Page 100 of Reckless

I turn back to the workstation. The traffic trace has been running in the background all night, the way it has for weeks now, quietly gathering everything I have been too careful to rush.

I pull it forward and run the resolution one final time.

The pattern locks into place.

I sit for a second and make myself run it again, because I don’t trust a single pass on something this important, not even when the answer looks clean the first time.

The second run matches the first.

I run it a third time anyway.

Same result.

The outgoing signal resolves, and I stare at it for a second longer than I should.

Then I run it again.

Same fucking result! It traces back to Sage’s phone.

Not a spoofed relay.

Not a cloned device sitting somewhere nearby.

Her goddammed phone!

The one she slides into the pocket of her jacket after every message, lifting her head with that practiced little smile like nothing untoward has happened. The same recovery I’ve watched a dozen times over the last two months, every instinct I own, quietly filing it away while the rest of me searched for a reason to be wrong.

I always found one.

Until now.

My eyes stay on the screen.

The data doesn’t care what I want it to say. It only tells me what’s there, in black and fucking white.

I wasn’t reading it wrong.

I close the laptop.

The room stays quiet around me, and I sit there with my hands flat on the closed lid for longer than necessary.

I open it again.

I stare at the screen as if the data might have changed in the six seconds I let it sit there in the dark. It hasn’t.

Ten weeks. Someone has been sending encrypted messages to Sage’s phone for ten weeks. Sage has been receiving them and saying absolutely nothing.

Not to me.

Not, judging by tonight, to anyone at all.

I think about the parking lot footage. The hand going to her pocket. The delay before she answered me that lasted long enough to mean something.

I think about Piper’s hands moving across this same table an hour ago. ‘She never learned to let anyone stand beside her. Only in front of her.’

I sit with all of it for a long time, longer than I usually let myself sit with anything, because there is a version of me that wants to keep running the trace another time just to have a reason not to move yet.

Then, I pick up my keys and head for my bike.