Nyanther put down the welding mask as Jake rattled down the stairs. “You should be at home, sleeping,” he said sharply. He shook off the heavy gloves and dropped them on the bench beside the mask.
Jake dropped his ass onto the bottom step and pushed his face into his hands. “This is home,” he whispered. All the way here, fighting the morning traffic, he had been focused on that one true feeling.
Nyanther crouched in front of him. “What’s happened?”
Jake sighed and told him.
Nyanther sat on the step next to him, his hands on his knees, staring into middle distance. There was a deep furrow between his brows. “How likely is your uncle to follow through with his threat? Can he make you do this?”
“He would have to chain me up and tie me to the desk to do it, but he doesn’t have to go nearly that far. There are more efficient ways to keep reluctant people towing the line. He’s been using those ways for years, on me and on others in the family that kick up.” He thought of his cousin Rebecca and how she had cried against his shoulder thirty minutes before her wedding to a man she didn’t want to marry.
“Leverage and coercion,” Nyanther said. “He has leverage over you?”
Jake nodded.
“Brandy,” Nyanther murmured.
Jake’s insides squeezed. He closed his eyes. “I am so fucked,” he breathed.
Nyanther squeezed his knee, making him look at him. “Do you trust me?” he asked.
Jake snorted. “That’s the most stupid, the most…of course I fucking trust you!”
“There might be a way out of this,” Nyanther said slowly.
Hope soared. “Might?” Jake said, trying to squash his blooming anticipation.
Nyanther examined his hands. “It’s high risk. Very high risk.”
Jake considered him. “What sort of risk?”
“If it goes wrong, you’ll never see Sabrina or me again.”
Before Jake could answer, a steady, loud beeping started up, coming from the bench.
Nyanther surged to his feet. “The tracker!”
* * * * *
“The older satellites this tracker uses have to reposition themselves every twelve hours,” Nyanther said as Nick and Jake stared at the red glowing dots on the screen. The tracker was still sitting on the bench. It had only taken Nick and Riley a few minutes to arrive back at the apartment from their borrowed hotel room.
“I forgot about the recalibration,” Nyanther added. “I’m used to continuous adjustments, the way the modern ones do.”
“I didn’t know satellites adjusted at all,” Riley said as she stowed her katana carefully under her raincoat. “They just sit there in space.”
“If they didn’t, the location they send you to, that they think is the same location, would shift by about two feet, every day,” Nyanther said. “At the same time the older satellites reposition, they update any coding, in a batch process.”
“So the metrics Sabrina scanned took twelve hours to update?” Riley asked.
“We wasted a whole night searching?” Nick asked.
Riley rolled her eyes. “When you can smell them at half a mile? We had redundancies, Nick. It wasn’t wasted.”
He stared at her. Then, shockingly, he smiled. “None of us would have stayed home, anyway. Sorry.”
Jake turned his attention back to the two glowing, pulsing dots. “They’re near Pearl Street, after all,” he said. “So why didn’t you smell them, Nick?”
“Seawater,” Nick said. “Rain, sewerage and salt. There are all sorts of possibilities.” He resettled his coat so it wasn’t lopsided, pulled down by the weight of his sword. “Ready?”
Jake pushed the second of the long folding knives into his jacket. “More than,” he said flatly. He glanced at Nyanther.
Nyanther didn’t smile.
The fear that had been trembling on the brink of life bloomed and bit into his nerves.