Tristan had closed his hand around her wrist and was trembling with the effort of not shaking her. “What’s happened to Mel? What is Gráinne doing? Explain yourself!”
She looked cowed—or at least, as close to cowed as Erszebet Karpathy could ever look. “She wants to take over DODO and use it for her purposes,” she said in a strangely small voice. “From San Francisco, she has already Sent Mel somewhere else, someplace Mel will not be able to come back from.”
“Where? When?”
She avoided his gaze. “We agreed not to tell each other what we were doing. Like the French Resistance—it is safer not to know.”
“How the fuck is this like the French Resistance?” Tristan growled, looking angrier than I’ve ever seen him. He let go of her and walked away, muttering to himself.
Erszebet’s face had flushed such a bright shade of red that she was almost unrecognizable. I’d never known until this moment that she was capable of being embarrassed. “I know, of course.” She looked at Tristan. “And, if you think about it, so do you. You have always known where Mel would end up.”
Tristan turned and looked at her, his anger suddenly replaced by a look that said, Of course. I get it. “London,” he said, “1851.”
“Yes. We can speak more of it later. But today . . . Gráinne will be back from 1850 San Francisco,” said Erszebet. “She has Blevins wrapped around her pinkie finger. Frink too. She also has the affection of Mr. Shiny-face Gordon Healey. She tried to seduce Mortimer but she says he is too much of a nerd.”
“Geek,” I corrected. “I’m a geek. If I were a nerd she’d have me in bed by now.”
“There are other people,” said Erszebet. “I do not know all of them.”
Tristan’s face still showed blank astonishment. “But what’s her goal? What does she want?”
“She wants magic not to go away,” said Erszebet. “That is not the same thing as letting it go away and then bringing it back.”
“Holy shit,” said Tristan under his breath. And then, as the full implication of this hit him, he repeated it much louder: “Holy shit!”
“I will leave,” said Erszebet, with nervous decisiveness. “It is best if you leave too, Tristan Lyons.”
“You’re not going anywhere without me,” said Tristan. “Not until you’ve told me everything you know.”
Erszebet’s breathing suddenly seemed labored, as if it were dawning on her that she couldn’t casually walk away from her aborted mission. “I have already told you almost everything. But I will stay with you until we figure out how to help Melisande.”
“Damn right you will,” said Tristan.
“That is my choice,” she informed him, rebounding back to the fierce and scornful witch around whom we all love to walk on eggshells. “Do not treat me like I do not have a choice in this. It was my choice right now not to send you back to the Ice Age. I could have done it like that”—she snapped her fingers for emphasis. “Do not treat me like I have done something wrong. I have done something right. You will appreciate that or I will walk away.”
Tristan collected himself. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. Thank you for not annihilating me when you had the chance, I realize that maybe wasn’t easy for you.” A brief pause as he considered options. “We’ll go to Frank Oda’s house and bring him up to date.” He turned to me. “You’re logged in as being here with us right now. If we disappear they’ll want to know what you know. You should probably get out of here with us.”
“We have an hour,” I pointed out.
“What do you mean?” Tristan asked.
I’d already punched in the commands to power down the ODEC. “Gráinne can’t come back until at least one of the ODECs is turned on for her.” I was checking out the day’s schedule on a monitor. “Earliest that could happen is an hour from now. During that time, I’ll get as much intel as I can and get it out of the building.” And because Tristan hesitated: “I’m on Team Oda. I don’t care about the rest of it.”
“We should go,” said Erszebet to Tristan, heading back into the bio-containment ward, which was the only way out. “Everyone arrives soon. Let’s be far away.”
They left, and I did some deep-breathing exercises to lower my heart rate back to normal, and then went about my morning as if it were just another day. Except that I also quietly plugged my biggest flash drive into my desktop computer, and began to download as much of ODIN as possible. The whole ODIN system—all of the message threads, NDAs, HR records, DEDE reports, security camera video, and other bureaucratic junk that had piled up on our servers during the five years that DODO had been in existence—would have filled my flash drive a thousand times over, so I tried to be selective, searching for documents that referenced Mel, Tristan, Blevins, and other key names, and focusing on certain ranges of dates when it seemed like a lot of important shit had gone down—like Halloween. Even so I ended up accidentally grabbing a lot of stuff like the sexual harassment policy that I didn’t really want or need, but I didn’t have time to be more selective. Now that it’s all up on GRIMNIR I can maybe go through and prune it later.
I kept my head down as people came in and the office filled up as on any other day, except that head count was low because a lot of people were taking vacation. My cube is on the edge of the R&D group area, so I saw Dr. Oda come in and do a stand-up meeting with the crew that was going to be taking the ATTO out on the road—a driver, obviously, plus a MUON and two technicians who were going to be in the back, operating the equipment and running tests. Nothing too fancy—they just wanted to verify that the ATTO’s onboard power supply and comms features would operate nominally while the thing was bouncing around in real-world traffic conditions.