Page 32 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

She flicks the paper again, then tugs the compass out of her pocket. Still in the same relative location, only changed a few kilometers since she got the new location lock, and the compass still points true.

It’s still barely dawn, the rural airstrip all but empty, so Chloe turns her head to glance at the dirt parking lot.

Chloe hot wiresa broken car with only a twinge of guilt, coaxing the engine to turn over and chugging to life.

The car air conditioning blasts her in the face, watering her eyes, and she immediately twists the dial down. With the amount of dust accumulated on the windshield, it had probably been here since early summer, but…

The air refuses to decrease, only giving her a tinny whine at the movement.

She pokes at the radio. Usually, radios are simple to fix, to snap into place, but this one has an unusually large amount of rainwater sloshing around in it.

“Great,” Chloe whispers, then glances at the piece of paper.

She can barely read the numbers, they’re so faint.

“Fuck you,” Chloe whispers, her blood fizzing, then throws the car into drive and dials her new phone from memory.

Instead of Gurlien, however, Delina picks up. “Chloe, you okay?”

Chloe sighs, attempting to use windshield cleaner to wipe away some of the dust but only creating mud. “I was hoping to get Gurlien?”

“He’s with the Half Demon, I think they’re arguing,” Ambra’s voice filters through, which great, she’s on speakerphone. “I’m letting it happen.”

Chloe has no doubt that’s how she views it. “Well, I’m in central Arizona right now,” she starts, and Delina makes a wordless noise of delight. “And my coordinates are pointing me to a place called Jerome, ever heard of it?”

“Tourist trap,” Delina says, though her voice is full of barely disguised delight. “Good BBQ places, though.”

Right, she’s from the area, and Chloe squints at the rural airport sign. “What about bases?”

“An old one,” Ambra replies, thoughtful, which means she’s never stayed there. “They spoke of abandoning it, how it’s outlasted its usefulness, don’t know why”

“There was a base that close?” Delina asks, and Chloe just shuts her eyes.

Of course she would get the two people the least likely to have answers.

“So Maison would probably know?” Chloe asks, finally pulling off of a gravel road and onto an actual paved highway, heading south. “If you were there and all…”

“Good bet,” Delina says, “listen, if you’re there for a while, go to Bobby D’s BBQ.”

Chloe sighs again.

“I know it’s a vault,” Ambra says, almost indignant that Chloe would go to Maison instead of her. “I know they co-opted an old structure in the mountains.”

“So it's a mine,” Delina interrupts her, “the whole mountain over there, full of silver mines.”

Chloe lets them ramble on, attempting to point the air conditioning somewhere else for the drive, and her heart pounds all the same.

She getsto Jerome as the loosely described city starts to wake up, exhaustion eating at her eyes. Ambra and Delina made her promise to not dive into something until after they get info fromMaison, who is apparently out of cell contact with Gurlien for possibly all day, and

so she pulls into the parking lot of a cheesy motel.

As she cruises into town, the numbers fade, fully unreadable. Sure, she has a general direction of where it is, but without the exact information…

She opens the car door in the parking lot of a cheap motel, rubbing her face.

Her eyelids hurt.

“This is what I mean,” from behind her, the Wight speaks up, thoroughly startling Chloe. “You overwhelm yourself and it’ll stop working.”

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