Sirena folded the paper, slipped it into her jacket. “We’ll find where that code belongs,” she said. “And then we’ll find the people who put it there.”
I marked the line. Logged. Hunting.
“It goes without saying that I’ll fund you,” Thorne said as Sirena stood.
I didn’t need his money. I needed to be the first thing she reached for when something broke.
“Even Nex?” she teased.
“Even the . . . Nex,” Thorne said, looking like it pained him.
Sirena rose on her toes as he lowered a massive black wing, so she could see the girl again. “Just get some rest, hydrate, and if you remember anything else—he knows where to find me,” she said before turning on her heel to leave.
6 /SIRENA
“Well?”I asked as I got into my car and turned it on.
There was no way Nex hadn’t spent the past fifteen minutes working on what the hell that weird code meant.
“Well, what?” he asked through my car’s speakers. “When you had that ornamental downspout crush my earpiece, I assumed you wanted total comms blackout.”
I backed out of the space with a snort. “Oh my God, Nex—you’re such a shitty liar.”
Nex gave me a nanosecond before responding. “Okay. Fine. There were two cameras in the room—turned off, but I could’ve easily turned them on—plus Thorne was wearing a comms device and, of course, there was a camera and an audio pickup inside the pendant I gave you.”
“Which means you got to hear me make him say your name, right?” I asked, flashing the rearview mirror—another place where I knew he had cameras—a glance.
“I did.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“How did that make you feel?”
This time the silence before he answered was less pouty and more profound. “I believe I enjoyed it.”
“A feeling!” I crowed. “At long last!”
“Not so much a feeling as an interpretation of one.”
“Ugh, give me one moment of triumph, Nexium,” I teased him—and then did a double take as the car’s map changed on the screen.
“Regarding that code,” he continued. “I have good news, and I have bad news. Would you like to eat a burger first? If I’ve calculated localized driver intents correctly, there’ll be a lull at Valencia Burger’s drive-through in five minutes. I’ve already added your order to their queue, so you can bring it home with you—along with the tracker I want to see.”
Which explained why the car’s map had jumped. “Only if you start talking—now.”
“Done,” he promised, as I took the next right-hand turn.
On the drive to the burger joint, Nex explained to me that he had no idea what the code inside Sophia’s mind meant.
“What’s the good news part of this?” I asked, fishing piping-hot fries out of the bag.
“That it’s nothing terrible, either. Yet.”
“How very glass-half-full of you,” I said, licking salt off my fingers before sipping my soda. “But she wasn’t born like that, Nex.”
There was a pause as I assumed he was reading all of my previous personnel files. “How many people with altered minds have you tried to read?”
