Not like Teplova.
Her applied skills had somehow been so many worlds away from my realm and everything I could control. How was that possible? Mathematics underpinned everything. I had followed the intricacies of how she’d made Willow beautiful, and the theory had all been so perfectly understandable, a well-fitted jigsaw puzzle of ingenious creativity. But I’d missed everything important.
And in practice, the more I saw of her creations, the more her choices eluded me. The confluence of equations, the local and absolute extrema that served as her fulcrums, the web of reinforcing and refining with each new technique to build that theory into usefulness—I had the creeping, desperate premonition that it might be fundamentally beyond me.
Just because I understood circuit theory didn’t mean I had the first idea of how to build a mobile phone. I’d failed to save Coach, but … I didn’t even know if I could have.
I went over and jacked the sedan to life, then once the engine turned over I slumped in the driver’s seat waiting for Checker. The door to the van slammed with a dull finality, locking Juwon and his family inside. Checker came over and swung into the passenger side next to me, pulling apart his chair with practiced smoothness to pass into the back next to Pilar, who was curled in the fetal position against one of the doors.
“How is she?” he asked.
I didn’t know any better than he did.
“Hey.” He prodded my shoulder and pointed. Juwon was backing up in fits and starts. He took a stuttering turn and then managed to creep out toward the street. “We’re following for a second, right?” Checker asked.
I’d said we were. It was smart. I’d be able to spot any tails from back here, for sure.
None of it seemed to matter. D.J., Willow Grace, Pithica—whoever wanted us dead, they’d been a dozen moves ahead before we’d ever realized we were playing. Willow Grace could have planted a tracker on the minivan. Juwon might have been brainwashed by Pithica. D.J. might have figured out Dr. Washington was a known acquaintance of Arthur, and already staked her out …
What was the point? What did they want? They’d jerked us around for days, kidnapping Arthur and letting him go, only to try blowing up him and his whole family. They’d had Willow Grace embedded with us from the beginning, only for her to help us find Arthur and then kidnap Tabitha a day later. Nothing we’d done seemed to have made a damn bit of difference.
“My house is clear. So far,” Checker said. He must have been looking at his security system on his phone. “I need to stop there. Get some equipment, and—” His words squeezed off, and his hand stuttered in the air, waving off an end to the sentence. “If you think it’s safe enough for me to work from the Hole, even better.”
Willow Grace knew about Checker’s place. She knew about all of us.
I followed Juwon for long enough to be sure I was the only one behind him. He was an awful driver, creeping up to lights and hesitating and swerving into any lane changes, but at least he didn’t seem inclined to speed. Rush hour was beginning to seep out of LA’s overclogged pores, which would either help him out by keeping traffic to a crawl or become a trial by fire.
Either way, we couldn’t help him. I peeled off and headed toward Checker’s place.
“There has to be something about Willow Grace.” Checker spoke rapidly and tightly, engrossed in his phone. “Something, some way we can—use that—we could go to her house, her work place, call everyone she knows…”
She’d taken Tabitha over an hour ago now. An hour was enough time to hide the body of one sixteen-year-old child.
Four minutes had been long enough for me to get Coach’s body off the street.
“Cas! Cas, are you listening to me?”
I pulled into his driveway and jolted to a stop. My hands felt like clay on the steering wheel.
“Cas, snap out of it! We need to find Tabitha—”
“Arthur was right,” I said, so hollowly it sounded like a stranger. “I don’t know if I can save her.”
Checker twisted in the passenger seat, grabbing onto my shoulder roughly. “Stop it!” He shook me. “This is not the time to go blue screen of death on me—Cas! You are the most arrogant person I’ve ever met and—” He swiped at his face with the back of one hand and seemed to gulp back a