It was still creepy to think back on that moment on the street corner when the device had mimicked her voice calling 911 … but had obviously not really called 911.

She had no idea why it had done that—Just to scare us?—but now mostly wanted to know how it knew about her father’s illegal activities and what they were. She thought about texting the others, asking if she could take a turn with it. But they’d say no and then she’d feel like an idiot. It wasn’t worth putting it out there.

She couldn’t sit here all day, though, and most likely the guys in the car wouldn’t either. So she circled back to the office block just as the car was pulling out onto the street and driving away. It probably had nothing to do with her or her father at all, but his company was in the news and also the device had made her paranoid.

She knew that the pass code for the keyless entry pad was her birthday. She punched in the numbers—just the month and day—and heard the lock click. She turned the bolt and entered.

The place didn’t look like much from the outside—a one-story brick building with high glass-block windows and a door—and it wasn’t that much more impressive inside. There were several desks with large monitors meant to plug into laptops, but only one laptop was actually there. Ilanka sat in front of it, opened it, and woke it up. The monitor displayed a large photo of Saint Petersburg—the canal and the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood, with its colorful onion-domed towers. Their last trip over had been only a few weeks ago but now felt like a dream.

Ilanka didn’t even know what she was looking for so she sat for a while, staring at folders in a finder window. Making matters worse, it was a PC and she was a Mac person to her core.

Finally, she figured out how to do a sort of global search. She sat there, watching the cursor blink for a good long while, her fingers perched on the keyboard, before getting up the courage to type the word: Aizel.

Eli

ELI

Aizel hadn’t answered. He hadn’t really expected her to. So after sitting there waiting for longer than was probably reasonable, he’d googled the address. It looked to be the office of a data company and it was local. A news hit showed the company was implicated in a data breach just yesterday.

Maybe he was actually getting somewhere?

Aizel had sent him … a clue?

Thinking back to those final moments with her, he did another search. This one for “Aizel” and the words “I know you are but what am I.”

The results were … confusing … then maybe not.