“Maybe,” Mitch said, “but I don’t think anyone is going to make a move on Mellon or Myki while we’re all over them.”
“So it was effectively a turf war,” Salvi said, nodding to herself. “Anything that encroached on MasterSlave, its offerings, its owners, its clients… people were erased. Just like that.”
He nodded. “Greed helped MasterSlave rise up, but greed took everyone down.”
“Greed,” Salvi said, staring off at nothing. “Money. Power… Control.”
She raised her hand and touched one of her neural devices. Mitch reached out and took her hand, moved it away from the device. She looked at him.
“Do you think the Chief knew what was going on?”
Mitch seemed to consider her question. “Maybe. Maybe not. But if he did, he didn’t stop us finding his daughter. He didn’t stop us shutting it down. Maybe he knew, but he was powerless to do anything about it because they had his daughter. But he knew that we weren’t.”
“I don’t know who to trust now,” Salvi whispered.
“You can trust me,” he said softly.
Her eyes blurred with tears and she looked away.
“Beggs?” she asked.
“He’s doing okay,” Mitch said. “He’s off life support.”
Salvi nodded, as tears rolled down her cheeks. She thought of Caine, tortured and murdered, of Beggs’ mangled body, of the neural devices she and Bronte would now bear for the rest of their lives. Hub 9 had taken many casualties. Far too many. The Ghost Network had gotten to them, and they were still out there. She thought of Travis holding that data pane and looked back to Mitch.
“The connectivity?” she said raising her hand to her devices again. “It’s not–”
“No,” Mitch said reassuringly. “They disabled that part.”
“How do we know that?”
“Riverton oversaw it,” he said. “Ford insisted. They plugged your devices in manually and Riverton took care of it. Only it knows the password to enable the connectivity again.”
“They can’t get to me?”
“No,” he said. “You’re safe.”
Salvi knocked softly on the door to Bronte’s room.
“Hey,” Kara said gently. She was sitting beside Bronte’s bed, dressed in a hospital gown, her arm bandaged and a drip rig hooked up beside her. “How you doing?”
Salvi nodded but said nothing as she stepped further into the room. She shifted her eyes to Bronte. He was asleep, his side bandaged. She studied the neural devices on the sides of his head. Part of her felt sorry that he’d been changed forever too, but part of her felt grateful she hadn’t been the only one; that she wasn’t alone in her torment. She looked back at Kara, whose face had now fallen.
“I’m sorry they did that to you both,” she said. “I owe you. You got me out of there before they got me too.”
Salvi managed a smile. “I’m glad we got out.”
Kara nodded. “We went in together, we came out together. Just like you said.”
Salvi’s smile faded as she thought of Dancer again, his limp body; his urgent pleading for her to remember the word Bacchus or Bacchanalia. She had no idea what it meant, but she knew she couldn’t tell another soul until she found out.
“And we saved those missing girls,” Kara said. “And everyone one else who was trapped there too.”
“We did,” Salvi nodded.
Kara looked at Bronte again, then back to her. “Are they letting you go?”
“Soon. I’m waiting for the doctor to clear me.”
Kara nodded, her face turning resolute. “We’ll get ‘em, Salv. We won’t let them get away with this.”
Salvi stared at Kara a moment, then nodded. “I hope you’re right.”
She turned and left Bronte’s room and made her way back down the corridor. She seemed to wander aimlessly for a while, but then somehow found herself standing outside the room of the Chief’s daughter. When she glanced inside, she saw that Clare was sleeping, and she too had the neural devices affixed to her skull. Salvi felt her stomach sink as she stared at the young woman, imagining what she must’ve gone through these past weeks at MasterSlave. Then she thought of the android-woman, and the other woman, more machine than human, and the young man with prosthetic arms and legs, and she wondered where they were now.
And despite how awful Salvi felt inside, looking at Clare she felt the slightest glimmer of hope. Salvi had indeed nicked the ghosts’ artery, and she had set the Chief’s daughter and all those others free. The war was still being waged, a fact that cut Salvi to her core, but the battle to save Clare had been won. Caine had not died in vain.
Salvi walked into her apartment with Mitch following. She hadn’t said a word all afternoon. Not when the doctor came to see her, not even when Mitch offered to drive her home, but her mind had been cycling endlessly over all that had happened.
She moved to her floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out onto the misty Golden Gate Bridge as rain sprinkled against the glass.
“You’re going to have to talk soon, Salvi,” Mitch said, coming to stand beside her.
She looked at him then back out the window. She saw her reflection in the glass; could see that despite the top layers of hair hanging down either side of her face, that underneath the silver neural devices sat pressed against her shaved skin.
“What’s there to say,” she said. “We closed half a case. The perpetrators, if they’re ever caught, will probably get away with it and then they’ll start over again.”
“And if that happens we’ll do what we can to stop them again. It’s an endless game of whack-a-mole.”
“The killer is still out there. You saw what he did to Caine and Chaney. You saw what he was capable of.”
Mitch nodded. “And Ford’s right. As soon as they appear on our radar again, we will hunt them down and stop them.”
“The Chief is going to sweep his daughter’s abduction under the rug, isn’t he?”
Mitch thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. He’s just not
