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Holly waited quietly. I was proud that she knew when to keep her mouth shut without being told.
After a few minutes, Reggie handed the phone back to me. “It’s not her,” she said. “It’s a deepfake.”
I let out a sharp breath. I’d been holding my breath. Well, duh. Nice fantasy, but of course Reggie would come to that conclusion. No one could blame a lonely, scared, sick little girl for going straight there, and holding her ground. To the death.
“How do you figure?” I asked. All of us were clustered around the bed now. Frey and Kat sat down at the foot of the bed, on either side.
“Well, her hands, to start with,” Reggie said. She ran the video back. “Look how she waves. Cass doesn’t wave like that. That twinky-wink finger thing, that’s totally not her. Plus, those arms have no freckles. Cass has freckles everywhere, like me. Whoever’s hands they used for that video doesn’t. See my arms?” She held up her freckly forearm, with the dangling IV line. “Look at my freckles. Cass has even more.”
“It could just be the light, washing them out,” Ethan warned.
Reggie just gave him a look. “And then there’s the hair,” she said. “Her hair was straight in the video. Cass’s hair was in a really tight braid yesterday. It takes time to get to that place, and she braided it wet yesterday. So if she brushed out her braid, there would be crimped braid-waves. Unless she got there, took a shower, and blew out her hair, which take forever. There wasn’t enough time to change into the dress, put on that makeup and blow out her hair. Cass is slow with girly stuff.”
Kat and Frey stared at each other. “I didn’t think of that,” Kat said. “I have straight hair, and never longer than my shoulders. Didn’t even occur to me.”
“But the biggest clue is that there’s no tattoo,” Reggie went on.
“Cass has a tattoo?” Frey said. “I didn’t see one.”
“She was always wearing big sweatshirts with long sleeves since she’s been here,” Reggie said. She pointed to her left wrist. “She has ‘Regina,’ in cursive, right up her arm. Her tattoo artist knows about ancient Chinese medicine, and she put it right on the heart meridian. When I’m big enough, I’m going to have one on my heart meridian that says ‘Cassandra.’ This girl didn’t have it. She’s definitely not my sister. Cass made me some temporary tattoos with her name, but they took them away from me at the bad clinic. And washed off the one I had. The bastards.”
I digested that, all my nerves buzzing with… no. Goddamn it, I couldn’t afford anything as stupid as hope. I just didn’t dare. It was too damned tempting.
But the scar on Reggie’s scalp, the blown-out hair, the missing tattoo… that was huge. I’d seen Red’s tattoo, the morning we woke up together, but I’d forgotten it. We’d never had time for the kind of lazy bed talk where tattoo histories were discussed.
It made bombing Halliwell’s place into dust much more complicated, if Red was there. And if she was still the Red that I had always believed her to be.
The Red I’d fallen hopelessly in love with.
The doctors were filing in, talking excitedly. Demiguel was shooing us all away from the bed and out of the room. Stuff was happening in here. Thank God.
It was time to make it happen out there, too.
I looked at Ethan. “I’m ready,” I said. “Let’s extract Cass and grind that motherfucker into the ground. We’ll sort the mess out later.”
“Amen,” Ethan said.
We raced toward the parking lot, boots thundering on the pavement.
CHAPTER28
Cass
Icouldn’t get into his system. Damn him. I was an excellent hacker, but Halliwell was always ten steps ahead of me. You could say what you wanted about him being a blood-sucking, power-mad, narcissistic monster, but he was freaking smart and very detail oriented.
Ten minutes. Twenty. Twenty-five. Somehow, Jana was still alive down there on Level Eight, or the place would be floating in the stratosphere by now, and me with it. I couldn’t even activate the vents to blow the poisonous gas out.
Halliwell had me blocked at every turn.
But I couldn’t just leave her. Jana had risked everything for me and Reggie. She’d given me the key to free my little sister. She’d paid for it with everything she had.
Jana was my sister too, whether she knew it or not, and I wanted her to live. To come back from this and be who she always should have been, if she hadn’t gotten sucked into the lethal vortex that was our father.
He’d killed enough of us. It had to stop.
My phone buzzed, and I almost screamed. I grabbed it and saw Jana’s number.
I picked up. “Hey! I’m still upstairs trying to find a fucking override, but I can’t?—”
