June checked in to that same hotel the next day, and waited. Waited for proof that Victor was the EO killer, that he was the person Stell was looking for, the one Marcella promised to find.

She had been waiting for three days.

Victor came and went, a constant, restless force, carving slow circles through the small city, and June would follow at a distance, snapping

photos with her phone. But so far, he’d yet to make a move. June was getting restless.

Still, it hadn’t all been a waste of time. She’d gotten to see Syd—

hadn’t let the girl see her, of course, there would be time for that later—

but once, she’d trailed Mitch and Sydney to a movie, sat right behind them, and let herself pretend they were there together, like a family.

It had been nice.

But mostly, June waited.

She hated waiting.

Right now, she was pacing on the curb outside the hotel, dressed as an old man, a cigarette hanging from her fingers.

She looked up, now and then, waiting for the balcony door five floors up and two over to slide open, waiting for Syd to emerge into the afternoon sun.

A few minutes later, she did.

That familiar blond bob caught the light as she stepped out onto the patio. June smiled—despite Sydney’s complaints, she was growing up.

The changes were subtle, sure, but June knew people well enough to read those subtleties, even if they had less to do with height and weight and more to do with posture, poise.

Syd had explained the problem of her aging, sometime around her sixteenth birthday. It was the cold—or, at least, that was Victor’s theory

—that the hypothermia she’d suffered had slowed everything about her.

Syd had complained that, at the rate things seemed to be going, her teens would take forever. But then June had pointed out that so would her twenties, and in her own experience, those were the best years, anyway. Syd had gotten quiet then, silence stretching across cities.

“And by the time I’m thirty,” she’d said, “everyone I know will be dead. Except for Eli.”

Eli. The way Sydney said that name, as if she was afraid that speaking it too loud would somehow summon him.

“What about you?” she’d asked June with sudden curiosity. “Do you age?”

June had hesitated. She’d glimpsed the shape that hung in the back of her wardrobe, the one she never took out. It hung so perfectly still, beneath its film of disuse, but there was no denying.

“I do.”

Now, June watched as Sydney sank into a patio chair, head bowed over her phone even as she put her feet up on that giant black dog, who didn’t seem to mind at all.

A few seconds later, June’s cell gave a soft ping.

Syd: Are you still in Merit?