And that order was backed up. Backed up by a neutered version of Nexus running in her brain. A version of Nexus that couldn’t communicate with the outside world, but that could very well constrain her. Its nanites took hold of her now, kept her walking smoothly, guided her hands to unruffle her slacks, put a smile on her face, slowed her respiration, guided her through the lobby of her building, up the lift, and into the flat she shared with her wife and infant son.

“Alice, I’m home!” Lisa Brandt said brightly, the rage seething inside. “How’re my two favorite people?”

Carolyn Pryce looked over the report from Lisa Brandt’s interrogation.

The woman knew nothing about the PLF herself, nothing that she hadn’t learned from the memos.

And she wasn’t ERD_Secrets. She wasn’t the one who’d leaked the information about the ERD’s assassinations of the foreign scientists in ‘33–35. Holtzman hadn’t sent her those files.

That was puzzling.

Brandt had been wired into a network helping to smuggle Nexus-dosed children and their parents out of the country. A network that had used Holtzman to break Shankari and a group of children out of ERD custody during Zoe.

No names, though. And the woman had been smart enough to realize she’d be marked as soon as Holtzman died. She’d burned herself out of the network more than a month ago.

It was just as well. For all Homeland Security’s protestations, Shankari wasn’t someone she viewed as any sort of national security threat. And imprisoning children… that was damaging the nation’s security.

The real prizes were the rest of what had come from Holtzman. Not the ERD assassination records, but other data that was better, far more useful.

Pryce had the original video from Holtzman’s eyes as Brandt had received it, now. It was shaky, raw, distorted. It was either the real thing or a brilliant fake.

It was real, her gut told her. That was Barnes, coming into Holtzman’s office, admitting to being behind the PLF, all but admitting to being behind the assassination attempt on the President, the Chicago bombing, Warren Becker’s death. That was Barnes, forcing a pill onto Holtzman, a pill that resulted in a death from myocardial infarction that a coroner couldn’t differentiate from natural causes. A death that resembled Warren Becker’s death all too closely. Both deaths that every security and tracking system at ERD and on Barnes’s phone and car swore he could not have been present for.

I’ve been so blind, Pryce told herself. I chose to be.

The only question now was how high it went. Did Miles Jameson know, when he was President?

Did John Stockton know?

Did he order the assassination attempt on himself?

Christ, Pryce wondered. If Stockton had ordered Becker and Holtzman’s death…

Am I in danger?

Carolyn Pryce took a deep breath.