Sydney hung up, and found herself about to text June—before she remembered that she no longer had her own phone. Which meant that Sydney didn’t have June’s number anymore. And even if she did . . .

Syd shoved the burner phone back in her pocket. She heard the car door open, Mitch’s heavy steps in the grass as he approached.

“Hey, kid,” he said. His voice was so gentle, as if afraid of telling her the truth. But Syd already knew—Victor was gone. She stared at the distant skyline of Merit, shoved her hands in her coat, felt her sister’s bones in one pocket, the gun in the other.

“It’s time to go,” she said, returning to the car.

Mitch turned on the engine, pulled back onto the highway. The road stretched ahead, flat and even and endless, almost like the surface of a frozen lake at night.

Sydney resisted the urge to look back again.

Victor might be gone, but there was still that thread, tangling their lives. It had led Sydney to him once before, and it would lead her there again.

No matter how long or far she had to look.

Sooner or later, she would find him.

If Sydney had anything, it was time.

III

AFTER

A Message from Victor Vale

EON

HOLTZ shivered, not at the sight of the corpse on the steel table, but from the cold.

The storage room was fucking freezing.

“Not so tough now,” muttered Briggs, her breath a cloud of fog.

And it was true.

Lying there, under the cold white light, Eliot Cardale looked . . .

young. All his age had been contained in those eyes, flat as a shark’s.

But now they were closed, and Cardale looked less like a serial-killing EO and more like Holtz’s kid brother.

Holtz had always wondered at the gap between body and corpse, the place where a person stopped being a he or a she or a they, and instead became an it. Eliot Cardale still looked like a person, despite the shockingly pale skin, the still-glistening bullet wounds—small, dark circles with serrated edges.

Nobody knew how Haverty had been able to render Eli human—or at least mortal. Just like they didn’t know who had shot the EO, or who had killed the ex-EON scientist—though everyone seemed to assume it was Victor Vale.

“Holtz,” snapped Briggs. “I’m freezing my ass off, and you’re making moony eyes at a corpse.”

“Sorry,” said Holtz, his breath pluming. “Just thinking.”

“Well, stop thinking,” she said, “and help me load this thing.”

Together, they maneuvered Cardale’s corpse into cold storage, which was basically just a permanent stretch of deep drawers in the basement of the EON complex, dedicated to indefinitely housing the remains of deceased EOs.

“One down,” she said, scribbling notes on her clipboard, “one to go.”

Holtz’s eyes flicked to the other body that waited, patiently, on its own steel plank.