“I’m done.”

“What?” Tucker twitched, but didn’t take his eyes off the road.

“I had my say. I vented.”

From Tucker’s silence, she knew he’d missed absolutely every word she’d uttered, instead focusing on whatever was happening with the traffic behind the truck. It must have been pretty important. But so were her fucking feelings.

Watching the concentration of Tucker’s stony gaze, Macy began rationalizing. Maybe her feelings could wait. She felt a little better when he finally breathed a sigh of relief, and then radioed the same sentiment to Jasper. Another sigh before his attention and his still stony gaze concentrated on her. It was just the two of them again.

“So, you were saying . . .”

“It’s nothing.” She settled back against the hard metal wall of the truck, careful to keep her head from banging into it at every bump in the road. Tucker stood near the door behind the EMP tripod, the light glowing through the wisps of his hair like a halo. An angel, in any other circumstance.

Maybe a few hours ago, before she caught him stealing her data, she could have still seen him that way. Maybe in the future she could, too, see him reverting back again into her angelic savior. In every other action but the hack, he had been her angel. He had been her rescuer.

She wasn’t ready to admit it yet, but still, she had a sneaking suspicion that the guy maybe deserved a break.

“Nothing,” she said again, when asked again for an elaboration. She really didn’t want to talk anymore. The action had seemed to die down, and they were well on their way to the port town of Durban. Soon she’d be back in the light, sunlight, its harsh glare and its heat. Soon she’d be back in the world of the living, out of the shadows of Africa—and of the back of a truck.

After Tucker returned to surveillance mode, Macy pulled her phone from her pocket. She winced as she scrolled through her personal text files. It was unsettling—and at the same time, mildly interesting—thinking about Tansy and whoever else rummaging through her files. What did they think of her now, and what had they managed to piece together from the evidence?

Which wasn’t really much.

What did they expect to find, anyway?

Had she been some agent for the South African’s incoming administration, a well-concealed mole with nefarious plans, and would she really be so dumb as to store incriminating communications and evidence on her phone?

Her phone, instead, carried another type of incriminating evidence. A fucking memoir. It began as a diary. Therapy. An outlet for all the stress and toxic secrets she’d kept bottled up. Early on, before she’d given up practically all hope, Macy had dreamed of one day being free again. And by then, she might just have a pretty interesting story to share.

The whole idea seemed laughable now.

She scrolled through the entries, slowing near the section about St. Louis. It was some of the latest work. In real life, she and Tucker at least, seemed to have moved well away room it. But in her mind there were lingering ghosts.

She lingered there now, through her phone, from a dark truck. She read some of her rough work, one particularly long and tortuous passage about Tucker. Occasionally she would look up at him, that glowing angel of hers, and then back down to the glow of her phone where she described, in painful detail, just how she’d gone about destroying that angel. She read her descriptions of how she’d done it, a destruction she’d carried out on the behalf of a crooked police chief, Bill Gormley. Even at the time, in the thick of it, she’d had a hunch that it would be the start of her own destruction, too. Yet she went ahead anyway with the lying and the obstructing. She did it for her career, to save her own ass. By the time she realized what a monumental fuckup the whole situation was, she was already in too deep. That’s what she’d told herself at the time, anyway. Would Tucker ever understand and accept that?

She’d also ruined Tucker’s career, part of her doing it as punishment to him for rejecting her. He’d never accept that one. And perhaps never forgive, either. She wouldn’t, either.

Macy was more trusting back then, naturally. She even trusted a crooked scoundrel, Chief Gormley, trusting him with not only her career, but her life. She didn’t know that her very soul was in the mix, too. Favors after favors, blind eye after blind eye, it was a slow descent into the swamp of corruption. And before she knew it, Macy had found herself wading knee deep in it. The only way out was for her to turn on Tucker. That was the offer Gormley made to her. An offer that she could have only accepted with the aid of anger and emotional turmoil.

She’d suspected that Tucker knew about all this. Certainly, he knew that he’d been done wrong. But perhaps not the details of why. It was nice of him not to ever ask. It came as no surprise that he didn’t want to talk about St. Louis almost as much as she.

Macy was well aware of the guilt. It was, at times, a physical sensation. A sick feeling deep in her bones that seemed to radiate stronger with every minute spent with Tucker. A frustration, too, somehow turning it around against Tucker in some perverted way. But it didn’t have to be like that.

She slid the phone back in her pocket, blinking to adjust her eyes back to the darkness. She found his shape again. “You want me to take over?”

“What?”

“Are you tired? Tired of standing there like that?”

“I’m okay,” he said, his eyes still on the road. “Thanks.”

“Just let me know. I’m sure I could probably handle it. Just point and shoot, right?”

“I’m no expert, but yeah. Something like that. It’s probably pretty intuitive for you.”

“I’m sure I can handle it.”

Their conversation dropped off, and a minute later Macy started feeling tired again. Road noise, the droning of the tires, and the vibration had been lulling her into sleep. She caught herself nodding off a little, her head suddenly feeling heavy, her neck going limp. Trying to wake up, she quickly forced her head back, slamming it against the truck half by mistake, and half intentionally to knock the sleepiness away.

Tucker must have heard it, because his voice wafted through the darkness. “Macy?”

“Yeah?” She waited him for to say something, but he stayed quiet after that. She decided to go ahead: “So how long is the trip supposed to be?”

“We’ll get to the port in half an hour, if everything goes smoothly.”

“Do you think it will?”

“I do,” he said. “If not, I think we would have already known about it by now.”

“So, the traffic looks good to you out there? No one seems suspicious, like a Humvee plowing cars aside to get to us?”

Tucker stayed quiet for a moment, and then said, “Want to come take a look?”

She considered it, ultimately deciding against staring at the front bumpers of hundreds of cars in the midday rush along the outskirts of Johannesburg. “No, I’m good.” She listened again to the droning sound of the road, her body relaxing with it.

“Actually,” Tucker said. “I was just trying to trick you. To get you to come and take over. Do you mind?”

“Um . . . no?”

Tucker had his hand behind his back, massaging up his shoulder. “I’m getting a little sore from hunching over like this.”

Macy got up off the wooden floor and moved toward the light. “You should have said something.”

“I just did.” He moved out of the way and said, “Okay, it’s pretty simple. You just look around for a vehicle plowing through cars and trying to get to us, just like you said. If you can do that, I’ll man the radio.”

She took up his spot behind the EMP cannon, looking through the sights and out of the cutout into the blinding light of day. A panorama of traffic lay behind them, signage and burnt grass, all the infrastructure speeding away. Back at the cannon, she felt even more lost. “So, just . . .” Her breath stopped short when she felt his hand on hers, guiding her to where to hold the cannon.

“Yeah,” he said calmly, “Just like that.”

She stood, holding the cannon just like he’d instructed. “Just like this, huh?” She could almost feel his energy behind her, his breath, again close to hers in the dark. When she turned to face him, he was completely lit up, the whites of his eyes gleaming, the white of teeth from his smile. Her heart raced, and Macy quickly turned around to face the roadway, to keep a watch on any suspicious vehicles. To focus on her job.

Fucking focus.

“Got it?” he said.

“Yeah. Got it.”