Page 120

There’s a thing happening in my chest and I don’t quite know what it is.

I know I’m standing in the desert dirt with a gun against my spine and a plan that got about as far as walk in, shoot a man, go to prison. I know I’m watching this person—this girl, this girl I have known for eight months and apparently not at all and maybe also my whole life—do everything, be everything, run me off the road and talk some sense into me and find a missing kid and make it all look so easy⁠—

“Tink,” I say.

She holds up a hand, eyes still on her phone. “Don’t.”

“I just⁠—”

“Pan, I swear to God, if you make some smartass crack right now, I will put you back in the gravel and leave you for⁠—”

“I love you.”

Now she looks up.

And I look at her right back.

Pretty girl. Brilliant girl. Even with her short hair all messed up and road dust on her skin and a look on her face like she wants to run me over with my own bike and set the whole thing on fire.

“I…” Her mouth has fallen open. I take a step toward her and gently push it closed with a finger.

“You whatever,” I say. “Just had to tell you. In case⁠—”

“No.” She smiles a little, she blushes, which honestly makes me want to jump for joy hard enough to launch myself into orbit. “No. I love you too. I just⁠—”

She turns the screen around.

It’s a map. There’s a blue dot on it. And the dot isn’t anywhere near the Strip.

Tink flips the phone back.

“Kingfisher Lane,” she reads, spreading pinched fingers to zoom wide. “That’s⁠—”

I’ve already got my helmet. “Marina.” I stoop down and toss hers over too. “Let’s ride.”

She calls Fox back from the freeway.

“Dropped a pin,” she says, on speaker and on mic, glancing from her phone mount to the road. “Can you see it?”

I let her take the front. Like there was any question of that. I sit on her tail down the 303 with the dark coming up behind us and the sodium lights starting to pop on overhead. I watch her ride, I follow, and I don’t even look at her ass that much.

“Yeah. Yeah,” I hear her say. Damn, I like the sound of her voice. Her real voice, I mean. “We’re en route. I—I don’t know. Bring whatever. Just share location and I’ll try to find you when we’re there.”

I zip past a pickup, eyes on her. Traffic’s let up, rush hour’s over, almost dusk now. We’re leaving the desert just in time for the light pollution to take over, but not before I see a couple stars in the sky.

Tink signals for the exit.

Kingfisher Lane is sprinklers.

They’re everywhere. Sprinklers going tick-tick-tick across golf-course-sized lawns. It’s sprinklers, and little solar lights staked along a walkway, and a guy hosing off a boat trailer in his massive driveway like that’s a good use of time or water.

And gates. High, metal, everywhere. One per house.

Tink decels, scanning street numbers and her phone, and then, suddenly, flings out an arm.

“Here.”

She rounds a corner, lights off, and I follow. We kill the engines short and wait, watching, under a jacaranda and out of range of the too-bright streetlight, one of those high-efficiency ones that’s painfully bright. Not thirty seconds later, I see it, see them, at the crest of the hill we’re facing: Blue first, coasting the last stretch with his motor off and his boots down, and Fox and Kit rolling in on either side of him the same way. We look dumb as hell, a bunch of grown men duck-walking their bikes past a hedge like kids out past curfew, but that’s beside the point.