Daniel’s jaw drops. He holds up a finger.
He rushes from one pile to the next. His hands rifle expertly through the papers. His muttering sounds like the swish of a softwhite-noise machine. Tiny sculptures orbit him as he works his way around the room. It’s odd how precise Daniel can be even as he scrambles in a tight circle.
“Oh no. You’re right.” Daniel finally stops moving. “We need to tell someone.”
“Speaking of which.” Ellie shows Daniel the paper. “You’re supposed to check your texts.”
Daniel pulls out his cell phone. He swipes at it, then swipes, then swipes, then swipes.
“Ahdi.” Daniel says the name as though it explains everything. “The highlights: He wanted to warn us that there are multiple families of side channels. Naturally, we now have more homework.”
“You may have already done some of it.”
“Maybe. Anyway, someone attacked him last night. Don’t worry. He’s fine. The attacker, not so much.”
“What?” Ellie sits up. “Someone attacked him? Who? Why?”
“He doesn’t say. It probably has something to do with his next section.” Daniel points to his phone. “He doesn’t connect the dots but, honestly, I think he did this to test a hypothesis. He altered the skunkworks to eliminate several exploits—”
“Several? Last night? By himself? Is that even a thing?”
“Yes, yes, yes, and yes if you are Ahdi.”
“Youknewhe’d pull something like this, didn’t you?” Ellie isn’t openly accusing Daniel of anything, but she is.
“If I may point out,Iwasn’t the one who wanted to visit him.”
“That is so not the point.”
“As I was saying, he’s telling us to be careful because there really is a cabal of maintainers who, even if they didn’t create these side channels—and I’m thinking they couldn’t have—don’t want anyone to know about them. They certainly don’t want anyone to get rid of them.” Daniel shrugs. “I keep telling you. He’s a lot.”
Ellie doesn’t dignify that with a comment. She merely sighs andstarts going through one of the piles on the table. If she wanted to sort through an absurdly large amount of paperwork and fend off a secret cabal, she could have stayed in Boston. At least no one in grad school has tried to kill anyone.
Not that she knows of anyway.
CHAPTER 16
Daniel’s living room comes into focus as Ellie coalesces. It’s a TV on the wall, a sofa, and a coffee table on a hardwood floor. The three pieces of furniture are, of course, perfectly aligned and parallel to the walls. Heavy shades cover the windows. Sharp rays of light sneak through. Bright horizontal stripes trisect the room. Coming back from the archive, Ellie doesn’t crash into the sofa or through the table. She studied the living room before they left this morning. It’s a place she now knows.
She stands at one end of the table. Daniel stands at the other, eyeing a dark corner. A man waits there, not particularly hidden.
He steps toward them, covering them with a gun. Under any other circumstance, he’d probably present as tall and broad. Unfortunately for him, Daniel is standing right there, looming like the cliff he always is. Nevertheless, the man’s wide stance and squared shoulders try really hard to make tall and broad happen.
“Hey, Danny boy. This time, I’m prepared for you.” The man smirks. “I bet you’re wondering how I got in here.”
It takes a second for Ellie to recognize Tom, the guy who gave her the Chief Architect’s note at the reception. Tom’s more puffed up now that he has a gun.
“Not really, Tom.” Daniel is pleasantly casual. “You can appear here because once, in some speculated existence, you followed Aunt Vera here.”
“Very good, Danny.” Tom exaggerates his tone as if Daniel were a toddler potty training. “Youhavebeen paying attention.”
Their exchange makes Ellie’s mind reel. It only makes sense if the cabal Ahdi mentioned littered the skunkworks with alternatives from discarded realities where her mom survived. The monstrosity she dismantled kept Mom in an odd sort of limbo. Maybe they weren’t trying to cure her. Mom in limbo, combined with some exploit, worked as an engine to generate all sorts of scenarios that involved her, no matter how unlikely. For them, Mom in limbo was better than an actual living Mom. So many more possibilities.
Rage roils through her. Dragging out Mom’s death was bad enough when she thought they were trying to cure her. Deliberately trapping her in an unknown state where she could have gone either way is unspeakably worse. The rage feels uncontainable and wants to thrash and shake her body to pieces.
Daniel’s gaze locks with Ellie’s for an instant before returning to Tom. Ellie forces herself still, for now. Tom is here for a reason. She might learn something if she’s patient.
“Flattery will get you everywhere.” Daniel deploys a smile so friendly, it’s blinding. “You get thirty seconds. I’m impatient.”
