Chapter Fifteen

Noah had spent the last three days in his workroom—and it showed.

He wasn't a slob, not by any stretch, but there were unmistakable, unavoidable signs of constant inhabitation. He'd slowly collected tablets and manuals and loose components and put them all into easy reach. Now, those items formed a clear semicircle around his chair where it was situated in front of his numerous, differently sized screens, like leaves shuffled to the side of a well-used wooded path.

Noah's eyes were red, his hair mussed. When he slept, it was only because Emma periodically dragged him away to bed. When he ate, it was because someone shoved a plate or a sandwich into his hands. He downed the food quickly, almost all of his attention still fixed on the lines of code scrolling across the screens.

Cracking the encryption was vital, but Jeni didn't know how much longer Noah could keep this up. She shot Noelle a pointed look from her chair near the door, where she sat with her own tablet, and the other woman furrowed her brow. “Noah—”

“No.” He half-rose from his seat, his face intent on the screen to his left even as he reached out and tapped blindly on a tablet to his right.

Noelle exchanged a worried glance with Jeni and circled the table. “I know you said you were close, but that was five hours ago. You need—”

“Shh.” He swept up the tablet they'd picked up from Owen Turner, leaning over so far that his chair rocked precariously. He thrust the tablet in Jeni's direction. “I think I've got it.”

The last few times he'd uttered the words, adrenaline had surged through Jeni. But they'd turned out to be false alarms. “I think it's time to talk about diminishing returns, Noah. You're exhausted.”

“One more,” he shot back, waving the tablet insistently. “If this isn't it, I'll take a fucking nap.”

“All right.” She lifted both hands in surrender and rose. “Let's check it out.”

She took the tablet from him and accessed the last message, some unsolicited offer for a free trial to the latest time-wasting, pay-to-play game on Eden's network. Noah jabbed his finger down on his keyboard one last time and collapsed back into his chair.

The cursor on his monitor blinked three times before spitting out several lines of text. Noah scrubbed his hands over his face and left them over his eyes. “I can't look. If it's not right…”

“I know.” She leaned over to peer at the monitor, and all the shock and excitement that she'd shoved down before crashed through her. “...don't miss this amazing, exclusive offer—holy shit, Noah. Holy shit.”

Noelle leaned over his other shoulder, her eyes wide. Her gaze skimmed to the end of the decrypted text, and she threw her arms around him. “You crazy bastard, I knew you could do it.”

“That makes one of us,” Noah said hoarsely. He dropped his hands and blinked blearily at the screen. “So that's it. We have an algorithm now. I can start the decryption process—”

“Or get some sleep,” Noelle interrupted.

“Or get some sleep,” he agreed with a rusty laugh. “I just need...wait a second.”

He sat upright and snatched the tablet out of Jeni's hands. A swipe of one hand brought him back to the list of incoming messages, while his other hand flew over the keyboard. Another list appeared on the monitor—gibberish subject lines with only the dates and times visible.

Noah held the tablet up next to the screen. “There are messages missing. Incoming communications that we caught at the switch. Turner must have deleted them from the tablet.”

“No wonder everything on it made for boring reading. Too boring for a spy.” Jeni nodded to the screen. “Can we retrieve the deleted messages?”

“I already have them.” Noah shoved two of the large tablets cluttering the table aside and came up with a third, smaller one. “Give me a second and I'll decrypt them.”

Noelle watched him, her lower lip caught between her teeth. As soon as he'd transferred the decrypted messages onto the smaller tablet, she laid a hand on his shoulder. “I can oversee the decryption. I'll wake you up if I run into trouble. But you need food and a bed.”

Jeni knew it was bad when he didn't even argue. He rose slowly, passed Jeni the tablet, and started for the door with the too-careful steps of a man running on pride.

“He did good.” And Dallas would reward him handsomely for it. “Now it's our turn.”

Noelle flexed her fingers and slid into Noah's abandoned chair. “I'll have to decrypt this in chunks, then run the filter. We need some way to narrow down what we're looking for.”

“May as well get started. Who knows what we'll find.” Or if they'd find anything. Jeni dropped into her chair again and opened the cluster of restored messages on Owen Turner's tablet.

There were about two dozen missives to Paige, the girl who worked for Gia. They ranged from studiedly casual notes right on up to bad love poems. A few of the later ones had taken on an air of desperation, even of vague threat, and Jeni found herself wishing Hawk or Jas had found the motherfucker after all.

There were more, some of Turner trying to flex on some small-time hoods in and out of Eden, and others asking for jobs, loans, even transport out of the sectors to one of the nearest mountain colonies.

Then one message caught Jeni's eye—stark, terse, and nonsensical.

By the way, we're out of sugar.

And that was it. Not only was it phrased more formally than the rest of Turner's communications, but it seemed oddly domestic for a man whose apartment, by all accounts, didn't have a working kitchen. Beyond that…

Who the hell says by the way when they haven't said anything else?

She double-checked the time stamps, thinking that maybe it was meant as an addendum to a previous message, but there was nothing. Turner hadn't communicated with this address before or since.

By the way, we're out of sugar.

Something else about the message tugged at Jeni, prompting a flash of memory too brief and hazy to grasp. But she knew she'd seen these exact words before—in that massive pile of shit Noelle had given her to read through.

“Can we run a search on something?” she asked softly. “Doesn't have to be recent. Everything from before the wall went hot is fine.”

“Sure.” Noelle scooted her chair to one side and activated a second monitor. “What is it, a name? Phrase?”

Jeni propped the tablet in front of her. “What do you make of that?”

“Out of sugar?” Noelle made a face as she started typing. “Why would he even have sugar to...begin…” She trailed off with a frown, a deep furrow forming between her eyebrows. With a flick of her fingers across the monitor, the results of the search appeared on the wall in front of them. “Oh, my God.”

Page after page filled the wall, pouring from the projector in a glaring, damning rush. All with those exact same words.

It had to be a code phrase. What it meant, Jeni had no idea—maybe it was an update, or a way to ask for a face-to-face meeting with a handler—but its purpose was clear. To be innocuous, so mundane that no computer program would ever catch it. So that you'd never even see it unless you were already looking for it.

Jeni walked toward the wall, everything numb and frozen but her galloping heart. She touched a page at the edge of the image, heedless of her body blocking out most of the rest of the projection. “This one was in the stuff you gave me. I didn't think twice about it because the lady owns a food stand in the market…”

Owned a stand. Another memory burned through her brain—Tatiana's face crumpling into tears when Jasper told her that Mila had died, had killed herself—

The numbness was nothing compared to the chill that swept through Jeni now. She almost stumbled back as she took in the names, trying to focus on them, to work them into some semblance of order while her mind whirled. “Anson, Ramirez, Schaffley—Noelle, do you see this?”

“They're all dead. Jesus Christ, Jeni.” Noelle's face was pale as she rose. “I need to get Dallas and Lex.”

She hurried out of the room, while Jeni kept staring at the wall until the names swam together. Those people weren't just dead—Hawk and the others had pried their corpses off the electrified wall.

For weeks, they'd all braced themselves against finding another body, another person who'd succumbed to the stress and pressure of an impending war. It had become a distillation of their larger worries, only instead of waiting to see when Eden would attack, they were waiting to see how far hopelessness had dug its claws into the people of Sector Four.

Suicide-by-Eden was sinister enough. This was something monstrous.

By the time Dallas and Lex appeared in the doorway, disheveled and a little out of breath, Jeni's numbness had given way to a strange kind of furious calm, a rage so deep she didn't even know how to express it.

Lex spoke first. “What do you have?”

“Your spies.” Jeni barely recognized her own voice. “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

“Give us the good.”

Jeni turned to face them. “They're all dead. Electrocuted on the wall.”

Dallas's expression hardened as he stared at the projected data. “Who'd they send the messages to?”

“Throwaway IDs,” Noelle answered. “You can buy them in Eden in the illegal market by the dozen. Usually they get shut down pretty fast by the automated checks, but if you know how to avoid those, or if Security has a vested interest in keeping them active…”

“Somehow I doubt they all got real guilty and marched out to off themselves in the exact same way,” Dallas said.

“You know better, honey.” Lex had gone pale. “Our spies were murdered.”

Dallas clenched his fists. “Every fucking one of them died on the wall, but so did people who aren't on that list.”

“Then we have two options,” Jeni whispered. “Either people got wind of how they died and figured it was as good a way to go as any, or—”

“Or,” Lex cut in, “they were killed along with the others as a cover. In case we started looking at things too closely.”

“Shit.” Dallas's hands curled into fists. “They're some fucking sadistic motherfucking murdering shitheads.”

“Worse,” Noelle said softly, her gaze locking with Jeni's. “They're Eden.”

“They'd never pass up a chance to wage psychological warfare on the sectors,” Jeni agreed. “But they wouldn't kill their own spies to do it unless they'd been compromised.” Or outlived their usefulness.

“Loose ends,” Lex whispered tightly. “The city's cleaning house.”

“Which means they're about to move.” Dallas turned to face them. “Noelle, keep on the decryption. Figure out every other weird-ass email that's ever come and gone from those spies and see if anyone else was sending the same thing.”

“Got it.”

“Jeni?”

“Yeah?”

There was sympathy in Dallas's eyes. Pain. But also unbending, steely resolve. “Go find Hawk. It's time.”

“I'll tell him.” Alya wasn't going to like it. And Hawk— Jeni's peculiar calm shattered in an instant, replaced by pain, by a regret too deep for words or even tears.

Sector Four was his home now, but the farm in Six would always be a part of him. And now it was a part he had to destroy.