Keith’s brow furrowed. “Dry. For sure.”
“How hot is hot?” pushed Marcus. “What was the temperature?”
“I didn’t really have a thermometer to look at!” exclaimed Keith, growing frustrated.
Marcus was equally impatient. “Then take a guess. A hundred degrees?”
“No … not that. But hot for November—at least for me. I grew up in Boston. More like … I don’t know. Eighties, I guess.”
My attention was on Marcus now. I secretly hoped he’d suddenly say, “Aha!” and have all the answers. He didn’t, but he did at least look as though this was useful information.
“Anything else you remember?” he asked.
“That’s it,” said Keith morosely. “Will you please go? I’ve been trying to forget that place. I don’t want to go back for helping someone try to find it.”
I met Marcus’s eyes, and he nodded. “Hopefully this’ll be enough,” he said.
We thanked Keith and started toward the door. Considering his insistence on us leaving, I was kind of surprised when he was the one who suddenly said, “Wait. One more thing.”
“Yeah?” I asked, hoping he meant he had one more useful fact about re-education to share.
“If you see Carly again … tell her I really am sorry.”
“Do you still want her to turn you in to the police?” I asked.
Keith got that faraway look again. “It might be better. Certainly better than going back there. Maybe even better than this.” He gestured around him. “Technically, I’m free, but they’re always watching, always waiting for me to screw up. This isn’t how I pictured my life.”
When Marcus and I got into his car, I couldn’t help but remark, “Two months. He was only there for two months. And look at him.”
“That’s what that place does to you,” said Marcus grimly.
“Yeah, but Sydney’s been there more than twice that long.”
Those words settled heavily between us for a few moments, and I had a feeling Marcus was trying to protect my feelings. “Did she seem that defeated?” he asked.
“No.”
“She’s stronger than Keith is.”
My heart sank a little. “And that’s also probably why she’s still there.” When he didn’t respond, I tried to find a more optimistic topic. “Was any of that of use to you? The dry-heat stuff?”
“I think so. Here. Let’s trade.” He opened the driver’s side door. “You drive, so we can get some hours in. I’ve got calls to make.”
I swapped places with him but still couldn’t help but ask, “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Maybe we should stay put until we’re able to figure out where she is. We could be going in the wrong direction.”
“Not if what Keith said is true. She might not be in Palm Springs, but she’s definitely south of us.” He pulled out his phone as I drove us toward I-84. “I’ve studied this list of possible re-education locations so much, I’ve practically got it memorized. There aren’t many places in the United States that would be in the eighties in November.”
“There are tons,” I argued, feeling like we were having the Potato State discussion again. “Hawaii, California, Florida, Texas. We were just in Las Vegas, and it was an oven!”
He shook his head. “Most of those aren’t going to have dry heat. They have warm temperatures and rain in the winter. And a lot of the high-altitude dry places with desert climates—like Las Vegas—aren’t that hot in November. From what I can tell from this list, Keith’s info, and you being certain she’s in this time zone … well, I think there are only two possible hits. One’s in Death Valley. The other’s outside Tucson.”
I nearly drove off the road in surprise. “California and Arizona? The two states we were just in within the last twenty-four hours?”
“They’re big states,” he said wryly. “But, yes, those are the ones.”
My mind reeled. Either one of those places was less than a day’s drive from Palm Springs. It wasn’t possible that she’d been that close the entire time, that I’d suffered like I had missing her, and there’d only been hours between us! Marcus started to dial his phone but then seemed to notice my stricken expression.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “You couldn’t have known.”
Is that true? demanded Aunt Tatiana in my mind. She was so close! All this time. You could’ve practically reached out and touched her.
I didn’t need her censuring. I was doing plenty of that myself. A sick, heavy feeling of guilt and despair settled within me. So close! Sydney had been so close, and I’d failed her … just as I’d failed at everything. …
“I should have known,” I whispered. “Somehow, I should have felt it in here.” I patted my chest. “I should’ve known she was nearby.”
Marcus sighed. “First of all, put both hands back on the wheel. Second, I’ll give you credit for being a brooding vampire with phenomenal magical powers, but even you don’t have that kind of sixth sense.”
His words made no dent in the cloud of despair clinging to me. “It’s not about magic. It’s about her and me. If the Alchemists were twisted enough to keep her that close as some kind of weird extra torture, I should have sensed it. You can’t understand.” Marcus, like Jackie Terwilliger, was one of those people who’d never explicitly been told about what was going on with Sydney and me but had pretty much figured it out.
“It wasn’t any weird extra torture,” he insisted. “It’s a sad, ironic coincidence. The Alchemists have one re-education center in this country, and it happens to be a few hours from where she was taken. From what Keith and others have said, though, it might as well have been light years from where she was taken. We’re going to have our work cut out for us, even if we narrow down the location. Now, can you focus on the road, or do I need to take over?”
“Do what you got to do,” I told him bleakly.
I stayed quiet as he made his calls to his shadow agents, asking them to drop whatever else they were working on in order to determine whether the facility was in Tucson or Death Valley. He also put out feelers to find out everything possible about the facility itself, to help us with our rescue, and he even made some disconcerting requests for tranquilizer guns and “other related supplies.” All the while, that dark debilitating depression swirled within me, as did Aunt Tatiana’s condemnation. When Marcus finally finished his last call, he explained to me that most of his intel on the place’s logistics wouldn’t come until after he had a hit on the location.
“Once we have a concrete place, we can dig up old records. Even the Alchemists can’t build a place invisibly. They’ll have it masked, of course, but there should be a public paper trail if we know what to look for. I’ve got a few people on the inside too who’ll be able to help once we’ve got better search parameters.”
I nodded in compliance and finally managed to shrug off my despair by replacing it with something else: anger. Not just anger. Rage. Fury at those who’d done this to Sydney. This kind of reconnaissance was Marcus’s thing. Mine would be blasting open the doors and getting Sydney out of that hellhole. That’s how I would make this right.
Yes, hissed Aunt Tatiana. We will make them pay for what they’ve done.
“How long until they find out which place it is?” I asked. “Before you said it could take as long as a week or two.”
“That was when we were guessing blindly. Knowing it’s definitely one of these helps a lot. If it’s Death Valley, we might find out pretty quickly. There’s not a lot out there. Tucson could take a little longer since there’s more of a metropolitan area—and the outlying desert—to hide things. I’ve got people working on both places. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”