Told u we didn’t have much time, Bailey texts. Prolly mins til they figure you’re systems offline too. U should head back.

She wants to text him back, but she can’t remove her hand from the bag of pills. Choices, she thinks.

“Choices,” she whispers.

Charley?

Three is what she asked for, so three is what she’ll take.

After the drama of the hiding place and the lockbox, the Ziploc bag inside seems surprisingly pedestrian. The pills within look just like the last ones he gave her. Lumpy and cakey, like they came from a meth lab and not an industrial one. That means they’ll break easily. She empties nine of them into the lockbox’s padded interior, then twists the top of the Ziploc bag into a loose knot above the remaining three so they’ll be protected.

Give me a sec, she texts back.

In another few minutes, she has the lockbox closed and back inside its hiding place.

Once she’s up the grassy bank and back on the shoulder of the road, she texts, Did you know this is what he was going to do?

Yes, comes the response.

Are you next?

?

They just busted in on him. Are they coming for you next?

They can’t.

Why not?

That’s not how it works.

She’s not about to keep typing in furious responses to his evasiveness in the darkness on the side of the road.

We need to talk. Now.

We r talking. This is how I talk.

Call me. Now.

Ugh.

Now Bailey.

As she settles into the driver’s seat, the phone rings. It’s an unknown caller, of course. She places the Ziploc bag in the empty cup holder.

“This isn’t really necessary,” Bailey says when she answers.

She can count on one hand the number of times she’d heard the guy speak out loud when she was a teenager and Bailey was barely high school age. He was a lot younger than her, for one, but he was also a quiet introvert, rarely seen around town; the polar opposite of his athletic, loudmouth older brother. Still, she’s surprised by the softness of his voice. It lacks the spark of his text messages.

She starts the car, pulls a U-turn, and heads back in the direction of the 101.

“Did you know this is what he was going to do?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“OK. Then you need to also know he can’t always be trusted.”

“You think the pills are fake?” Bailey asks.

“That’s not what I meant,” she says. “You just don’t know the whole story with him.”

“I’m learning. I did a bunch of reading while you guys were chatting.”

“Where are you?”

“If I try to explain the Graydon network to you, you’ll just get—”

“No, I mean physically, Bailey. Where in the world are you?”

“I don’t want you to know.”

“And you don’t want Luke to know, either, is that it? I’m not keeping this call a secret from him, so please. Give me something I can tell him that will make him hurt a little less.”

“I’m safe. He doesn’t have to worry about me. He’s never had to worry about me. I don’t know why he does anyway.”

“Because you’re all he has.”

“Not anymore. He’s got you. And he shouldn’t waste his time with you worrying about me. That’s dumb.”

She shouldn’t be surprised Bailey speaks with the sullen certainty of a seven-year-old who’s never had a responsibility. But she is.

“Just give me something I can share with him that will make him feel like you’re OK.”

After a long silence, Bailey finally says, “Tell him Cole doesn’t even know where I am.”

“What? How are you working for him, then? Have you guys even met?”

“IRL? No. I don’t do anything IRL.”

“What about all this raw computing power he supposedly gave you?”

“Ever heard of UPS?”

“I thought he agreed to clear your record.”

“So he says. Do you believe everything Cole says? You shouldn’t. ’Cause if he told you you had good security, he’s lying. You’ve got surveillance, but that’s it. And right now, he doesn’t even have that because I threw it all offline.”

“That thing . . . Noah said. About being injected with something that can kill him?”

“Yeah, they’ve got some kind of tracking system on him. In him, it looks like.”

“They injected me with all sorts of things during lab testing. Do I have one, too?”

“Yes.”

“And it could kill me at a second’s notice?”

“I can’t tell that from here,” he says, as if he’s trying to spot a storm front, not discussing whether there’s a device inside her that could end her life in an instant.

“What can you tell?”

“With you, it’s not just a tracker. It’s giving them biometric data. Like blood oxygen levels, cell counts. It’s more like a medical monitoring system, and it’s putting out twice the information his is. With him, they’re just trying to tell where he is and if he’s alive.”

“OK, so is it tracking me right now?” she asks. “Or did you knock it offline, too?”