At that moment, my phone rings loudly.
My heart lurches to my throat and my watch shrieks. It’s such a high-pitched sound that it pierces the fog of conversation from the emergency room.
Kelly whirls around to locate the source of the ringing. I duck out of sight, put my phone on silent, and try my best to breathe.
Inhale.
Be still…
Exhale.
And know…
I wait a few more minutes, terrified that when I peek around the bend, Kelly will be right there, staring me down.
Inch by inch, I ease out of my hiding place. I look past waiting patients, busy doctors and nurses, and the other hospital personnel.
No Kelly.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I take cautious steps to the door and hustle into the sunlight. A taxi lets out a patient in front of the hospital, and I hop in.
“Where are you going?” the driver asks.
I check my DMs. Courtney still hasn’t answered me. What if she never does? What if Kelly finds me before I can find answers?
Fingers tapping quickly over my phone, I grab directions to the nearest internet cafe. “Take me here.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
FINN
Dutch slows his car in front of the hospital after our flight lands.
“We’ll head home first,” he says quietly.
I’d already begun to open the door and I let it slam shut again. “You’re not coming up?”
Dutch shakes his head, his jaw tightening.
I look over my shoulder, and Zane is staring unseeingly through the window.
Their expressions are… hopeless.
While I can’t understand my own emotions, I know how brutal it is to want something, to search everywhere for it, and then come to the slow, painful realization that answers will never come.
“Zabanero gave us a big clue,” I remind my brothers. “Now that I know this is an AI, I can talk to J about what she knows. With that information, we can come at the algorithm from a different angle.”
Dutch nods absently.
Zane doesn’t even have the strength to twirl his drumsticks. “I kept thinking it was Dad or Kurosaki or some other enemy wedon’t know about. I was ready to fight. I was ready todieto have Grey back. But how do I fight something that doesn’t even have a body?”
“We don’t know if it’s AI for sure,” I remind them.
“Mom was working on an AI project that went rogue, and then a few weeks later, she took Cadence and Grey and hid them so deep that no one can find them,” Dutch says coldly.
“They can’t even reach out to us because AI iseverywhere. If they access the internet, we won’t be the first one to find them. Some freaking autonomous computer program will find them first.” Zane pulls his hands into fists as his voice trembles.
Dutch stares straight ahead, eyes unseeing.
