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A slight delay as the call routed around the globe through more than a dozen software virtual-telephone-switch destinations.
Then the sound of sobbing.
Answering the phone as the Nowhere Man, he was accustomed to that. He often spoke to people at their worst moment of desperation.
He waited.
And then he recognized who was crying.
Joey Morales.
After she’d washed out of the Orphan Program, he’d been put in a position where, against all his wishes and his protocols as a solitary operator, he’d had to rescue her. In a manner of speaking, she’d rescued him, too. An unlikely familial bond forged between teenage hacker and adult assassin that puzzled him still. Before her he hadn’t understood the fierceness of affection. The vulnerability of it, too, how someone else’s pain could hurt worse than your own.
He hadn’t been trained to consider other people’s pain. He’d been taught to barely register his own.
He stopped the rush of questions—What happened? Did someone hurt you? Who do I need to maim?—and forced himself to wait.
The Fifth Commandment:If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.
“Okay,” he said. “All right.”
Joey kept on weeping, soul-rending cries giving way to what sounded like a panic attack—jerky inhalations, rushed exhalations.
Somehow she forced out a half-formed plea. “Make it su-stop.”
“I’m going to breathe,” he said quietly. “And you match me. Okay?”
“… k-kay.”
He breathed audibly, slowly. At first they were out of sync, but slowly she started to calm to the rhythm of his respiration.
“Bottom out your exhalations,” he told her. “Twice as long.”
“Iam!”
“No. Listen.” He modeled it. “Making room for more oxygen.”
It took five full minutes for her to mirror his breathing. Then they held the cadence for another two.
Finally he asked, “What happened?”
The RoamZone had a variety of features—a self-repairing screen, nanotech batteries, an antigravity suction case. It could also prop open a broken window. He thumbed on the holographic display and watched Joey’s words dance as the RoamZone threw her voice.
“Nothing,” she said. “Everything doesn’t always have to be athing, X.”
He’d set her sound waves to orange so they flickered like a flame. It was all he had of her right now.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“A little motel outside of Phoenix.”
It didn’t surprise him that her improvised road trip had wound up in Arizona. Or that panic had overtaken her there. Before her beloved maunt—her mom-aunt—had passed, Joey had lived with her there for the first innocent, uncomplicated decade of her childhood. And then had come the foster homes. And her brief stint in Orphan training. Neither of which was innocent. Nor uncomplicated.
“Know what she used to say? My maunt? When I did something funny, she’d say, ‘I’ve created a monster.’ And I’d love that, because it meant she was proud I’d taken the best parts of her. She was so, so funny. No matter what kind of shit we were going through. And—” She cut off with a sharp intake of air.
Joey hated crying, fought it all the way through.
Evan gave her time. There was nothing else to give her.
