Free The Rule of Luck by Catherine Cerveny Page A

looked back up at Petriv. His bland face looked like it could potentially become a scowl. Wonderful. First I insulted him personally, then I insulted his culture’s food. Nothing for it but to keep plunging forward. “So, the Consortium wants the contract.”
    He took a long swallow from his glass, then gazed into it as if deciding what to say. “Yes, but it will be difficult. TransWorld has a flawless record: zero incidents for the entirety of their five-year contract. When shuttling human cargo between Mars and Earth, the slightest mishap can be catastrophic. For the organization in charge, the result is complete ruin. As admirable as TransWorld’s record may be, our intel suggests their business model is not entirely ethical. If we can expose their methodology as the situation warrants, we win the contract.”
    “How does my mother factor into this?”
    “She heads TransWorld’s Research and Development department.”
    That brought me up short. I rested my spoon in the bowl. “My mother works for TransWorld? I always thought…I mean…This is confusing.”
    “In what way?”
    I frowned, not sure where to start. “Families have stories and legends. In mine, my parents were the doomed fairy tale. Love at first sight, married within a few weeks of meeting. They applied to the Shared Hope program and had me nine months later. My mother went back to school to finish her geology degree. She received a grant to study the rock formations on Mars. We were all supposed to go. Instead, she supposedly died in a mining accident during a work placement in Chile. My father went crazy at the loss and was declared mentally unstable, and I was raised by my paternal great-grandmother and grandmother.” I stopped there, feeling like I’d reopened a wound I’d believed was already healed. “Why would she lie?”
    “I don’t know, Ms. Sevigny.” Petriv put down his glass and met my eyes across the table. “I don’t know why parents do the things they do to their children.”
    I looked away, afraid I would cry—the last thing I wanted to do in front of him. I picked up my spoon again, promptly fumbled it, and then watched as it bounced across the table and onto the floor, splattering soup on the red linen tablecloth. Mortified, I leaned down to pick it up. Petriv caught my wrist, stopping me.
    “Leave it. You don’t approve of it anyway. It’s no loss.” He pushed the bread basket toward me.
    His kindness unnerved me. Crime lords weren’t supposed to be kind. Kindness might make me think he was a real human being. I took a slice of bread and tried to recover. “What does my mother do for TransWorld?”
    “Monique is one of the world’s leading geneticists and was once at the forefront of Modified Human research. I need to unravel how TransWorld applies her work to their transit program.”
    “Space travel and genetics don’t seem like they go together.”
    “No? What if it were easier for humans to travel through the tri-system? Right now, our reach goes no farther than Jupiter. What if we were better able to survive the cold vacuum of space? Suppose we could enter self-sustained hibernation for weeks or months at a time? We could extend our grasp to the outer edge of the solar system. Her research looks into all these aspects and more, I suspect.”
    Shit, my mother was a genius. Could that explain why she’d left? I tried to imagine such a woman thriving in my tech-averse family and couldn’t. But to fake an accident to get away?
    “If her research saves lives, how is that a bad thing?”
    He shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid I’ve made it sound nobler than it truly is. It’s not the lives they’re saving that concern me, but how they’re achieving those ends. My priority is to expose TransWorld’s actions and eliminate them as a contender for the contract. I believe you’re the key. I just need to discover what door you unlock.”
    “You can’t ask me to destroy everything she’s worked for. I