Lib Novel Page 62
Lifting my head from the tablet, I stare at the back of Percy’s head.
“What?” Byron asks, leaning over, and it clicks—why the vampires wanted me. Why they were coming after me so adamantly?
“The baby,” I murmur, “Veronica’s showing, now.”
“Yeah,” Percy says, twisting in his seat to look at me. “She is.”
“But not before,” I say, eyes watering as I look down at the tablet again, the numbers and letters blurring. “Not when the three of us were going on missions together—Bernice said we look the same. She said she would have thought we were sisters. With the brown wig, I looked like Veronica.” A feeling of horror rolls over me as I look up at Percy, meeting his eyes. “I even borrowed her perfume in Minneapolis.”
He stares back at me, processing this information.
“They know she’s pregnant,” he says, finally, “and they thought you were her, which is why they were going after you. Then she started showing.”
“And now it’s obvious that she’s the pregnant one,” I say, talking through the knot in my throat, “not me.”
I can feel Byron looking at me, but I can’t bear the thought of returning it. Of course, I’m not the pregnant one. Even though Veronica is going through all this because of her pregnancy, I can’t help the jealousy that fills my mouth like battery acid.
“Where to, man?” Bigby asks, his hands flexing on the steering wheel. “We have to choose an exit.”
I look up through the windshield. One leads west, toward Leech Lake, the other east, toward Duluth and Lake Superior. Percy falters for a moment, panic crossing over his face.
“Shit,” he says, “I—I think west?”
“It’s the water,” Bigby murmurs, “like losing her scent, the mental connection gets weaker.”
Percy’s face goes white, but Bigby takes the exit toward Leech Lake, reaching over and patting him on the shoulder.
“Your intuition is probably right, buddy,” he says, then, into the backseat, “you guys got anything for us?”
I blink, realizing that I haven’t been looking at the code this entire time, while Byron has been hard at work, tapping on his keys. I nod, take a breath, and return to the code in front of me, heart racing.
Veronica is on water. But that could be Lake Superior, or Lake Leech. Hopefully, it’s Leech—if it’s Superior, it’s going to be a lot more challenging to find her.
“There’s a weakness,” Byron says, biting his lip, and then tapping on my screen. “Focus here. I know you can do it faster than me if you focus.”
He knows exactly how to motivate me. I zone in on my tablet, letting everything else fall away. Forgetting about Veronica, and how we look the same, about how she’s pregnant, about Percy’s worry, about how Bigby is driving this car like he’s trying to qualify for the Indy 500.
After a moment, there’s just me and the code. I work systematically, focusing on the area Byron indicated, breaking through wall after wall. I exploit the weaknesses, dig at the holes, unravel the webs of encryption.
And then the files are open in front of me.
“I did it!” I say, a little too loud, which makes the other people in the car jump. Byron grins over at me, and we quickly break through on his laptop using the information I have on my tablet.
“There’s so much information here,” Byron says. I’m scrolling through pages and pages of documents, so much stuff I don’t have time to begin to understand. I filter my search, tapping frantically. I find a bill of sale for a boat, identify the marina, and find information about a security system on the boat.
“I have the location,” I say, breathlessly, looking up and meeting Bigby’s eyes in the mirror. “I have the location!”
“Alright, great,” he says, his loud, rumbling laugh filling the car. “Care to share?”
“Oh, right,” I say, hands shaking as I lean forward and hand my tablet to Percy.
“Lake Leech,” he says, sounding like there’s something in his throat.
“Right,” Bigby says, “that intuition, man.”
“Guys,” Byron says beside me, and I realize he’s been looking through the information on the hard drive this entire time. “I think this is worse than we thought. I’m sending these files over to Aris—but if they’re in Chicago right now, they might be in trouble.”
“Send them to everyone,” I say, breathlessly, “not just Aris. Rosa is home, right? And Ado. Have them start on the files so they can inform Aris, Rafael, and Triste if they’re in trouble. That way, we can focus on this and they can get a head start on reading through this stuff.”