The guy had a point, and I could already feel my eyelids drooping, my body succumbing to the warmth and safety of the place—the warmth and safety of Jace himself.
“Do you think we’ll get them back?” I asked quietly. “Not the techs. I mean, of course the techs, but more so our friends. Do you think…”
He reached out and pulled me closer, laying my head on his shoulder.
“Of course we will,” he said softly. “I’ll make sure of it.”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath of him, the smoky, warm smell of his skin, and I believed him. Then, just as I was giving myself permission to sleep, I swore I felt him press his lips to my forehead, just for a moment.
I didn’t open my eyes, but smiled to myself, and relaxed into the sleep my body so desperately needed.
21
I woke up to find myself tangled up with Jace. My clothing stuck to my skin with the heat of the room and the blankets, but I had the satisfaction of seeing that he was still asleep. It meant I had some time to actually look at him. Really look—which was something I’d found you didn’t do in everyday life. Maybe because you were too busy, or maybe because you were worried about the other person catching you doing it. Either way, though I’d been around him for days on end, and had been through some pretty intense situations with him, I’d never just… looked at him.
Now that I did, I could see why Jackie, Alexy, and the others had been making jokes about us. It wouldn’t have been possible for a girl to be around him without finding him achingly attractive. He had the kind of deep-set eyes that begged you to tell him secrets, and his lips appeared fuller, softer while he was sleeping. Almost childlike. The tussled, curly hair just made him seem even more innocent in his slumber, and I had to stop myself from reaching out to trace the curve of his cheek.
This wasn’t a child that lay before me. He wasn’t a naïve, vulnerable being. Or rather, if he was vulnerable, it was simply due to the fact that he sometimes allowed himself to be. I’d seen him in battle, and I knew that there was strength there unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Strength that he had, for some reason, used on my behalf.
At that moment, his eyes opened, dark with sleep, and he caught me lying there staring at him. My legs were still caught up with his, my mouth turned upward in a soft smile, and I almost died of embarrassment.
I struggled to disengage my legs from his and looked away awkwardly as words tumbled out of my mouth on top of each other.
“Morning. I just woke up myself, but it seems like it’s light outside, so maybe we should—”
He put a finger against my lips, and the babbling died in my throat.
“You talk too much in the morning,” he said softly. “But you’re right. We do need to get moving. I’ll go upstairs and get us some coffee and a couple of pastries. The perks of living in a coffeehouse basement, eh?” He smiled and tilted his head toward the bathroom. “You can take the first shower. I don’t get too much hot water down here, and something tells me I’m more used to cold showers than you are.”
He brushed his finger affectionately down my nose, making me almost cry out in a combination of panic and longing, and then rose gracefully, leaving me lying in a puddle on the floor, wondering how the hell I had found myself in this position.
“At this rate we’re going to exhaust our sick days and get ourselves flagged for not following the rules,” Ant snarked when he opened the door to our knock.
Jackie yanked the door open farther and gave me a look that spoke volumes about how many times she’d addressed this exact statement through the night. She shoved Ant to the side.
“You’re forgetting that we probably won’t even need those sick days much longer, because we probably won’t be working anymore. I’m laying money down that the Ministry is either going to find us and arrest us, or we’re going to end up dead.” Jackie shot Ant a grin. “And I’d rather die having taken full advantage of my sick days, wouldn’t you?”
I heard a defeated snort from Ant and smiled to myself. If they’d had this conversation more than once, I bet that Ant had also lost it more than once—probably in this exact same way. If I knew Jackie, her responses had become more and more outrageous the more he’d brought it up. It had always been her favorite trick for shutting him up.
She gave me an arched look, her eyes moving over my shoulder.
“And how was your night?” she asked, her voice thick with innuendo.
“So, who’s our first target?” I asked, striding briskly past her into the room and leaving Jace to follow. Things had been distinctly awkward since our wakeup call this morning, though he was acting completely normal. It was my own head that wouldn’t let me get past what had happened between us.
I hoped that getting into the action of the day would help me get over it.
It had been thirty-six hours since our friends had fallen prey to the Ministry. Cloyd, Zion, and Alexy had seemed sure that they wouldn’t hurt our people and that they were keeping them as bait, but that didn’t make me feel any better about leaving them there. The sooner we found a few techs, the sooner we could figure out what was going on with OH+ and move on to figuring out how to rescue the others.
I was still holding out hope that Nelson was in hiding somewhere, but if the Ministry had caught her, then she was on that list too. We needed to get in there and get them out.
Jackie glanced down at her phone, presumably to look at the list of techs I’d sent her. Gabby had sent it to me before starting to do her research on the other list and the documents she’d found. I knew passing things around like that wasn’t the most secure way to operate, but I didn’t want anything remaining in one place anymore. It made it too difficult to find things when we needed them—especially if that one place happened to go down.
“I vote we go after Naomi531,” Jackie said. “She lives the closest to us, so she’ll be the easiest to find. She was important, wasn’t she?”
She glanced up at me for confirmation, and I nodded.
“She was Nelson’s second-in-command on the IT team,” I replied. “I think she was the first one to actually get into the auction site. Definitely important. Definitely smart. I second your vote.”
I cast glances at Jace and Ant, asking silently if they had any better ideas, and received nods.
“It makes sense to me,” Jace said, looking at his own version of the list. “They’re all relatively local. Nathan must have kept them pretty close to each other, just in case he ever needed to gather them in a hurry. The nearest location will make for the quickest confirmation, and if we can start with the higher-level techs, we’ll have a better chance at getting the system up and running as soon as possible.”
I glanced at my phone, noting that he was correct about the addresses. Everyone was in our town or one of the cities closest to us, which seemed odd.
“Do you think he actually moved people around?” I asked. Nelson had already lived here, of course, but had the others? Or had he just helped them get here?
Jace shrugged in response.
“Not sure, to be honest, but it could be a lot simpler. This is a crowded area, with all the factories and lots of people. It makes sense for Nathan to base his operation here and then do recruiting in the immediate area. It could just be that he never ventured any farther than this county.”
I pressed my lips together. That was a simpler explanation than I’d been thinking, and a more logical one. I reminded myself that I was supposed to be giving Nathan the benefit of the doubt, not making up conspiracy theories about him. I turned back to the list.
“Naomi, then,” I said, trying to cover the awkward pause. “Our mission is to find the techs using these addresses. Gather them together, or at least secure communications by phone so that we can get in touch with them again. Do it fast.”
I didn’t need to explain why time was of the essence.
“Seems like that really only takes care of part of the problem,” Ant said. “I mean, what are we go
ing to do after we rescue our team? Assuming we do manage to rescue our team at all.”
I gave him an even look.
“That’s a problem for the future. I think we have enough problems for right now, don’t you?”
He tilted his head to the side and nodded.
“I see your point. Okay then, let’s get it done. We don’t have any time to waste sitting around this joint. Naomi in Sedgeville, here we come.”
We rose and strode out the door, our minds on the mission ahead of us. We were still in the hallway when I got a text from Gabby.
Can’t figure out how to search for who the addresses on the List of Five Hundred belong to without being too obvious, don’t want to get myself caught, it read. Still looking for a way to go completely anonymous when searching through public records.
I frowned, but it was solid reasoning. I didn’t want her getting caught, and at this point, any suspicious search parameters could be risky.
Got it, I typed back in response. Your safety first. Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out. Wait for me on that one. I don’t want you putting yourself in danger.
It was the right call—to wait until we had a less dangerous way to search. Though, that didn’t mean I liked it. I would have felt a whole lot better if I’d known for a fact that the Ministry didn’t have my home address.
22
The trip to Sedgeville was a quick one—just half an hour westbound on the C train. We were there almost before I could gather my thoughts on the matter. Standing on the platform of Sedgeville’s main train station, Jackie called the meeting to order.
“Okay, we’ve got her at 555 Ash, which is three blocks away, according to my GPS,” she announced, typing madly into her phone. “We go out here, take a left, and walk straight down the street. It’s going to be easy, but it’s also going to be obvious. Anyone got any bright ideas about how we make it less so?”
I groaned. This field trip was so rushed that we hadn’t even really thought about anything that would serve as a disguise. It felt like a major problem to me, but Jace shrugged nonchalantly.
“It’s the middle of the morning, and this town gets a lot of foot traffic,” he explained. “I don’t see any reason to be stealthy about this. We just blend into the crowds and walk. We’re just like anyone else.”
We would be out in the open, therefore easier targets, but it also seemed like it might work. If we were acting normal, it would likely keep us from attracting attention, but if we snuck around like thieves…
“Works for me,” I said quickly. “Let’s go.”
We walked down the stairs and out of the train station—an old-fashioned structure that was open to the world, with a row of columns decorating the front entrance, holding up absolutely nothing. Each column had a pot at the base with ivy growing out of it and up the structure, and it gave the entire place a green, forest-like feeling.
When we got to the town beyond, I could see that the streets were set up in much the same way. Trees grew in rows along the roads, and flowers were planted haphazardly along the sidewalks.
“Looks like someone is actually trying to take care of this place,” Jace said with surprise.
I agreed it was very rare to see so much greenery in one place. Then again, Sedgeville was a residential town. The people who lived here commuted to the factories in my city, and that might explain the difference.
“The government tries to make the cities where people live more attractive, I guess,” I mused. It seemed strange that they would bother. Most of the people who lived there were still below the poverty line.
So, the government would give them pretty things to look at—but still snatch their children and sell them. Talk about a hypocritical policy.
We strolled past the grocery store, then a line of row houses. These were crowded cheek to cheek and stuffed into a space too small for so many residences. It was here that the façade of well-manicured vegetation started to show its cracks. The buildings weren’t well maintained. I could see the grime on the brick and counted three broken windows, each of them roughly patched with cardboard. There was a sign on one door indicating an apartment for rent. In the next window, I saw an older woman, her cheeks pinched with hunger and despair.
The trees were prettier in Sedgeville than they were in the city where I worked, but the people were the same.
Desperate. Hungry. Hopeless.
I turned my face to the front and kept walking, trying to keep my mind on what we were doing here. I looked farther up the street, wondering what sort of house Naomi had.
Then I stopped dead.
I could already see where she lived.
Or where she had lived.
I didn’t think she lived there anymore, and I prayed that she hadn’t been in that building when it happened.
If she had, she was most certainly dead.
“Holy…” Ant whispered, having stopped as well. “That’s even worse than Nelson’s place.”
He was right. Nelson’s building had at least still been standing. What remained of Naomi’s was a burnt-out hole. There was nothing left, not even the frame of a building, though you could see that something had been there at some point, missing among the row houses.
We crossed to the other side of the street without speaking a word, all of us in some silent agreement that we needed to get closer. We just didn’t want to be on the same side of the street as that disaster—and I could see that all the foot traffic was doing the same thing. The people around us might not have known what had happened, or who had lived there, but they obviously didn’t want to go near it. The sidewalk was crowded, but the spot right in front of the hole was ominously empty.
At least it gave us a better view.
We drew to a stop about two hundred feet away and stared just like the many other people. A charred black crust covered the lot, along with the skeleton of what had once been a tree but now looked like a Halloween decoration. I saw the cornerstones of the building and noted coldly that the houses on each side of it had also taken some damage, their walls burned and one of them sporting a distinct hole.
“Another explosion,” I muttered, and my hand dropped from my chest to instinctively seek Jace’s hand. His fingers were right there, as if they’d been waiting for mine. I grabbed at them, needing something tangible to hold, something secure. This was much too close to what we’d seen at Nelson’s place. Even the enforcer tape calling it a crime scene was the same.
That was no coincidence.
“We have to get out of here,” Jace said suddenly, and I jerked my eyes from the wreckage. I looked to the people around, trying to figure out what he was talking about.
“Why?” I whispered. “What do you see?”
He turned toward me and threw his arms around me as if to give me a hug. His breath was hot as he whispered in my ear.
“Right at the south side of the building, on the sidewalk. Where the crowds stop because people don’t want to walk past the bombsite. The man in the blue jacket and the hat. He’s not looking at where the house was. He’s not upset about the destruction. He’s watching the crowds. See him?”
I tried to ignore how close he was to me and get my brain to move. I directed my gaze to what he was referencing and immediately saw who he meant.
“You’re right,” I whispered, my eyes moving over the guy. “He’s also way too well dressed to be hanging around in a neighborhood like this.”
The man was staring right at us, and I shuddered.
“He’s seen us. He’s looking right at us.”
Jace nodded, stepped back, and put a hand to my cheek.
“Look at me like I’m comforting you. Like you’re upset about the house blowing up, upset about the violence of it or something. Jackie and Ant, you two do your best to look annoyed with Robin for being such a pansy.”
I heard Jackie snicker but focused on trying to look upset and let Jace comfort me for a moment. After an appropriate minute, we continued walking in the
same direction we’d been headed, doing everything we could not to look at the house where one of our people had lived.
We were back on the train, completely shell-shocked, before anyone said anything. It was I who broke the silence.
“What’s our next stop?” I asked quietly.
“Are you crazy?” Jackie asked. “You want to keep looking?”
I cast her a cool glance and noticed that she was sitting a lot closer to Ant than she had been on the ride to Naomi’s. In fact, Ant had his arm around her and had pulled her against him.
Not that I blamed either one of them.
I hadn’t let go of Jace’s hand since we’d seen what was left of Naomi’s building, and I wasn’t sure I was ever going to let go of it again. I was terrified by what I’d seen and even more terrified of what I thought it might mean.
But I wasn’t yet willing to give up.
“Maybe Naomi was helping Nelson during the raid, and we didn’t know about it,” I offered, voicing my thoughts. “Maybe she got caught by the snare protocol as well. She was Nelson’s second-in-command. It would have made sense for her to be involved in some way, behind the scenes.”
“I don’t know a lot about tech, but I second that thought,” Jace said from beside me. “Nelson knew how important that raid was. It would have been practical for her to have backup on her end, and there wouldn’t have been any reason for her to tell us. For all we know, Naomi was just caught up in the same storm that took Nelson… or at least her office.”
He squeezed my hand with the last statement, and I squeezed back, thankful that he’d added that. I wasn’t willing to give up on Nelson being alive yet, either.
Jackie stared at us both, then shook her head.