“SHIT.”
ALICE HAD GROWN USED to the idea of touching her steering wheel to make calls, but it was useless without a paired phone. She hadn’t bothered to ask for hers, figuring it would only draw attention to the exit Smyth had made possible. The people she asked for her phone back might be some of the same people who wanted her released from custody to open her big mouth … but only so long as she reached the decade’s biggest story too late.
Without her phone to yell at, Alice couldn’t ask for a detour around the roadblock she’d rather interestingly encountered on the otherwise lightly trafficked roads.
But even if she had her phone, Alice thought the roadblock might move anyway. There were more Panacea agents than there were Alice Franks in the world, and their task was easier. While she tried to race through obstacles to Hemisphere HQ, they merely had to stay in her way for another hour or so.
Alice looked at her dashboard clock.
For another forty-five minutes or so.
“Shit. Shit. SHIT!”
Maybe she could get out of the car. Maybe she could borrow someone’s phone, ask for directory assistance, call the goddamned Hemisphere switchboard if nothing else. Bridget Keys would have a listed number, right? Except that Smyth had already established the phone access Panacea could get if it only tried, and Alice sort of thought her calls, no matter how ingeniously concocted, wouldn’t do the trick.
If Smyth’s information was correct, Panacea would release fifty or more fast ferals on the Hemisphere picnic, and her friends were about to find themselves in the middle.
Unless she could get there, and fast.
Alice looked at her dashboard clock.
It was 9:31 a.m., and the barricade ahead showed no signs of moving.
She wrenched the wheel around, weaving around the other cars on the berm, saluting angry honks with her raised middle finger.
She hoped Archibald Burgess was the kind of guy who couldn’t manage to be on time, or that Ian would at least grab the mic and begin shouting right away, before the horde was released. But it didn’t seem likely.
Minutes ticked, vanishing like water down a drain.