Daughter of Zeus ✔

20.4

At first, Darcy seemed fine with her new living arrangements. She and Ada would sit and talk for hours, a rarity in the age of interfaces, or they would practice honing the skills she inherited as a Corentin. Ada taught her sister the ritual of purge. Shylar heard surprise when Ada told him what she'd learned.

Darcy's electric manipulation was much stronger than Ada's. She was able to shoot electric arcs several hundred feet in front of her. The true limit of her ability had not been fully tested because their practice area was the townhome next to Kressick's. It was a location they could trust was without State surveillance equipment.

"Two townhomes. I thought Kressick was just playing the part of excessive Prominent," Ada said to Shylar.

"He had plenty of money, and he liked his privacy. It wasn't about excess."

Her footsteps echoed in the 5,000 square foot space. "Seems damn excessive to me. But it does make for a great practice area."

One afternoon, Darcy asked Shylar a random question, but it he suspected it wasn't really random at all. "What are the Sammies going to do with my father?

"First, they'll try to use him as an operative. If that fails, he'll be studied for potential military applications." It wasn't in Shylar's personality, even before the re-wire, to put things delicately.

Her face fell. "You mean dissected?"

"Yes."

A few days into the sisterly bonding and training, Darcy began to change her attitude for the worst. Instead of talking to Ada, she would call her mother. When she did talk to Ada, she would try to bring up Moretz. Ada shut her down by snapping at her or ignoring her. Shylar, with his unbiased point of view, could see where the present course of events was moving toward. He watched and waited.

His waiting came to a halt during dinner on the fifth night of their stay in the townhome. After dinner, the two women had gone to the other townhome for training. Customarily, they would be gone for two hours or more, but this time they re-appeared in Kressick's living room ten minutes after leaving.

Ada walked through the front doorway of the dissipating door looking angry. Darcy followed, and he could see they were in the middle of an argument that had cut their training short.

"Why won't you even consider it?" Darcy yelled at Ada's back.

"Let's just say I had a different childhood than you did."

Ada put up the dissipating barrier in her bedroom to end the debate.

With slumped shoulders, Darcy stood at the door. The barrier remained, and she walked away to join Shylar on the living room couch. He didn't speak, and neither did Darcy. In mock concentration, he flipped through the virtual pages projected from his wristlet. She threw a pillow at him, which he caught with one hand without looking up.

"Nice job pretending not to see that," she said.

"I'm here to protect, not to judge."

They sat in silence. In the background, he could hear Ada slamming drawers around in her bedroom.

Darcy tried initiating another exchange. "She hates him so much."

"Yes, she does."

The him in her sentence did not need to be elaborated upon.

"Why does she hate him?"

Shylar kept quiet.

"You know, I know you do! You know everything."

"You're family." He was wired to be honest, but something held him back on this. "You should work it out between yourselves."

"Tell me, you goddamn robot!"

He commanded himself not to grin. The more time Darcy and Ada spent together, the more their shared traits became obvious. They were two women who had no trouble being rude or name- calling when they were angry. The urge to smile disappeared when he thought about how best to explain Ada's dislike of Moretz. It was a delicate subject, and if Shylar explained it fully to Darcy, it would forever change her view of her father.

Limiting his use of euphemisms, he quickly highlighted the abuse Ada suffered at the hands of Moretz.

While he spoke, Darcy began to cry and shake her head. "No, that's not true. He never touched me."

She was rationalizing. Moretz hadn't touched her, and so he couldn't have touched Ada.

"His political career put him under more scrutiny than he was used to later in life," Shylar said. "He held himself back. Are you sure there was never an instance when you felt uncomfortable with him?"

She continued to shake her head, but her eyes said something different.

~*~