“Emerson.” His mind moved fast, adjusting and carefully evening his tone. Audrey felt the emotion he tried to mask, though. The unmistakable feeling of attraction.
Audrey moved to stand in front of him, caressing his shirt. Their auras reached toward each other and stopped just short of touching. “How do I fit into all this?” she said.
“You fit in because I need you,” Emerson replied.
“And what do you want from me?”
Emerson cocked his head to the side, a smile pulling at his mouth. “A brief partnership where we both get what we want.”
Audrey could always tell when people were lying; Emerson wasn’t. That made her trust him less, though.
“You’re more dangerous than he is,” she said after another minute.
“No,” he said. “I’m more patient.”
Her mouth thinned. Patience was a long-term quality. It meant he was willing to dig his heels in and get his hands dirty.
Outside, the city brightened. Inside, Audrey stood between two paths: the one with her mother would consume her, and the other with Emerson would control her.
But under both, another path had begun to take shape.
One that was solely her own.
10
They lay in the dark, not touching. Emerson’s breathing evened out an hour ago—steady, trusting.
He wanted her.
Audrey understood that kind of leverage.
And she’d used it.
She and Emerson did everything but sleep together, and drugs made distracting him easy.
But Audrey wasn’t lying there because she couldn’t sleep. She was measuring the room, replaying every answer he’d withheld and deciding how much further she was willing to push before sunrise. If Emerson wanted to involve her in his mysterious plans, then before the night was over, she would know exactly what game she’d been dragged into.
When his arm fell from her waist, she counted sixty seconds before rising.
Emerson wanted her for something, but she wasn’t going to trust him. Audrey needed to find her mother, to learn the truth about herself. That urgent goal burned below her skin. She would seek answers alone.
His jacket lay folded on the chair. She slipped her hand into his pocket and took her phone. Then she saw the tablet—thin, unbranded, edges scuffed. It was made entirely of glass. The clear surface caught the dim light.
Its shape lit up her memory.
The man in her backyard all those years ago had held something like this. Older, perhaps, but it had the same sense that it didn’t belong.
She picked it up. The glass came alive, as though reacting to her hold. A biometric scanner flared on the screen.
Audrey prowled back into the bedroom, and, careful not to disturb him, she lifted Emerson’s hand just enough to press his palm over the glass. The device responded to him immediately, blooming brighter. She left him there, breathing slow and deep, and returned to the couch.
The interface defaulted to one she didn’t know, with hundreds of folders and only a few apps. There was no social media, no music, and no signs of a regular life. She changed it to English, also labeled as Aggregate Standard, with a calendar and timestamp she couldn’t decipher. Margins referenced compliance with Aggregate Protocols, as if it answered to an authority beyond the government.
She opened what looked like a photo folder.
Frame by frame, devastation appeared: buildings gutted by fire, smoke billowing from broken windows, streets reduced to rubble.
It took Audrey a moment to understand what she was seeing. At first, she thought they were news photos, but upon closer examination, she realized they were evidence, taken straight from the scene.
