Chapter 29
The hours afterward are a haze of flashing lights, shouting voices, and my own aching injuries.
I find myself out in the courtyard. It’s been roped off by police tape and unmarked SUVs.
I tell the story of what happened about eight times. I’m not even sure who I’m talking to half the time—it’s all a blur of faces and noises and demands.
I omit certain details, of course. Nonna becomes “That Nice Old Lady Next Door Who I’ve Definitely Never Met Before.
” I absolutely do not talk about Edgar. I hold my backpack between my knees, his chassis hidden in the secret pocket.
I will have to find him a new portable body, but that’s a problem for later.
When I am asked what happened to Eames and Piper, I simply tell them that I don’t know. I pushed Hannah Vale into the pool to disable her ringware and cut her access to the mainframe, and then I awoke several minutes later, having been pulled to safety.
It’s only when I see Prefect in a rumpled white dress shirt that I realize I’m wearing his suit jacket over my soaked clothes. He must have put it on me at some point.
He sits down beside me and exhales. He looks bone-tired.
The first button on his shirt is undone and there’s no tie to be found.
It’s the most wrecked I’ve ever seen him, and I wonder what he has been doing for the last few hours.
Probably fighting with SWAT to keep them from storming the building or something.
“Prefect,” I say.
“Augusta,” he replies.
Neither of us speaks right away.
“Consul alive?” I ask.
He dips his chin in a begrudging nod. “Unfortunately.”
I huff out a laugh. “That’s a terrible thing to say about a coworker.”
“When that coworker turns traitor and sells out two informants, endangering the lives of civilians and my asset, no. It’s not a terrible thing to say.
” He reaches to straighten a tie that isn’t there, makes a face, then puts his hands in his lap.
“And the one time we met in person, she took the last doughnut from the office kitchen.”
“Oh, well,” I say wryly, “she absolutely deserved to get shot, then.”
He gives me a tolerant smile. “We’ll all be undergoing some security checks, I believe.”
“Oh, great.” I snort. “The most paranoid federal agency is about to get even more paranoid.”
To ISD, my victory is half won. Hannah Vale and her crew are captured—but I lost Project Persephone. I lost ISD’s best leverage against Vale. She’ll be convicted but she won’t be used. All those hacks she perfected—she won’t divulge them.
Prefect’s gaze slants away. A silent confirmation. “We reviewed all the faces you ran through facial recognition. Carla William and Oliver Dawson were part of Ratiocination, along with Vale.”
“Oliver Dawson?” I ask, frowning.
“The hacker.”
“Oh, you mean Bud.”
Prefect grinds his thumb into the line between his brows. “Oliver ‘Bud’ Dawson. They were part of Vale’s little cyberterror crew.”
“Not terrorists,” I say. “Vale was in this for money and revenge, not a cause.”
I glance toward the building. There are still many people being evacuated—EMTs helping out children and the elderly; middle-aged people milling about the little rescue center that’s been set up; kids playing an impromptu game of tag.
“You should talk to Carla.” I lick my dry lips. My mouth still tastes of chlorine. “If anyone’s going to make a deal, it’ll be her.”
Prefect inclines his head. “I’ll take that into consideration.”
“So what about Consul, Corey, and Anasova?”
“Consul is being retired.”
I scrunch up my face. “Retired? That’s it? Like, I am not a law expert but I think words like ‘treason’ and ‘aiding and abetting’ should be thrown around right now.”
“Oh, no,” he says, “she will never see the inside of a courtroom.”
“Not another Lawyerbot case?”
His gaze goes a little distant. “Do you know why wraith handlers don’t use their real names?”
I blink. The question throws me, and it takes a moment to answer. “I always thought it was so wraiths couldn’t track them down after we’re freed. And so you can all pick pretentious titles like you’re counselors at the world’s worst summer camp.”
That gets me a laugh. It’s short and dry, but honest. “Well, yes. But as you did a good job today, I’ll let you in on a small secret.” His face sobers. “Wraiths do not die. Not officially. They simply … vanish, their records erased if they perish on a mission.”
I scowl at him. “That’s not a secret.”
His expression doesn’t flicker. “Wraiths aren’t the only ones for whom that applies. Particularly if a handler dies on the job … or if they do something unforgivable.”
It takes me a moment to get it. “Oh,” I say. Then, “Oh.”
I’ve always thought wraith handlers had it pretty good.
Order around some criminals, solve some crimes, do some paperwork, get a decent paycheck and federal health care.
But perhaps they are also chosen because no one will miss them.
Perhaps the line between wraith and wraith handler is thinner than I ever thought possible.
“So Consul’s getting retired,” I say. Permanently. To some impenetrable federal prison. And no one will ever look for her, because technically she doesn’t exist.
“As for Corey,” continues Prefect, “he was found unconscious in the basement. He’s alive, but he’ll need some recovery time. You hit him with a rather large dose of sedatives.”
“And Anasova?” I ask. “She was on the roof. I zip-tied her to a solar panel.”
“I know.” He rubs at his mouth and I hear the scratch of day-old stubble. “We found the broken zip ties, along with some blood. But there was no sign of her.”
“Wonderful.” Now there’s an orange-haired assassin on the loose with a grudge against me. Just another Saturday.
I look at him. “All right. So I have one last bone to pick with you.”
His dark brows flick upward. “What?”
“This.” I gesture at the lawn brimming with rescued hostages. “I thought me being here was a coincidence. It wasn’t.”
His expression smooths out into neutrality. “What are you saying?”
“You knew,” I say. “You knew there was a mole in ISD, that someone was working with Vale. I’ll buy that you didn’t know ISD had her kids, but you knew we had something on Vale and it was stashed here.
That’s why you sent me to a motel with a dead raccoon in the tub.
I bet you even put it there beforehand.” The thought of Prefect chucking a dead raccoon makes me smile.
“Well, maybe not you personally, but I bet you paid someone to do it.”
“Why would I do that?” he asks, tilting his head.
Because the world is his chessboard.
And I am his knight.
“Because you wanted me to stay in this building,” I say. “You couldn’t put me here yourself without someone at ISD taking notice. But me going rogue and avoiding a terrible motel gave you plausible deniability.”
His mouth curls upward. “I’m not omnipotent,” he says smoothly. “How could I have ever predicted you would choose this apartment building?”
Because he knows. He knows about Nonna. I’m sure he does—he’s the type to leave no stone unturned when investigating someone.
He’ll know every detail of my past. He might even have influenced ISD to have Project Persephone placed in this apartment building, knowing that I could be lured here to protect it.
Maybe.
I’m not sure if I’m that paranoid yet.
But this is what Prefect does: He places his chess pieces on the board and hopes for the best.
“How did you know?” I ask quietly. “That I could even handle this? Pretty big leap of faith for you.”
He tucks a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “Augusta. I don’t have faith in much. But I do know this—when you put your mind to something, there’s no stopping you.”
Well, that’s the closest thing to a compliment he’s ever given me.
“Vale said something to me,” I say. “That I’ll never go home, even if that is my deal.”
He considers me. “There’s an old saying. ‘You can’t ever go home again.’ Which isn’t true, of course. You can go home—but what the saying really means is that home might not have changed, but you will have.” He gives me a steady look. “Are you the same person you were three years ago?”
No. No, I’m not. That girl was light and airy, confident in her abilities and her future.
I still have some of that confidence. Okay, maybe it’s bordering on arrogance. But I have changed. I’m harder, angrier. But I’m also more careful, more wary.
But how I feel about my family—that is my foundation. When everything else I am crumbles, that love will remain.
“The thing about being a wraith,” says Prefect, “is that you get used to working in the shadows. And not all work done in the shadows is ignoble.”
I scoff.
“Well, some of it is,” he says, conceding my point without shame. “But tell me, Augusta. How many people were in that building today?”
I shrug. “I dunno. Didn’t really do a head count.”
“There were over two hundred.” One of his tattooed clocks begins to blink gently and he touches a finger to it.
It flares green for a moment, then goes back to its normal gold.
“And how many people would have died if Hannah Vale had been allowed to sell her information? Thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands.” He leans toward me, eyes intent. “You stopped that.”
For once, I don’t know what to say.
Prefect has no such problem. “Wraiths do things that others cannot. And when a person’s sentence is up, some decide not to return to a normal life.
They stay with ISD instead. Because we can do great things, sometimes.
And an old life can be a shackle to leave behind, rather than a goal to return to. ”
“Am I going home?” I ask quietly. It’s as close as I can come to asking if ISD will uphold our deal. “When this is all over?”
Prefect meets my eyes, his gaze unwavering. “If you want to.”
I spent the last three years trying to atone. Numbing myself with work and jobs, with new cities and new faces. And if I was a little too reckless on a job, I could blame that on being an impulsive criminal.
But maybe it was always fear.
Fear that even if I do survive my ten years, if I do manage to claw my way back to my old life, that old life won’t want me anymore.
My family won’t want me anymore.
I can still feel the light squeeze of Nonna’s fingers on my shoulder. Come back, when you can.
It won’t be the same. I’m not the same—and they won’t be, either.
I look at Prefect. Really look at him. At the boyish cast to his features, the shadows beneath his eyes, the rumpled dark hair and the raised scar from his temple to his hairline.
Not everyone gets second chances.
But some people do.
Prefect rises to his feet.
Steve is hurrying by, carrying a box of evidence. Without so much as hesitating, Prefect takes hold of Steve’s tie. Steve skids to a halt rather than allow himself to be strangled. “Sir?”
Prefect loosens that tie, slips it over Steve’s head, and then settles it around his own empty collar. “Back to work,” says Prefect.
Bewildered and tie-less, Steve hastens away.
With a practiced hand, Prefect straightens his new tie. He looks more himself with it.
“Come on,” he says. “We’ve got work to do.”
I push myself to my feet.
And together, we walk into the shadows.