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“Anyone with eyes on?” Adam radioed the teams.
“Negative,” Abigail replied from where she and Robin, both recognizable to Atlas, were posted in a parked car near the quad’s south entrance.
“Negative,” reported another pack pair lounging on a bench at the north end of the artificial lawn.
“Negative,” Jenn radioed from where she and another pack member were pretending to be tourists, taking pictures near the west end.
“Negative,” Cormac radioed from beside Adam, the two of them crouched on a rooftop at the east entrance.
They returned to silent waiting, except Cormac, whose silence didn’t last a minute. His thoughts, unsurprisingly, veered in the same direction as Adam’s. “If Atlas sent that picture, why? There’s no demand for a ransom, no demand for a meet with Icarus or us. We don’t even know if she’s still alive.”
“I think we’d know if she wasn’t.”
“If Icarus is telling the truth about what she is.”
Adam side-eyed his former partner. “You’re the one who kept harping about what you saw him do at the Canyon Lands that day. Now he’s told you. How else do you square that?”
“I don’t know exactly what I saw, but I do know something isn’t squaring. And you’re a good enough detective to know that too.”
He wasn’t wrong; their mental gymnastics just weren’t focused on the same person. Adam’s gut told him to trust Icarus, but Cormac’s observations couldn’t be discredited either. He’d been right about that day in the Canyon Lands, even if they still didn’t have all the details. “You think Icarus isn’t telling us the whole truth?”
“Haveyoutold him the whole truth?” Again, Cormac wasn’t wrong, nor was he done examining all the angles. “I’m not sure Icarus knows the whole truth about his sister either.”
Maybe not the direction Adam thought his suspicions were headed. He kept his eyes on the quad while continuing to hear the detective out. “What makes you say that?”
“I did some more digging. No record before she showed up at that shelter.”
“Sealed?”
“Not that I could find.” He drummed his fingers against the roof’s ledge like he would his talons in raven form. “Couldn’t find anything on Canton either.”
“She erased all of them.” That would be the safest thing to do.
“Including Atlas?”
He glanced again at the raven. “Why would you look into him? We already knew he was erased.”
“Something else I saw at the Canyon Lands that day. Atlas cast an orb at me and Icarus and missed.”
“It was foggy and chaotic. The earth was falling out from under us.”
Cormac wasn’t buying it, his lips pressed into a thin line. “He’s better than that.”
Jenn cut off further debate, her voice whispered over the comms. “We’ve got eyes on.”
Adam whipped his gaze back to the quad, adrenaline spiking then heart sinking as he spotted the couple who emerged through the west entrance.
Cormac narrated the thoughts Adam didn’t want but couldn’t avoid. “Does that green-haired pixie look like a hostage to you?”
“We don’t know what we’re seeing,” Adam countered to Cormac and himself. Sure, her arm was around Atlas’s waist and his was casually draped over her shoulder, neither of them looking the worse for wear, but why would they want to stand out in a crowded location full of people? They looked like any other couple out for an afternoon stroll. But what did they sound like? What words were escaping their moving lips? “B team, move to second position.”
“Copy that.” The pack pair on the quad stood, frisbee in hand, ready to extend their reach as needed. Jenn’s team also wandered closer, picking a spot just inside the lawn’s edge well within their hearing distance, but far enough back from where Atlas and Mary had stopped near the center of the oval, arms around each other.
“If she’s betrayed him...” Adam mumbled, fear and anger slipping out, even as his training coached him otherwise. Coached him to look deeper, beneath what Mary and Atlas wanted everyone to see.
“She’s playing along to protect herself,” Jenn said. “I can hear her heart racing from here.”
“Look at her posture,” Cormac added. “She’s playing casual, but her back and shoulders are stiff as a board and her fist is clenched behind Atlas’s back.”
