knuckles until they cracked. Lucas glanced at me, and cleared his throat. “Sir?”
When Daniel looked up, he continued. “The chip. You promised Mila you’d remove it.”
I feigned interest in the table, feeling Hunter’s eyes on me. But I had to be over that now. I couldn’t be ashamed of who—and what—I was.
“We can do it right here, if there’s enough room,” I said.
Daniel shrugged. “Should work. Let me grab a few things.”
A few things turned out to be a handheld scanner and a probe, with an end that separated into thin, razor-sharp tweezers. Lucas eyed the scanner. “I’ve never seen that technology before.”
“It’s new, something Quinn’s team made. Designed to be unnoticeable.”
While Daniel positioned me with my back to him, I wondered what kind of people would need such technology and why. Maybe I didn’t want to know. Daniel directed Lucas to pull the back of my shirt down. After checking with me for permission, he complied.
I was acutely aware of the others looking on while the scanner hovered over my bare skin. Daniel muttered as he started the search just to the right of my spine, but had to move the scanner left, and then down.
Beep, beep, beep.
BEEP.
“There it is. Things migrate sometimes,” Daniel said.
The probe sank in, its metal cold against my warmed skin.
And then it was all over. “Done!” Daniel pronounced. A tiny dot of metal was clenched between the tweezer tips. He promptly slid it into a waiting Ziploc.
With that complete, everyone stared at me expectantly. Feeling a little like a circus performer without a net, I started my search.
Secure network: Log on?
The smooth ease of the connection flooded me with relief. Until this moment, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed using one of my most basic functions. The hum, the flare, the thrill of tapping into something vast and ubiquitous; of being able to reach out and grab whatever information I needed, whenever I wanted. I hadn’t appreciated it before.
As I searched for information on Montford and the Watson Grant, I heard a strange sound.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Water. The faucet outside the RV was dripping. Steady and distinct.
Something about the sound sent a creeping shadow up my spine. Dread, I identified. Then I realized why.
The dripping sounded too much like a countdown. A reminder that inside this RV, nestled among the only people left that I cared about, there was a ticking time bomb.
And that bomb was me.
Shaking off that unsettling notion, I concentrated on the search.
First, I accumulated information on Montford Prep.
Scanning . . . Citations found.
I skimmed through the data and shared what was relevant.
“Montford Prep, founded in 1926. List of deans if needed, current one named Robert Parsons. Seven board members,” I said, sharing the names. “But none of them triggers any links to Holland. If someone wants to follow through on that, though . . .”
“On it,” Samuel said, through a mouthful of chips. He shoved the bag aside and began to type.
“Alumni donations totaling over five million dollars in the last three years alone.”
Samuel whistled. “Must be nice to be rich and douchey.”
When I finished with Montford, I switched gears to the Watson Grant, starting with any former or current recipients.
Searching . . .
To my surprise, only five names pulled up; six if you included Sarah’s.
“The Grant is something new. In fact, Sarah was the first-ever recipient, and the only one that year.”
Daniel swore under his breath, and I couldn’t blame him. He probably wished he’d never heard of the Watson Grant.
“Now, for the current students.”
I whipped through names and descriptions.
Hannah Peckles—a tiny blond computer-science whiz. In her sophomore year of high school, she’d developed a top-selling iPhone app that created 3D games based on the user’s location.
Ben LaCosta—a lanky redhead with a splattering of freckles across his cheeks and nose. He placed out of college calculus his sophomore year in high school, and had been part of some wunderkind math team that won every time.
Claude Parsons—a boy with a long, oval face, wire-rimmed glasses, and a shock of dark hair, praised by his teachers for his aptitude in language (oh, the things you could learn by hacking into school transcripts!). He’d acquired three before high school—Spanish, French, and German—and then Mandarin by the end of junior year.
Sharon Alexander—an athletically built brunette who had used ad revenue from her popular blog and a Kickstarter campaign to raise a million dollars for the victims of domestic violence.
J. D. Rothschild—really, the only one who sounded like a contender for Samuel’s “rich and