up. “So they’re either fake, which means we’re wasting our time, or they’re genuine, which means they’re useless. Which means we’re wasting our time.”
“Rose was a medic,” I pointed out. “She shouldn’t have taken this many Walks.” Walker medics served multiple teams, so they usually stayed in the Key World unless called out for a specific emergency.
“Fakes, then.” Eliot pushed the laptop away. “But why bother making up an entire book of bad data? Why did Monty send us here?”
I stared at the scatter of pages in front of us. Two hundred Walks. For a medic, that alone was suspicious. “Maybe it’s not completely fake.”
Eliot started to pace around the island, pencil spinning. I frowned into my mug and waited, but the pacing didn’t stop. His lips moved silently.
I finished my coffee and poured another cup. He kept going.
“Hey—” I said, but he held up a hand to silence me. “You’re going to wear a groove in the floor.”
Impatient, I pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and listed Rose’s Walks again—just the numeric frequencies. There was no pattern, no cluster of worlds or range of pitches she seemed to favor, and I huffed in irritation. When I was done, I had a list of random numbers and Eliot standing over my shoulder, smelling of pine sap and buttered popcorn. “Solved it yet, Genius Boy? Because I’m stumped.”
Wordlessly he pulled the pen out of my hand and drew a thick black slash through two of the Walks.
“Hey! I actually worked on that, you know.”
“Del, look.” He ran down the paper, crossing out the duplicate frequencies. “Signal to noise. The real information is here, but you have to dig through a lot of meaningless stuff to get at it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Consort would have read these journals, same as us. So it means anything obvious is probably useless—like Echoes she went to more than once. The Consort would assume they’re important, but their true purpose is to throw Lattimer off the trail and obscure the real data.”
I studied the remaining frequencies. “Those are the Walks she actually took?”
“Some, yes. But I’m betting we need more exclusion criteria.”
“I don’t speak genius,” I muttered. “Translation?”
“We need another filter. Other ways to separate out which frequencies are important and which are camouflage.”
“She took this one with Monty,” I said, pointing to one of the numbers at the bottom. “According to his notes, it was their last Walk together before she left. Is it important?”
“He said her story was the one that mattered, right?”
I nodded and stuffed another Oreo in my mouth.
“If we cross out any Walks they took together . . . ,” Eliot said.
I leaped up and grabbed Monty’s journals from the living room.
“Read me the frequencies from each trip,” Eliot ordered, and I obeyed. He crossed out batches, pen flying over the paper. “I’m dropping any world they both visited, even if it was at different times.”
“Do you think she really went to these places?” I asked when he was done.
“Hard to say. It’s possible she wrote down frequencies that fit the code, rather than places she visited.”
We stared at the list in silence.
Eight frequencies in all. I wrote them on a fresh piece of paper, but they still didn’t reveal their secrets.
“I’m not seeing it,” he said around a mouthful of Oreo. “Are these a map? Was this her escape route? A list of worlds with Free Walker outposts?”
I stared at them, trying to discern a pattern. “We could check them out. See what we find.”
He sprayed crumbs across the table. “That’s a terrible plan. We don’t know what we’re looking for. You want to show up with a sign that says ‘Honk if you’re a Free Walker’?” He shook his head. “Not to mention, neither of us is licensed. I’m not going to let you—”
“Let?” The warm, easy feeling between us vanished. “You don’t ‘let’ me do anything. You’re not my mom. You’re not even Addie.”
His shoulders tensed. “No. I’m just the guy—”
The back door slammed open with a noise like a gunshot. “Damn it, Del! Have you completely lost your mind?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ADDIE STOOD IN THE DOORWAY, vibrating with outrage.
“I take it you talked to Mom and Dad,” I said.
She stomped inside, Laurel behind her looking amused and resigned in equal measure.
“Cocoa?” Eliot asked her. “This part takes a while, sometimes.”
Laurel stifled a laugh.
Addie ignored them. “You should not be working for Lattimer.”
“You are,” I pointed out. “You asked me to help, remember? How is this any different?”
The project is