Page 116 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

They had all agreed that showing activity in the cabin during the day would be bad, but that hasn’t made them any more likely to relax anytime soon, and Gurlien keeps on twitching the floral curtains open to peek out at them.

Instead, all four of them are trapped in there together, and it’s not helping anything.

“I still think we should draw up the schematics of where she’s hidden,” Delina drawls. “There has to be a way in there.”

“There’s not,” Gurlien replies, screwing up his face in frustration at her. “Tell her there’s not.”

“There’s not…that we know of,” Maison replies, and Gurlien makes a crude gesture at him, almost upsetting the cat sitting on him. “She’s probably not even at the Atlanta base anymore.”

“What, do you think they’d take her to LA or to the Toronto location?” Gurlien replies, sarcastic. “Because all of those are so easy to break into.”

Chloe makes a noise, a small noise, but it’s enough to draw everyone’s attention, and the mint box in her hand turns into a blob of plastic once more.

“Yes?” Delina asks, and Chloe blinks up at her, then over at Maison.

“They have a demon center at the Toronto location,” she says, small. “A lot of their research is there, a lot of demon defenses are there.”

Silence descends over the room, and Delina twists, breathless, to look at Maison.

His expression is as if stone.

“They had stasis holding cells designed to keep full demons at bay,” Chloe continues, and she hunches her shoulders in on herself. “And everything in between.”

“Yes, that’s where Dr. Frisse stole the idea of the Terese project,” Gurlien says, as if he’s trying to be dismissive but failing. “They have a thousand failed vectors of that experiment in there, it’s ghastly.”

“If I was trying to keep a Half Demon out of somewhere, I’d go there,” Chloe says, but she’s frowning at the very idea of it, and Delina starkly remembers the scars on her ribs. “Or trap a necromancer.”

Gurlien sits up, jolting the cat from its perch. “Frisse has three condos in that city, they only know about two of them.”

Maison’s face twitches. “That’s a lot of conjecture,” he warns, but there’s a small light of something approaching hope in his eyes.

“I’m gonna…I’m gonna make something,” Chloe declares, then throws a look at Gurlien. “The extra laptop, I need it.”

“Are you going to wreck it?” Gurlien asks, but he’s standing, already in motion.

“Maison, with your permission, can I make a tracker for the satellite phone?” Chloe asks quietly. “It should just be on our side, but there is a chance they’ll be able to tell.”

Maison freezes.

“I want to confirm at least the zip code they’re calling from,” Chloe continues, “that could help us with the location.”

Slowly, Maison nods, as Gurlien comes back with the laptop.

“How big of a chance?” Delina asks, standing and stretching her legs. “You said there’s a chance, how big of one?”

“If she does this correctly, about point seven percent,” Gurlien says, clattering the laptop onto the table. It’s an old laptop, bigger than most of Delina’s college textbooks, and she’d be shocked if it could actually connect to the internet anymore.

Delina paces into the kitchen, crossing her arms, but Maison’s still. Pale.

“How often do you not do this correctly?” Delina asks, if Maison isn’t going to.

“Well, I’ve never done this particular conversion,” Chloe replies, turning over the laptop and taking a screwdriver—that was just a mechanical pencil, Delina belatedly notices—to the underside of it. “But electronic conversions are mostly all the same and mostly deal in intent. I just need to figure out exactly how to do it.”

She pops the casing off, showcasing the innards of the laptop, and despite occasionally having to function as IT for a group of older coworkers who can’t fix printers, it’s over Delina’s head as well.

“Take your time,” Gurlien mutters, staring hard at the laptop as well. “Remember, the closer to use, the better.”

“Right,” Chloe says, and they both bend their heads over the laptop, and she converts a fork to another screwdriver with just a twist of her fingers.

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