Chapter Eleven

Jeni finished writing down the last name she'd committed to memory and handed the list to Dallas. “Gia said that's everyone who's been spending money like water at her place these days.” The look on his face would have made her laugh—if the circumstances weren't so horrible. “Yeah, it's not exactly a small pool of spy candidates.”

His gaze slid down the list, his jaw tightening. “Jesus fucking hell, Jeni. Damn near twenty, just from Gia?”

“And her girls don't come cheap. I should know.”

Dallas snorted and passed the paper to Noelle, who nibbled on her lower lip as she studied the names. “It's not necessarily that dire. Some of them are probably just blowing their money now before Eden has a chance to get to them.”

“Oh, that's the good option?” Dallas rubbed a hand over his face. “So we have desperate motherfuckers who are about to be broke, desperate motherfuckers. We have people getting rich off Christ-knows-what behind our backs because we don't have time to chase them down. And somewhere in the middle of that mess, we have assholes selling us out to Eden.”

Talk about your clouds with no silver linings. “Owen Turner,” Jeni said quietly.

Dallas raised an eyebrow. “You got a feeling?”

Well, that was flattering. “Hardly. He's a talker, and he has a crush on one of Gia's girls. Keeps trying to steal her away. Last week, he told her she should take him up on the offer before it's too late.” She rose with a shrug. “It could be nothing.”

“Wait a second.” He jabbed a finger toward the seat. “Park your ass.”

She sighed but obeyed. “That's all I know, Dallas. You'll just have to run the leads, see where they go.”

“That's not what I want to talk about.” The full weight of his Dallas O'Kane, King of Sector Four gaze settled on her. “I wanna know if Hawk's taking good care of you. Because if he's not—”

“Dallas.” Noelle sounded exasperated. “Lex is going to kick your ass.”

“Shut it, kitten.” Dallas leaned forward on his elbows. “It's an easy question. Is he taking good care of you?”

When Dallas locked in on something, he didn't stop until he got what he wanted. Jeni's only defense was to make him want to end the conversation before he died of embarrassment.

So she relaxed back in her chair and let her eyes and expression go dark and sultry. “Oh, he's been taking very, very good care of me. You want the filthy details, sweetheart?”

“Maybe.” Without looking away, he reached to the side and dragged two glasses between them. The liquor followed, an inch in the bottom of each glass. He scooted one toward her. “You care about him this much, huh?”

“Enough to challenge you?” Jeni picked up the glass and sipped the liquor to hide her smile. “I'm wearing his collar, Dallas. What do you think?”

“I think you're wearing his collar.” Dallas touched her wrist. “But you're wearing my ink, same as him. And this'd be a lousy time for me to have to kick his ass if he's not doing right by you. But I would.”

“Understood. No one needs an ass-kicking.”

“Until Lex hears about this,” Noelle muttered.

Dallas slammed back his drink and rolled his eyes skyward. “Why did having an assistant seem like a good idea again?”

Noelle winked at Jeni over Dallas's shoulder. “Because you're going to get your ass out of here and go deal with business, and by the time you get back I'll have pulled files on everyone on this list and will probably know who to look at first. So scoot.”

Dallas grumbled his way to his feet and circled the desk, letting his fingers trail lightly over Jeni's shoulder on the way. When he reached the door, he turned back and pointed to Noelle. “You say scoot to me again, and I'm telling Jas not to spank your ass for a month.”

“Liar,” Noelle shot back with a fearless grin. “You like watching too much.”

Dallas muttered something Jeni couldn't understand and slammed the door behind him.

As soon as he was gone, the jovial mirth slipped from Noelle's face. She sank into Dallas's chair and rubbed her forehead, and Jeni's chest tightened. She'd been so distracted by her budding relationship with Hawk that she hadn't even thought of what Dallas must be going through in days.

She set down her glass. “How has he been?”

“He's…” Noelle sighed and shrugged. “Honestly, I don't know. I don't think anyone but Lex does. He's holding everything together, and she's holding him together, and all we can do is take as much of it off their shoulders as we can.”

And Jeni had been cross with him. For a moment, remorse surged through her, but she shoved it aside. She knew Dallas, and the last thing he would want was to be treated differently right now, as though the world really was ending, and he wasn't so invincible after all.

Sometimes, all it took to make something true was for enough people to believe it.

She refilled her glass. “Is there any word on what the city has planned?”

“Nothing concrete.” Noelle rescued Dallas's abandoned glass. “When I first got here, I wrote this program to track communications between the Sectors and Eden. I thought I was going to break the intel game wide open, give Dallas everything he needed to keep us safe.” Her lips curved in a wry smile. “When Noah and I finally got a filter working for the data, guess what most of it was?”

“Petty arguments and porn?”

“Pretty much.” She sipped her drink and shook her head. “Sometimes we found things buried under all the garbage, but now we don't even have that. The day the wall went hot, the data started coming out encrypted. Noah's been killing himself trying to crack it, but we need more processing power. Ford and Mia are working on something for us, but the factories weren't designed to turn out the parts we need.”

“Maybe Noah will get lucky,” Jeni offered. “Or maybe he's just that damn good.”

“If anyone can do it…” Noelle tapped the list. “This gives me something to work on, anyway. I have pretty hefty files on all the troublemakers. And I'll check out Owen Turner first.”

“It could be nothing.” Jeni hoped it was. Dallas and Lex had it hard enough. The last thing they needed was to deal with the idea of spies in their sector, of people who should have trusted them turning to the city instead.

“It's still a start. And hey—I'm glad you and Hawk are doing good. Forget Dallas, okay? He's snarly and protective, because you're...” Noelle smiled softly. “Not many people get as close as you did, Jeni. You're always gonna be a little bit his. Just like Jas.”

“Not exactly like Jasper.” It was more and less, but nothing so much as...different. “Anyway, if Dallas really thought he needed to be worried, he wouldn't ask me shit.”

“That's the truth. But still, I'm glad. Hawk is sweet, and he cares about people so much. Jas respects the hell out of him, and that doesn't come easy.”

Jeni's cheeks heated. “I didn't realize they'd spent that much time together.”

“Jas grew up on a farm, too, you know.” Noelle poured another shot into her glass and swirled the liquor. “Hawk comes to dinner with us sometimes. He and Jas can talk for hours, coming up with plans for his sisters' place. Cars, too, but mostly farming and family.”

It sounded delightful, more intimate than friendship. It sounded like the family Noelle had mentioned, and Jeni found herself smiling.

This was what Dallas and Lex had built, what they were working so goddamn hard to shield and protect from the threats to come. The reason why Dallas's dark hair was going gray at the temples, no matter how much stress they tried to take off of him.

She spoke without thinking. “You're from Eden, too. Do you think they know what'll happen to us if we don't win this war? Not us, I mean—not the O'Kanes or the other people the MPs would kill outright. But to everyone else.”

“I don't know if they can imagine it.” Noelle closed her eyes. “Hawk and Six can. Jasper. Anyone else who lived on the farms or the communes, the places that Eden needed to control. But so many of them think life is already as bad as it can get, and all they've ever known is being ignored, maybe swatted if they got in the way. They don't know how bad it can be when Eden decides to use you.”

Jeni's fingers clenched until her nails dug painfully into her palms. “Then that's what we can do for Dallas. Make sure they never find out.”

Noelle's eyes popped open, then narrowed. “You pulled that list out of your head. Lex told me you're good at that, remembering things you've read.”

“Mostly. Also things like pictures or diagrams, it just has to be something I can look at.” Noelle was staring at her in the oddest way, so Jeni tilted her head. “What are you thinking?”

Noelle twisted Dallas's chair around and came back with a large tablet in her hands. She dropped it on the desk and swiped the screen awake, her fingers flying. “I'm thinking I'm an idiot. Here…”

She spun the screen around, revealing a file full of documents labeled with dates and times. “It's the last of the filtered data we have from before the encryption kicked in. Just the stuff going between the sectors and Eden. Maybe you'll notice patterns we might have missed.”

Jeni opened one document and flipped through the first few pages. It all seemed mundane—letters, mostly, ranging from quick, dashed-off notes to formal correspondence. “You want me to look for things that don't fit?”

“Or just get an idea of what normal was before this happened, and then once Noah cracks the encryption…”

It seemed simple enough, though Jeni knew it couldn't be. If it was, Noah would have already written a magical program that could have done this for him. “Is this the part where we make a joke about how technology can't overcome the splendors of the human mind?”

“No doubt.” Noelle leaned back. “We can tell it to look for patterns, but what about the ones we're not expecting? The ones we wouldn't realize were there until we saw them? No matter how smart you make a program, it finds a way to remind you how stupid we'd be without our subconscious minds and our gut instincts.”

“How much is here?”

“Well, it is the filtered data.”

“And that wasn't an answer.” Jeni eyed her teasingly over the top of the tablet. “Come on, kitten. How bad can it be?”

Noelle wrinkled her nose. “Not quite five thousand?”

“Pages?”

“Not quite! Forty-eight hundred, at most.”

“Oh, fuck.” Jeni would need days—weeks, even—just to make a dent in it. “And what kind of time frame does this represent?”

Noelle lifted her glass again—and held it between them like a shield. “The last two days before the wall went hot.”

Jeni felt faint. “How much shit did Noah's algorithms filter out?”

“You don't want to know, Jeni. Seriously.”

“Well.” Her fingers tightened around the edge of the tablet. It was a daunting task, one she wasn't even sure she could handle—but it was special, different from anything else she'd ever been asked to do.

She danced, and she tended the bar. She covered whatever needed to be covered. But until Dallas had asked her to study up on herbs, that had been it. No one relied on her, because all of her jobs were things anyone else could pick up at a moment's notice.

Even the herb garden. Once it was set up and established, it could be cared for like all the rest of the fruits and vegetables. And when the time came to make the tinctures and medicines from those herbs, anyone else could be taught how to do it.

But not this. This was a task that could help them out immensely—that could save their fucking lives in a way salves and balms couldn't—and it was hers.

Noelle leaned forward to touch her hand. “Welcome to Dallas O'Kane's spy network, Jeni. Population three, including you.”

She folded the tablet in her arms and had to swallow hard before she could trust her voice. “I'd better get started.”