“Seph?” Quillan asked. “What is it?”
I slammed the door and ran into the trees, forgetting my bodyguards, forgetting the messenger, forgetting everything but the hope that threatened to strangle me. The hooded man disappeared as quickly as he had appeared and I paused at the spot where I thought I had seen him last, turning in a circle. There was a cell phone taped to a tree, right in front of my face. When I switched my gaze to the side of the tree, I had a perfect view of the side of Quillan’s car—right where we had been. I ripped the phone free just as Quillan reached me. I showed him the phone and explained what I had seen; but our search of the surrounding trees revealed nothing. The man was nowhere to be found.
“Let’s go,” I finally said, trudging back to the car.
I waited until we were on the road before I turned the phone on, which caused Quillan to sigh in an exasperated way beside me.
“I told you to wait until we got back to the house.”
“I’ll start obeying you like a dutiful little Atmá after you tell me why you let Silas run rogue, resulting in him as Weston’s hostage—an angry Weston, by the way, because you shot him with a sniper rifle—Dominic Kingsling as a corpse on the ground; and me, with a bullet in the shoulder. Until then…” I trailed off, thumbing through the message threads on the phone. None of them were names that I recognised. Mother Hen, Trouble #1, Trouble #2, Her, Home, Other Home, Crass, Dom, and a bunch of others. I clicked on Mother Hen, because it was the most recent.
We’re set, the last message read.
Well, that was informative. I scrolled up, but all of the messages were similarly brief and uninformative. I clicked on Trouble #1, and found much the same thing. I bypassed Trouble #2, and clicked on Her.
The last message read: I haven’t heard from you. You won’t answer your phone. I’m coming to get you.
Frowning, I scrolled up and found myself reading a message that I had sent on the night that Dominic Kingsling’s men had kidnapped me.
“Oh my god,” I breathed out. “This is Silas’s phone.”
Quillan pulled the car to the side of the road, snatching the phone out of my hand. He silently examined it as I fell back into my seat, running through the contact names in my head. Mother Hen had to be Quillan—Silas had called him that before. Trouble #1 and Trouble #2 were Noah and Cabe, and I was… Her. I didn’t know about Home and Other Home, but Dom could be Dominic Kingsling and Crass could be Jayden—he had called himself Agent Crassus after finding me at the scene of the limousine accident, so I assumed that it was his last name. After a few minutes Quillan pulled back onto the road and handed the phone back to me.
“Are you sure you didn’t see the guy’s face?” he asked me.
“I’m sure. Only a hood—he was wearing jeans, I think. What does this mean?”
I clicked on the message folder again and glanced down the list of names, pausing at one that I hadn’t noticed before, as it was further down in the list, indicating that it wasn’t a recent contact.
Hunter.
My stomach lurched and I quickly clicked on the thread belonging to Kingsling so that I wouldn’t click on Hunter’s name. There were mostly messages coming in, rarely any going out, and they all stated locations, dates or times.
“What’s up with this?” I asked Quillan, flashing the screen of the phone at him.
“It’s how we receive our assignments,” he explained, glancing at the phone briefly before turning his eyes back to the road. “Our handler will send us as few details as possible—mostly because of hackers like Silas—and we meet up in person to discuss whatever they need us to do.”
“What if it’s an emergency?”
“There will just be a location—no date or time. There won’t be a person at the location, but all emergency locations are situated near hotspots. It’s any place marked with a K: chalk on the pavement, graffiti on a subway platform, that kind of thing. There will be a disposable phone in the hotspot location, with directions on what to do.”
“Wouldn’t that be a little hard to find? A random K written into the environment?”
“For less experienced agents… yes, I suppose it would be.”