ALEXA
…and waited, and waited, and waited.
I’d just told Nolan that I had his data—surely that warranted a reply? A thank you? Why was he ignoring me? Had I said something to upset him? I read over our last few messages, but nothing jumped out.
So why didn’t he answer? It was daytime in California, and Nolan never slept in the daytime. No, he slept like the dead at night, and then he got up early, way too early, and made me breakfast. Or at least, he used to. Now I had Chase, who liked mornings about as much as I did, but he still dragged himself out of bed to hunt me a croissant.
Finally, at two thirty p.m., I did what any other girl in my position would do and tracked Nolan’s phone. It was true that Ruby had always reminded me about boundaries and how it was important to respect them, and with Nolan I tried, I really did. But what was the point in having access to all this technology if I didn’t use it? His phone was sitting in the farmhouse, probably in the kitchen, if I recalled the layout correctly. Did he not listen to a word I said? I’d told him not to leave his devices unattended.
Wait, what if something had happened to him? What if he’d fallen in the shower, or tripped and hit his head on one of those marble countertops, or taken a tumble down the stairs? What if Juno had turned on him? He’d said she was friendly, but I didn’t trust those beasts. When I was homeless, just minding my own business, scared and trying to get some rest, a psycho thought it would be fun to set his dog on me. He and his equally demonic buddy laughed the whole time as it ragged on my leg, blood on the sidewalk, me screaming and crying and begging for it to stop. It didn’t, not until my leg was hamburger. Eventually, they’d gotten bored and walked off, dragging the fur-coated monster behind them, and I’d taken a cab to the emergency room. The third cab, actually, because the first two drivers saw the bleeding mess and refused to let me in. At the hospital, the doctors had treated me, but I’d had to skip out on the bill, and without the money to pay for ongoing care, I’d been left with a hell of a scar. And I never had managed to find the two psychos, a failing that annoyed me to this day.
Anyhow, dogs were bad news. I brought up the list of satellites I had access to, some legitimately, some in a slightly more roundabout way, and found one that would soon be passing over Northern California. Come on, come on… I realised I was chewing my hair and spat it out. It was a habit I’d mostly broken over the years, but when I got stressed, I still did it unconsciously. I found a fidget toy instead, then sat there pop-pop-popping the plastic until the satellite was in position.
Unfortunately, this particular model didn’t carry CIA-grade imaging equipment, so everything was a little fuzzy. Those video feeds you saw in the movies? It was all nonsense. Very few satellites were video-capable, and those that were had nowhere near the clarity you might expect. A low Earth orbit spy satellite could pick out a licence plate, but not a face. Facial recognition from that height just wasn’t possible right now. For the necessary resolution of, say, one millimetre, the Rayleigh equation—that dictated aperture size as a function of wavelength and angular resolution—said the camera aperture would need to be over five thousand feet wide, and nobody was launching a satellite that big. The science guys who didn’t officially exist were working on a synthetic aperture, but the optical processing wasn’t advanced enough yet, so for now, we were stuck with the blur. Plus the average LEO satellite was moving at eight thousand miles per hour, so we couldn’t track a person continuously. You’d need either a whole line of satellites or a high-altitude drone for that, and?—
Ah, we were overhead.
The first picture showed the farmhouse, no ambulances outside, thank goodness, but there was a red car that looked suspiciously like Marielle’s Ford compact. I obtained the title information from the DMV, found a picture of the exact model, and overlaid it. A match. Dammit. What was she doing there again? How long did decorating even take?
I heard footsteps, then glimpsed a mane of honey-blonde curls.
“Hey, Barbie,” I called. “Could you do me a favour?”
She poked her head around the door to my little basement suite. “Does it involve food or illegal wiretaps?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Then what could you possibly want?”
“I need you to phone this woman”—I jabbed Marielle’s cell number on the screen—“and find out what she’s doing.”
“Like, what she’s doing in general, or right at this moment?”
“Right at this moment.”
“Who is she?”
“Nolan’s ‘interior designer.’” I pulled a face.
“Dare I ask why you’re cyberstalking her? Do you need new drapes? Or are you still head over heels for your ex-roommate and worried he’s having a nooner?”
“I am not head over heels for Nolan de Luca,” I snapped.
“Whatevs.”
“I’m not. I’m just looking out for him, that’s all.”
“Okay, sure.”
“She flits around him like a pesky fly, all pretty and confident and ‘Nolan, let me decorate that for you.’ Ugh.”
“Is decorating a crime?”
“Can you do it or not?”
Barbie sighed and perched on the edge of the desk. “Give me the number.”
Kendall Cummings, aka Barbie, was a top-notch undercover operator. There wasn’t a man, woman, or child she couldn’t bait into falling for her charms. She was also a hotshot sniper, although she rarely combined the two activities. She pasted on a perky smile as she got into character.
