The Operator

Nothing had been spent at an airport, though, and she frowned until she saw the Your Skies payment. The jet-for-hire service had been put on retainer at opening of business today. Peri’s eyebrows rose. Private jets were the best way to move around when you were covered in gunpowder residue. He was alive.

Not knowing how she felt about that, she closed out the financial records and opened Detroit International Airport. Everything in a fifty-mile radius from Detroit used the same tower whether it was a glider at Parkway or a crop duster at Ypsilanti. Stomach rumbling, she reached for her pendant pen, jerking it open and writing NEWPORT on her palm when she found a match.

Peri recapped the pen, focus distant as she thought. She had a direction, but it had been too easy—an invitation to find him, almost.

The sound of silverware clinking pulled her attention, but seeing Jack still fussing over the bacon, she returned to her tablet, closing everything out and wiping the search memory. A timer popped up, and not wanting to shut it down until it was finished, she glanced at Jack’s back and typed in an address by memory.

An uncomfortable unease seeped into her. Fidgeting, Peri tugged the tablet closer as her mother’s facility loaded. A few more taps and she had access to all the cameras, little slices of life in three-by-eight rectangles. Her brow furrowed as she leaned in, her knee throbbing as she searched the grainy black-and-white displays for her mother. Guilt rose as she saw the wrinkled faces and fading hair. Some were vacant, some angry, some eerily happy as they watched old movies as they sat in rows of wheelchairs and scooters. It was too cold to be outside, and she searched the nature room, where goldfinches and cardinals made a living display. Her mother liked birds, though Peri could never remember a time they’d had a feeder. She had always told Peri that birds were filthy.

“Breakfast is ready,” Jack said cheerfully, and she snapped the tablet off. Standing above her, Jack hesitated, two plates of food in his hands. “You’re going to eat it, right?” he said as he set one on the table and collapsed into the overstuffed chair across from her with the other. Plate on his lap, Jack looked mildly hurt. “If I’d wanted to turn you over to Bill, I would have already. It’s your usual. At least, it was the last time I got you breakfast.”

“I don’t remember.” Setting her tablet aside, she picked up the fork.

Jack lowered his head over his food. “I do.”

Her eyes narrowed. In sudden mistrust, she pushed her food across the table to him and took his plate right off his lap. Jack chuckled, continuing to eat her eggs instead without pause. Emboldened, she took a bite. Salt and protein hit the sides of her mouth, waking up her appetite. She began eating in earnest. Jack was clearly pleased, and she muttered, “This doesn’t mean anything except I’m hungry.”

His expression didn’t dim at all. “I know it’s going to take time.”

She stopped chewing, then swallowed fast. “There’s not enough time in the world, Jack.”

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” he said, his brow furrowed. “I’m sorry I tricked you into believing you were one thing when you were something else. If I could draft back to the beginning, I’d do it differently.” She snorted, and he added, “What can I do to prove myself?”

Pushing her eggs around, she chuckled and said, “You can kill Bill for me.”

“Peri, I lied because I loved you. And you loved me.”

She pulled her head up, ticked. “You lied because you loved me. Seriously?” He didn’t love her. He loved what she gave him. And it was such a nice breakfast, too, she thought as she set her plate down. “Three years, Jack. You made me a corrupt agent, the very thing I was supposed to be fighting.”

“You put yourself there, not me,” Jack said. “I didn’t make you into anything you didn’t want to be. If you don’t want to go back to Opti, fine, but don’t go back to WEFT.”

“If Opti can’t have me, no one can? God, tell me it is more than that,” she said bitterly.

“You’re better than this!” he exploded, arm waving dramatically, and she had a fleeting memory of seeing him like this before at some forgotten task. “If you try to bring in Michael with that lousy excuse of an anchor Allen Swift, a desked CIA agent, and a . . a . . . psychologist, you’re going to get killed.”

“Then it’s a good thing I can get around that.”

“You aren’t listening!” he said, his anger somehow comforting. It was real when not much right now was.

“No, you aren’t listening to me,” she said, not backing down. “We are done.”

Jaw clenched, he pointed his fork at her. “You need me,” he said softly, adamantly.

“It’s not about need.”

“Sure it is.” He returned to eating, stabbing his eggs with angry jabs. “If you’re serious about taking Michael down, you need me there to render your drafts back if nothing else.”

“Excuse me?”

Jack lifted one shoulder, easing back into the musty chair in an obvious attempt to look harmless. “You think I wouldn’t notice you aren’t remembering? That you haven’t been accelerated? I know you. I know you better than you know yourself, babe.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I’ll call you whatever I want. You’re not accelerated, but you are hooked on Evocane,” he said, and it was all she could do to not smack his insufferably confident face. “You need my help to get that secondary source of Evocane. Steiner has one vial. Where is the other? Did that punk in the arena keep one?” he said, the light in his eyes shifting. “I thought so.”