Page 33 of Of Angels & Absolution

I sit down to watch him work, though I know there’s no way I’ll remember enough to replicate the steps he takes when I’m back on my own computer. That’s probably why he lets people watch. He pulls up a fucking hologram a minute later, probably just to show off. My phone’s video feed hovers in the air over his fingers. It moves backwards, a timer counting the rewinding numbers in the bottom corner, until Mercy comes into view, moving backwards in jerky, speedy steps. She goes backwards through the door, and then the campus is still again.

Nate acts without instruction, and a minute later, she’s in her room, getting dressed.

“Don’t watch that,” I snap as her clothes disappear—skirt, then jeans, until she’s in her underwear.

Nate shakes his head, but he doesn’t stop the feed. “That’s the least interesting part of my job.”

And then Mercy’s back in bed, and the screen hovering in the air disappears. “So, she got up at midnight, put on double clothes, and left campus,” I say. “How does that help?”

“I can only trace actions, not motivations,” he says, switching over to another screen. He leans in, examining a still from the video, the place where Mercy left campus. He pulls up an aerial map and studies it, then types for a minute. A dozen dots appear on it.

“I’ll look at these cameras, but it’ll take a while to hack into each one,” he says. “Get comfortable. But not too comfortable. Don’t touch anything.” Without looking away from his screens, he gestures to a fancy leather office chair in front of another computer.

I sit and watch, and we get lucky on the third try. The convenience store security footage is grainy and silent, but there’s Mercy, buying a hat.

“What the fuck?” I mutter, leaning forward and watching her. She leaves, and Nate freezes the feed, takes a screenshot of the license plate of the car she climbs into that’s barely visible through the window. He works on clarifying that for a few minutes, then traces it and somehow finds that it’s a registered rideshare.

“Can I ask you a question?” I say, sitting there in awe while he hacks into the rideshare app. “Why are you at a shitty college in Arkansas? Shouldn’t you be running cyber security for Black Rock or… I don’t know, the government?”

“It’s just undergrad,” he says. “I’ll go to an Ivy League for grad school, but I learn more on my own anyway. I doubt any school can teach me anything I don’t already know, so what does it matter where I go?”

“Connections? Impressing potential employers?” I wince at how much I sound like my dad when he starts in on his lectures. Nothing he could say would make me leave Heath and Angel, no matter how much he threatened to cut me off and disown me like he did Mercy. Eventually, he gave up trying to make me follow in his footsteps, though he can’t figure out why that’s the last thing on earth I want to do.

But Nate doesn’t have loyalty to anyone, so it’s a mystery why he’d insist on staying in Faulkner.

He chuckles. “I’ve already got connections.”

“Not the same ones you’d make there, though.”

“Not going to scold me about how humility is a virtue again?”

“I didn’t scold you,” I grumble.

“Her rideshare dropped her off here,” Nate says, zooming into his map again.

I stare at the Fred’s store that’s been closed and boarded up for years. “What’s she doing there?” I demand.

Nate shrugs. “Store’s closed. No cameras.”

“I know that,” I grumble, yanking the tie from my hair in frustration. “Fuck!”

Nate watches me from behind his glasses, his eyes serene but wary. “I can check a couple intersections, but there aren’t a lot of cameras in that area,” he says. “Mostly industrial buildings.”

I tell him to go ahead, and I sit and stare at the map he left up while he works at another screen. I remember that Fred’s store. The Quint used to go in and buy sodas and candy. The last time we went in, we were walking around for a while, until an employee accosted us.

“You need to buy something or leave.”

Heath argued they were kicking us out unfairly, that there was no law that you had to buy something when you shopped. The guy said there was a law you couldn’t shoplift. Mercy got all offended and said they were profiling us, even though Angel was the only one who wasn’t white. We left, though, and we weren’t even out of sight of the shop when Heath pulled a half dozen bags of chips and candy out of his hoodie, and Eternity pulled bottles of nail polish and makeup from her pockets.

We laughed and high-fived, because we’d gotten one over on the guy, but Mercy wanted to go back and return it. She pouted for an hour and refused to speak to us.

“Stealing is wrong,” she said, and even though she was right, I was embarrassed of her, not my friends who had stolen. That has to say something about my morals and hers, about some people being born good and others not.

But what is a good girl with strong morals doing at an abandoned store? There’s nothing to do there but break in, and Mercy wouldn’t do that.

“If you can’t find her, how can I find out where she went?” I demand of Nate when the traffic cams come up empty.

“If you can get me her phone, I can install something for you to track,” he says. “But she’d have to take it with her, and if you check that video you have of her room, she left it on the charger.”

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