38.
I woke from the dreamwalk with a gasp, sitting up to find Harry next to me, and Cassidy tapping away in the corner of the room, still lit by her screen. She glanced at me for just a second, then went back to typing.
“You heard?” Cassidy asked.
“Deltan Data Systems in South Minneapolis,” I said, shivering a little, either from the torture I’d just performed or the realization I was about to go into another fight that would probably end up in an incredibly brutal fashion. “You sure about that one?”
“It’ll work,” she said, not looking up.
“Harry—” I started to say.
“I’ll go get us a vehicle,” he said, already on his feet. He brushed my hand as he stood, and I realized he’d been kneeling at the side of the bed when I’d awoken. He tossed me a smile, then vanished through the bedroom door. A few seconds later, I heard the front door open and close.
“I think he might have a crush on me,” I muttered under my breath.
“Duh,” Cassidy said. “Even I can see that.” Then she paused, looking at her computer screen, eyes unfocused.
“You’re thinking about Simmons … about Eric, aren’t you?” I asked, putting my legs over the side of the bed.
She looked down, almost trying to hide behind the screen of her laptop, but it was so small it afforded no protection from my prying gaze. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Is he dead?” I asked.
She didn’t answer for a moment, staring straight ahead. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t?” I asked. “No body found, I assume?”
She shook her head. “No body. No confirmation.”
I let her baste in silence for a beat. “What was he doing in Virginia? Why was he attacking that aircraft carrier?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I … when I got out of the Cube, it was before everyone else. Harmon let me loose … to come work with him on destroying you and completing the serum. When Eric got out …” She turned so I could see her profile. “I don’t know what happened, but when I finally got free of Harmon a few months later … he had already disappeared.”
“I suppose a guy like Simmons wouldn’t want to be found by the cops again.”
“No,” she said, turning to look right at me, eyes burning. “He didn’t disappear from the cops. I could have found him if he’d gone underground. He disappeared, Sienna. Vanished. Not just off the grid, off the continent. No record of travel under any alias. No one matching his description. He was gone, like he’d never even existed.” She turned away again. “Not many people have that kind of power to … make things disappear and reappear—like he did in Virginia. No customs record. No passport. The FBI investigation?” She touched her laptop screen. “It’s like he dropped out of thin air. Eric wouldn’t have gone after a target like an aircraft carrier just for the fun of it. He’d need a reason. Someone made him do this.” Her face hardened. “They pushed him in the path of this maniac.” She looked away. “They got him killed.”
I felt a little chill, like a familiar boogeyman had come strolling behind me and stroked my spine. “There’s only one group I know of that seems to have the ability to make things appear and disappear out of the United States these days without any trace.”
Her gaze hardened. “Revelen.”
I nodded. “It’s hardly conclusive, but … yeah.”
“I don’t know much more about what’s going on over there than you do,” she said, focusing back on her screen. “They’ve got someone who’s pure dynamite working Infosec for them.”
“ArcheGrey1819,” I said, taking a breath as I slid off the bed and stood.
“Probably,” Cassidy said. “But her architecture is so good it’s tough to tell without seeing inside the walls for hints of her … signature code.”
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked, thinking again of her use of pep pills during our road trip. She had the dark circles under her eyes now, and I wondered how long it had been since she’d slept.
“Your false concern is unnecessary,” Cassidy said, focusing her attention back on her screen and typing again. “You don’t really care if I’m processing these amphetamines properly.”
“I care a little bit,” I said, trying to be gentle. “From a purely utilitarian standpoint … Cassidy, you’re watching my back on this. I need you in the best possible working condition.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, not looking up from whatever she was typing. “I can work for seven and a half days without sleep, and I’m on day four, hour six. As you know from your recent experiments with alcohol consumption, narcotic effects are lessened among metahumans due to superior liver and kidney function—”
“I was expressing concern for you as a person,” I said. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”
She paused her typing. “Oh,” she said, not looking up from the screen. Her pale skin glowed in the screen light and she glanced up at me. “I know you’re not doing this for me anymore. Because of our debt.”
I sighed. “And here I was hoping this would square things between us. Kinda annoying that you finally learned enough about detecting human motives to figure out mine had changed in the course of this thing.”
“I’ll make you a new deal,” she said, thinking for only a millisecond before speaking, leading me to believe this was something she’d scripted out ahead of time. “When the day comes that you go to Revelen …” She kept talking, even though I opened my mouth to protest, “… and we all know it’s coming …” Her gaze got hard, furious, and I saw hints of the depths of anger within Cassidy, and it was … boundless. “I want to go, too.”
“You could just buy a ticket tomorrow,” I said, shrugging. “It’s not like the country is under embargo. Airfare is like a thousand bucks, no obstacle for you.”
She shook her head. “Going in that way? They’d see me coming a mile off.” She shut the laptop and leaned forward. “No. I just want you to tell me when you go—so I can come at them my own way.”
My brow puckered as I frowned. “Why?”
She smiled thinly. “Because when you go in everyone will be paying attention to you and the mess you’re making. They won’t have time to spare a thought for me.” She leaned back and opened her laptop once more.
I tried to decide how to take that, and finally settled on pretending it was some kind of compliment. “You’ve got a deal,” I said and met her gaze over the gulf between us. Once upon a time, I would have said the distance between Cassidy and I was light-years. But now, looking at her as she typed, planning her revenge …
It didn’t seem nearly so far.