Oscar had fled.
I hadn’t seen D.J. or anyone else. But I had enough. It had to be enough.
I pressed a groaning Simon onto the bed a lot more gently than I ordinarily would have and resisted the urge to sit ministering to him. I did check his vitals and the dressing on his bandages. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t in immediate danger, and his own head injury was muddling through my consciousness so clearly, I thought I could tell how bad the concussion actually was.
Huh.
I was also keenly disappointed in myself.
Or he was. In me.
“Sorry,” I said, not sure whether I meant it this time.
I did sit with him for a few minutes after that. He needed rest; his thoughts eventually started to become more disorganized as he drifted, and I managed to rouse myself to go to the computer Rio had left. I opened a chat session with Checker.
Is Rio there? I asked.
Checker’s reply came back immediately: cas!
And one second later: he’s been trying 2 reach u
After another second: how did it go? r u ok?
I made sure Rio wasn’t watching over his shoulder and then explained what I’d seen. Can you help me pinpoint this place? I asked.
We put our brains together. I gathered Rio was not happy—at least, if Checker’s i think he might be furious at u but its rly hard to tell w him and i’m not putting my neck on that block sry was anything to go by. But Rio had at least done what I predicted and stayed at the Rosales house to ensure the family wouldn’t go unprotected just because I decided to do something foolhardy.
Foolhardy and unethical.
With Checker’s help, forty minutes later, we’d pinpointed the ranch in Oscar’s memories. Time to reach it gave us a radius from the city, and I’d been able to estimate the distance to the mountains and also to a line of light that had indicated a highway. A blurred memory of the sky showed the angle to the North Star, so we had approximate latitude.
And once we were down to scanning satellite imagery, the three-dimensional shapes of the buildings easily converted to a two-dimensional bird’s-eye in my head, and there was the ranch.
Excellent, I wrote to Checker. We found where the dogs are kept. Or bred. Or … something.
and whats yr plan??? u aren’t going r u???
Of course I am, I typed back.
???!!!
Checker’s chat responses didn’t always get the benefit of words.
Simon’s going too, I said. Though he didn’t know it yet. If we run into anything mind-warping, he’ll just have to talk both of us down.
V BAD IDEA CAS
Bombers and killers coming after us and a lot of other people, I reminded him. Plus possibly psychics behind it all. Do you have a better plan? If not, bye.
And I shut the laptop. A text popped up on my phone, but it was only more punctuation marks.
But this was good. This was perfect. This was a risk I could take, a good risk, the right risk. One I could win. And be the person who shielded everyone else.
Simon groaned.
“Wakey wakey,” I said. “How’s the head? Are you still out of control? Because if so, I’ll wait. We’re going on a field trip.”
Usually Simon’s unintentional telepathy didn’t come with words attached, but this time I caught the virulent Fuck you, Cas.
That was uncharacteristic of him. He must be very, very mad at me.
twenty-seven
HAVING SOME backup who wasn’t Simon along might have been nice, especially given his head wound. But I was sure Rio was still pissed, plus I needed him where he was.
I thought about calling Pilar. But a twinge of risk assessment reminded me how many probabilities here were still question marks. Checker wasn’t out of line in objecting—this was dangerous, and impulsive, and I didn’t know what we’d find. But dangerous and impulsive were where I lived. And Pilar could be one of the people I did it to protect.
That was the way things should be.
Besides, bringing Pilar might have strained Simon’s focus too far. I was already a bit worried about that with only two of us. Simon had tried to refuse to go at first—but after a little more rest, he’d wrestled back enough of his control that his refusal didn’t have any more weight than making me second-guess myself. I pushed it away and told him that if he wasn’t coming, I’d be going in alone. As whacked as it was that he felt so strongly about not