The streets of Devil’s Isle were unusually quiet. “Where is everyone?” I asked.
“It’s memorial day for them, too,” Liam said quietly. “They have their own dead to mourn.”
I felt stupid and insensitive for not realizing they’d need to grieve, too.
We walked to Moses’s shop, found him deep in an argument with something he kept trying to hit with an old-fashioned flyswatter.
It buzzed through the air toward us, zooming right into my face, pausing long enough for me to get a look at a curvy green female with wings like a dragonfly’s, and probably twice as big as one.
She looked me over, flipped me off, and flew out of the store through a flapping pet door.
“Charming. Peskie?”
“Peskie,” Liam confirmed. “And a very unhappy one by the look of it.” He walked toward Mos, smiled. “Who’d you piss off this time?”
We walked to the back of the store, where Mos worked on what was left of his hair with a small plastic comb.
“No one. She wants unacceptable terms, she can get her electronics from somewhere else. Keeps messing with my hair.”
“I think you look devastatingly handsome.”
Mos looked up at me, blushed. “You shitting me or trying to get information?”
I grinned at him. “Telling the truth. Plus the information thing.”
He looked at Liam. “I like her.”
Liam made a vague noise that probably could have gone either way. “I got a message you have something for us.”
“I do,” Mos said. He spun in his chair, used the dark monitor behind him to check his reflection, finish his hair, then tossed the comb away. And then his hands were on the keys, and he was moving through layers of security like a knife through butter.
He got to a document, sent it to an old-fashioned printer that whirred back and forth across paper with holes on each edge.
“You are the master of technology,” Liam said.
Moses grunted. “Don’t I know it?” When the pages had printed, he ripped it off the printer, ripped away the edges, slapped them on the counter in front of us. “Poked around a little in the Containment files searching for the name you gave me, then moved into the files of some of those businesses they hired to do their work. This one belonged to a contractor called ComTac.”
Liam nodded. “Some of our acquaintances talked to them.”
We looked down at the page. It was clearly a list, but that was about all I could tell. They used the English alphabet, but the words themselves didn’t make any sense. Just jumbled bunches of letters.
“I don’t know what I’m looking at here, Mos,” Liam said.
“It’s a list of persons of interest,” Mos said. “Says so right at the top.”
The top said nothing of the sort.
“But not so you’d get that at first glance,” Mos said. He flipped over the pages, folded it once longwise about a third of the way across, then again. When he turned it back, he folded the flap again, hiding some of the letters in the middle.
“Cheap way of encrypting,” he said. “Effective if you don’t do print.” He grinned with sharp teeth, turned the list toward us again. “But ineffective if you do.”
It became readable. And it became a list of three columns: name, location, power.
“Oh, damn,” I murmured through the horror. “It’s a list of Sensitives. Probably the ones who worked with PCC during the war.”
“Yeah,” Liam said. “Their persons of interest.” He flipped to the second page, reoriented the folds so the names lined up, scanned them. “I count forty-three names in total. And they’ve been working through the list.”
He was right. The first two dozen names had lines through them; they’d been marked off the list. Marla Salas was right in the middle, her name struck through. And we knew what had become of her.
“Damn it, Liam—she wasn’t saying ‘contact.’” I looked at him. “She was saying ‘ComTac.’ She was trying to let us know. She was communicating with us.”
Liam’s eyes widened, and he stared down at the paper. It was the first proof we’d had that wraiths really were capable of communication. “Damn,” he said quietly. “ComTac is trying to open the Veil. They have to investigate each one. Eliminate them one by one to find out if they had the encryption keys.”
I looked back on the list, scanned through for names that looked familiar, as if I’d somehow be able to match up the wraiths I’d seen with the Sensitives on the list.
And on my second pass through, I saw it.
“Oh my God.”
Liam’s gaze snapped to mine in alarm. “What?”
The names had been crossed out in order—one after another. And the next two names on the list, the ones that hadn’t yet been crossed out, were frighteningly familiar. I knew them.
Phaedra Dupre Chenal Conduct magic
Zana Dupre Chenal Call animals
“This is Tadji’s family,” I said, looking up at Liam. “Her mom and aunt. Is Chenal in Acadiana?”