Page 104 of Amethyst Flame
The lobby was not even a tenth the size of Banta’s, just a generic front desk in pressboard, a scattering of overstuffed chairs that still managed to look uncomfortable, and one of those modern art prints probably mass-produced by a painting monkey. Not a research monkey, obviously.
Everything would’ve been corporate generic… Except for the two corpses.
The bodies, clad in the navy-blue polyester of rented security, were spreadeagled in mirror poses on opposite sides of the desk. Their guns and radios were still holstered. They’d never had a chance.
“Goddammit, Will,” I said.
Yes, I was a murderer too, but at least I’d let them shoot at me first.
Dane stepped over one outflung arm to stand behind the front desk, tinkering with something back there. “Phones are out. Internal cameras are out,” he said curtly. “Completely dead.”
I shuddered. “Can we not use that term?”
“What do you see?”
I knew he didn’t mean with my eyes. But it felt…dangerous to send up my butterflies, like lighting a flare in a zombie movie or donning a chum bikini in shark-infested waters. “The whole place is dusted with his bugs,” I told him. “But they don’t seem to be doing anything.” No offense, no defense, they didn’t even seem to be following any sort of map command.
Dane grunted. “Did he lose control of them? Run out of energy? Or is he just shedding them like dead skin cells?”
I wrinkled my nose at him. “Eww. I have no idea, but this can’t be a good thing.”
Dane had pocketed his sunglasses, so it was easy to see the concern in his eyes. The dark gray might as well have been a mirror for my own doubts on the matter.
“I’m rebooting the systems,” he said. “I don’t know if that will give Jacob access, but it might be something else for Will to deal with. Divide and conquer, as it were.”
While he fiddled, I accidentally glanced down at the body nearest to me. The security man’s swarthy skin was mottled like the Tesla’s finish, exposing patches of flesh and muscle and white bone.
All the snacks in my stomach churned. At least there was no blood.
Maybe I didn’t want to know why there was no blood.
Dane’s presence at my shoulder—looming but welcome—broke me from my shocked stupor. “We can still save him,” I said, but my inflection tilted at the end, making it sound like a question.
Dane followed my sightline down to the body. “I’m sorry, Imogen. But he looks very dead to me.”
“I mean Will.”
“This is already a much higher profile case than Alling and his hired muscle. We have multiple locations and numerous eyewitnesses with no easy pressure points to incentivize staying quiet.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure I can cover this up.”
Not like he had with my murders, he meant. I looked up at him, all the ways he’d covered for me suddenly coming clear in my head. Trust had seemed too risky, considering, but he’d always had my back, even when he was lying to me. “Dane…” I wasn’t sure what I was going to say next.
“Focus, Imogen,” he said gruffly. “Can you track Will?”
I was just being a chicken. Right. Well, it wasn’t like we were going to take this opportunity to run away.
I sent a tentative pulse of my butterflies winging outward. At the last moment, I directed them to the HVAC system. I closed my eyes. “This will take a second,” I told him. “My spies are fast but very small.”
Dane stood so unmoving I couldn’t even hear him breathe. How could he be so calm when my rushing pulse was like a memory of Banta’s lobby waterfall in my ears?
“There’s a big room—cafeteria maybe?—with high levels of CO2. Seems like a lot of bodies there.”
“At least they’re breathing,” Dane muttered.
My butterflies raced onward. “Finding a few other single-person heat signatures, maybe locked in smaller rooms by fire doors.”
“Sheltering in place,” Dane guessed.
I kept scanning deeper into the building. “Here. The lab, I’m guessing? Handful of people. And Will.”
