“I’m not sure that means what you think it does.”
“Forget all this fighting. We can do anything.” She jumped up on the bed. “We have money; we have powers; we can—Ah!”
Isabela lost her balance as the bed shifted weirdly beneath her feet. She would’ve fallen off, but Caleb hopped forward and she braced herself on his shoulder.
“A waterbed,” Isabela declared, stomping down on the rippling mattress. “How ridiculous. Now we know that this man is evil.”
Isabela pushed off Caleb’s shoulder and navigated the bed’s waves until she stood on the pillows directly beneath the painting. She flipped her knife into an overhand grip.
“He must have had this made special, yes? What do you think he asked for? Sistine Chapel but for a horny loser?”
Caleb cracked a smile and tried to think up a joke. He wasn’t the best when it came to riffing, especially not with Isabela. Before he could formulate something witty, Isabela slashed her knife through the canvas. Caleb cringed.
“I mean, someone did spend time painting that . . . ,” he said weakly.
“Yes, and they got paid and then probably spent a week washing their eyeballs.” Isabela flopped into a sitting position, the motion ‘accidentally’ plunging her knife into the waterbed. She left it there, a steady trickle of water bubbling up around the handle. “Oops.”
“So, we’re vandals now,” Caleb said. “That’s what we left Earth Garde for.”
She stood up and gently slapped his cheek, her fingers still sticky from the nectarine. “I don’t know why you left,” Isabela said. “Me? I was tired of being told what to do. You might not want to admit it, but I think you like this too.” She gave the leaking bed an emphatic kick. “You’re tired of orders. But you have that little thing inside—a conscience or whatever—it keeps telling you that you need to do something important. The sooner you stop listening to that, the happier you’ll be.”
Once again, Caleb’s mind filled with half-formed sentences, none of which would do as responses to Isabela. His mouth hung open and he made a conscious effort to snap it shut so that he wouldn’t look like a total idiot. Isabela didn’t notice. She had already started across the room, towards the attached bathroom.
“Did you check in here?” she asked over her shoulder as she nudged open the door.
“No, not yet. I—”
Isabela’s shriek cut him off. Caleb jolted forward, pushing into the bathroom right behind her. He half expected to find some Foundation assassin lurking in the shower or a bomb affixed to the shimmering bidet. But there was no threat at all.
There was only a Jacuzzi.
Isabela clutched his arm. “Are you seeing this? I think it has a whirlpool.” She brushed her fingers through her hair. “Do you know how greasy I feel cooped up on that spaceship?”
She didn’t look greasy to Caleb. As usual, her skin was perfect, her hair flawless. But then, that was all thanks to Isabela’s shape-shifting Legacy. Caleb had seen Isabela’s true form, the burn scars that she’d gotten in an accident before the invasion. He squinted at her, trying to see through her façade. Could she really be so cynical about their situation? Would he really be happier if he ignored the tug of his conscience and went full-on YOLO like Isabela recommended? Was he even capable of that? Did people still say YOLO? Even thinking that acronym gave him anxiety.
Isabela unzipped the Jacuzzi’s cover and shoved it aside. She turned on the jets, steam immediately rising. The gold inlaid wall-to-wall mirrors over the sink began to fog up. She reached around to her hip and unzipped her skirt, shimmying out of it in the same fluid motion as she began peeling off her shirt.
Caleb gulped.
She glanced over her shoulder at Caleb like she’d totally forgotten him, although that was obviously just another one of her games.
“Coming in?” she asked, one arm draped demurely across her chest.
“No, uh, I—”
“Then shut the door,” she said with a wave. “You’re letting in the cold.”
His cheeks hot, Caleb backed out of the room. As he closed the door behind him, he swore he could hear Isabela laughing over the bubbling tub.
“Seriously, dude? That’s your decision?”
A duplicate stood next to Caleb. When had he gotten loose?
“Remember when she made out with us on the beach?” the duplicate asked. “That was dope.”
“I remember,” Caleb said. “Shut up.”
Caleb absorbed the duplicate and went in search of Ran and the rest who, hopefully, were all fully clothed. He found most of them gathered downstairs in the villa’s expansive living room—or maybe the rich guy who lived here called it something fancy like a “parlor” or a “salon.” Whatever. There was a big-screen TV mounted on one wall, an endless leather sectional and a bar. That made it a living room, no matter how many nude sculptures stood watch around the edges.
Duanphen nodded at Caleb as he walked into the room. She sat at the bar, her long legs crossed, idly scratching her fingers across the dark stubble growing in on her once clean-shaven scalp. In the time Caleb had been traveling with her, Duanphen hadn’t said much. She was difficult to read, seemingly content to go with the flow. Like Isabela, she seemed happy just to be out of her past life and in the world uncontrolled. Even seated, there was a readiness about her, like she could snap into action at a moment’s notice.
“Find anything?” she asked Caleb.
He shook his head. “You guys?”
Duanphen dragged her finger across the bar, making a squiggle in the dust. “This man has been gone for weeks. Even the maid stopped coming.”
“Another dead end,” Caleb said with a sigh. “What should we—?”
“Morons! Liars!”
Caleb and Duanphen both turned at the shout. Across the room, Einar paced back and forth behind the couch. He pushed a hand through his hair and left a tuft sticking up. The Icelandic boy had seemed so fastidious when Caleb first saw him in his collection of expensive dress shirts and slacks, but since Switzerland he had stopped taking so much pride in his appearance. Back in Greece, when they rested at the abandoned mansion, Caleb had walked in on Einar ironing one of his shirts. Lost in thought, he’d let the iron linger too long and left a brown scorch mark on the sleeve. Then, he’d thrown the appliance at the wall. Caleb had left the room before Einar noticed him watching.
“I thought we agreed to not let him watch TV,” Caleb said.
“You try to stop him,” Duanphen said lazily.
The big screen was tuned to the BBC. There was Einar, speaking directly into the camera, his unblinking gaze either passionate or unhinged, depending on your interpretation. Caleb had seen this clip before. He’d been there when it was filmed. The video was captured on Isabela’s cell phone right before the battle broke out. They had never discussed uploading it to YouTube; Einar had gone ahead and done that without asking permission, snagging Isabela’s cell phone while the rest of them slept. He’d expected his speech to be a call to revolution for the Garde suffering under repressive regimes—Foundation or otherwise—around the world.
“This is how we do it. By banding together. By not abiding by any law they pass to control us. We will not be their pawns. They will not be our masters,” the Einar on-screen ranted.