“I’d bet my life on it.” She stared him in the eye, both of them knowing full well that if she was wrong, she really may have to put her life on the line. “This is the pattern we need to follow—looking for people involved with Primus Sanguis, and possibly, tangentially, how it relates to people in the anti-ACA movement. But again, I think this is much bigger than the ACA. I think this has to do with something none of us knows yet about SANGUIS, something the Bone Carver thinks is worth killing over. If I’m right about all this. . . I’d speculate there’s something about the Primus Sanguis AI infrastructure that’s not entirely legal. I think they’re trying to cover up code that’s going too far, and the Bone Carver is trying to expose it.
“I can try to re-hack back at the Society and get more information—newer information—on the project. Then we can make a map of all people we can find who are and were linked to it, weigh those who have higher involvement and then maybe we can get to the person before—”
“Get to the potential victim? Or help out the Carver?” Wayne cut in, forcing Jo’s whirring thoughts to sputter to a halt. She blinked up at him, one hand pressed into the desk though no papers shuffled beneath her touch. “Because it sounds like you’re trying to get to the next one before the perp does, and that’s not our job.”
“I’m not.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m trying to think of a third way out,” she confessed, her voice dropping to a whisper.
“Way out?” It took him a second, but Wayne finally connected it back to her earlier comments in the briefing room. “Doll, there is no way out.”
“How do you know that?” she pressed. “Why not try to stop this? Maybe we can grant the wish—the Bone Carver could do this indefinitely—by changinghismind about doing it in the first place?”
“Or maybe we end up wasting time chasing rabbits down holes.”
“She said dismantled, Wayne.Dismantled.”
“Who?”
“Pan. She said the Society could be dismantled.”
“I don’t think she meant it literally,” was what his mouth said. But his tone crafted a different story. One where he was considering what she was saying in a way that he never had before.
“Why not?” Jo reached out for him, grabbing for his hands. “What if there is a way out? A way to approach wishes—no, not just wishes—all of this, that no one has ever looked at before?”
“There is no way out.” He took her hands gently in his.
“Help me, Wayne.” Jo saw it again, as she worried circles into the sides of his thumbs with the pads of her own. She saw the same little magical tracings of the seams she had to rip to get him to agree with her. It was an identical sensation to their interaction in the kitchen except for this time she wasn’t about to let herself get lost in it. She would approach it with the precision of a surgeon. “The wishes, the Society—why is it like this?”
“It always has been.” His words were comforting, placating, and almost confident.Almost.
“It hasn’t.”
“Doll—”
“I know it hasn’t,” Jo said firmly, undermining his objections.
“Tall words for someone who only joined the Society a few months ago.”
“It’s been nearly a year,” she retorted as calmly as possible, even though it felt as though her intestines had become barbed, her stomach filling with acid several times too strong.
“So what?” Wayne pulled his hands away and folded his arms, making the fact clear and apparent that he had no want of her comfort. They were back into the push and pull they always seemed to end up in during high-stress situations. “You’re practically a child compared to the rest of us.”
“I know what I’m talking about,” she insisted.
“You don’t know any—”
“I see it in his eyes!” Her voice cracked and with the outburst of emotion her magic seemed to go haywire, hiding the path she’d been trying to follow moments earlier. If it didn’t mean wasting precious time, she’d jump back into reality just long enough to throw the captain’s mug against the wall. “I see it in the way he looks at me—or rather, doesn’t, when I ask him. I hear it in his voice when I know I’m getting too close to the truth.”
“He?” Wayne paused, dumbfounded for a long moment. “You mean Snow? Why are you thinking of him now of all times? You’re losing focus, Jo, this is why I told you—”
“Just, listen to me, Wayne, please.” She was pleading now, she’d sing it for him if that’s what it took to be heard. “Thinkabout the wishes. You said it yourself, they’ve been getting more intense.”
“Ever since you arrived.” He couldn’t let go of an opportunity to twist the knife.
Jo used it to her advantage. She would break him yet. “Yes, me, thelastmember, the last lineage. Snow said there’d be no more after Nico. You don’t think that it isn’t just a little suspicious that Pan only starts killing people off once we’re all assembled?”
