Mitch continued muttering even as he took the book and got to work.
Victor turned his attention toward Sydney. He carried a tub of noodles to the couch, and sagged onto the leather cushions as he offered it to her. Sydney set aside the dead EO folder and accepted the food, fingers curling around the still-warm container. She didn’t eat. Neither did he. Victor stared past the windows and listened to the sounds of Mitch composing the post. His fingers itched to black out lines, but Mitch was using the book, so he closed his eyes and tried to find quiet, peace. He didn’t picture sprawling fields or blue skies or water drops. He pictured squeezing the trigger three times, blood blossoming on Eli’s chest in the same pattern it had on his, pictured carving lines into Eli’s skin, watching them fade so he could do it over again, over and over and over. Are you afraid yet? he would ask when the floor was slick with Eli’s blood. Are you afraid?
XXI
THREE AND A HALF HOURS UNTIL MIDNIGHT
THE ESQUIRE HOTEL
“DO you really have a plan?” asked Sydney sometime later.
Victor dragged his eyes back open, and said the same thing he’d said in the graveyard, when she asked if Wrighton Penitentiary had let him go. The same words and the same tone and the same look. “Of course,” he said.
“Is it a good plan?” pressed Sydney. Her legs swung from the couch, boots grazing Dol’s ears with every pass. The dog didn’t seem to mind.
“No,” said Victor. “Probably not.”
Sydney made a sound, something between a cough and a sigh. Victor wasn’t terribly fluent in her language yet, but guessed it was a kind of sad affirmative, the pre-teen version of gotcha or okay. The clock on the wall said it was almost nine p.m.. Victor closed his eyes again.
“I don’t get it,” said Sydney a few minutes later. She was scratching Dol’s ear with her shoe. The dog’s head rocked back and forth gently with the motion.
“What don’t you get?” asked Victor, eyes still closed.
“If you want to find Eli, and Eli wants to find you, why do you have to go through all this? Why can’t you just find each other?”
Victor blinked, and considered the small blond thing beside him on the couch. Her eyes were wide and waiting, but they were already losing their innocence. What little she’d clung to and brought with her down that road in the rain had faded in the face of Victor’s pragmatic execution, his promises and his threats. She’d been betrayed, shot, saved, healed, hurt, healed again, forced to resurrect two men, only to witness the reassassination of one of them. She’d gotten tangled up in this, by Eli and then by Victor. She was like a child, but not a child, and Victor couldn’t help but wonder if becoming an EO had hollowed her out the way it had him, had all of them—cut the ties of something vital and human. He wasn’t protecting her, not by treating her like a normal kid. She wasn’t normal.
“You asked me if I have a plan,” he said, sitting forward. “I didn’t, at first. I had options, yes, ideas, and factors, but not a plan.”
“But you have one now.”
“I do. But because of Eli, and because of your sister, I only have one shot to get it right. The first person to act sacrifices the element of surprise, and I can’t afford to do that right now. Eli has a siren on his side, which means he could compel the entire city. Maybe he already has. I have a hacker, a half-dead dog, and a child. It’s hardly an arsenal.”
Sydney frowned and reached for the folder of living EOs. She held it out to him. “So make one. Or at least, make yours stronger. Try. Eli sees EOs—us—as monsters. But you don’t, right?”