Page 216 of Keldori By Daybreak

“Gas isn’t cheap, but you drove for hours and then turned around and came back? To pay for more gas?” I screwed my face up at him. “I already knew you were a crap scientist, but I didn’t think you were that dumb.”

“Excuse me?” Maxwell said the words through a disbelieving laugh. “My mountain of accolades and research says otherwise.”

“Crap. Scientist.” I repeated the words at him, and the corner of his condescending smile twitched. “I actually thought for a second you came back for the rock, but then I remembered. You’ve never been curious.”

“I’m plenty curious. A good scientist always is. Now, my money—”

“But you aren’t curious. You knew I existed. A daughter. Made out of you. And for eighteen years, you didn’t wonder at all about me?” I couldn’t help the rising anger. It figured that the only time in my life he’d willingly made himself available was when I had bigger issues to deal with.

Maxwell rolled his eyes and turned back to the rock.

“This again?” he drawled. “I told you before. I don’t want any part of it.”

Those words he’d said at Von Leer came back once again.

He didn’t ask for this.

He didn’t ask for me.

A few weeks ago, the words had devastated me. Now, however, I could only think how small he seemed.

“If you don’t want any part of it, why’d you come back?”

“I already told you. I want my money.”

“And I don’t believe you. You could’ve sent an email.”

“Emails are easy to ignore,” Maxwell chided. “I don’t trust your mother to not give me what’s owed.”

I laughed at the audacity. If I didn’t, I might’ve hit him instead. “If anything, you owe her for raising your daughter for you.”

“I didn’t ask her to do that.”

“But thank God she did. Thank God you estranged yourself from me before I was born so I didn’t end up anything like you.”

“And yet you’re trying to get into my alma mater to study geophysics in my footsteps in a building with a study room named after me. You’re more like me than you’d like.”

I was more like him than I’d like. Not only was everything he’d said true, but I looked like him too. Some days I hated myself for it. Today, however, I didn’t have the time to.

“Right,” I snarled, “because who would want to be anything like a crap father and a shit scientist?”

He paled in the light of the street lamp. “I have international prestige in my field that most academics can only dream about—”

“You told me paleomagnetists were the rockstars of geophysicists. Do you know what that actually makes you? A loser. Because only losers unironically call themselves the rockstars of anything. You don’t care about answers to questions. You don’t care about science. You care about validation.”

“This ‘loser’ was the greatest thing to ever happen to your mother,” Maxwell scoffed. “And then she threw it away for you, a child she hadn’t even met yet, and a career selling smut novels to the lowest denominators. And still living at her mother’s it appears since this is where you had me bring you, though I don’t see either of them here. So go ahead and call me a loser for not being around, but remember that Eliza is the bitch that abandoned you eighteen years on.”

Something snapped inside me, striking like a matchstick. I struck out at my father with a fist swathed in flames of blue.

He stumbled aside, and my knuckles slammed into the rock.

I thought the resounding crack had to have been the bones in my hand splintering against the stone. It certainly felt like it, and I cried out in frustrated pain.

I readied my other fist to strike at Maxwell a second time, but Ciarán grabbed me from behind.

“The ground, Wren!” he warned, and I noticed the quaking pavement for the first time.

That magnetic pressure from the volcanoes of Skalterra was hitting its limit, and I could feel the fissures that ran along the bond.