I feel something, something different—just over the muscle—and I take the blade and make one more cut, prying it out, and Cameron goes still. It’s smooth and narrow, but it’s covered in blood, and I have to wipe it off with the bottom of my shirt to be sure—the thin tracker, a curved piece of metal, out. It’s out. I throw it to the floor and I crush it under the butt of the empty gun, over and over again.
But the cut that spans the length of his scar is bleeding more than I imagined it could. I ball up his shirt and press it against the wound, and I hold it there while he remains motionless. I strip the shoelaces from our ruined sneakers, and I use the blade to slice off a long piece from the bottom of my shirt, and I use both to bind his shirt to his back, looping the material around his shoulder, applying as much pressure as I can to his wound in the process. He recovered from this cut once before. He will recover again.
And then I flip him over—his eyes blink open and slowly reclose. I quickly pull him to sitting, because I’m not sure if he can do it himself. “Cameron, wake up. Cameron, I got it,” I say.
“ ’Kay,” he says, and he reaches for my face, as if he is talking in his sleep.
I close my eyes and ask for strength, but the only feeling that floods through me is a sharp wave of panic.
I guess that will have to be enough.
I take my hand and bring it down hard and fast across his face, my palm stinging, the blood from my hands staining his face.
His eyes pop open, and I say, “Get up.”
He tries, and my God, I love him for it. He holds on to my shoulder as he pulls himself to standing, and I am so thankful for the muscles I have earned over the past year, pushing myself upright, and bringing him with me in the process. For once, they are useful. “We have to move,” I say.
We’re both covered in blood, and it’s trailing behind us as he bumps into the wall while we walk. I have butchered him. I was not careful, or calm, or efficient. I was fast, and I was brutal. I wish I were better.
“Thank you for waking up,” I say as we make it to the door.
He leans into me, and for a second I’m scared he’ll pass out again. But he stays on his feet. He’s trying to say something, but his back connects with the door, and he winces.
“Don’t,” I say. “I’m sorry. I know I made a mess of you. Please, if you’re going to be mad, be mad later. We have to move.” We have to move before Dom comes. We have to move before he passes out. Please, I think, let him not have lost too much blood. Please.
We have to move to the fifth floor, and that thought alone seems insurmountable.
We push through the doorway, and I see the stairs. “Don’t look up,” I say. I’m saying it for myself, but it will probably help him as well. I start moving, step by step, and his bare feet stumble alongside mine. He’s got half his weight on me, and half on the railing, or against the wall, but at least we keep moving.
I try not to notice the walls, smeared with his blood, that we’re leaving behind. Who needs a tracker when you have a blood trail?
Please let Casey be okay, I think. Please let her get what she came for, I think. Please let all of this be worth it for them.
“Get off the wall,” I say when we reach the landing for the third floor. I take my bloody hands and smear them across the entryway to the hall. I run down and try to leave a trail of blood, transferring what’s on my hands, my body, to these concrete walls.
Cameron wavers in the middle of the landing. He looks pale but his expression is alert. He’s here. He’s back. “No more blood on the stairs,” I whisper as I race back toward him, but even that echoes. He leans on me but manages to support himself—by sheer willpower, I’m sure—as we make it to the fifth floor, where Casey should be.
The hallway is dark and silent, but we are barefoot and alert.
There’s an open doorway.
The sound of her voice.
And the sound of another.
Cameron rushes by me, and I put my arm out, trying to stop him—but he keeps moving, almost running, until I catch him by the arm and hold him back.
Patience, I want to tell him. But I don’t dare speak. I keep my back pressed against the wall and pull him beside me as I walk closer to the room.
“It’s just one name,” I hear Casey say.
I hear a gravelly voice speaking, aged and smoke laden. “It always starts with just one name. It never is, though. It never ends.”
Casey’s voice is shaky, and I want to tell her to be calm, be brave. Though I have no bravery and no calmness to spare her. “Ivory said she would trade me for it. She said you could do it. Didn’t she tell you?”
“Ivory Street would throw me under the bus in a heartbeat. I didn’t go to her when she called, though I’m sure she expected me. No, I waited here. I waited for you to come to me.” Ivory must still be in the basement, waiting, waiting, for someone to come. “But you are not the one I’m waiting for. Where is she?”
I hear the sound of knuckles cracking, and I smile. Casey, buying time. Casey, gathering herself. “Alina? Oh, she got bored with this whole thing,” she says. “Took her freedom and ran with it.” God, I love her. I do.
He laughs. “You’re a terrible liar. All youthful arrogance, like June was.”
I ease my head around the entrance, and I can see only the back of him. Slacks with deep wrinkles, as if he’s been folded up inside them for days. A plaid collared shirt, and a sprinkling of gray hair along the base of his skull. From the back, he looks perfectly nondescript. Perfectly like anyone else. He takes a step forward, and I expect his knees to creak. A generation passed since the picture I saw of him was taken—when he first set up the Cybersecurity Data Center.
Casey sits behind his dark-brown desk, facing me—the room is full of computers and machines with periodically flashing lights, and there’s a door to the side that must lead to his work lab—because there’s a window in the door, and I can see the blue blinking lights behind it. Her face looks unnaturally white in the glow of the monitor. She doesn’t see me. There’s a wall of windows behind her where I can see the reflection of the monitors and the man before her, but I worry he will catch a glimpse of me in the reflection as well. I pull myself out of the doorway. “How badly do you want this, single, solitary name, child?” he asks.
“Badly enough to break Alina Chase out of her containment,” she says.
“Good,” he says. “Then that’s the price. Alina Chase for the name.”
She pauses. “I can’t. I don’t know—”
“That’s the price, and your time is running out.”
I peek again. He doesn’t seem to have a gun, so I’m not sure why he’s saying that. I don’t see any immediate danger—he’s just an old man in a computer lab. He has his cell phone out, and he holds it up to her. “I called the authorities as soon as I was sure you all were here. Your price went up, child. Two million dollars for information leading to the capture of Alina Chase. How long do you think they will take? If I were you, I’d want a pretty good head start.”
Casey stands, the sound of the chair scraping along the floor out from underneath her as she moves away from the desk. She takes one last, longing glance at the screen. “Am I free to go then?” she asks.
“I’m sure I cannot stop you,” he says, stepping aside.
All this for nothing.
Her name for nothing.
I’ve got my answers, even if I can’t prove them.
I stand in front of the open door, even though I feel Cameron’s hands reaching, and then losing, a grip on my arm.
“Hello,” I say, and the old man spins around.
He smiles, his eyes crinkling at the corners, his lips cracking as they pull farther apart. “You’re even smaller than I imagined,” he says. “Such a little thing. Such a big mess …”