Sphere: Blackwood Security Book 9.5

make Bradley drive back.”
“You can’t. Sam and I have dinner reservations tomorrow, and if Bradley plays chauffeur, we’ll still be somewhere around Fredericksburg.”
“Fine, then I’ll have to settle for coffee.”
Bradley ran out of the house once more, and this time he was wearing sparkly pink hi-tops and matching sunglasses. I was half-surprised he hadn’t changed his hair colour as well, but that was still turquoise.
“Can we go now?” I yelled out of the Porsche’s window. I’d borrowed my husband’s Cayenne. He didn’t need it today because when Bradley suggested he might like to tag along, he’d helicoptered to the airfield and flown to Barcelona. Coward. Now the Porsche had a custom-made hot-pink leather baby seat installed in the back—courtesy of Bradley, of course—and I had a good mind to leave it there as a punishment.
“Yes, but if you’re going to be snippy, then I’ll ride with Mack.”
Ana settled back in her seat and adjusted her aviators. “Good. Snippiness rules.”
In the rear-view mirror, Tabby mimicked her mother with her own Babiators, and I suppressed a shudder. I loved my niece, don’t get me wrong, but…yeah. She wasn’t a normal child. Kids scared me, I freely admitted that, but Tabby was a weird cross between a mini mercenary and a toddler, and I was never quite sure how to handle her.
Half of my little group of friends had kids now. I had a feeling Mack would soon join the club as well. That would leave me and Sofia as the only two non-moms, but Sofia had just connected with her long-lost brother, and he lived overseas, so she was travelling quite a bit. Which left me a little…not lonely, exactly, but I felt as if people were moving on without me. We’d always be there for each other, of that I was certain, and of course I was happy that they were happy, but still… Perhaps that was the real reason I was going today. I didn’t want to get left behind while their lives changed for good.

CHAPTER 2
AT THE PARK’S main gate, a bored-looking teenager in a SciPark baseball cap charged us a fortune, then issued us with paper maps.
“There’s an app too,” he told us in a monotone speech he’d obviously given a thousand times. “Your Wi-Fi password’s printed on your ticket, and the audio tour’s available in thirteen different languages.”
Thirteen? Couldn’t they have added one more to avoid bad luck? If I’d known what was to come, perhaps I’d have taken that as a sign. But since I’d left my crystal ball at home, I trailed into the park oblivious, hanging back as Bradley bounded on ahead in a silver jumpsuit that probably cost me a thousand bucks.
According to the map, the park was laid out in a series of concentric circles, nine of them, kind of like Dante’s Inferno except the middle was dominated by a giant silver sphere rather than a lake of ice. There were over six hundred exhibits. No way would we get through everything in one day, but I wasn’t about to mention that to Bradley because he’d probably check us into a hotel and then we’d be stuck there forever.
“What do you want to do first, guys?” Dan asked, her question aimed at her three boys. When she adopted ten-year-old Race not so long ago, his two older buddies had come as part of the package. Nobody minded. Before the trio crossed paths with Blackwood, they’d spent most of their time getting into trouble on the streets, the result of parents who just didn’t care. Now Trick, the eldest at fifteen, spent most of his spare time hanging out in Dan’s boyfriend’s recording studio, Vine had recently discovered baseball, and Race—or Caleb if one was to use his actual name, which Dan tended to—liked to come to the office. We’d given him a desk next to Dan’s, and he must have had the best grades in school considering the amount of help he got with his homework. They’d turned out to be good kids, even if their morals could be questionable at times. None of us were in a position to judge them for that. So far today, they’d been taking care of Josh, even though he was seven years old and probably ruined their street cred.
Dan was the only one of us who looked vaguely happy to be at SciPark. Probably because the three older boys could fend for themselves, meaning she was ready to hit the non-alcoholic cocktails at ten in the morning. On any other day, Carmen might have been okay with the trip as well, but her new rifle had been delivered yesterday, and I knew what she’d rather be doing.
“Can we see the dinosaurs?” Josh asked, and everyone else shrugged.
Jurassic Park it wasn’t. Live dinosaurs would have been an interesting spectacle, but these were all made of plastic and the ones that did move just jerked around on the spot while roars sounded through loudspeakers.
“How do they know what dinosaurs sounded like?” Race asked.
Good question, and I had no idea of the answer. It wasn’t something I needed to know in my line of work. Perhaps if I ever had to go undercover as a palaeontologist… Thankfully, Mack and Dr. Google were on the case.
“Okay, so nobody actually does know what dinosaurs sounded like. Scientists just guess based on the shape of their nasal and throat passages.” She scrolled down farther on her tablet. “In fact, they think a T-Rex made a low rumble, and birds honked rather than sang.”
“Then why don’t these pterodactyls honk?”
“Do you know how many guns there are in America?” I asked. “If we had to put up with constant honking, somebody would shoot the things.”
“But the sign at the entrance said no guns are allowed inside the park?”
Ah, such innocence. I glanced at Ana, and she smirked back. Dan obviously hadn’t corrupted her son completely yet.
“Why don’t we