“I guess so.” Tech’s mind was still spinning. The chances of a reaction like that to the tell-all were very, very slim. He’d developed the tell-all himself, after all, and he wouldn’t have made it unsafe even if he did have a little help with it. “Let me look at something real quick here.” He replaced Rev’s hand when the roadrunner lifted it from his chest. “You don’t have to move,” he said, and Rev grinned at him.
He called up the notes from his files onto a ceiling screen, using the magnetic interface to navigate his archives, and studied them. There was his handwriting, all over the compound synthesis. But the initial notes, the scrawls specifying which compounds to use, were in a different handwriting, similar to his, but less precise, more scratchy.
Ralph’s handwriting.
That connection finally clicked in his head. The tell-all was a leftover from his university days, one of the projects they’d worked on together before their falling out, before the arrest, before the meteor. He’d revisited it after the meteor, but had only changed minor things. Still, his hubris had conveniently let him forget Ralph’s involvement. If he’d remembered that, with his current suspicions of Ralph, he might have fought harder against Ace.
Or he might not have.
“You okay cutey you look kinda spacey I guess the mood’s kinda broken I can go if you wanna be left alone.”
It was telling that Tech had time to curl his arm around Rev. Despite his offer, the roadrunner hadn’t moved, and he could’ve been back in his room by the time the coyote’s paw lifted from the bed. “No. I want—I’d like you to stay.”
“‘Sall you had to say so what’s on your mind that’s got you all quiet anything you wanna talk about I know it always makes me feel better to talk about what’s going on in my mind.” Rev snuggled up closer to him, bare feathers to bare fur.
Tech looked down at the roadrunner’s green eyes and yellow beak and breathed in his scent, exhaling across the purple topknot and watching the feathers sway back and forth. Did he want to risk telling Rev?
Turn the question around: if he couldn’t risk telling Rev, who could he tell?
He pointed up to the ceiling. “Those are the notes on the tell-all from when I worked on it back at University. It didn’t quite work then. After the meteor, I figured out how to fix it up, but bio isn’t my specialty.”
“You’re pretty good with roadrunner biology and I should know I am one,” Rev murmured.
Tech gave him a squeeze. “Anyway, I forgot that I worked on it with someone else. You ever heard me talk about Ralph?” Rev shook his head. “He was a fellow student of mine. We kinda gravitated together because we were the only critters at the school. We looked enough alike that people mistook us for each other all the time anyway.”
“What are the odds that the two students in your class would both be coyotes well I guess when it comes to smarts you guys have a corner on the market but still that’s gotta be weird weird weird!”
“He wasn’t a coyote,” Tech said. “Isn’t. He’s a wolf. But people couldn’t tell us apart anyway, not at first glance. We were in the lab together a lot. Thing with him was, he was really…” He sighed. “Angry. His family’d lost their home and had spent the last of their money to send him to school. His brother was arrested for stealing. His father was arrested for fighting. That sort of thing.”
He felt the motion of Rev’s beak as he nodded. “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree that’s what my mother used to say we were all fast in my family but hey I should shut up and let you talk sorry about that.”
Tech’s paw smoothed down the feathers on the roadrunner’s side. “It’s okay. We used to work together all the time. We really connected. Not in that way, but just inventing. The thing was, I was just interested in the science. He kept trying to design weapons. Real nasty ones. We had a big fight about it. I didn’t see him after that for a while, until he got arrested. I went to see him in jail. I asked him to stop fighting, and he told me to go to hell.” Rev’s hand pressed down on his chest, but the roadrunner didn’t interrupt.
“I didn’t hear anything about him after that. Just recently, though, that genetic scrambler we got from the Ringmaster set me thinking about our powers. And that scrambler was pretty sophisticated, more than I’d expect from a clown like that.” Rev giggled, and Tech nuzzled his topknot. “Pun intended. Then this Hunter guy shows up with weapons out of a government arsenal and powers kind of like ours: reflexes, accuracy.
“I think Ralph’s behind a lot of this.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’d forgotten he designed the tell-all. And one of the things he said—this was right before we had that fight—he said, ‘I know how to make them resistant to this.’ I said, ‘but the whole point is that they can’t resist it.’ He had this nasty wolfish grin. He didn’t say anything to that. And the prisoner definitely knew him. He thought I was Ralph, when he first saw me.”
“So you think he gave something to the prisoner that maybe killed him when you gave him the tell-all like a time-release poison or something holy cow that’s cold Tech I can’t imagine you ever hanging out with a guy like that just doesn’t seem like you but anyway even if the tell-all did kill him that was Ralph’s doing not yours and this guy was a scumbag anyway killed a bunch of people and almost Duck if you hadn’t saved his life—”
“We saved his life.” Tech squeezed the roadrunner again.
“Okay we saved his life the point is you can’t beat
