“I assume you’ll need your computer for this. Office?” I point my thumb in the direction that I watched through the front window, and I know I have unnerved her by the look on her face. Let her think I’ve been in here before. Let her think June gave me more information than I truly have.
I follow her into the office. Her stride doesn’t falter, but she’s slow and deliberate. A second here. Another there. Seconds adding to minutes becoming stretches of time. Someone is coming. She’s counting on it.
She logs onto her computer but stops. “We’ll have to go to a bank,” she says. “It’s not like you have a bank account.”
“You’re wrong,” I say. “I have an account.” Well, Casey has an account. She’s got something set up under a false ID, and I realize there’s no way one person gets through this alone. June couldn’t. She didn’t. But maybe—with Casey, with Cameron—maybe I have a chance.
“How resourceful of you,” she says, cutting her eyes to me for a second. Her hands pause over the keys. “Tell me, is Dominic Ellis helping you?”
I try to keep my face still, to keep her from seeing that she has unnerved me, too. Instead, I think of the information Ivory is giving me. She has just admitted that she knows who Liam White is in this life. She knows. Casey was right. She has a way to access information in the database. She has a goddamn way in.
I laugh—I can’t control it from bubbling up and escaping. “No,” I say. “Dominic would love to be here with me, but he’s not.”
“Of course he’s not,” she says, her hands falling momentarily under her desk. “By the time June showed up here, she’d left Liam White behind as well. He sacrificed himself, he really did, because he thought it was his fault. Can you imagine?”
She watches my face, but I keep it still, focusing on her arm, still under the table.
“No, I suppose you can’t,” she says. “Not quite capable of love, my dear? Throw them to the wolves to get ahead?”
There’s movement at the window, and I smile.
I’m focusing on her arm, and not her words, so when she pulls it out from under the desk, I’m ready. A gun. She has a gun. And now I see Ivory for what she is—not just a name on the paper, not just someone who might’ve made a mistake with that study, but someone who did something on purpose.
And just as I’m seeing Ivory, I see June, standing exactly where I am, as she confronts Ivory about those studies. What did Ivory do when June asked about the data?
I put my hands in the air without her asking.
“Hey, Ivory, tell me. What are the chances of me committing violence? What did you learn from that study?”
She tips the gun to the side. “I think you know,” she says, buying seconds again. She doesn’t realize I’ve been buying them as well until they become minutes—until they become something solid and real.
“A likelihood of 0.8, or 0.32?” I ask. “Which is it, Ivory? And if I wasn’t violent before, is that good news or bad news for you right now? Am I predictable?”
She scoffs. “You are so predictable. You showed up here, just like June threatened to. You demanded answers, like June. You showed up alone, with no one. You showed up thinking you had the power to do anything at all. But I’m the one with the gun right now, Alina. I’m the one with the power. Now back away, slowly, toward the door.”
“No, I’m not alone,” I say. I close my eyes, and I imagine Cameron at the window, with a gun pointed at Ivory’s head. And it’s in that moment—when all the seconds have added to minutes, and the minutes to this moment—that Casey waltzes into the office.
“Hey, Alina,” she says, pretending not to notice that Ivory has a gun pointed at my chest.
She waves to the window, and I can’t stop the warmth from spreading through me as I see him there: Cameron, behind the glass, the empty gun pointed at Ivory, just as I imagined him.
I smile. “I’m not June,” I say.
Her hand falters as she glances quickly over her shoulder. “What do you think?” I ask. “Will I tell him to shoot?” I see her debating, and I wonder myself, if that gun was full, if it had been in my pocket instead of Casey’s bag—what would I do? “Put down the gun, Ivory,” I say. “We didn’t come to hurt you. We came for answers.”
She lowers her gun and moves away from the window. Casey walks across the room, lifts the window, and Cameron climbs inside, the empty gun still in his hand.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hey,” he says, smiling.
“Nice to meet you, Ivory Street,” Casey says.
“Who are you?” Ivory asks.
“Casey,” she says. “Don’t you watch the news?”
I smile at her, but Ivory says, “That’s not what I meant.”
Ivory eyes the gun but gestures toward me all the same, speaking directly to Cameron. “This is a highly unstable person. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
“She’s not so bad, once you get to know her,” Cameron says, and Casey laughs. God, I love them.
“We have a few questions,” I say. “You answer, we go, the end. Got it?”
“I love how simple you assume this will be. Sure. Got it,” Ivory says.
“I found June’s notes,” I say. “I saw her work. She realized there was a mistake.”
Ivory is silent, then leans forward. “I’m sorry, was that a question?”
I hear June’s voice, whispering into my ear.
224081 - Ivory Street - Edmond
June was sorting through human data. Important facts she was listing for herself as she figured things out. No part of this was a location. These are people. “Edmond is your husband?” I ask, and Ivory flinches.
She leans back in her chair, folds her hands on top of her desk, and says, “He was, many years ago. A brilliant PhD candidate, too, if you must know. And he was senselessly attacked while walking home from his lab late at night. He was killed by someone else who worked in the lab. Someone who was not right. So very not right. But nobody knew it, until it was too late.”
She stands from her desk then, ignoring the gun. “You know who was the first person I looked for in that database? Not Edmond. His killer. And you know what I discovered? He spent twenty years in prison in his past life. For manslaughter. You don’t need a science paper for me to explain that to you. Edmond’s death was preventable.”
“224081,” I say. “Was that him?”
She tilts her head at me in acknowledgment. And I am in awe of June. Of what she uncovered. Of what she risked to come here, knowing what she knew.
June’s math comes to my mind, the numbers across the page, so different from the study. The starred IDs, not matching up.
There was no mistake in the research papers. “You did it on purpose,” I say. “You self-selected the data. You’ve done it on all these papers.”
“Data,” she flings her hand, “can be used however one sees fit to twist it. The truth can be anything. We are dealing with human beings here. There’s no control for a human being. Way too many variables. It could be the truth. Evil is evil, Alina, there’s really no other explanation.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it? It matters what everyone else believes,” she says. “But this much is true: 224081 was a killer in two lifetimes.”
“What about the third?” I ask. “Has he died?”
“224081 owes me a lifetime,” she says, as a chill runs down my spine. “And he’s serving it now, in prison. Do you know what prisoners looking down a life in jail do? They die. They stop eating or find something to hang themselves with when the guards aren’t looking. It’s a twenty-four-hour job, keeping those people alive. Not letting their souls have a fresh start. But soul number 224081 is still living, still rotting. I’ve seen to that.” She sighs, laughs to herself. “Sometimes I think I should’ve done a study on suicides. Maybe showing that their souls disappear. Some sort of incentive. Well, hindsight.”