Page 43 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

Her eyes open and find me immediately. No disorientation. She clocks my jacket, the field kit, the earpiece.

The exhaustion on her face hardens into something considerably less soft.

“You’re leaving.” Not a question.

“I’ll be back in two hours.”

She pushes up onto one elbow, and the sheet slips. I’m acutely aware of how much I don’t want to be walking out the door. I’ll do it anyway. This is why I have operational discipline.

“Julian.” My name in her voice is always doing something, even when she intends it as a warning. “You’re not going to the Venetian without me.”

“I am.”

“That’s a terrible idea.”

“It’s the correct idea.” I set the kit down and turn so she can see my face properly. “The Consortium has a full physical profile on you. Every camera angle they can pull from three continents. You walk into the Venetian right now and you light yourself up on a surveillance network that actively hunted you for eighteen months.” I hold her gaze. “I’m a ghost. They don’t have a file on me. I go in, I go out, I’m on a cab back to this house in ninety minutes.”

The muscle in her jaw tightens. She knows I’m right. She hates that I’m right.

“And when you get to the lost-and-found desk.” She’s very careful to keep her voice steady. “What exactly are you planning to do? Ask nicely?”

“I’m going to give them the claim ticket.”

“You don’t have the claim ticket.”

The silence between us has an excellent quality to it.

I wait.

She pulls the sheet tighter across her chest, which I note is a defensive gesture rather than a temperature response because it is not cold. Her eyes track across my face with the calculating precision of someone running threat assessment and finding the result unsatisfactory.

“Fine. The claim ticket is in my left shoe.” Each word costs her something individual. “The backup pair. In the go-bag. Inside the insole.”

I cross the room. She doesn’t move. I duck down, pull the backup boot from the side pocket of the go-bag, peel back the insole, and find a small claim ticket folded three times over. Venetian Macao logo. A six-digit claim number in her handwriting. The ink is faded at the crease from eighteen months of being walked on.

I fold it back exactly as I found it, and I put it in my breast pocket.

She watches me with an expression I don’t have a precise classification for. It sits somewhere between furious and stripped bare, which in Ivy’s lexicon is actually quite close to the same thing.

“I’m going to bring it back.”

“I know.”

“Ninety minutes.” I reach down and tip her chin up with two fingers, and her exhale comes out uneven, which gratifies me considerably. “Stay on the comms. And try to get some sleep.”

“I’m not sleeping.”

“Then don’t.”

She catches my wrist before I can pull back. Her grip is firm. Her eyes are very direct.

“Julian.” She doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t need to. Be careful is implicit in the pressure of her fingers and the way her jaw goes tight again.

“Two hours. Start the coffee.”

She releases my wrist. I pick up the kit and walk out the door before I reconsider the mission timeline.

The cab smells like cigarettes and something floral underneath it. The Cotai Strip materializes through the windshield in the predawn gray, forty floors of hotel casinorising straight out of reclaimed land with the particular confidence of money that has never considered the word restraint.