After the shock passed, anger surged bright and hot through his body. He glared at Vicious and snapped, “Is this a joke?”
“No.”
“Do you really think it will be that easy to replace her?” Terror wanted to throw the box in Vicious’ face. “You think I’m going to just Grab the first woman I can catch?”
“I think Maisie would kick your ass from one end of the planet to the other if you did,” Vicious replied too jovially. With a huff of laughter, he clapped Terror on the back. “You idiot! Those are for Maisie!”
Terror felt his knees go wobbly. “What?”
“Cipher designed the collar to connect to a watch that will vibrate to alert Maisie to alarms, messages and other things she can’t hear,” Vicious explained. “We have some other ideas, too, about how to make it easier for her to transition.”
“Vicious,” Orion reprimanded. “You still haven’t told him the important part!”
“Oh!” Vicious had the decency to look apologetic. “Terror,” he said seriously, “we found her.”
Terror’s knees actually gave out. Vicious caught him as he crumpled and helped him to the nearest chair.
“You really are the biggest oaf,” Orion scolded. “I knew I should have handled this.” He elbowed Vicious out of the way and crouched down in front of Terror. Keen handed him a tablet, and Orion turned it toward him. “Look.”
Terror grabbed the tablet out of Orion’s hands. His heart flip-flopped wildly as he saw Maisie looking back at him. Her hair was a little longer, and her skin was tan. She seemed to be outdoors. There were trees all around her. Was she standing on a ladder? Were those pruning shears in her hands?
“She’s alive,” Terror said on a relieved breath.
“Yes,” Orion said. “She’s very much alive.”
“How did you find her?” Terror couldn’t believe after all the dead ends and bad intel she was staring right back at him.
“Savage was able to get the transponder and ID numbers for the pod on Flint’s crippled ship. Keen tracked it down to a scrap yard in a colony planet in that sector. Torment went to the scrap yard to investigate.”
“I know,” Terror said, not even bothering to ignore the urge to stroke the screen. “I went over all of that intel at least a hundred times. It was a dead end.”
“It was,” Cipher interjected, “until Brook.”
Terror glanced up from the tablet. “Brook?”
“She was angry that we hadn’t found Maisie yet, and I told her that all the leads had dried up. The evidence didn’t go anywhere else. She told me that we were overthinking things. I figured she was probably correct,” Cipher admitted with a wry smile. “So, I asked her what she would do to find Maisie.”
“And?”
“She wouldn’t have focused on the pod’s final location. She made the point that it could have passed through a number of hands before it ended up in the scrapyard so looking at the planets and skyports near the scrapyard was pointless. She wanted to know how far the pod could have gone after launching from the crippled ship,” Cipher continued. “I did the math and presented her with the options. She asked me to show her the way the navigation maps would have looked at the exact moment when Maisie had to make her choice. I was able it to wind it back, and Brook picked two planets that were outside of Alliance patrol corridors and beyond the reach of other possible Splinter vessels in the area.”
Irritation flashed within him. “Why didn’t we do that at the beginning?”
“We did,” Keen assured him, “but we weren’t using the navigation map at the exact time that Maisie launched from the crippled ship. We were using the aggregate from the entire day, and as you know, things changed quickly during that twenty-four-hour period. Starting from the wrong navigation map was the beginning of a cascade of bad intel.”
“Each layer built on the previous,” Savage said, “and we ended up where we did.”
“I looked at the two planets, one was agrarian and the other is mostly water with a few densely populated fishing communities,” Cipher explained. “I scrolled through the intel on the agrarian planet, and as soon as Brook saw the orchards, she was positive that’s where Maisie would have gone.”
“The oranges,” Terror murmured.
“Yes,” Cipher agreed. “Brook said if she was separated from me, she would have picked a place that reminded her of me and vice versa. I hijacked a satellite in the area, gave it a little side mission and managed to grab