Peach had been thinking about the past again. She’d been reminded two weeks ago how many people had been stripped out of her life. At age eight, she’d been orphaned when her parents died on a missionary trip in Colombia. At age twelve, she felt as if she’d been orphaned again when a soldier of the Liberty Empire Alliance gunned down her oldest brother Lyle, along with Birch Fairmont.

Now she was twenty-two, although people usually mistook her for a teenager. Now it had happened again. Another death. Another loss.

Peach felt numb.

She peered down the city streets. It was early evening, but it was June 29, a Friday, and it would still be light for hours. The streets weren’t busy. There wasn’t anything to bring out the after-work crowd in this sleepy section of the city. By habit, she checked the windows and balconies in the nearby apartment buildings to see if anyone was watching her. Deacon said she was paranoid, but she couldn’t stop. When she decided she was alone, she veered across the parking lot to the office door.

The location of CWF Research was a drab, mostly windowless building with a brown metal roof. Half the building was vacant. The rest of the space was taken up by a cubicle farm owned by the foundation. She let herself in through double-wide doors on the side of the building facing Florida Street, only a block from the 275 freeway. The number was 1100, but the last zero had slipped sideways, making it look like an eye examining the traffic.

Peach hated being in the office. The space was claustrophobic, with dirty white paint on the walls. She didn’t like being inside, sitting at a desk, making phone calls, clicking keys on a laptop. She liked the old ways of doing things. Paper. Film. At home, she didn’t even use a computer or a tablet.

Once anything about you is digitized, you don’t own it anymore. Soon you don’t even own yourself. Justin.

She wanted to be where the people were. There was safety in numbers. She was desperately shy and had no real friends, but she liked watching people, studying them, analyzing them, listening to them. That was what she did best. Humint, Deacon called it. Human intelligence. Peach was their oppo girl. She was the one they sent when they needed someone who could blend into a crowd and come back with evidence of what their enemies were saying.

Peach didn’t like thinking of other people as enemies, but that was what they were. They had proven that over and over again.