Eli scanned through the seven packets, including Silas’s, and looked to me, his face carefully blank.
“Where did you find this?” he asked, his voice even in a way that didn’t speak of calm. Everything about Eli was controlled. Staged. Just like this scene.
I’d think about what that might mean later.
“I found it in that box,” I said, pointing to a file box on the table next to me. “It was on the floor,upside down.”
“Anything else like this?” Eli’s eyes scanned the room.
“No,” I said. “Mostly research on different companies. I saw a few files that are general research on a whole company, a few others that narrowed in on R & D or recent acquisitions. Nothing like a stack of résumés and work history. Why would this data broker have a folder on your team? And who’s Silas? Why isn’t he with you guys? Did he sell the company to Sinclair Security?” The questions tumbled out.
I half expected Eli to shut me down, but I wasn’t prepared for the stab of hurt in my heart when he did exactly that—his eyes shuttering, his jaw tight, expression otherwise blank.
“Something like that,” he said. “He had some business to take care of. It’s not a big deal.”
Everything he wasn’t saying told me that it was a very big deal.
“Is Silas the mentor you told me about? The one you met when you were getting out of the army?” I asked, feeling a queasy squirm in my stomach. He’d told me about his parents and sister dying. I’d shared so much about my life. My family, awkward teenage memories, the horror of the carjacking. Asking about his mentor shouldn’t be a big deal. But it was, because Eli didn’t answer.
He shrugged with a jerk of one shoulder. “We should take this back with us. Anything else we should take?”
“I don’t know,” I said, not letting my own tone convey how I was feeling. I wasn’t ready to show my cards. “You look. Maybe there’s something I’m missing.”
Eli spent twenty minutes going through different papers. Finally, he gave up on finding anything. Standing in the middle of the room, he scanned the mess of boxes and papers strewn around us. “If there was a point to all this, Ican’t see what it was. All we know is that whoever Emily was talking to, Janus Vault or Glass Spire or whatever name he was using, he’s long gone.”
“And we can’t tell if he ever met with Emily,” I added, putting aside my own feelings for the moment, and wishing I hadn’t handed that Creed Global folder over to Eli. He held on to it with a tight grip but led me back to the loading bay door we’d crawled in through.
We looked back at the room.
“See the way the papers on the floor are piled?” he asked. “As if someone walked around the room and dumped all these boxes upside down. But no one stepped in the piles or disturbed them. Like they went one by one, dumping them out, and then left.”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “This wasn’t ransacked. No one was in a rush. It’s not destructive.”
“Just meant to look that way,” Eli finished.
“Another dead end?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Why does it feel like we were meant to find that file?” I looked at it in Eli’s hand, and again, the shutters fell over his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The ride back to Sinclair Security was long and silent.
Eli tried to pawn me off in the elevator with, “Why don’t you go up to the apartment? I’ll just drop this file off. Then we’ll get some lunch.”
“No, that’s okay,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’ll come with you.”
I thought I could hear Eli’s teeth grinding together, but I was tired of being left out—tired of them talking around me and over me. And if I was being honest with myself, Iwas both mad and hurt that Eli didn’t trust me the same way I’d trusted him.
The end result was the same. I had questions, and I wanted answers.
I followed Eli back to our temporary home base in Hacker Central to find Maddox, Emmett, Wren, and Ryder, who seemed to be the de facto head of the crew, though I’d only met him once when he’d been passing through while we’d been going through files.
“What’d you find?” Ryder asked.
Eli gave a quick report, leaving out what I’d found.
