The Brightest Night (Origin 3)

Lonely.

The only person I really knew here was Zoe—Grayson didn’t count—and she had gone to catch up with Cekiah, and I missed Heidi and James. I had no idea how James was doing back at home with all of us gone. What would happen to him if the Daedalus did end up releasing the flu on a wide scale? Had he gotten vaccinated? I couldn’t remember, and there was no way to reach out to warn him.

With that thought, I scooped out another spoonful of peanut butter smoothness and shoved it into my mouth.

Wait. How old was this peanut butter anyway?

It tasted fine, but if it belonged to the previous owners, I didn’t think it had a four-year shelf life. Maybe it had been picked up on one of the supply runs. Frowning, I lifted the jar until I found the stamped “best by” date was over a year ago.

I glanced from the jar to the half-full spoon, shrugged, and then thrust that spoon right back in my mouth.

I ate only one more spoonful before I felt I should possibly leave some for Luc. Forcing myself to put the peanut butter down, I was about to investigate the closed-up spare bedrooms when I felt the weird tingle of awareness along the back of my neck. Frowning, I turned toward the front door. Not even two heartbeats later, someone knocked on it.

Zoe would’ve just walked right in, and Luc had no reason to knock, so I was full of curiosity as I all but bum-rushed the door, throwing it open.

Dee Black stood there, her long black hair tucked up in a bun that would rival Zoe’s in terms of neatness.

Her blue jeans were splattered with something brown.

Dee’s emerald-green eyes followed my gaze, and she laughed. “I look a mess. I know. I was trying to melt chocolate chips with my hands.” She waved them. “Microwave hands courtesy of extraterrestrial awesomeness.”

I blinked slowly. “You can do that? Cook food with the Source?”

“Well, pretty much anyone except me can. Every time I try to do anything outside of boiling eggs, it goes south fast, evident in the fact I’m covered in dried chocolate. I heated it too fast, and it sort of exploded,” she explained. “No matter what, do not let Luc or anyone else try to convince you that Source-cooked meat tastes good.”

“It doesn’t?” I heard myself ask as I tried not to gawk at her so openly … and failed.

“Oh no. No. It tastes like meat cooked with charged air, and while that doesn’t sound all that bad, it is. There’s no amount of seasonings that can cover that burned ozone taste.”

“Okay.” I felt myself nodding.

“Anyway.” She smiled brightly. “I was sent over here to retrieve you. Kat wants to talk to you.”

“She does?”

Dee nodded. “Yes. And she’s super-pregnant, as you already know, and you don’t tell a woman that pregnant no.”

Completely dazzled by Dee, I found myself walking into Daemon and Kat’s house a few minutes later, not even remembering the short walk or if I had even agreed. The fact I was so, well, starstruck by Dee had everything to do with what her easy smile and somewhat flippant attitude hid. Dee was incredibly intelligent and possessed a quick wit that enabled her to spend many evenings from a secured location outside of Zone 3, arguing with bigoted idiots like Senator Freeman on TV without losing her cool. Not only that, she was remarkably brave, becoming the public face for all the Luxen. There couldn’t be one person in the United States who wouldn’t recognize her. I was sure she had a lot of fans.

I was also sure she had a lot of enemies.

Zoe had been right. I had a total crush on Dee.

She led me through a living room that was free of creepy angel paintings but looked like a bookstore. Neat piles of books were everywhere—on the media console that must’ve housed a TV at some point, stacked in towers on either side. Books were piled on either side of the couch and the gray recliner, and the rest of the space was nothing but rows of mismatched bookshelves, some tall and some white, others short and deep brown, and all of them bursting with books. I’d never seen so many books in one room before.

“Kat is a big reader,” Dee said, noticing what I was staring at. “No one touches her books without permission. If she lets you borrow any of them, that means she likes you, but you’d better return that book back to her in pristine condition.”

Considering I dog-eared pages all the time, I kept my grubby fingers to myself as we walked down a similar narrow hall to the bedroom at the end. Curtains were lashed to the sides of open windows, allowing sunlight to pour into the room. The breeze kept the room cool, giving it an open and airy feeling.