I’ve never interacted with Query before, at least not on my own. He rarely leaves the Executive in his wheelchair, and he supports his partner remotely through an earpiece and up-to-date intel. I remember when he was brought to the Executive a few years after I arrived, already paralyzed from the waist down even at the age of five. By now he’s learned how to hack into any classified files on the Executive’s own system. He wouldn’t be a decent Query if he couldn’t.

In the computer lab, the operative is sitting behind a messy desk in the back corner. He’s wearing a slouched knit hat and fingerless gloves on his hands, as if he’s outside in the midst of winter, and his glasses are thicker than Agent Novenine’s spectacles. There are four computer monitors on his desk, as well as a mountain of empty soda cans behind him. He barely glances up as I approach.

I clear my throat, unsure whether to interrupt. Even though he’s in Mongoose, I still don’t know who killed Kilo. Someone must have helped by disabling the security cameras. It could have easily been Query, and either way I don’t know if he’ll report this to the Executive.

“I already told Alpha it’s done,” he says finally, typing on his keyboard, his eyes not leaving his screen. “I modified the autopsy report to say that the cause of death was fire, and the police report to say that the fire was started by faulty wiring in the... treehouse mini-fridge, whatever that means.”

“Um,” I say, briefly thrown off. He must be referring to the dead butler. “Actually, I have a question about something else. It’s kind of sensitive.”

“Frame it as a hypothetical,” he says, sounding impatient.

“Okay,” I say, after a pause. “Let’s assume I received a text message from an unknown number claiming to be an operative. What would you be able to find out?”

Query stops typing all at once, and the computer lab suddenly feels too silent, as if everything has been frozen in time. He swivels his wheelchair around to face me and says accusingly, “Kilo didn’t text anyone before he died.”

“I thought you said this was a hypothetical!”

“That’s just what I say to get people to tell me things,” he says, shrugging. “And you made it more than a little obvious that it’s about a dead operative. What did Kilo send you?”

I try not to grit my teeth. “Tell me why I should trust you first.”

He considers my expression for a moment, then offers me a hand. “Why don’t we start over? My name’s Quinn.”

After a moment, I reluctantly shake his hand. “Eliza.”

“Nice to meet you,” he says. “Look, Alpha trusts me enough that he’s talked to me about you. I already know he told you about Mongoose. I’m not going to turn anything over to the handlers, if that’s what you’re worried about. And yeah, I can hack into the security cameras whenever I want, but I had nothing to do with Kilo’s death. I want to find his killer as badly as you do.”

Query doesn’t seem to be lying, at least, and I know he’s one of the few people August regularly talks to at the Executive. Based on what he included in Code Name Alpha, I’m pretty sure he knows a lot more about me than he’s letting on.

And besides, what other choice do I have?

“Kilo texted the phone I’ve been using for my mission,” I say finally. “It was a message for Tango, but I received it less than an hour ago.”

Query raises his eyebrows and leans back in his wheelchair, thinking for a moment. “Okay, so this is what I can do for you. I can trace the number and see whose phone he used and where he got it from. I can track the location and see where he sent the message from. If there was a security camera nearby, I can see if it was really him and if anything prompted him to send it. I can run the message through a text analyzer, based on the Executive’s files from his previous missions, and see if he really wrote it. And I can check the timestamp and see how it matches up with what the autopsy report says is his time of death.” He grins. “That good enough for you?”

I blink at him. “Sure, but I can’t leave the phone with you. I need it for my mission.”

“Cool,” he says. “It’ll only take a few minutes. Let’s have at it.”

I hand over Lily Bass’s cell phone, watching as Query connects it to his computer with a thin cable. He pulls up the data on a monitor and swivels it toward me, coughing awkwardly when he sees the latest text messages between me and Jamie.

“Sounds like you have a hot date planned,” he says. “How unfortunate for Alpha.”

I barely register his comment. “It’s the message from the unknown number.”

Query whistles. “Yep, I see it. Kilo sent that almost eight hours after he died.” He swivels another monitor around to show me the autopsy report, then returns to typing again. “Text analyzer says he was the one who wrote the message, at least.” But then, several minutes later, he emits just one word: “Huh.”

The tone of it, and the way he says it, is enough to make me question everything.

“What is it?” I ask, feeling a certain amount of dread.

“The message was sent by a burner phone,” he says. “There was a dead man’s switch on it. If Kilo didn’t press a button every eight hours, a prewritten text message would be sent to Tango. Her number must have been changed to yours in his phone at some point.”

“So Kilo couldn’t press the button after he died,” I say slowly. “And then his phone texted me because the dead man’s switch activated?”

“Well, not exactly. This is the location of his phone every time the button was pressed over the past few days.” Query swivels yet another monitor around to face me, displaying a grid of recordings from security cameras around the city. The same figure is in each one, glancing at a phone and tapping something on it.

It isn’t Kilo.

“But that’s Romeo,” I say, feeling numb. “Are you sure it was him?”

“Yep,” says Query. “Any idea why your British friend would have Kilo’s burner phone?”

It doesn’t make any sense. I haven’t even seen Reese since the day of the sailing race, when we kissed in the safe house and he told me about Mongoose. Lawrence Fisher allegedly died in a highly publicized explosion, so I’d assumed Romeo was long gone by now. I can’t wrap my brain around the possibility that he might have been the one who killed Kilo.

He wasn’t trying to kill me when he injected venom into my bloodstream, was he?

I sink down into a chair across from Query, my legs feeling too weak to support me anymore. My entire world has been gradually falling apart, bit by bit, ever since the Woodland Castle. My unexpected feelings for Jamie, the ups and downs in my partnership with August, whatever has been happening with Reese... It’s all been slowly breaking me down to the point where it’s finally too much.

No wonder Juliet has been treating me like a child. I’ve always been a qualified operative, but I’ve never been willing to do anything that might go against the Executive. I’m too scared of solitary confinement, too terrified of realizing that my world isn’t what it seems. No one will tell me about the shipments. My own partner has been the leader of Mongoose for who knows how long, and I never even suspected a thing.

But as I stare at the monitor, watching Reese press a button on Kilo’s phone again and again, I notice something. In four of the recordings, he actually seems to glance directly into the security camera right when he presses the button. It’s barely noticeable, but it has to be on purpose. Like all operatives trained by the Executive, Romeo would never make this kind of mistake accidentally.

I lean forward, peering closely at the monitor. “Are these in chronological order?”

“Yep,” says Query, restarting all the recordings with a single click. “There’s a timestamp in the corner of each one. Why, see something?”

It takes me another minute to piece it together, but I finally figure it out. In the first of the four recordings, Romeo is standing outside a butcher shop, underneath a small sign that says “MEAT MARKET.” In the second recording, he’s sitting on the patio of a French café, eating a piece of white cake. In the third recording, he’s reading a copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables while leaning against a statue in a park. Finally, in the last recording, he stands still for exactly one minute, starting at midnight, before leaving.

I almost laugh with relief. It’s a coded message aimed at me. Romeo wants to meet in Paris while I’m at the wedding with Jamie. Near the Arc de Triomphe is a famous statue of Victor Hugo, where he’ll be waiting for me at midnight. Not everyone thinks I’m a child after all.

But why would he have gone through all this just to set up a meeting? Romeo must have changed Tango’s number in Kilo’s phone so the dead man’s switch would text me instead of her, prompting me to check the security cameras and figure out his message. But he could have just contacted me directly or through another member of Mongoose.

Which has to mean that someone close to me is compromised.

Seeing my expression, Query says, “I’ll keep this under wraps. But you...” He hesitates, then swivels the final monitor around to face me. “You should try not to let things get out of control.”

The monitor is displaying a page from a draft of Code Name Alpha. In the first panel, September is saying to January, “I can never give you what you want. But Rho is the same as you. He can give you what you need.” In the next panel, a man with a shaved head is kissing January while holding a poison-marked bottle at his side. The radioactive green poison dripping out of the bottle trails into the last panel, where September is lying on the ground, a farewell letter to January penned in above his head.

“I want you to have the life you deserve, Epsilon. Every time I see you crying because of us, another piece of my heart breaks. You can never be truly happy with me. I’m sorry, but it has to be this way.”

And then, in hard capital letters, the final words of the comic book.

“I love you, January. Goodbye.”