Something we want to learn.
We will watch.
We will wait.
I’M THINKING SERIOUSLY ABOUT SOME KHAO PHAT. On one hand, it would involve getting off my butt—but on the other, when I checked the street cams before, Mama Samorn was behind the wok, and that means there’ll be some fine cooking coming up.
I’m in my den, chair folded around my body, wall of screens spread out before me. There’s something comforting about their symphony of soft chimes and whirs and beeps—it’s the sound of home. On the screens to my right, I can see my bots spidering all over the forums I host. Conspiracy theorists are a nervy bunch, but sift through enough of what they say, and occasionally you find a grain of something to work with. My friend Mae—or at least, she’s closer than anyone else to being my friend—is my general for those. She has an amazing knack for dropping a comment here, an idea there, sending them scurrying toward whatever we want investigated.
Straight in front of me is my tracking program for Antje Towers, and that’s what has my attention right now. She resigned her commission and vanished from Avon after the broadcast, with a paper-thin story about going off the grid, retiring to a pastoral colony. Enough death, she said.
Not enough for me, Commander Towers. When they went into the hidden facility after the broadcast, every hint of LaRoux’s presence was gone. That cleansing happened on her watch, and she looked the other way. I know she’ll have the dirt I need—the public testimony, if I have to choke it out of her myself—to expose LaRoux for what he really is. She’s been running and hiding for a year, now, switching IDs every few weeks—she’s been Lucy Palmer, Taya Astin, Anya Griffin, Natalie Harmon.…The list goes on and on. She’s always jumping to somewhere new, leaving me with ghost trails, and occasional reports of a blonde switching to a new ship, a different planet. From what I’ve dug up from their databases, even LaRoux Industries doesn’t know where she is—which makes her perfect for my purposes. LRI keeps such close tabs on its employees that I can’t even get close to any of them. But Towers—she’s not under the umbrella of LaRoux’s protection anymore.
Her trail went cold when she hit Corinth months ago, and more than ever, my pulse is pounding with the urgency of finding her. I’ve had a thousand imagined conversations with her, hurled a thousand accusations her way. If I can find her, maybe I’ll learn more about what Alexis and I saw at LaRoux Headquarters.
All these years of single-minded focus have led me here, to this. If I can find her, I’ll be able to drag all LaRoux’s crimes into the light. Not like Flynn Cormac did, but publicly, irrefutably—with Towers, I can prove enough of what he’s done to ruin him.
I’m starting again with Towers’s arrival at Corinth—under a fake name, of course—and preparing to comb through the arrivals records for that date again, when off to my left I hear the soft rippling chime I assigned to the mailbox I left for Alexis. Huh. Didn’t think I’d be hearing from you again, Dimples.
I lift my left hand, clad in a half-finger sensor glove, to point at the screen, then beckon. The sensors beep at me obediently as they switch the displays, flipping my main screen away to the left, and throwing up Alexis’s message in front of me. I’d pretend I wasn’t grinning, but there’s nobody here to know.
Hi babe,
No need to come over tonight after all. My father and some of his friends stopped by, so I’m going to go out to dinner with them. I’ll see you this weekend though—we’re still on for the park where we met last time, right? I’m dying to see you.
Love, Alice
My grin dies, crumbles to dust, and blows away on a cold, cold wind as I stare at the message. Oh, hell. But I don’t have time to dwell, because I’m already yanking down a keyboard, fingers flying over it to trace back her message and bring her cameras to life as I voice my other instructions. “Command: Scan the message on screen forty-nine. Check for security breach. Make sure no bugs got in with it.”
The ping takes only a few seconds, and I force myself to slow my breathing, close my eyes for a moment, so I’m ready when two soft chimes announce the security check result, and success with the camera.
“Security intact,” the system promises me. And then the cameras blossom to life, delivering half a dozen sharp images of her apartment to my screens, and my oh-so-calm breath jams in my throat.
There’s a brute of a man standing over her in a bedroom, and as I watch she tries to drag herself up onto her elbows, then collapses once more. The gorilla reaches down and helps her up by grabbing a handful of her hair—she whimpers, clearly groggy, and I find my hand lifting, like I can reach through the screen and stop him.
“Where are you taking me?” she asks, her voice catching with a sob that could be real, or could be one of her tricks—though given the situation, it has to be at least partway genuine. She’s given me the warning I need, though—they’re going to move her. While part of me is taking a deep breath—whatever they’re planning to do to her, that means there’s time before they do it—the rest of me is filling with dread. Because if they need to move her first, it’s probably going to be messy.
I speak again as I flex my legs, the movement instructing my chair to straighten up and release me. “Command: Open a voice channel to Mae.”
Seconds later, Mae’s cheery voice is flooding my headset. She always sounds like she was just sitting there, wishing you’d call. “Why, hello there, Handsome! What’s the special occasion?”
“I need backup.”
The shake in my voice is enough to stop her in her tracks, and the laughter drops away. “Emergency?”
“The worst,” I say quietly. “I’m sending you an address. I’ve got LaRoux security forces removing an ally of mine. I’m going after her, I need eyes.”
She sucks in an audible breath. “Honey, you’re not ready for this. We don’t have half the files we need to—”
The gorilla pulls Alexis to her feet, steadying her by the shoulders as she sways, trying to blink her way back to consciousness.
I peel off my gloves, scrabbling through the pile of clothes on my bed to dig out my boots. “So that’s why I need to get her back with minimal contact. Find me security cameras, public access cameras, traffic cameras in the vicinity of my current feed. I need to see where they go.”
“And how the hell am I going to figure out which one’s them?” Mae asks, though I can see from the displays she’s throwing up on my right-hand screen that she’s already on it, as I pull on my boots and tie them with shaking hands.
“Look for—”
She finishes the sentence for me. “Anything with a LaRoux badge, got it.”
On-screen, the gorilla’s speaking to Alexis again. “We’re going somewhere we won’t be disturbed. You can tell us exactly what you were doing when you came calling, and why your friend was there.”
“My friend?” She sniffs, lifting a tearstained face, giving him the full force of her big eyes and running mascara. She’s trying, even now, to protect my identity—or maybe just to protect her own. “I don’t know anything about the guy I was with, I promise. We didn’t go together. He took me hostage.”
Easy there, Dimples. Definitely not trying to protect me. I find one of my reversible T-shirts, with a LaRoux Industries logo on one side, black on the other. I flip it black side out and haul it on over my head, followed by my climbing harness. It’ll attract attention, but if I end up needing it to reach Alexis in time, I don’t want to be fumbling with straps—and I’ve seen plenty weirder fashion on the streets of Corinth. Then I’m digging through a nest of wires to find what I—usually laughingly—call my crime bag, and slide my lapscreen in beside the supplies already there. I shove my night-eye goggles on top of my head and jam an earpiece into my ear, and running a wire from it to my screen, I’m ready. “I’m going mobile, Mae. Lock the signal down as tight as you can for me.”