But Emily, who didn’t want anyone to suggest clever ideas, interrupted with a sharply indrawn breath.
“Yes?” Kincaid’s full attention was on her—thoroughly disconcerting, but what she wanted.
“Um. N-nothing.”
“You really shouldn’t withhold information, Dr. Daggett.”
“It’s just that—that ...” She stopped, hoping the whopper she was about to tell would be more believable if they had to force it out of her.
Shaw tsked. “Don’t much care about your mum and dad, do you?”
Emily let the words out so fast, they tripped over each other on the way. “He wouldn’thaveadvance warning!”
Crawford rolled her eyes. “He invented the tracking system. Don’t try to tell us he doesn’t have one of his own.”
But Kincaid considered Emily, tapping a finger to his lips. “That’s not what you meant. Is it?”
She shook her head, bowing it so she wouldn’t have to look him in the eye. “Something happened to his program right before you showed up. It just ... stopped working. He said it was the server—or the network?” She made a helpless noise, the sort to communicate a complete lack of technical knowledge. “He was really upset. He ...”
She stopped, pinching her lips together, hoping she wasn’t overdoing it.
“Go on,” Kincaid murmured, looming over her with the gun still at hand. Quite useful really; no need to pretend to be frightened.
“He said it might take several days to fix,” she whispered, tears dripping onto her shirt.
Kincaid was silent. She sniffled, every muscle in her body rigid with anxiety. Didn’t he believe her?
“Where in the humanities building?” he asked.
Trying to hide her relief with more tears, she blubbered: “The basement.”
He heaved an irritated sigh. “It would be, wouldn’t it. Gwendolyn, find a likely spot to land just outside the building, please.”
“But sir—if his tracking systemisworking—”
“I’m not risking my molecules by materializing in an underground location without ever having been there before,” Shaw objected.
Emily was so elated by this turn of events—her idea was working, working even better than she’d hoped—that she made herself take several half-sob breaths for verisimilitude. Perhaps she could persuade them to teleport some distance from the humanities building. Perhaps she could sell them on popping in at the stand of trees beyond the quad.
Kincaid turned his X-ray gaze back on her. “Will we find anyone else in this basement?”
“No,” she said, only half her attention on the question, an easy one.
“I see.” His tone made her stop thinking of teleportation. “No doubt it slipped your mind that I know he has at least two other collaborators. I must say, this calls into question everything you’ve told us thus far.”
For a heart-stopping second, she was too horrified to speak. Then she said: “No! I mean, yes he does, but they—”
“Stop,” he said.
His right hand—the one holding the gun—was moving. She wondered what a bullet felt like tearing through skin and bone, and if he intended to show her how much worse death could be if not quick. Or would he make her watch her parents’ deaths first?
But he didn’t point it at her. He slipped it into a magical approximation of a holster glimmering against his right thigh.
Then he lifted his now-empty hand in her direction and squeezed.
It really was too bad her clothes blunted anti-magic.
His spell wrapped around her torso with suffocating pressure. She tried to yell “wait” but couldn’t pull in the oxygen to yell anything. She struggled against the ropes. Pressed her chin down. Kicked her legs. Wheezed a tiny “please” with the last thimbleful of spent air in her lungs.
