“What do we know?”
“Exactly what I said on the phone. We don’t know who it is, and we didn’t send them. Which is totally true.” She waited for him to say more, but he shook his head. “I don’t know anything else, I swear.”
The phone rang again, and as Gabe and Sophie both reached for it, a woman walked into the office. She wore a Pilot-blue dress and matching blue lipstick like she was reclaiming the color.
“Knock fir—Lana?” Sophie said, letting Gabe answer the phone. “What are you doing here?”
Lana ignored the question. “Who are all the people I just stepped over to find you? You’re supposed to be running a field office, not a hotel.”
“It’s sanctioned by the landlord and field office operations.” Sophie closed the door. “They need a safe place to crash, and they repay us with endless volunteer hours. It works.”
Lana eyed the couch like she was debating sitting on it, then decided against it. “No reporters have stopped in this morning?”
“There’ve been a bunch of calls, but nobody has come here.” Sophie looked to Gabe, still talking quietly on the phone, and he nodded in confirmation.
“And that phone stays locked up, right? Neither of you put any apps on it that access the microphone?”
Sophie bristled at the suggestion she might be that amateurish. “Only Gabe and I have keys to this office. Also, it’s a landline. No unapproved apps.”
Lana rubbed her neck, and Sophie realized that up close, under her makeup, she looked exhausted. “Hmm. Okay. It must have leaked someplace else.”
“Must have.” Especially since we were never told anything, Sophie didn’t say.
“It’s not like you had any information to share,” Lana said.
“Exactly.” Sophie was getting annoyed. “I pretty much have no idea what you’re talking about or what happened, but feel free to leave it that way if you want.”
Lana sighed. “I’m sure you saw the news. Someone got into Balkenhol and then got arrested. Everyone assumes it was an anti-Pilot thing, so we’re getting calls from the media and the cops. If they haven’t called you yet, they will. We had nothing to do with it, of course.”
“Of course,” Sophie repeated. Though if that was the case, why did Lana happen to be in the city?
“I’m going to make the rounds of your local news broadcasts to put our best spin on it before they start poking their heads in here. This isn’t the image we want to project.” She eyed the couch again. “Just keep doing what you’re doing, both of you.”
She swept back out of the room, and Sophie looked over to see Gabe watching her with curiosity. “What did she say? I missed some of it.”
“What you said, more or less, and that the police may stop in to chat.”
“Oh, they did already. Before dawn. My first wake-up.”
“You didn’t say that! Why?”
“Why do you think? They wanted to know who was in charge, and if we had planned a break-in, and who hung out here. I said we didn’t keep a roster, and we didn’t do break-ins, which is true. And they asked if we had ever been to BNL, which I said yes, outside, to protest. I probably shouldn’t have said anything, but I thought those answers would get rid of them faster than refusing to talk to them.”
He didn’t point out that it was good Sophie hadn’t been around, that if this did in fact have anything to do with her brother’s ID, it was better their shared surnames hadn’t been invoked. Or that it was good the whole thing had been taken off their hands.
Sophie knew not to raise any of that out loud. Lana had said something about a leak, the only important detail in the conversation. She probably wouldn’t have come in if she thought either of them was the culprit, unless she wanted to look them in the eye while she asked.
All of which left Sophie with almost as little as she’d learned on the news. Someone had been arrested and charged in conjunction with gaining access to BNL. If it was someone from National, something had gone wrong. She still had no clue if this was the operation with David’s ID or not, which was something she very much wanted to know.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
DAVID
The party at Milo’s only confirmed what David had known for years: he was broken. If he wasn’t broken, dysfunctional, a little off, what could explain that there was a drug that took other people to exactly where he lived his life? They were playing games, literal games, with something that had bothered him since he’d gotten his Pilot. When he realized it, he’d wanted to shake that woman Alyssa, to shake everyone in the room.
Instead, in the dawning, blissful quiet the Fortress of Solitude brought him, he asked, “What if you got stuck in that state of awareness?”
“Stuck?” Her eyes still darted around; he’d long ago trained himself to focus so he didn’t go out of his head.
“Yeah. What if you didn’t come down?”
She laughed. “It’s physiologically impossible. It’s just a drug. The effects wear off.”
“But what if? What if it somehow broke your brain? Could you train yourself to work with it?”
“I don’t think I could live at this level of sensory overload. I love chocolate cake but I couldn’t eat it for every meal. This is like everything is too rich, too saturated, too intense. Fun for a while. Speaking of fun . . .” She turned and walked into the bedroom, where everyone else still sat enjoying the pill David had
