How absurd is that?
I want to tuck the picture into my pocket, but I’d have to fold it to fit, and that seems wrong. Zian and Andreas join us a minute later, and I slide the clipping into Zian’s now mostly empty bag.
We’ve pawed through the rest of the box’s contents, and nothing else has jumped out. We all stand up, clustered in the records room.
“All right,” Jacob says. “We got everything these people can offer that might be useful. Andreas will wipe all memory of us from their minds, and I’ll untie one of them before we go so they can all get free. No point in killing them. They don’t seem to have had anything to do with the facility anyway.”
Zian cracks his knuckles. “And then what?”
Andreas is looking at the phone. “I guess we head out to Kansas? It’ll take a couple days, but if we leave right now—”
I blink at him. “You want us to head straight to this other spot from here?”
Jacob scowls at me. “Why not? Do you have a better idea?”
“I just…” Every inch of my body balks at the idea of charging off on a quest into some new unknown when we’ve only just survived this venture.
Do we really have to race straight into sticking our necks out all over again?
With each step we take, we’re getting closer to Ursula Engel’s connections to the facility. Closer to the enemy. Why can’t they see how dangerous that is?
I drag in a breath and speak before Jacob can sneer at me again. “We pushed ourselves pretty hard here. Wouldn’t it be smarter to go back to the townhouse and take a day or two to go over everything we’ve learned and rest up? We’re tracing what this woman did more than twenty years ago—it’s not like a couple of days is going to make a lot of difference to that.”
Andreas rubs his head. I suspect from the flattening of his lips that he’s fighting off a headache.
“She does have a point,” he says. “I’m not sure I can even drive right now.”
Jacob raises his eyebrows. “So you’re going to trustherjudgment?”
Andreas shrugs. “She did help us here a lot. She stepped up every time we could have expected her to, even when she didn’t need to.”
He smiles at me, and I smile back through a rush of warmth. Maybe a couple more days will be enough to convince them to see this situation completely my way.
Jacob scoffs. “We don’t know if the guardians might catch on and start covering their tracks—or Engel’s. Every minute could count.”
A spark of inspiration hits me. “But shouldn’t we scour the townhouse to make sure we’re not leaving anything that could be used against us? It’d be careless to leave it without making sure we’ve totally coveredourtracks. We didn’t expect to be abandoning it when we left this morning.”
Dominic’s mouth twists. “That’s a good point.”
Zian rubs his hand over his thick black hair, his forehead furrowing. “Should we come up with some kind of story too, to explain why we’re leaving all of a sudden? So that our neighbors don’t ask too many questions?”
Jacob glares at him as if annoyed that even the guy whose main focus is brawn is coming up with solid reasons to go along with my suggestion. But now it’s four against one, and while he’s pissed off at me, he isn’t so spiteful he’s going to screw his own mission over just to stick it to me.
“Fine,” he bites out. “We’ll go back foronenight and tie up loose ends. But we don’t want to waste any more time than that. We could be risking the entire mission.”
Andreas hesitates, and for a second I think he might change his mind. The others would probably follow.
He glances at me, and I let my smile slant wryly as if to say,There he goes, being a grumpy jerk again.
Drey’s expression relaxes. “Until tomorrow,” he says.
I can’t deny that there’s a flutter of hope in my chest that maybe Ursula Engel’s trackswillbe covered before we can follow them any further.
If there’s no trail to follow, then the guys will have to stop chasing her down this reckless path.
Sixteen
Riva