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.”