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She’d have her answer soon.
Tucking the vial in her pocket, she ordered pizza from a shop nearby, reading off the order exactly as Dixon had written it. On another day, ham and pineapple pizza might have been a culinary adventure. Instead, she barely tasted it while her eyes bounced between her palm and laptop.
Luckily, Dixon dozed on the couch, too tired to stay awake after a poor night’s sleep, an early morning, a long training session, and a full belly.
His gentle snores might have lulled her into a nap on any other day. Instead, she wiped her hands, tossed her palm on the coffee table, and took up her laptop, scrolling through the bios of those who had access to the oracle’s compound but were not on a Squab’s Sojourn. After reading through each entry, she took a quick break and peeked at the results of another search. A sea of workborn apartments stared back at her, nothing but anonymous off-white walls and grimy carpets, the price on even the smallest dwelling a shock.
She could swing it if she signed a contract with the oracle, helping Connell update the compound’s security systems. She could make similar deals with other oracles, too. With Italian mercs and moles on the loose, the oracles needed an experienced hand to guide them, or so they claimed.
Such an arrangement wouldn’t require her to become a purplecoat or live on an oracle’s compound, either. She could live on her own terms for a while, making her own decisions. Perhaps her mother would come to her senses, overturning her exile, recognizing she’d been wrong in how she’d treated Senator Dubois. Maybe the chairwoman would even do something to make his situation right, even if she didn’t send Jewel to the auction house.
Maybe Jewel would do something to set it right, too.
That was all Lila really wanted. Regret, responsibility, and compensation. Some small measure to make things right, some evidence that the chairwoman had changed, that Jewel had changed. If they could do that, maybe she could call herself a Randolph with pride again. Maybe she could return home without wanting to vomit. But until that happened, she refused to jump from one matron to another, regardless of how well the oracle had treated her.
Lila brought up the bios once more, scrolling to the next name in her list. Kara, the compound’s computer tech, hadn’t been born into the oracles. She’d gotten into bit of trouble with Bullstow in her late teens, the result of an unchecked gambling addiction, but she hadn’t had a single gambling charge levied against her since she signed her first contract with the oracles. She’d moved to New Bristol nearly three years later, changing compounds when Mòr needed a new security admin.
It didn’t take much digging to figure out why Kara had abandoned the rest of the world to become an outsider. Her father had been killed in a training exercise at Fort Rose when she was a little girl. A few weeks after her fifteenth birthday, a drunk driver killed her mother and brother. She’d lived with her older sister until the age of nineteen, when a violent lover had taken her last sibling’s life. It was a familiar story of many on the list, a history beset by tragedy.
With such a history, one either grew closer to the gods or grew to hate the world.
The admin had chosen the former, but it had taken a detour with alcohol and cards to get there. Unfortunately, she’d gotten lost again. Perhaps Kenna mistook her evasive return to darkness as the suspicious behavior of a mole.
Lila flagged Kara for deeper consideration and moved on, pulling the next bio on the list.
Camille Lécuyer.
Lila skimmed the first few lines of the young woman’s bio. She’d attended school in New Orleans from the age of—
Lila squinted at Camille’s childhood address, then pulled up a map. She’d enrolled in a high school close to her home, rather than one seven kilometers away, the one she was legally obligated to attend. Lila might not have noticed anything amiss if she hadn’t tarried so often on her family’s compound in New Orleans, dealing with her family’s militia and disputes with the city. She’d had to deal with the senate once after they tried to alter the boundaries of the school districts nearest the compound. The change would have altered the high school for the children of the workborn servants—most of whom lived in apartment buildings near the compound. They would have had to walk an extra two kilometers to a school with a poorer track record.
Access to good schools was a perk of working for the Randolphs.
After fighting over the boundaries with several senators from New Orleans the year before, she knew the boundaries. The school listed on Camille’s bio might have been closer, but it was out of district for the home she’d lived in.
The school never would have enrolled her.
Sitting up, Lila poked deeper into Camille’s official net ID, the ID that should have been created by the state when she first enrolled in school. Although Camille had been inserted into their database as a student, her official ID did not appear in any logs. It was as if she’d never done a single search or sent a single message during her entire school career. Only when Lila dug into Camille’s university’s logs did she find the ID in use.
Pulling up obituaries from the New Orleans Chronicle, she searched for Camille Lécuyer, already knowing what she’d find. The five-year-old lowborn girl had died, along with her family, sixteen years before.
Lila wrote a short piece of code, comparing the mole’s messages to Camille’s visitation records for the compound.
The records matched perfectly.
Chapter 23
The apartment door jiggled at six, giving Lila just enough time to snatch her hood and slip it over her head. The mesh fabric scratched at her face, and the heat stifled her skin. She’d stripped down to a tank and a pair of Dixon’s shorts after lunch, nearly removing them a dozen times to sit around in her panties and bra. As usual, Dixon had cranked up the heater, all so he could walk around in little else but a pair of pajama pants.
But Dixon wasn’t moving when the door opened. He’d been caught dozing again, fallen asleep in the middle of reading a file. His tablet rocked dangerously on his knee every time he exhaled, his soft snores a restful accompaniment while she worked. As he’d chosen Lila’s shoulder as a pillow, she’d developed a bit of a crick.
Since her father and Max had not messaged her with any updates, she and Dixon had stayed at the shop all day, chasing down more information about Camille in an effort to find the mole’s accomplice, if one existed. She had no intention of returning to the oracle with half the information, for Connell might isolate Camille the moment Lila named her, and that might spook her partner.
So far, Lila had found no new leads.
Dixon had worked the problem in a different way. He’d spent his afternoon scouring the net for information about the Italian military, trying to figure out how Lila might search for one member among the fray. Dixon had attained fluency in all four official languages of the Allied Lands—English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese—therefore, he could make out a great deal more Italian than she could with her French and Spanish. During his research, he’d learned that parents often announced their children’s entrance into the military by taking out ads in their local newspapers. With Dixon’s help, she’d written a program that searched the announcements, pulling out the photos. She then compared them against an age-regressed photo of Camille.
Unfortunately, the approach had been far too fruitful, for Toxic’s computer spat out too many results due to the poor quality of the newspaper photos. Regardless, Dixon had been diligently examining each match, as well as the inside of his own eyelids.
