“We were not involved until Penny went missing.”
Which didn’t mean they weren’t on the government payroll now. “How long ago did the attack happen?”
“Four months ago. She was the fourteenth child taken.”
Fourteenth child. I closed my eyes again, fighting back the fury. I couldn’t get involved. I really couldn’t. But that didn’t stop my asking, “Why would wraiths kill the parents and snatch the children? That’s not the way they usually operate.”
“If we knew what they were up to,” Jonas said, his voice dark, “we might actually have some chance of stopping them.”
“Meaning the other missing children weren’t with Penny?”
“No. She somehow escaped wherever she was being held,” Nuri said heavily. “And contacted me via dreams only two days ago.”
If Penny was also a seeker—and the fact she’d contacted Nuri via dreams suggested that was very much the case—then it certainly explained how she’d known my name and what I was. She’d simply plucked the information from the emotive swirl of my thoughts. Or maybe even from the ghosts—after all, as a seeker she could both see and communicate with them, and the younger children might not have been aware of the dangers in telling her.
“And she can’t tell you anything about where she was kept or what they were doing?”
“Nothing. She has no memory of that time, beyond what she has already told you.”
“So what is it, exactly, you want me to do?”
Nuri contemplated me for a moment, and unease swept through me. I didn’t like that look. Didn’t like the sharpening of anger radiating from the shifter.
“There’s one thing Penny probably didn’t tell you,” she said eventually. “Her parents weren’t killed at night, but rather the middle of the day.”
“Impossible,” I said immediately. If there were two truths in this world, it was that neither vampire nor Other could stand the touch of the sun.
“So we’d all thought,” she agreed. “But the truth cannot be denied. We are dealing with a new breed of wraith. One that has gained full immunity to the sun.”
Chapter 4
“Impossible,” I repeated. “If the Others have somehow gained such immunity, they would have swarmed the surface by now.”
“True,” Nuri said. “Which suggests this immunity is not widespread. And we also think it is not a natural development.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because Penny is not what she once was.”
Meaning that uneasy sense of wrongness I’d been getting every time I’d studied her hadn’t been so far off the mark. But if that were the case, why hadn’t the ghosts reacted to her? If there had been something deeply wrong with her, they should have, because ghosts were innately sensitive to the energy output of others.
“Again, I have to ask why you’d think that.”
“There is a darkness in her spirit that was not there two years ago. And because Penny’s family, like many others who now lie dead, signed up for a lucrative drug-testing program at that time.”
My frowned deepened. “Why would any family risk their lives testing unknown drugs?”
“Because it generally isn’t much of a risk. The drugs have usually undergone years of exhaustive testing, and these types of rollouts are usually the last step before release.”
“And because it pays a lot of money,” Jonas added. “Many of the families involved were living on the edge of poverty.”
“If they were living on the edge of poverty, they wouldn’t have been in Central.” They would have been in Chaos. From what I’d seen over the years, those in charge had little time or patience for those who did not pay their way.
“A statement that shows how little you know of life in Central,” Nuri murmured. “And Chaos is certainly not filled with her refugees or outcasts. It is filled with the free.”
I blinked. “You mean, people willingly live here? They choose this place over the safety of cities like Central?”
“There are worse things in this world than the vampires and Others, and many of them hide under the veil of civility and lights.” She waved a hand. “But that is neither here nor there, and does not alter the facts of what has happened.”