“It’s been plugged into my car.” I hold out my palm, since there’s something very strange about my phone, with the geometric patterned case Mara gave me for Hanukkah last year, in Neil’s hands. I try the power button yet again. “I can’t exactly play without my phone.”
“Wait. Wait. We can fix this.” McNair swipes around on his own phone, tapping Sean Yee’s contact photo. “Sean can fix anything. He brought a twelve-year-old MacBook back to life last year.”
“And why would he help me?”
“He’d be helping both of us.” He types out a message I can’t see. “And he got killed pretty quickly earlier, so he doesn’t have skin in the game.” His phone pings. “Sean’s free, and he’s at home. He lives right off I-5, Forty-Third and Latona. It’ll only take us ten minutes to get there.”
“Wasn’t he at the safe zone? With you and Adrian and Cyrus?” This is too weird. McNair’s friend helping me, out of the goodness of his heart?
A smile curves one side of his mouth. “He just came to hang out. Were you… looking out for me?”
“I’m just perceptive.”
“You were looking out for me,” he concludes. “I’m touched.”
HOWL CLUES
A place you can buy Nirvana’s first album
A place that’s red from floor to ceiling
A place you can find Chiroptera
A rainbow crosswalk
Ice cream fit for Sasquatch
The big guy at the center of the universe
Something local, organic, and sustainable
A floppy disk
A coffee cup with someone else’s name (or your own name, wildly misspelled)
A car with a parking ticket
A view from up high
The best pizza in the city (your choice)
A tourist doing something a local would be ashamed of doing
An umbrella (we all know real Seattleites don’t use them)
A tribute to the mysterious Mr. Cooper
4:15 p.m.
“WELCOME TO MY laboratory,” Sean says in a voice that makes him sound like a villain in a spy movie that definitely doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test. He ushers us into the tiny basement of his Wallingford bungalow. And wow, it really does look like a laboratory down here. There’s a worktable with four monitors, a rack of tools, and countless wires and electronic gadgets strewn about. The lighting gives everything a vaguely greenish tint.
It’s cold in the basement, and when I rub my bare arms, I remember where I left my sweater: on a chair in the listening booth.
“I hope we’re not interrupting,” I say. “Seriously, thank you so much for doing this. Or for trying to.”
Sean and I have never had a reason to talk much. Frankly, he has no reason to be this nice to me. Savannah has me suspicious of everyone who used to seem harmless.
“Trying,” Sean says under his breath with a glance at McNair, and the two of them snicker, as though the idea of Sean not succeeding is ludicrous. “Nah, I was just playing the new Assassin’s Creed.”
“Why would you put yourself through that after getting killed so early in Howl?” McNair asks innocently.
“Thanks so much for the emotional support.”
I tap my dead phone. “I can Venmo you some—”
Sean’s eyebrows shoot up. “What? No, no, you definitely don’t have to do that. I’d have failed my French final without Neil. I owe him one. Or seven.” I don’t have a chance to point out that him helping me isn’t the same thing as helping McNair before Sean swipes a pair of thick glasses from the worktable and puts them on. “May I see the patient?”
Biting back a laugh, I surrender my phone. Neil said he explained the whole situation when we were driving over, but if it’s odd for Sean to see the two of us together, he doesn’t say anything.
“So what exactly happened?” Sean asks, gently placing my phone on the table and rummaging through a drawer before extracting a cable and plugging it in. He plugs the other end into his main computer.
“It died while installing an update. And then it wouldn’t turn on.”
“Hmm.” Sean hits a few keys, and the phone’s screen turns blue. “This shouldn’t be too hard.”
I let out a sigh of relief. “Great.”
“Thank you,” Neil says, and flashes me an encouraging smile.
My fingers are twitchy. I kind of hate that I’m so married to my phone that even ten minutes without it sends me into withdrawal. Madison’s target, though—I have that. Brady Becker. Guess he’s still alive.
“I can’t imagine what all of this is worth,” I say, gazing around the lab.
“Most of the tech, I found used and restored it.” Sean hunches over my