“Maybe plans changed at the last minute,” Andreas says. “But you can lay into him when we get to the meetup if you want. Just don’t wreck his doll.” He pauses and then speaks again in an eager tone so familiar in my memory that it brings a fresh burn of tears to my eyes. “Did I ever tell you guys about the man I saw on the subway who used to work at a toy shop?”
“Probably,” Jacob mutters, but he can’t totally disguise the note of curiosity in his voice.
The guardians never let us hold on to much in the way of physical possessions, but Andreas built up a collection of a different type. Every time he’d go off on a mission, he’d delve into the memories of any person he saw who caught his interest and come back with the most interesting stories he was able to dig up.
He falls into that yarn-spinning cadence now as he turns the SUV off the track onto a proper road. “It seemed like he hadn’t ever really wanted to run a store—especially one full of toys. He’d inherited it from an uncle, and when he first found out, he was outright pissed off. But then…”
As Andreas unravels his tale, I curl up against my window and let my eyes drift closed. It feels almost like old times, if I let myself focus on nothing but his voice.
By the time he’s switched on the radio instead, I’m drifting off to sleep, exhausted enough that even my damp clothes can’t keep me awake. It’s a long drive back to the city. When I wake up with the cutting of the engine, the fabric is pretty much dry.
The hacker is waiting in the back room of a foreclosed arcade. When the three of us come in, his head jerks up with an eager flash of his pale eyes.
Zian and Dominic, who’ve been waiting with him and sort of standing guard, straighten up with pinched expressions like they’ve had a little too much caffeine to stay awake this long.
“You—” Jacob starts to vent, but I don’t have the patience to listen to him harangue the guy. The expedition is finished now. We all survived.
I wave him quiet. “Let’s just get this over with.”
I unzip the backpack, meeting the hacker’s gaze. “We got what you wanted.”
When I pull out the action figure, still encased in its translucent watertight bags, the guy’s face lights up as if I’ve brought him the elixir of life. He reaches for it automatically, but Andreas steps in.
“You know we got it. Now you need to dig up the information we need. Then we pay.”
“Yes, of course.” The hacker grins at me. “You have no idea how much this means to me. They only ever made a hundred with that specific detailing, and most of those have ended up in the trash over the years. That one—my dad helped me buy it, just a couple of months before cancer finally got him.”
Oh. Maybe it’s a little more than just a silly toy after all.
I offer an awkward smile and tuck the box under my arm. “We’ll take good care of it until it’s time to hand it over.”
He chuckles, and his smile turns slyer. “I bet you will, if you had the skills to get it in the first place. I’d have liked to see you in action.”
I don’t know how to respond to that. His tone sounds oddly flirty, not that I’d be a good judge of that.
He can’t really think I’ve come back from his death-defying mission looking for a hookup, right?
“There wasn’t much to see,” I reply. “It was very dark.”
“Hmm.” The hacker sidles close enough that he can trace his fingers over my forearm—the unwounded one. “But so many fun things can happen in the dark, especially with a girl as—”
“Get away from her,” Zian snarls, shoving between us so abruptly that I stumble backward. Before I can even catch my balance, another hand grabs me by the elbow and yanks me farther away from the overly optimistic hacker.
I glance around and find Jacob gripping me, his eyes searing cold as he glares at the other guy with just as much hostility as Zian is giving off. “She isn’t on the menu.”
“Whoa, whoa,” the hacker says, holding up his hands and backing up a few paces. “No offense meant. Just like to take my shots when they present themselves. I didn’t realize you were together like that.”
“She’s with us,” Zian says with a growl, and even though I know he doesn’t mean like that, that he might mean simply as a prisoner, something low in my belly wobbles giddily at the sight of his protective stance.
“Sure, no problem. Here, initial gesture of good-will—I have the fake IDs you wanted too.”
He hands Andreas the counterfeit driver’s licenses with our photos and birthdates that make us all drinking age—which we might actually be, not that we plan on drowning ourselves in alcohol. We never celebrated birthdays in the facility, and the best we can figure is we’re around twenty or twenty-one.
The hacker takes another step back and gives us a flippant salute. “I’ll get on with your search… and maybe with fielding a phone call from one very pissed off trust-fund kid too.”
A smile touches his face as he says those words, but it tightens almost as soon as it’s formed. A shadow passes over his expression. He tramps out the door without another word.
I watch him go, a strange pang echoing through me. His happiness about getting his toy back didn’t last very long, even if the figure had a special meaning to him.