"We've got movement?" he asks.
I nod.
He takes the bag from my hand, slings it over his shoulder like it weighs nothing.
"Tomas said to gas the car."
"Thirty seconds," I say.
He's gone before I finish.
I stand alone, listening to the hum of the servers, the soft whine of the cooling fans.
My hands are steady, but there's a pulse in my head, a rising pressure behind my eyes.
I look at the clock, then away.
On the way out, I pass Fiachra in the stairwell.
"Found her?" he says, and there's hope and fear in equal measure.
"We have a fix," I tell him.
He follows, silent.
Outside, the wind is sharp enough to strip the paint off a car.
The sky is that particular blue-gray you only see before a snowstorm, heavy and predatory.
The team is already at the curb—Killian at the wheel, Tomas in the back, his laptop open and running on the dash.
I slide in, and no one says a word.
As the engine starts, I say, "They took my wife."
No one corrects me.
I look at them, one by one, and see what I need to see—the readiness, the anticipation, the fear.
"We're not stopping," I say, "until I bring her home myself."
For the first time all day, I let myself feel the hunger.
I roll it around in my mouth, taste the copper and iron of it.
We are coming.
16
KEIRA
Icome to in increments—first the cold, then the taste, then the ache.
The cold is total, a radiating, marrow-level chill that blooms out from the concrete under my thighs and up my spine, spreading until even my teeth feel brittle.
The taste is chemical, a flat bitterness that crowds out all other flavors, as if I've spent the last hour chewing on latex gloves.
The ache is old-fashioned, proof-of-life headache, blooming from the crown and working its way down until it meets the new problem, a pressure at the base of my skull that only intensifies when I move.
