutted shell of a Humvee covered by a dark green tarp. I had grown up just like this. When I would get home after school, Mom and Dad would still be gone, so I’d grab a snack and go hang out with Grandma in her shop. You could tell Grandma anything. She said that vehicles spoke to her if she let them. Children did too. She never judged, and even if you cursed or admitted to doing something terminally stupid, she would never tell Mom and Dad. I vented most of my fears and worries here. Then it was Bern’s and Catalina’s turn, then Arabella’s and Leon’s. We all were busy now, so we didn’t visit as much, but at least once a week one of us would end up hanging out here, spilling our guts and shaking our fists.

“Dinner!” I called.

Arabella scooted further up the tarp. She looked glum. Something didn’t go well at school.

Grandma slid from under the vehicle and sat up. “Grub. Yes. Hungry.”

I handed her the plate and nodded at the vehicle. “What’s his name?”

“Thiago.” Grandma touched the metal. Her eyes grew distant for a second—her magic making the connection to the inner workings Thiago’s engine. “Wolf-Spider class. He seems like a Thiago to me.”

Mech-mages like my grandmother were rare. Some made guns, others worked in civil engineering, but all shared a magical connection to things of metal and moving parts. For Grandma Frida, it was armored things that moved. It didn’t matter if they rolled, crawled, or floated. She lived and breathed the deep-voiced rumble of their engines and the smoky odor of their guns. Tanks, field artillery track vehicles, personnel carriers, she loved them all. Luckily, many of the Houses maintained private security forces, and she had a steady supply of clients.

“Is your mom okay?” Grandma asked. “She was in a funk earlier.”

“She’s fine,” I told her. “She just misses Dad, that’s all. I’ve got a question for you.”

“Shoot!” Grandma said.

“In the military, how do they keep mages in line? If one of them snaps, wouldn’t they nuke their whole unit?”

“Shockers,” Grandma Frida said. “Also referred to as joy buzzers, the shakers, squid shivers.”

“Squid shivers?”

“A squid is a navy grunt,” Grandma said. “The navy was the first to use the shockers, because it quickly found out that mages and ships don’t always mix well.”

Made sense. If you set fire to the ship or summon a swarm of poisonous flies, there was nowhere to go.

“It’s some kind of device they implant into your arms. Completely invisible from the outside, but it lets you shock anyone with magic. Hurts you like hell, but it hurts whoever you grab even more. Seriously nasty gadgets. People used to die from those.”

“People who got shocked?” I wondered if Mad Rogan ever got shocked . . . okay, I needed to stop obsessing over those eyes. I was a freshman in high school when that recording was made. He probably didn’t even look the same anymore. He definitely wasn’t the same nineteen-year-old. He’d been through six years of war. War chewed people up and spat out the gristle. If I kept going this way, I’d end up on Herald, trawling for Mad Rogan fanfic. We made love as the city fell around us, raining down concrete in chunks of despair . . . Yeah, right.

Grandma nodded. “The shocked and people who did the shocking. A shock works two ways. First, you have to prime it with your own magic, and only then it hits the other guy as you make contact. It sucks a good chunk out. If it takes too much magic, your body gives out and it’s curtains. First generation of trials had a mortality rate of over thirty percent. By the time Penelope enlisted, they had done a lot better with them. You wouldn’t believe the stuff they’ve got now. I know a guy who can implant one.”