“Sorry, boy,” he murmured, wishing he could do more for Dol. But only Sydney could have helped him now, and Mitch had no idea where she was. He stood there, amid the carnage, torn between the need to wait for her and the need to go find Victor, and for a second the two forces seemed to pull him physically, painfully apart.

But Mitch couldn’t do both, and he knew it, so he asked himself, what would Victor do? What would Syd? And when the answers were the same, he knew.

Mitch had to leave.

The question was where to go.

The soldiers had taken his laptop, and he had crushed his primary cell, but Mitch crouched—which turned out to hurt just as much as standing up—and felt under the lip of the sofa, dislodging the small black box and the burner smartphone that it was feeding into.

His butler.

In the old black-and-white movies he’d always loved, a good butler was neither seen nor heard, not until they were needed. And yet they were always there, tucked innocently into the background, and always seemed to know the comings and goings of the house.

The concept behind Mitch’s device was the same.

He booted the phone and watched as the data from the soldiers’

electronic tracking streamed in. Calls. Texts. Locations.

Three phones. And they were all in one place.

Got you.

All his life, people had underestimated Mitch. They took one look at his size, his bulk, his tattooed arms and shaved head, and made a snap judgment: slow, stupid, useless.

EON had underestimated him too.

Mitch looked around, found the playing card Sydney had left behind.

He scribbled a quick instruction on the back, and rested the playing card on the dog’s motionless side.

“Sorry, boy,” he said again.

And then Mitch grabbed his coat, and his keys, and went to save Victor.

XIII

THE LAST AFTERNOON

XIV

EON

VICTOR opened his eyes, and saw only himself staring back.

His lean limbs, sallow skin, black clothes, reflected in the polished ceiling. He was lying on a narrow cot against the wall of a square space, quickly discernible as some type of cell.

Panic slid like a needle beneath Victor’s skin. Four years he’d spent in a place like this—no, not quite like this, not as clever, not as advanced

—but just as empty. He had been buried alive in that solitary confinement cell, and every day Victor had sworn that once he got out he would never let himself be trapped again.