No one was going to sneak up on Jenna unawares.
He gave one of the cameras a little wave and walked up to the door. He didn’t bother knocking. She knew he was there.
Sure enough, a few seconds later, a voice came out of a speaker over the doorbell. “Go away, Outlaw.”
He held up the files. He didn’t see a camera here at the door, but he had no doubt there was one. “Callum sent me. I have more intel on the robots. There’s been another case.”
“Why didn’t he just send them to me electronically?”
“He wanted to talk to me in person. He’s going undercover. Want to let me in, and we can discuss it not through a door, little librarian?”
There was silence for a moment. “Why did you just call me that?”
“Look, you may not be an explorer or an adventurer or a treasure-seeker, but you’re proud of what you are.”
“And what is that?”
He grinned. Good. She gotThe Mummyreference. He thought that was what she’d been semi-quoting the other day at the Eagle’s Nest, but he hadn’t been sure.
“You…area librarian,” he said.
“Technically, you’re supposed to pass out drunk as you say that, if you’re going to be completely accurate to the film.”
He could hear the smile in her voice. He chuckled. “Let me in, librarian.”
She opened the door, her body as far away from the outside as it could be while her hand still held the knob. That confirmed his suspicions about her disliking the outdoors.
He walked in quickly, and she shut the door behind him, leaning heavily against it. Her hair was up in a ponytail with tendrils falling around her flushed face. She’d been in the middle of some sort of exercise.
When he’d first met Jenna—on a computer screen for a Zodiac mission—she’d had black hair. Later, she’d dyed it blond. Neither of those had ever seemed quite right. Now, her hair had grown out and was a light, sun-kissed brown. This was probably her natural color.
Most of the times he’d seen her over the computer screen, she’d been wearing glasses, but not now. Now, those big brown eyes—honey-colored—were staring up at him.
“There’s another robot?” she asked.
“Yeah. I don’t know that I like that we’re calling them that. These are human beings.”
She shook her head. “I don’t call them that to strip them of their humanity. They’re being forced to do as they are programmed. The robot is a part of them that they can’t control. They can’t be held responsible for their choices. We have to find a way to separate the robot from the person.”
Fair enough. “This one didn’t survive either. He didn’t kill himself upon capture, but his system started shutting down, and he died a few hours later.”
Those brown eyes narrowed, and she pushed away from the door. Mark followed her as she walked farther into the house.
“That means they’re leaving tails in the robots.”
“Tails?”
She led him into the kitchen then grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. She handed him one too. “It’s part of the regimen I helped create. Leaving a tail in chemical subjectification means that without the given chemicals, the person’s body will start attacking itself. Did this newest robot have a heart attack?”
He nodded. “Yes, cardiac arrest is how he finally died. The other info is in these files.”
She slumped back against the refrigerator. “This is my fault.”
“You know it’s not. No matter what you may have initially created while you were held captive, this is not your fault.”
She shook her head. Mark was going to argue further, but she pulled out the files and set them on the kitchen island and began looking through them.
“Jenna, there’s more.”