Claire wondered if she should feel some kind of vindication, but she didn’t. She felt nervous. “What did she do in our house?”
“What do you get Oscars for?”
Shane and Michael both said, at the same time, “Movies.”
And the four of them looked at one another in silence for a moment. Claire didn’t know how they felt, but her stomach seemed to be in free fall, and no end in sight.
She slowly turned back to the screen, shut down the video, and looked at the folder.
“What?” Shane asked. She pointed at the screen.
“This is Kim’s personal video journal,” she said. “It’s where she recorded all her personal stuff.”
“So?”
“Look at the number.”
“Reality project cam . . . number . . .” Eve drew in a sharp breath. “Oh, holy crap.”
“There are seventy-one other cameras out there in Morganville,” Claire said. “Somewhere.”
“And at least one of them’s in our house,” Shane finished.
There was no sign on the Mac in Kim’s apartment as to where the video was streaming to. . . .
She’d need more computing power than a laptop to run seventy-one other cameras, especially if she was saving terabytes of data. “She’d need a server array,” Claire concluded, after doing the math. “Or off-line storage dumps. Maybe she only records during certain hours, then dumps everything to DVD-ROM or something.”
“What about the university?” Eve asked. “Plenty of servers there, right?”
Claire considered it, then shook her head. “Yeah, there’s available space, but how would she get to it without somebody noticing? She’s not even an enrolled student. And the TPU computer security’s pretty tight—it would have to be, because the vamps monitor it to prevent anybody from sending compromising information out.” That led her to another, badder place in her mind. “Kim thinks of herself as some kind of renegade indie filmmaker, right?”
“Right,” Eve said. “She talks about that a lot. About TV, cable shows, all that kind of thing. She’s kind of obsessed with it. The acting thing was really so she could see all the backstage stuff, the technical parts.”
Shane lowered himself onto Kim’s sagging bed, which gave Claire unpleasant associations she wished she hadn’t made. “She’s bugged the town,” Shane said. “She’s got it rigged up with surveillance. And she’s going to cut it all into, what, some kind of über-documentary about vampires?”
“Worse,” Claire said. “Seventy-two cameras, all running at once? She’s cutting together episodes. She wants a reality show. A Morganvillereality show.” She spun back toward the keyboard and brought up Kim’s e-mail. As far as Claire could tell, the built-in in-box had never been used. “She’s got to have e-mail.”
“Web mail,” Michael said. “If she wanted to cover her tracks, she’d do it that way. You think she’s in communication with someone outside?”
Claire brought up the browser’s history, but it had been cleared. “There’s some kind of maintenance app running. It wipes out her temp files and history every twenty-four hours.”
“Somebody’s working with her,” Shane said, and shrugged when they all looked at him. “Makes sense. Webcams don’t fall off trees, right? Buying that many takes funding, and Kim isn’t making that off her spare-parts art.”
“Somebody outside Morganville knows,” Claire said. “Do you think the vampires found out? That they’re behind Kim’s disappearing?”
“Oliver didn’t seem bothered. If we knew, I guarantee you that this wouldn’t still be here,” Michael said, and nodded at the computer.
We,not they. Claire didn’t miss that, and she saw it register on Eve, too. “We’d have taken it.”
Shane exchanged a look with both the girls. He hadn’t missed the us-versus-them implications, either. “What’s with the we, man?”
“What?”
“You counting yourself on the vampire team now?”
Michael sighed. “Do we need to have this fight right now? Because I think we’ve got bigger problems.”
“No, we don’t,” Eve said. “Kim’s disappeared. She’s doing something really dangerous, and a lot of people—including the vampires—might want her stopped, or just gone. But I need to know where you are, Michael. Are you with the vampires? Or are you with us?”
“ Usmeaning what? Humans? Eve—”
“ Usmeaning me, Shane, and Claire,” Eve said flatly. “Are you? Or are you going to tell Amelie and Oliver what Kim’s doing and make this an all-out witch hunt?”
He didn’t answer for a few seconds. Shane got up off the bed, which groaned as the old springs adjusted. “Michael?”
“Don’t do this,” Michael said, straight to Eve. “It’s not a choice. I don’t have a choice.”
“You always have one, you know that. You had one when you let Amelie turn you, and you’ve got one now. Sam didn’t run with the crowd. You don’t have to, either. You can—do good things.”
“Not everything vampires do is bad.”
Shane slapped his hand on the wall, a sharp gunshot of impact, and they all jumped and looked at him. “Are you going to help us stop this, or are you going to run off and snitch?” he asked. “It’s a simple question, man.”
“It’s not about you three. This is about Kim trying to destroy all of us, make herself some kind of reality TV diva, and get rich.”
“Maybe,” Shane said. “And maybe it doesn’t have to be. The video’s streaming somewhere. She must still be trying to cut it together. We can still find her and put a stop to it. Nobody else has to know.”
“Why do you want to protect her?” Michael asked. Shane glanced quickly at Claire, just a flash, but she saw the guilt in it. “Old-girlfriend blues?”
“Oh man, you’d bettershut up.”
“Eve wants to save her because they were friends; I get that. Claire just wants to save everybody—”
“Not everybody,” she muttered.
“But you, you hold grudges. You’d throw Monica under the bus in a hot second, but you don’t want Kim to get hurt.”
“Seriously,” Shane said. “Shut up. Now.”
“See how it feels?” Michael said softly. “I don’t like people questioning my motives, either. I’m a vampire. I can’t help that. I drink blood. Get the fuck over it and don’t make this about me. You want to save Kim? Fine. But if we don’t find her in the next twenty-four hours, I’ve got to tell someone, and then it’s on.”
“It’s all on,” Eve agreed. There were tears in her eyes, shining like silver, but she blinked them away. “And it’s all over. You bet your life on it, Michael.”
She turned on her heel and walked out, shoving crap out of her way as she went. Claire looked after her, then began unhooking the computer. “Shane,” she said. “Get the camera from the closet in the next room. Maybe we can trace the IP and see where she’s sending the video.”
Michael went after Eve, but Shane lingered as she stuffed the computer and power cord into the laptop bag. “Hey,” he said. His fingers touched her hair lightly, then her shoulder. “I’m not—look, it’s not like I’m in love with her. I’m not. It’s just—”
“You slept with her once. Yeah, I heard.” She snapped the catches closed on the bag and slung it over her shoulder. “She makes a hell of an impression.”
Shane got in her way, and despite everything, all her best intentions, she looked up into his eyes, and the light in them took her breath away. His fingertips touched her face, and then he bent down and kissed her. “No,” he murmured into her mouth. “She doesn’t. You do.”
Before she could think of anything to say, he turned and left to grab the camera from the closet. In the other room, Claire saw Michael talking to Eve—well, Eve’s rigid back. He turned when he saw her and Shane coming.
Eve opened the front door and slammed it back, charging down the stairs and leaving them all far, far behind. By the time they caught up, she was already in the passenger seat up front, face turned toward the tinted window. If she was crying, Claire couldn’t tell. She’d put on a gigantic pair of mirrored sunglasses that she absolutely did not need inside a vampire’s car.