Page 60 of Crosscurrent

She powered the burner on. Waited the long minute for it to find signal. Typed.

All is well here, but I need more. Time to talk about getting my real life back.

Her thumb hovered over send as she whispered a prayer. Please, Lord, help me find a way forward.

She hit send.

Then she stood at the kitchen window with the burner still warm in her hand. The bakery alley below was dark and empty. Wade had left the perimeter sensor armed. She could see the small red pinprick of it on the door frame down below.

Lord. Please let there be a way through this. And a future worth finding on the other side.

22

“Yo, team.”

Cara had been back down in headquarters barely ten minutes when Piper appeared at the top of the stairs with an overstuffed backpack hanging off one shoulder and her dark hair escaping its braid in at least four directions. “Janelle and I finally finished getting ready for our pre-calc final. Dad’s been here all day, which led me to conclude there’d be no food at home.” She dropped the backpack beside the stairs with a thud. “Also, I figured the bakery fridges contain actual vegetables that haven’t fossilized.”

“And you missed us,” Wade added, tossing her an unopened bag of pretzels.

Piper caught it one-handed. “If that’s what you need to think.” The teasing words came packaged with a grin.

Wade muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Too smart for her own good.”

Piper ripped the pretzel bag open while crossing the room, assessed the seating options with visible calculation, then selected the chair beside Owen like she was claiming territory. “Hi. I’m Piper.”

Owen looked at her the way he’d been looking at most things since Skye explained the kill calculus earlier — carefully, thoughtfully, as though the world had become slightly less predictable than he preferred. “Owen,” he said. “I’m having a rough few days.”

“Oh, same.” Piper reached into the pretzel bag. “What are we working on?”

“We,” Tom said, “are working. You are eating pretzels.”

She sniffed. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

Reagan passed behind Piper, snatched the bag neatly out of her hands, and kept walking. “You need actual food, girl. I’ll be back.”

Piper looked betrayed. “That’s community property.”

“It’s sodium,” Reagan called over her shoulder as she disappeared up the bakery stairs.

Cara watched Piper settle comfortably into the noise and movement of the room and felt something shift again inside her chest. There were truths she’d been carefully avoiding for months now — the fact that the bakery basement had stopped feeling temporary, the fact that the people in it no longer felt like allies she worked beside but people she instinctively counted when she walked into a room.

People who were hers.

Piper Nakamura showing up on a Saturday night because she missed everyone felt dangerously close to family, and Cara still didn’t entirely trust herself around concepts like that.

She turned back toward the center monitor. Gabe had Svalbard pulled up on the main screen. Longyearbyen looked impossibly small at that scale, a handful of labeled roads and clustered buildings wedged between dark water and glaciers large enough to make Oregon feel civilized. Tom had just finished running the flight windows and travel timing when Gabe finally said what the entire room had been circling for the last ten minutes. “Neptune is going to know we’re coming.”

Nobody disagreed.

Neptune held every advantage: lead time, infrastructure, a preselected venue, an operation already in motion. Going wasn’t boldness. It wasn’t bravery. It was simply the only move available that put them on ground they could still influence.

“What’s the latest?” Piper asked. Her gaze landed immediately on Skye.

Cara hid a smile. From the moment the former art thief broke into the bakery, Piper had attached herself to Skye with the focused intensity of somebody discovering a fictional character had accidentally become real. In Piper’s defense, Skye did seem assembled from several incompatible genres at once: polyglot art thief, cryptography expert, survivalist, terrifyingly competent disaster gremlin.

Skye, currently perched cross-legged atop a file cabinet with an ice pack balanced against the bruise at her temple, looked back at Piper with the patient resignation of someone slowly realizing she’d acquired a teenager.

“Owen teaches very boring things about the Middle Ages,” Skye said solemnly. “He’s going to a boring conference in Norway. The bad guys are expecting him, so we’re going too.”