“How’s India?”
“Hot and seen through jet-lagged eyes. I have been waiting for you to wake up. What the hell are you doing in Yuba City? Where is that, even?”
Katrina’s smile was rueful. “Jia told you.”
“No, I tracked you.”
“Did you?” Katrina rubbed the skin under her ear. Funny, she didn’t feel a chip there. “Ah. How’d you do that?”
“I have Find Friends set up on yours and Jia’s phones.”
“Oh right.” When Jia had come to live with them, they’dfollowed each other on the tracking app. Now that Katrina thought about it, she wondered if that made her phone less secure. She made a mental note to ask Jas.
“I’m glad to have it. I get worried. I listen to true crime podcasts.”
“You know you’re too paranoid to listen to those.”
“Okay, fair. Now answer my questions.”
“I’m north of Sacramento.”
“I don’t mean where literally, I mean, like... where in the grand scheme of things?”
“I actually don’t know what you’re asking.”
“What the hell are you doing in the middle of nowhere, Katrina?” Worry dripped off her words.
“It’s not the middle of nowhere.” Katrina went to the window and squinted out at the landscape. All she could see were trees from here, and a little barn set off from the house, its red paint chipped and weathered. “I mean, it’s rural and definitely small, but I skimmed the tourism page and there are many shops and restaurants. A Target.”
“A Target is not a surefire sign of civilization. It’s a sign that your wallet is empty because you walked in to buy milk and left two hundred dollars poorer. With no milk.”
“Do you know the Target Effect is a real thing? Social scientists think it has something to do with the lighting—”
“Katrina. Stop trying to distract me. Why did you leave the house?”
Katrina traced a finger down the window, where her face was reflected in the glass. “I had to go.”
“I’ve been monitoring since yesterday, even while I wasin the air. I’m certain this will blow over. If you let me tell Lakshmi, we can even make sure it does blow over.”
Rhiannon’s assistant was impressive, but Katrina didn’t know how she’d make the internet bow to her. Katrina had already considered and dismissed flexing legal muscle yesterday. The tweets were, literally, everywhere. “You can tell Lakshmi, but I don’t want her, like... hacking the CIA or whatever she might want to do.”
“She has never hacked a government database.”
Interesting, that left a lot of other databases for Lakshmi to hack.
“I know this sucks, but are you sure you shouldn’t be home? I worry about you out there, in a place I don’t even know, and me not in the country—”
“I told you I was kidnapped once,” she blurted out. She’d given Rhiannon the barest of explanations back then, mostly to explain the scar on her cheek.
They’d met a few years prior, at a party, when Katrina was twenty-two. For once, Katrina hadn’t needed to be prodded by her opportunistic dad to go speak to a wealthy person. Even in her twenties, Rhiannon had glowed with a confident, brilliant light. She seemed bigger than she was, her personality shining out of her.
Katrina had felt like the opposite at the time. Smaller than she looked. She’d craved what Rhiannon had. Her self-esteem had been so low, she’d been shocked when Rhiannon had seemed to return her desire for friendship.
Rhiannon sucked in a breath. “Is the kidnapper out? Because I’ll kill him.”
“Thank you for that offer of murder, but he’s still in a British jail and will be for a while.”
“Oh.”
