“What else have we figured out about Meshara?” asked Potash. “If they’re working together, he might be at her house. We still don’t know what he can do.”
“He ‘remembers,’” said Diana. “Trujillo spent all night with Brooke, but that’s all he got. I didn’t know you could remember someone to death, but that’s what I love about this job.”
“Wait,” I said, “was Nathan alone last night? Why does Nathan get to be alone and I have to live with Potash?”
“Our surveillance has never placed Mary Gardner and Meshara together,” said Kelly, ignoring me. “I went through as many of our old photos and videos as I could last night, and he’s not in any of them.”
“Maybe they know we’re watching Mary,” said Diana, “so they’re staying out of the way to hide themselves.”
“That could mean this is an ambush,” said Potash.
“We need backup,” said Kelly.
“We don’t have backup,” said Diana. “Even if we called the local police, we couldn’t brief them in time to be helpful, and once they knew everything we wouldn’t be able operate freely in the city.”
“Then we make do with what we have,” said Potash, turning from the front seat to hand me something. “Take this.”
It was a gun.
I stared at it, not moving an inch.
Potash jiggled the gun, prompting me again to take it. “Have you ever used a gun before?”
“Once,” I said, but it wasn’t what they were thinking. The only shot I’d ever fired was a hole in the top of my car, to pour a can of gas on Brooke’s head and burn her. I didn’t touch his gun, considering this other idea instead. “We could light her house on fire.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Kelly.
“Is it?” asked Diana. “If it gets the job done…”
“We can’t just light a criminal’s house on fire,” said Kelly, “that’s against every—”
“She’s not a criminal,” I said quickly. “She’s a monster. Our job is to kill her by any means necessary, and if that means burning her house down then we burn it down, and it’s not against any laws or regulations because our entire team is operating beyond the law. We do whatever it takes to get the job done.”
“This isn’t the only job we have to get done,” said Potash. “We have at least one more Withered to take care of in this city, and an attack as visible as a house fire will make it almost impossible to act. Diana’s right about the police—if they know what we’re doing, if they know we’re here at all—”
“Drop me off here and I’ll walk the rest of the way,” I said, feeling more desperate than I expected at the prospect of lighting a major fire. I lit small ones now and then, when I could get away from the rest of the team, but a whole house … I felt short of breath. “I can get into the yard without anyone seeing me, and no will ever know we’re the ones who set it—”
“Even if you can,” said Kelly, “we can’t guarantee she won’t get out before it burns. She’s not incapacitated like Cody French was, she’s just taking the morning off from work. We’d have to station Diana outside to pick her off when she runs, and at that point we’re just doing the same thing we always do, just way more publicly.”
“It was a good idea,” said Diana, patting my leg. “Maybe on another project.” I wanted to shove her hand away, but I knew it was overemotional. Three minutes ago I hadn’t even thought about a fire, and now I wanted it so bad I could already smell the smoke. Three hundred seventy-seven, six hundred ten, nine hundred eight-seven, fifteen hundred ninety-seven.
Potash offered the gun again. “You said you’ve used one once. Are you comfortable using one again?”
“Not really,” I said. My breath was only slowly returning to normal. “I don’t want to shoot you by accident.” Though if you don’t get out of my house soon I might want to shoot you on purpose. I paused again, collecting myself. “Do you have a knife?”
He shared a quick glance with Kelly and holstered his gun. “Can you use a knife?”
“I’ve been cutting open corpses since I was ten,” I said, exaggerating only slightly.
“But in combat?” he asked. “With a Withered?”
“Do your job and I won’t have to,” I said. “If the plan goes to hell, better a knife than nothing.”