I fought the urge to move, to act, to do something. Zenzi had a population of more than two million. I wasn’t going to just bump into one of the kidnappers by wandering around aimlessly. Sorting through the data was the best option, but it felt like doing nothing.

Twenty minutes later, Kee bounced in her seat with a triumphant sound. “The script is done. Who wants to see what this transport was up to, hmm?”

Torran returned to the room, and we all crowded around Kee’s workstation—everyone except Lexi. “Lex?” I asked.

She waved her fingers without removing her focus from her workstation. “I’m busy. Don’t wait. I’ll get the highlights later.”

Kee nodded and pulled up a map that had a few points marked. “This is the transport owner’s house,” she said, pointing at the first. She moved to the rest of the marks, naming them as she went. “Parking garage, Torran’s house, and where the transport was abandoned.”

The first few minutes were all trips to and from the owner’s house, but the date in the corner jumped wildly between each trip. “This is the data from before the vehicle was stolen,” she explained.

As we watched the little animated transport on the map, it left the owner’s house and drove straight to the parking garage. “Is this the theft?”

“No, this is a month ago,” Torran said.

Sure enough, the transport returned to the owner’s house. It made a few more trips to unlabeled locations, then sat for a week. Finally, it moved to the garage and stayed there.

“I want a list of all of these locations,” Torran said.

Kee smiled at him. “I’m way ahead of you. I have a raw data list I can share, and my new script is working on auto-tagging all of the locations.”

“For someone who doesn’t use their transport often, that seemed like a lot of trips,” I said. “Did you check the owner’s connections?”

“We didn’t find anything,” Torran said, “but you’re right, the data is suspicious.”

The next time the transport moved, it followed the route the kidnappers had taken. After the final pickup, it moved toward the forest, but rather than stopping at the marked abandonment point, it kept going. Kee zoomed in, and the map location perfectly overlaid the monitoring station. The transport paused for a moment, then turned around and returned to the expected point.

“Why would it go to the monitoring station?” Eli asked. “What’s there?”

“There’s nothing there,” Torran said. “We checked it after the kidnapping, and Tavi and I checked it again yesterday.”

Lexi cleared her throat and pointed at her workstation. “Yes, but did you look under it?”

Chapter Twenty-Six