Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

‘Off to bed with you. And me.’ Gonzalez smiled as an equally big yawn stretched his own face.

‘Yes, sir,’ Ingram replied, but she didn’t move, and her eyes focused on something only she could see. Gonzalez watched her in silence for a few seconds, letting the idea hatch before prompting her.

‘What is it, Aisha?’

‘You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? From the beginning, when the bodies started appearing in the Rhône, you knew. Everyone just shrugged, thinking it was just Leeches being Leeches, but you knew long before they found the Valentino girl that something more was going on. You weren’t surprised to find connections high up in the Central Police Inspectorate and among Cassandra’s CEOs, were you?’

Gonzalez sighed loudly, considering his answer. He had infinite trust in the integrity of one Major Aisha Toscano, but life had taught him that the need-to-know rule really had its uses. It protected everyone involved by providing them with plausible deniability. Should he fail to clear his name when the dust settled, no amount of drugs could squeeze out of his subordinates what they did not know in the first place.

At the same time, in case something did happen to him, it was about time to make sure Toscano was ready to take over.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I knew that the Central Police Inspectorate was involved and supported by corrupt officers from Military Command and the government. Not in a hard-evidence kind of way, but I did know. As for Cassandra… I had suspicions of their involvement the moment we discovered that the best VR expert in the Alliance was one of their freelance developers. Grab us some coffee before I go any further.’

No jibe about the bitter sludge and sugar told Ingram it wasn’t the time for jokes, and she simply nodded. When she returned a couple of minutes later, a mug of steaming coffee in each hand, Gonzalez relocated from the desk onto one of the comfortable armchairs and Ingram settled herself on the plush cushions as well.

‘You know I dropped out of Cairo’s Nano-Tech Academy to join the military halfway through my last year?’ he asked, starting the story at the very beginning, and she nodded. ‘It all sounded wonderfully patriotic in the final months of the Freedom Wars, when things looked hopeless so no one questioned my motives. A year or two later I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to ditch two and half years of academic studies, but back then the military welcomed me. My dad was furious, of course, but it was my choice. I was twenty, so I didn’t need my parents’ permission.

‘There were a lot of reasons why I did it, but the final straw was a conversation I overheard from my dad’s office. Then Brigadier General, now Lieutenant General Pepe Roberto van den Berg, who chairs the Military Committee on Nano-Programming Research, paid him a visit. Nothing unusual per se—there were high-ranking Elite officers in and out of the house my entire childhood…’ Gonzalez paused, squinting his eyes at memories so vivid they could have been from yesterday.

‘He was arguing with my dad. Threatening him with life in the slums, for his whole family, if he ever betrayed them. I have never heard my dad sound so terrified. All those years I had the impression that the Elite officers were buying his advice, treating him as the authority he was in the nano-programming industry, but that day I understood it was all the other way around. He was working for them, helping them weaponise the nano-tech.

‘That day I understood that he was being blackmailed to work for them. And that it would be me the moment I took over the family business.

‘The military was never supposed to have that kind of power over their civilian contractors, and it freaked me out. Maybe I was a naive twenty-year-old or maybe my head was just full of patriotic ideas… but I decided I would much rather be the one with the power to order other people around than have some damn general threatening my family. Given my family name, a long and profitable career in the military was a given, so I dropped out of academia.

‘I started snooping around my house before leaving for the training camp. I guess even back then intelligence gathering was in my nature. I found the photo van den Berg had used to blackmail my dad. It was a body, no different than all those Leeches that have been pulled out of the Rhône the last few months. Similar type of violent trauma. I didn’t know what it meant at first. More snooping led me to believe they were going to frame my father for the murder. That didn’t make much sense—our family was too strong to roll over—but I couldn’t find a better theory.

‘What I did find a good answer for was how the nano-programming research got so far so fast under my father’s leadership.’ Ingram noticed with curiosity how he had stopped referring to his male parent as ‘dad’ and begun to use the more formal and distant ‘father’, but she didn’t interrupt to comment. ‘They were experimenting on Leeches. Those that flunked out of basic and were still in working condition were hauled into his labs. They wanted faster results from my father and provided him with a steady stream of “volunteers”. That photo was probably one of the subjects who didn’t make it.

‘I didn’t know what to make of it. In a way, I understand exactly what Ms Moretti must have felt when we spelled it out for her. I always knew Leeches had it tough, and I always pitied them, but I never realised until that day that their misery was the doing of the Elite, rather than because they were so inept that they brought it upon themselves.’ He paused, locking eyes with Ingram. Letting her see the shame of his own youthful