police department hadn’t waned. It crawled across my skin like thousands of tiny pinpricks.
“What is this place?” I could have searched the datacloud but didn’t want to touch it here, as though the cloud itself might flood the insidious sensation through me.
“Nowhere. Sidelined developments from a property boom that never lived up to the dream,” Caleb replied, opening the door to a rundown hotel lobby. So rundown, in fact, that nobody manned the front desk. He leaned over, snatched himself a keycard, left his thumbprint on a dust-covered guestbook, and sauntered toward the elevator.
I eyed the abandoned foyer and the descending elevator numbers with concern. “Considering the state of disrepair, I’d recommend the stairs.”
Caleb huffed a dry laugh and headed for the stairs. “You look shocked, synth.” His voice ricocheted up the stairwell. “And there I was thinking you were the type of girl who’d rough it anywhere.”
Girl, not machine. He didn’t seem to notice his slip, but I held on to it and replayed the sound with every step. These occasional slips mattered. I collected and cherished them, and then, when alone, I examined them all over again. James—Doctor Lloyd—seemed to believe it was good to fixate on human responses, but I wasn’t convinced. I didn’t know why I did the things I did, and slowly, piece by piece, step by step like the stairs we were climbing, I wondered if I might be breaking apart.
Shepperd entered the room matching his keycard number. The lights automatically brightened, revealing a made-up hotel room complete with stained carpeting and sheets faded to gray. I wrinkled my nose. Fingerprints from several previous occupants dotted the layers of dust. Shepperd rolled up his sleeves, grabbed the chair from beneath a desk, and dumped it by the window. He moved about the room with familiarity. He’d been here before. A smuggler’s safe house? I closed the door and watched him sink into the chair with a wince.
“You just going to fucking stand there and read me? Tell me I’m a wreck, that I’m hurting?” He looked over his shoulder. “I can see it in your eyes, synth. You have a million things you want to say but won’t, not until you think I can handle it.” He faced away from me to look out the window at Lyra’s sparkling strips. “You don’t need to be here. Go back to Bren if you want.”
“The synthetic will try again.”
“He’ll have to find me first, and this place is off the map, so long as we don’t use comms. Comms can be backward traced.”
He kept his back to me, the chair angled away. I couldn’t read him and he knew it. What did he have to hide? I already knew he was barely functioning.
“The synthetic wanted you, One Thousand And One,” Shepperd said, his words soft in the quiet.
“You didn’t tell him where I was.” I crossed the floor to the window and stood beside him but kept my gaze ahead.
“He was going to kill me whether I told him or not.” Quieter still … almost a whisper this time. His heart slowed as the weight of events pushed down on him.
Haley. Adelina Candelario. Francisca Olga. And now Jesse. I didn’t need a myriad of processes to understand the anguish he was experiencing. “Grief is perfectly normal in such circumstances.”
He waited a beat and then chuckled dryly. “You’re so fucking cold, you know that? I don’t need you to diagnose me. Stop trying to figure me out. Stop all the fucking poking and prodding through every word I say, every goddamn expression. I don’t need a damn psychiatrist.”
“What do you need, Caleb?”
“How about a friend?”
I turned my head and looked down at him. Slouched in the chair, with Lyra’s lights blanketing him, he didn’t seem as vulnerable as he should have. He exuded a resolute stubbornness where others would be floundering, as though the more he got knocked down, the more he’d get back up and be stronger for it. He looked back at me, his eyes