“Uhm, how do I mute this thing?” Chase asked, her voice echoey.
“Let’s focus on something other than the ladies in the bathroom,” Augustus said, voice a little thick with embarrassment. “Yo, Colin, how’s the view from York?”
“I’m a little out of town,” Colin said, and I could hear the wind rushing past him. “Nice scenery. You know, I always figured I should try running across the ocean, but I can never quite get manage to get across Puget Sound without eventually falling in, so…probably not a great idea, huh?”
“You can still swim fast though, right?” Augustus asked.
“Pretty well, yeah,” Colin said. “Water offers a lot of resistance. Hey, I’m in York proper now.”
“Where were you before?” I asked, sliding open a window shade. This wasn’t a proper airport. Not that it mattered. Sienna would figure out what was going on and find her way to us.
I hoped.
“It’s kind of a run,” Colin said. “We’re a ways outside of town. Where did you say Sienna was?”
“She was at the train station,” Jamal said, and I could hear his frown without even looking at him. “She’s not there anymore, and I’m hard pressed to figure out why.”
“Hey guys,” Colin said, and he sounded a little breathless. “Did we ever figure out what this enemy of Sienna’s looks like?”
“We don’t have a description, no,” I said, a frown of my own puckering my brow. “Why? You see something?”
“I’m not slowing down enough to see much,” Colin said. “I’m running around this wall that circles the old city. Kinda cool.”
“Are you…doing touristy stuff?” Scott asked. “While the rest of us are stuck on the plane?”
“Why, do you need me to get you a York hat? Coffee mug? Tea mug?” Colin cracked. “Commemorative panties that say, ‘Mind the Gap’?”
“Ooh, I want some of those,” Veronika chimed in.
“Done,” Colin said. “Knew you would.”
“Colin, she’s somewhere near the train station,” Jamal said, still intent on his screen. “She ducked into a blind spot of the cameras or something, I don’t know—this is weird.”
“On my way—I think,” Colin said.
I settled my hand on the back of Jamal’s seat and gave it a squeeze. “How would Sienna have known where the blind spots are in the camera system?”
“She shouldn’t have,” Jamal said, still focused on his screen. “I mean, some cameras are obvious, but others are really well hidden, and sometimes you can get a look from blocks away. I don’t see how she did it, because the coverage here is pretty good, but…she damned sure found the blind spot. Almost like she—or that guy she’s with, more likely—knew exactly they were doing.”
“Lends credence to the idea it’s one of her UK sources,” I said, coming up again and nearly braining myself on the low-hanging bulkhead. “Colin, if you find her, can you extract her here?”
“In less than two minutes,” Colin said cheerily. “You find her, I’ll…uh…unwind her?”
“Unbind her,” Abby said. “It almost fits.”
“Lined her,” J.J. said, thinking out loud, “kind her, mind her, pined her—”
“Rind her,” Scott said with a smirk. “Like a watermelon.”
“Tined her?” Jamal asked. “Tinder. No! Wait, definitely not Tinder.”
“If you find her, get her the hell out so we can pop smoke, okay?” I offered, trying to steer past the rhyming police.
“Rogerwilco,” Colin said.
“Veronika?” I asked. “I know there’s not much going on here since Sienna’s in town, but do you see any activity?”
I waited a moment, got distracted staring at Jamal’s screen. He was still playing with the cameras around the train station, zooming out and trying to catch Sienna. His face was all screwed up in concentration, but he had a whole lot of nothing going on, that I could see, in the results department.
I paused, listening. “Veronika?”
“Yeah, boss,” Veronika said, the tension ratcheted up in her voice. It was obvious as the nose on my face when I actually concentrated on it.
“How are you doing out there?” I asked, experimentally.
“Oh, we’re doing just fine,” she said stiffly, and I almost swore. Instead, I motioned to Jamal, trying to get his attention. I caught it, and he looked at me quizzically as I pointed to his tablet, then brought my finger around to encompass the world around us, forcefully.
He got it, and touched the base of the tablet. The screen flickered, and then switched to something else.
A view of a plane on a tarmac.
Surrounded by men with guns, creeping closer and closer to the Gulfstream with the open door sitting in the middle of the runway.
Our plane.
We were surrounded.
35.
Sienna
“This is a safe house,” Wexford said as he bolted the door behind us. He’d led me into a nearby hotel just a couple hundred feet from the train station, a pretty swank-looking place that had looked like it might be one of those rare European hotels that had so much lux going for it I’d want to stay there rather than the cookie-cutter American chains I preferred while abroad.
“Oh, good,” I said. He’d led me up through the servants’ entrance and stairwells to this room, on the third floor, and we’d seen not a soul along the way. “Because I’ve been staying in unsafe ones these last few days and it hasn’t been working out so well for me.”
Wexford smiled thinly, leaning against the door. “I sense you’ve had a rough go of it.”
“Can you read my mind again?” I asked, making my way over to the bed. My clothes were still shredded, I was soaked in blood—including, still, my face despite my best attempts to use spit to rub it off. I couldn’t clean what I couldn’t see, after all.
“Indeed,” he said, a little wearily.
“Then you know what’s happened,” I said. There was a certain comfort that came from arriving here. Even seeing Wexford standing there at the train station had been a relief of sorts. With the exception of the cop I’d brainwashed to forget I was a criminal, I hadn’t exactly been sunning in a sea of friendly faces these last few days, and they’d been a little stressful.
He seemed to think for a minute, then nodded. “Yes, now I see. Rose, her name is?”
“Rose, her name is, but by any other name she’d be thorny as hell,” I agreed, stepping through into the bathroom before I could see his reaction to my witticism. I turned on the cold tap and looked in the mirror. My face was bloody, all right. I got to work on it. “I went into this thinking the perp was an incubus. I guess that shows me not to assume. And as you’ve no doubt ascertained from poking around in my skull, she’s royally pissed at me and I have only suspicions as to why. All I know for sure is that she’s gone to some rather extreme ends in the name of vengeance for…whatever the hell got her panties in a twist.”
“Perhaps I might shed some light on that,” Wexford said, and I caught sight of him standing behind me in the mirror. He moved, and on the bed behind him was a manila file. “For your suspicions do seem to be correct.”
I turned off the tap and almost lunged for it. When I opened it up, I found surveillance photos of Rose, all from a distance, all from cameras she didn’t know were there. Digging a little deeper, I found candids of the sort families took of their kids—her with other people, smiling. A mother, a really old dad or maybe grandfather. I looked up at Wexford. “You know her?”
“She’s known to us, yes,” Wexford said with a nod. “Rose Steward. She lived in the metahuman cloister in Scotland…at least until—”
“The war,” I said, my legs delivering me onto the bed with a gentle thump. “That cloister—”
“Was wiped out by your old friend Weissman—”
“That shitbird was no friend of mine.”
“—and your Great Uncle Raymond,” he said, looking over my shoulder at the file.