I turn so quickly that Calloway has to dive out of his chair. “Get an emergency geofence warrant on that cell tower NOW!”
“Go!” Calloway demands, righting himself. “I’ll send the address. Head north until County Road 84 if you don’t hear from me before then.”
“I’d better hear from you before then,” I snarl.
Captain starts issuing instructions to my colleagues, and as a team, they move out behind us, but Silas and I are already ten steps ahead.
“Lock it down, Sutton.”
I try as hard as I can, but I can’t seem to regain control. The scuffle and the words replay in my head on a loop.
“Did you hear those screams?” I ask as we jump into Silas’s SUV and tear out of the lot with lights and sirens blaring.
“Those weren’t from Alice.” He says my thoughts out loud.
It’s you or her.
I don’t much like children.
I jam my index finger and thumb into my eyes. “She thinks they have Nellie. They’re using my daughter to manipulate her, and Alice doesn’t know that she’s safe at home.”
Do whatever you want to me.
Jesus Christ. That burn in my gut grows hotter. She just sacrificed herself.
My phone buzzes from my pocket. I yank it out, half of me expecting Alice to call, the other half dreading who might be on the other side.
Another alert. “Her app is transmitting again.”
I click to open the app. Every second it takes to load feels like a heavy weight growing on my chest.
A gray bar sits at the top of the screen, something I’ve seen a few times before. Two words that nearly send me into total collapse.
Signal Loss.
“What is it?” Silas takes his eyes off the highway, the weight of his stare holding me together.
I show him the screen.
His brows knit. “She’s out of range again. Why does your face look like that?”
“This is different.” My voice is a jagged rasp. “If she doesn’t have service, the app doesn’t do anything. It just waits. This is what it does when she takes the sensor off to change it.” I lock eyes with my brother, refusing to say the other thing. The worst thing. The unimaginable thing.
That if she lost her sensor, her pod might be gone too and she might not be able to receive insulin.
Or maybe the signal is lost because she’s dead.
“This isn’t Jolene,” Silas says, his voice hard with conviction.
But he can’t possibly know that I’m not about to walk into the same fucking situation. “Sure as fuck feels like it. The difference is, I didn’t love Jolene. I love Alice.”
Which means that losing her will destroy me.
“You aren’t going to lose her,” Silas responds as if he can read my thoughts.
“Drive faster,” I quietly demand.
The RPMs on the SUV’s dash creep higher.
