The Plague Forge [ARC] Read Online Free PDF Page A

table it, all right?”
    “Okay,” Skyler said. Absently he rubbed his shoulder. Old wound, old habit. “Well, um. I’m glad you’re not dead. How’s the food in this place?”
    She laughed, and a bit of the vigor he’d seen so often before returned to her cheeks and her eyes.
    A few seconds of silence passed. Tania sat there, studying her hands. Then she closed her eyes. At the same instant, her hands clasped together. “I have to tell you something, and there’s no easy way to do it.”
    “This always leads to a fun conversation.”
    “Just … listen. And try to withhold judgment.” She took a breath, exhaled, and looked at him with absolute sincerity. “There’s only one more Builder event.”
    He’d expected, well, anything but that. “Pardon?”
    “After this ship’s arrival, there’s only one event left in this … sequence.”
    “How can you possibly know that?”
    “Because,” she said, and paused. Another deep breath.
    Skyler felt a tingle ripple across his scalp and down the center of his back. The room seemed to go totally silent.
    “It would seem,” Tania said, “that Neil Platz knew more than he was letting on.”
    The tingle became an outright chill. Before he could ask the next question, she held up a hand and went on.
    “He sent a note to Zane, just before he died. Literally, as Warthen’s men were storming Platz Station. We only found it recently. According to the letter, Neil knew all along. Neil and my father.”
    “He—wait, your father?”
    She’d closed her eyes again, and nodded solemnly. “Listen for a moment. I’m tired.”
    “Okay.”
    “All the note said, all I know, is that they knew. Somehow, they knew, because something happened before the Darwin Elevator arrived. An earlier event that, at least at some level, explained what was going to happen.”
    Skyler felt a flood of realizations pour into his mind from every angle, as if everything that had happened since the moment he left Amsterdam were disconnected pieces of the same puzzle, and Tania had just shown him a glimpse of the picture the pieces were supposed to form once joined. “He fucking knew?”
    “Don’t judge—”
    “Don’t judge ? He knew about the Elevator and built an empire around it? Nightcliff and the water plants and all that. All those aerospace companies he bought up. He, Jesus, he fucking knew about SUBS and didn’t warn anybody?”
    “Stop.”
    Her voice hit him like a whip, snapping his mouth shut.
    “You’re not just talking about Neil: You’re talking about my father. And we don’t know what exactly they knew, except the number. Six events, Skyler, and we just experienced the fifth.”
    He had more to say. A lot more. But the look in her eyes, and the memory of her brush with death, pulled him back from that precipice. He stared into those eyes, the deep brown with flecks of gold, and felt one final revelation, one more piece of the puzzle, click into place. All of that business in Japan and Hawaii had been bullshit. Neil had already known what they would find; he just didn’t want to expose that fact. No other explanation made sense. Which meant he’d sent Tania into mortal danger, and Jake to his death, to keep his secret. He’d known. It was, quite possibly, the most brazen example of insider trading in history, and like so many bankers and politicians before him, Neil had clearly gone to great lengths to cover it up. Only when faced with certain death or capture had he bothered to tell anyone. Despite the plea in Tania’s eyes, Skyler couldn’t bring himself to suspend judgment. He knew better than to tell her that, though.
    “Thank you,” he said, “for telling me. It makes things easier.”
    “How so?”
    “A light at the end of the tunnel.” Tania didn’t look convinced, so he tried a different tack. “Can you imagine if Neil had said ‘there’s eighty-seven events, just eighty-two more to go!’ No offense, but I probably would have thrown up my hands