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Unfortunately, the longer they thought about it, the less insane it seemed. Not the lasers and jet packs, but the idea of their enemy collecting oracles, especially young oracles who might be coopted. Such a thing had happened once or twice in the past, a traitorous oracle defecting and going over to the enemy. That problem had been solved by sending assassins. Oracles never had visions about themselves. They never saw it coming.
Oracles knew the score, but no one had defected this time.
“How’d they know these girls would be potential oracles?” Lila frowned, plopping back onto the couch with a mug of Sangre after their meal. “Breaking into pediatric medical records takes time.”
“Perhaps that’s why they stole children from smaller cities. They have less sophisticated security systems.” Tristan joined her with his own mug and picked up the girls’ files.
“Sioux Falls isn’t a necessarily a small city.”
“Yes, but they didn’t have to dig into Rebecca’s records, did they? She was outed as a future oracle during the investigation. It was all over the news. All they had to do was figure out where the girl was being held. That’s an easier problem to solve.”
“Apparently it is if you have tracers. They must not have been able to break into the FPS database. I suppose that’s some relief. It’s not easy, but it’s not that difficult, either. These mercs aren’t technical geniuses.”
“What did the oracle mean this morning when she said her vision was blurry?”
Lila shrugged. “She said it happens when someone hasn’t made decisions that impact the vision. Like if the mercs hadn’t decided how to take Rebecca yet.”
“Mercs from the empire are efficient. They have plans within plans and a thousand fallbacks if something goes wrong. They always know their play well before they act.”
Dixon whistled, still eating at the counter. Someone else involved hadn’t decided.
“That’s a good point,” Lila said. “If the oracle’s vision was blurry, perhaps their plan hinged on someone else, maybe someone deciding if the money was worth the betrayal.”
“Or someone trying to figure out if they’d rather give up a child, just so mercs would stop breaking their bones.” Tristan breathed out sharply. “This is a lot of work for one kid.”
“It was also an awful lot of work for Oskar.”
They don’t care much about getting caught.
“Yes, they do. It’s just that no one in the Allied Lands tests for tracers. We don’t even know what to look for. It was a fluke that my people noticed at all. The bullets make it look like an obvious setup. Natalie’s pissed off half the families in Saxony, not to mention her own. Her partners, too. There are plenty of people in New Bristol who might have done it and had the resources to implicate mercs. The only thing that’s hard for me to swallow is that Natalie would accept a drink from any of them. She was smarter than that.”
“You sound like you respected her.”
“I respected her as somewhat competent. That doesn’t mean that I wanted to be best friends.” Lila shut down her laptop. “I have to get home. I’ll be missed.”
“Stay. We’ll figure this out together.”
“I can’t,” she whispered in Tristan’s ear, her stomach churning, her cheeks burning. “Isabel will know someone was in my room last night, and she’ll know we weren’t just talking.”
Suddenly, Dixon became quite preoccupied with his fortune cookie.
“Isabel?” Tristan whispered back.
“The woman who cleans my room, since Alex hates me now. The woman who does my laundry, particularly the sheets.”
Dixon snatched up his food, then shuffled to the door.
Tristan hopped up. “Dixon, wait, I—”
Dixon waved him off and slipped out the door.
“He’s okay with us being…whatever we are,” Lila said after the door closed.
“Are you sure?”
“Talk to him, not me.” Lila shoved her laptop into her satchel. “Besides, I need to get home. I have a great deal of damage control on my plate for this evening.”
“From Isabel?”
