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“Grace!” says Risa “What are you—”
But before she can finish, they all hear the double crash of both the back and front doors being kicked in. She pushes them into Cam and Connor’s room, closing the door behind her. Cam leaps to his feet fully awake, as Grace knew he would be. She takes control, knowing they don’t have much time. She knows this particular brand of salvation is only a fifty-fifty chance at best.
“Risa!” she whispers. “Get under the bed. Connor—facedown in your pillow. Now!” Then she turns to Cam. “And you—stay exactly where you are!”
Cam stares at her in disbelief “Are you nuts? They know we’re here!”
Pounding footsteps on the stairs. Only seconds now.
“No,” Grace tells him, just before she squeezes beneath the bed with Risa. “They know you’re here.”
64 • Cam
Two men in black armed with silenced tranq Magnums burst into the room. One aims his weapon at Cam, and Cam reflexively puts his hands up, furious to be caught so easily, but he knows that resisting will only get him tranq’d.
The second attacker doesn’t hesitate, however, in tranq’ing the kid on the bed. Connor flinches from the shot and goes limp.
“You’re a hard man to find, Mr. Comprix,” says the guard with the weapon aimed squarely at Cam’s chest. It almost makes him laugh.
“Me? Do you have any idea who you just tranq’d?”
“We don’t care about the SlotMongers you’ve been slumming with,” he says. “We’re here for you.”
Cam stares at him in amazement—and suddenly he realizes the awful and awesome power he’s been handed. The power to save and to destroy. He instantly knows now that even in capture he will be a hero no matter what he does. The question is what kind of hero does he want to be? And to whom?
65 • Roberta
She does not enter the house until she’s been given the all clear by the team leader. Inside, the men continue in high alert, even though their quarry has been caught. The shrill cries of a small child blare like a car alarm.
“We tranq’d the mother,” the team leader tells her, “but we’re worried about tranq’ing the kid. The dosage might kill it.”
“Good call,” says Roberta. “We lost neither our element of surprise, nor our humanity tonight.” Still, the crying child is a nuisance. “Close its door. I’m sure it will cry itself back to sleep.”
She follows the team leader upstairs, where two more of Proactive Citizenry’s takedown force have Cam pushed up against a wall in a dark bedroom and are in the process of handcuffing him behind his back. She reaches over and flicks on the light.
“Must these things always be done in the dark?”
Once the handcuffs are snapped shut, she approaches him slowly. “Turn him to face me.”
He’s turned toward her, and she looks him over. He says nothing. “You don’t look much worse for the wear,” she says.
He glares at her. “The fugitive life suits me.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“So how did you find me?”
She runs her fingers through his hair, knowing he hates when she does that but also knowing he can’t stop her while handcuffed. “You had already disappeared off the standard grid by the time I realized you were gone. I had thought you left the country, but you were far more clever than that. It never occurred to me that you’d take refuge on a ChanceFolk reservation—or that they’d even give you refuge. But People of Chance are an unpredictable lot, aren’t they? In the end your thumbprint—or should I say Wil Tashi’ne’s thumbprint—came up when the ID of someone named Bees-Neb Hebííte was scanned at an iMotel.”
He grimaces, probably remembering the exact time and place he touched that ID, thereby leaving the incriminating print.
Roberta clicks her tongue at him. “Really, Cam, an iMotel? You were made for Fairmonts and Ritz-Carltons.”
“Now what am I made for?”
“Undecided.” She looks at the unconscious young man lying on the bed. “Can I assume I have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Hebííte?”
A pause, and then Cam says, “Yep. That’s him.”
