A nervous giggle welled up in my throat. “That’s a really good attitude. Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s the right thing to do.”
There was a clunking noise, followed by Kitty saying, “Thanks, Angel. You can hang up now.”
“Anytime, Kitty. Sarah, hope everything gets better for you. You sound stressed.” A click, and a change in the quality of the sound over the line, told me that Angel had hung up on her end.
“Hello?” I said.
“Sarah Zellaby,” said Kitty. Her voice seemed to come from next to me, rather than through the phone. That’s a classic bogeyman trick. They can throw their voices anywhere they can hear—which includes the other end of telephone lines. Just one more way nature and technology combine to make the world a creepier place. “Verity’s little adopted cousin with the big blue eyes and the clear antifreeze for blood. What brings a cuckoo like yourself to my virtual door?”
Humans have only known about cuckoos for a few generations. The bogeymen have known for centuries and, surprise surprise, they don’t like us much. That’s something they have in common with every other sapient species in the known world. “It’s Verity,” I said. “I can’t find her.”
There was a pause. Knowing what cuckoos were meant that Kitty also understood what we could do. “I’m listening,” she said.
I gave her the same explanation I’d given Uncle Mike, dwelling a little longer on the static, and the way it had gone away completely when the pain did. I finished by saying, “I’m scared. I think something terrible may have happened to her.”
“Before we start jumping at sunbeams, let me ask you this: is there any chance you’re having the cuckoo equivalent of a muscle cramp or something? Maybe you can’t feel her because you’ve got a problem, not because she’s not there.”
“I can feel everyone else in the building.” Everyone except the older Madhura—Verity said his name was Rochak—but his thoughts had been hidden before Verity disappeared. Bringing him into this would just confuse things. “Besides, this isn’t the sort of silence I get when someone blocks me out. I mean, it is. But that never starts with pain. I’ve never felt anything like that before.”
Kitty made a small, frustrated sound. “Which means, if I believe you, that the damn Covenant probably got her. Fuck. Do you think they killed her quick, or did they take her prisoner so they could torture her first?”
My breath caught in my chest, wedging there like a stone. I struggled to force it out, trying to get my voice back. Finally I said, “How can you even ask me that?”
“Look, Sarah. For you she’s family; I get that, I really do, and it sucks that you’re the one making this call, almost as much as it sucks that I’m the one taking it. But if she’s dead, she’s dead, and I have living people to worry about. If the Covenant knows what Verity knows, they can clean this city out. You follow me? Nobody’s safe if they’re torturing her—and don’t try telling me that she won’t break. Given enough time, and enough knives, everybody breaks. It’s just a matter of finding out how hard you have to push.” Kitty spoke with a soft assurance that whispered of experiences I’d never had, and never wanted to have. I found myself wondering which end of the knife she’d been on. I realized just as quickly that I really didn’t want to know. That sort of thing was Verity’s territory, and she was welcome to it.
Kitty listened to the silence for a few seconds. Then she sighed. “Look, Sarah . . . if they took her prisoner, that sucks for us, because we don’t know what she’s going to tell them. We have to be prepared for the worst. But it could be awesome for her.”
“How is being taken prisoner by the Covenant awesome for anybody?” I asked.
“People usually keep their prisoners alive for at least a little while before they kill them. If she’s been taken prisoner, there’s a chance that you can get her back.”
“But how am I supposed to—”
“I’m sorry, Sarah. I really am. I know she’s your cousin, and I know you love her. I owe her a lot. I wish it hadn’t gone down like this. But you’re the one who has to worry about getting her back. I’m the one who gets to worry about getting my people through this alive. Good luck.”
Kitty hung up after that. She didn’t say good-bye. There wouldn’t have been any point.
Mike and Istas were in the main room when I emerged. The Madhura I could detect was still in the kitchen; I assumed the older Madhura was there with him. Having someone in the building that I couldn’t “hear” made me profoundly uncomfortable. I was used to people being hard or even impossible to read. Them being invisible was something entirely different. It was like when—
I stopped where I was, eyes going wide. Uncle Mike looked away from the deadfall he’d been arranging over one of the windows—Istas was holding the rope that supported the deadfall’s weight with one hand, like it was negligible to her—and frowned at me. “Sarah?” he asked. “What did Kitty say?”
“That charm.” I started briskly toward the table where Verity had dumped Margaret Healy’s possessions. Midway there, I broke into a run. When I reached it, I started rummaging frantically through the knives, ammo packs, and things I didn’t know the uses of. “Where is it? Why can’t I find it?!”
“Hey. Hey! What are you trying to find?” Uncle Mike’s hand settled on my shoulder. His thumb grazed the skin above my collarbone. As always, the skin-to-skin contact did what it would normally take months of close contact to do: his mind snapped into sharp relief, a picture seen through a window blind that I could open if I needed to. Touching people does that for me, especially when it happens repeatedly in a short period of time. It’s why I try to avoid it whenever I can when I’m not dealing with people I’m already attuned to.
Uncle Mike was petrified. He knew Verity was dead. Not because he had some fact that I was missing; just because he’d been in situations like this one before, and he knew the odds had been against us from the start. Should never have let her go out alone, no matter what she was used to, he was thinking, blame and self-loathing dripping off every thought/word and sense/impression. This is my fault. How am I going to tell Kevin that I let his baby girl go out and get herself killed? Hell, how am I going to tell Evelyn? She’ll never be able to look me in the eye again. This is all—
I shrugged his hand off, breaking the endless loop of his thoughts before it could drag me even further down. If he wanted to put on a brave face and pretend that he thought everything was going to be okay, I’d let him. As long as I made sure not to touch him again, it might even make me feel better.
“The charm. The one the Covenant uses to block telepathy.” I looked up at him. “Margaret was a hole when we met her. She wasn’t a human, she wasn’t an individual, she was a hole. When Verity put the thing on to test it, she was a hole, too. She vanished completely from any sort of nonvisual spectrum.”
Uncle Mike nodded slowly. “So you’re thinking that, if she’s wearing one of those things, that might explain her disappearing the way she did?”
“I’ve never been attuned to someone who died, but I can’t imagine it’s as easy as ‘ow that hurts oh I’m gone.’” I stood up a little straighter, trying to ignore the waves of curiosity emanating from Istas. At least she hadn’t come over. That probably had something to do with the rope she was still holding, and the desire not to drop Uncle Mike’s deadfall on the slaughterhouse floor. “She’s not dead. She’s just missing.”