She patted her pocket, confirming she had the flare, and then pulled the Magnum out of its holster.
“Stay safe, Aisha,” she whispered. “I’m coming.”
Reece offered to watch for the secretary’s return—probably still feeling guilty about accidentally using insight, which yeah, he ought to’ve felt guilty for approximately forever, so Grayson let him stand guard. As Reece watched the hall and elevators at the far end through the glass, Grayson popped the flash drive he’d found into the secretary’s laptop. With any luck Marist had some kind of record of the oversized empath gloves that had gone to Keith Waller at the Seattle airsoft course.
But as Grayson scrolled through files, he didn’t see anything that looked like production orders.
He did, however, see something that had no business being on anyone’s flash drive, anywhere in the world.
“Evan?”
Grayson heard Reece as if from a distance as he opened the file.
“You went all quiet. Did you find something?” Reece had come up next to him. He blinked at the screen. “What’s that?”
Memories began to rise. Grayson ignored them, flipping through pages in the document like he was reading a dictionary.
Reece was frowning. “I see some pictures, some words that don’t make sense. Is that in code?”
“Abbreviations. Might as well be code if you don’t know them.” In his shoes right now, someone with emotions might have been screaming, Grayson distantly realized, as he calmly clicked through page after page, flicking away the memories before they formed like flies on a hot summer day. No one would need emotions to not be interested in reliving these particular moments.
“There are comments in some of the margins.” Reece leaned in and read one out loud.“‘Now a perfectly engineered weapon for these predators.’”His gaze turned flinty. “Someone with the initialsVNwrote this.NforNichols, as in the guy on Marist’s wall? The one you don’t want me asking questions about his research facility?”
He didn’t wait for Grayson’s answer, pointing to the reply to Nichols’ comment. “‘The irony.’That’s fromHT, who’s that?”
“Holt Traynor, the Empath Initiative director.” Grayson quickly clicked forward, before Reece could ask whopredatorsreferred to.
The next section of the file was older pictures, the West Texas landscape, a bunker underground, a room that had since been burned to ash.
“Is that a—dentist’s office?” Reece’s frown had deepened. “That’s a weird chair. What’s it for?”
Grayson immediately hit Back, away from the room, returning to the landscape. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Why would I worry about a chair?” Reece’s gaze had gone to Grayson. “What am I really looking at?”
Grayson cleared his throat. “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping watch?”
“What are you trying to distract me from now?” Reece said suspiciously. “What is this document?”
“Something I would never explain to an empath,” Grayson said. “Which is why you’re going back to your watch.”
But Reece wasn’t moving. “Evan, I am getting bad vibes from this,” he said, pointing to the screen, and there was a new tightness to his voice. “And you’re acting like you know what all this is, and I don’t like that. Ireallydon’t like that.”
He’d gone very tense, and Grayson could practically see his blood pressure ticking up. “I do know what this is,” he admitted, trying for part of the truth that would calm Reece down. “But it’s fine. It’s not like I have any feelings about those memories.”
“Oh, I see,” Reece said, and he soundedmoreupset, not less. “So this is bringing you the kind of memories other people would have feelings about? Should I guess what kind of feelings people normally have seeing creepy documents found on hidden flash drives in corrupt corporations?”
Well, shit. “Reece—”
Reece tapped the screen. “What is this? And what does it have to do with you?”
His eyes were on Grayson’s face, and he wasn’t flinching away from the lack of emotions. On the contrary, he’d gotten close enough that Grayson could feel the heat pouring off him.
Grayson shouldn’t confide in an empath. But standing here, in Stone Solutions, reading a file annotated by the directors of the Empath Initiative and Polaris, the person Grayson trusted most was the partially corrupted empath who wanted to stay by his side.
“It’s a broken instruction manual, more or less,” Grayson confessed. “How to make a Dead Man.”
Reece’s eyes widened. “It’s aboutyou?”
