in the mirror above the sink. No, the necklace wasn’t the only reminder of her sisters. It couldn’t be, not when their faces stared back at her from every reflective surface.
But sometimes the pendant was the only reminder she could bear to look at.
Dani bellowed Nina’s name, snapping her out of the past. “I’m coming!” she called back, then braced her hands on the sink and took another, harder look in the mirror.
It didn’t matter what Garrett Knox wanted, whether he was telling the truth or not. Nina had to be prepared for the worst. If she let him catch her off guard, Dani and Maya would be the ones paying the price.
And then Nina’s sisters wouldn’t be the only people she’d gotten killed with her carelessness.
* * *
Nina was late.
Knox locked down his nervousness and distracted himself by rechecking the supplies packed into the truck’s secure storage area. His team gave him shit about his exhaustive lists and endless contingency plans, but Knox couldn’t count the number of times they’d come home intact because he’d been prepared for something no one could have seen coming.
Weapons. Med-kits. Hunting gear. Emergency rations. Survival supplies. He flipped open a box of tasteless, nutrient-dense meal bars. Game was plentiful where they were going, but he still counted the rations, enough for five men to survive two weeks—
His fist clenched, crushing the cardboard box top.
There were only four of them now.
“Hey, Cap.”
Knox forced himself to release the box and turned to block Conall’s view of it. “What’ve you got?”
“Not what I wanted.” Oblivious to Knox’s mood, Conall leaned against the truck’s bumper and opened his tablet. “I got clear pictures of all their faces at the bar, but facial recognition isn’t bringing up much in the TechCorps database.”
Conall was usually more precise in his phrasing. “Much?”
“Nothing on Nina or the blonde. They might as well be ghosts.” He skated his finger over the screen and pulled up a file. “Pretty sure this is Maya, though.”
The screen displayed a TechCorps employee profile for a Marjorie Chevalier. The black band across the top denoted executive-level access. The red band indicated something far worse.
She’d gone AWOL.
He studied the picture. The girl featured was so young that her cheeks still curved with childlike fullness. Her black hair had been shorn close to her head, and her face was devoid of the heavy makeup Maya had worn to the bar, but the brown skin, tilted nose, and dark, wary eyes were all the same.
“Why are you only pretty sure?” Knox asked as he skimmed the sparse status details. Most employee files were written in obscure, coded language. Special Executive Assistant meant someone who’d been altered to serve a specific purpose, that was simple enough. But the two words on the next line chilled Knox’s blood.
Data Courier.
Knox skimmed back up to the red bar and tapped it. Text filled the space, bright white and stark. CONFIRMED DEAD. 2,000,000-credit reward unclaimed.
The familiar rhythm of Conall’s voice had faded to a distant hum, but one word caught Knox’s attention. “Wait, what did you say?”
Conall heaved an aggrieved sigh. “I said that coders back at the dawn of the twenty-first century were lazy. And racist. And cheap. Facial recognition was designed by white people who tested it on other white people, and even after everyone knew it was all kinds of fucked up, most of the private sector had been building on those flawed algorithms for so long they didn’t want to go back and start from scratch. Too expensive.”
“But you found her.”
“Not with their system. But the employee database is mirrored on the GhostNet. I used a better algorithm to start my search, then cross-referenced with presumed age and—”
If Conall got going, Knox would be on the receiving end of a ten-minute monologue on data filtering. “Good work.” He waved the tablet. “Can I keep this?”
“Sure.” Conall pushed off the vehicle. “I’m going to go make sure everything’s ready in their truck.”
When he was gone, Knox went back to Maya’s profile. Dragging the red bar down expanded the specifics of her supposed death. A Protectorate squad leader’s brief report detailed his team’s discovery of skeletonized remains while out on an unrelated mission. They’d followed protocol, collecting DNA and scans of the teeth before continuing to their objective.
Knox knew what was coming without having to scroll down. But he did it anyway, with a sick twist of recognition. As soon as the lab had processed the results and matched them to Marjorie Chevalier,