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“Should I call the police?” Adrian asked, his phone already in hand.
I shook my head at him miserably. “No. Not yet.”
Timidly they began sifting through the wreckage of my house, picking things up, trying to put them back where they figured they belonged. Adrian actually started sweeping, but I couldn’t have cared less. They could set a match to the place at this point, and I’d be fine with it.
“They took it all?” Preston asked gently. “The haptic prototypes, the suits, everything?”
I nodded, sniffed, then collapsed miserably onto the couch. The blanket draped over the back cushions was too far away, otherwise I’d have pulled it over myself like an invisibility cloak.
“Well then we’ll just have to get it back.”
His words snapped me from my pity-party, stirring me to abrupt and sudden action.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Adrian agreed. “Of course.”
“And how are we going to—”
“Do you have a ring camera?”
Despair settled over me again. I shook my head.
“Maybe your neighbors do,” Preston offered hopefully.
“No,” I sighed despondently. “The woman across the street is ninety-five years old. The only camera she owns still uses flash-powder.”
None of them dared to laugh. I couldn’t believe I was making jokes, anyway. I wanted to slap myself in the face.
“They took your computers, but not your monitors,” said Preston off-handedly. “That’s weird.”
“Why is that weird?”
“Because if you’re a thief, you’d want them both,” Jax finished for him. “You’d sell them as a pair. You can’t use one without the other.”
Adrian shrugged. “Makes sense, I guess. But they left your televisions too. Do you know how light these things are, nowadays? Stealing them would be easy. You could carry them out, one under one arm.”
I rubbed at my eyes. I still didn’t know what they were driving at.
“I saw money on your dresser too,” said Preston. “At least sixty or eighty bucks. Why they hell would they leave that?”
I sniffed. “Maybe they didn’t see it?”
“Or maybe they weren’t after it.”
Preston’s words were followed by a long, uncomfortable beat of silence. I perked up again.
“Who wouldn’t be after money, though?” Jax scoffed. “Especially money laying there in plain sight?”
“The same people who wanted her computers, but not her monitors,” said Preston. He dipped into my bedroom again, but came right back out. “The kind of people who ransacked her whole closet, but didn’t take any of her Coach bags.”
He held them up. Dangling from his fingers were two of the only designer bags I ever owned.
“They took her prototypes on purpose,” Adrian realized. “They wanted her machines. Her designs.”
“As well as her servers, her thumb drives, and all her test data,” Preston nodded.
His eyes shifted to mine, just as an icy feeling stole over my still-trembling body.
