She glanced back at him through thick lashes, and winked, and Holtz climbed into his yellow speedster and drove away, still watching April, haloed in the rearview mirror. He kept waiting for her to disappear, but she didn’t. Life was strange and wonderful sometimes.

And tomorrow, he had a date.

* * *

JUNE watched the yellow car shrink into the distance.

Idiot, she thought, starting up the road, this time on foot.

By the time she reached the gates of EON, she looked for all intents and purposes like Benjamin Holtz, Observation and Containment, age twenty-seven. Loved his little brother and hated his stepdad and still had nightmares about the things he’d seen overseas.

“What’s this?” asked the security guard, rising from the booth.

“Stupid car broke down,” she muttered, doing her best to imitate Holtz’s northeastern accent.

“Ha!” said the security guard. “That’s what you get for choosing style over substance.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said June.

“What you need is a good midlevel sedan—”

“Just let me in so I can grab a van and some cables and get my shit back on the road.”

The gates parted, and June stepped through. Easy as pie. She crossed the lot on foot and whistled at the sight of the front doors. It looked like someone had driven a car into them. Inside, a soldier looked up from some kind of scanning station.

“Back so soon?” he asked, rising to his feet.

“Left my wallet somewhere.”

“Won’t get far without that.”

“You’re telling me.”

Small talk was an art form, one of those things that made people’s eyes gloss over. Go silent, and they might start wondering why. But keep them talking about nothing at all, and they wouldn’t even blink.

“You know the drill,” said the soldier.

June did not. This fell soundly in the realm of minutiae, something that rarely conveyed with a touch. Making a guess, she stepped into the scanner, and waited.

“Come on, Holtz,” said the soldier. “Don’t be a pain in my ass.

Arms up.”

She rolled her eyes, but spread her arms. It was like standing inside a copier, a beam of white light that moved from head to toe, followed by a short chime.

“All clear,” said the soldier.

June saluted him, a casual flick of her fingers as she started down the hall. She needed to find a computer. It should have been easy, a building as fancy as this one, but every hallway looked alike. Identical, even.

And every identical hallway was studded with even more identical doors, almost none of them marked, and the farther into the maze June went, the farther she’d have to walk out. So she settled instead for simplicity, pointing herself toward the nearest door. Halfway there, it swung open. A female soldier stepped out, took one look at Holtz, and rolled her eyes.

“Forget something?”