Page 50 of Crosscurrent

Cara met Gabe’s gaze from across the room. If she had to guess, he was thinking exactly the same thing she was.

The question was who got to control the narrative from here: them, or Neptune.

18

The basement stairs were narrow enough that Gabe had to lead, which meant he heard David before he saw David’s face. The pause told him everything.

“Gabe?”

“Yeah.”

“You said you weren’t official anymore.”

“That’s accurate.”

Another beat. “I assumed that meant — I don’t know. A desk. Some paperwork. Maybe a sign on a door.”

Gabe turned around. David had stopped three steps up from the basement floor, one hand on the railing, taking in the room with a stunned expression. The Rig’s six monitors threw cool blue light across his face. The conference table sat wide and solid under the overheads. The Faraday cage hulked in the corner, copper mesh and silence.

Still shaking his head, David stepped down into the Sweet and Sawyer headquarters.

Sophie came down the steps behind him. “Wow.”

“David,” Gabe said. “You going to come sit or what?”

“I’m processing.”

“Take your time.”

“This is a bunker.”

“It’s a basement.”

His brother looked at him. “It’s a command center the CIA would kill for.”

Wade perked up at that. “They wish.”

Skye was in the far corner, inverted against the wall, weight distributed across her palms with the calm of someone who had identified her optimal resting position, and it happened to involve being upside down. David pointed. “She’s⁠—”

“Skye.” Gabe headed further into the room.

“Right.” David nodded now. “Fair enough.”

Sophie smiled at Skye, waggling her fingers in greeting. Skye acknowledged her with an inverted nod.

Gabe had met Sophie a handful of times over the years — David’s holiday party last December, twice in Portland back when Gabe was still with the Bureau. Dark-haired, mid-thirties, the kind of focused attention that didn’t advertise itself. She had that quality Gabe had come to recognize as genuine competence. She gathered information before she spoke.

Her gaze landed on the Rig and stayed there.

Tom materialized from behind the server rack with a cable in one hand. Sophie drifted closer. “The network architecture, is that a custom mesh, or are you running on a modified commercial framework?”

Tom set down the cable. “Both. The mesh is custom. The commercial framework is a starting point I’ve mostly inverted.”

“How much of the sensor integration is proprietary?”

“All of it.” She had his full attention now — the same attention he gave the Rig, which was different from the attention he gave most things, with the exception of Piper. “No commercial configuration could handle what I needed.”

Sophie nodded, still looking at the monitors. “For sure.”