Heath half crouched near the wall of boulders ringing the area that had been leveled to build the tower and house. She had on Dem Bones, her high-tech robotic walking suit, legs and belly strapped in, bright silver lozenge-shaped pieces of machinery on the outside of her thighs and calves, hinges at hip and knee. The arm-brace crutches lay fifteen feet away where she’d flung them in a rage when they got in the way of her attempts to get this so-called wonder of modern technology to complete the simple task of moving her bony ass up and over the chunks of stone calved off the granite wall.
“Goddamn useless piece of shit,” she cried. Her hands clawed at the slick rock as the weight of her lower limbs, and the titanium skeleton, dragged her down. Using the motions available to her, she could only manage to kick uselessly at the rock with feet like senseless clubs, and knees not worth the effort it took technology to bend them.
As she slid back for the third time, leaving long white scratches on the glossy silver finish of the thigh and calf pieces, she screamed like a wounded panther.
Frustration consumed energy that, left alone, would turn to thoughts. There was nothing Heath could think that wasn’t insupportable, that wouldn’t sear the marrow in her bones. Someone was stalking her daughter; now her daughter was missing. Heath had been a fool to think cyberfilth would be the sum total of it. She was a fool not to have taken E to London, put her into witness protection, hired bodyguards. Such was her arrogant stupidity, she had thought a cripple, an old dog, and a septuagenarian pediatrician could keep her child safe.
E hasn’t been missing all that long, she told herself.
“Damned she hasn’t,” she said aloud. Only a few hours, but Boar Island wasn’t a few hours’ worth of adventure. Heath automatically reached down her right hand. No wheelchair, no saddlebags, no cigarettes. “Piece of shit,” she muttered.
Never would E intentionally scare her or Gwen by staying away so long. Wily would have come back if he could have, if for no other reason than his dinner was served at five every day. If E was hurt, Wily would have howled when he heard Heath calling his name. There was no girl and no dog, and the only way that could happen was if they’d been taken.
Not jumped or fallen, Heath thought. E wouldn’t take Wily with her into the grave, and Wily wasn’t the type to leap off a fifty-foot cliff even if E did. Besides, Elizabeth was past suicide. She was.
The lift bell rang. Frankenstein-like, Heath turned, then lurched toward where the elevator would release its passenger. “It better be you, Anna,” she shouted as she monstered across the level rock. Anna didn’t deserve that. Scarcely thirty-five minutes had passed since Heath called. The superwoman suit didn’t deserve to be called a piece of shit either, for that matter. Heath didn’t care. Choices were limited: She could rage or she could fall apart.
The lift clattered into its dock with a groan that, no matter how often Heath heard it, seemed to presage immediate disaster. Anna stepped off. “It’s me,” she said unnecessarily. She was in her full ranger costume, gun and all. Heath was so glad to see her, she could have burst into tears.
“About time,” she said.
Anna paid no attention to the snarling dog that had possessed Heath. Undoubtedly she’d seen that fear hound more times than she’d care to remember. Heath was grateful.
“Where have you looked?” Anna asked.
“Goddamn nowhere,” Heath admitted. “I got back into the ruins a ways and called. There is so much crap on the ground and the floors are so rotten, I couldn’t do much inside. The rest of this godforsaken rock might as well be Mars. I can’t get out of this bear pit. I went up and down the lift a few times and saw what I could from the dock. I butted myself up the whole piece-of-shit tower, one hundred and seventy feet of metal stairs, and couldn’t see a damn thing from the windows. Couldn’t hold myself up to look over the sills for more than a second. That’s it. That’s it.”
“How long has she been gone, and how did she go?” Anna asked.
Heath sputtered out the tale of the lobsters and Wily. “John picked Gwen up a few minutes later. It never occurred to us that E wouldn’t be right back. I am an idiot,” she finished.
Anna nodded as if Heath had given her a measured professional report of the search to date. She looked around the open space at the rocks and rubble, then up at the sky.
“Light’s going,” Anna said. “We’d better figure out where she headed and then get moving. You want to come?”
Heath wanted to. She wanted it so much she could feel her fingers curling around Anna’s from where she stood.
“No,” she said through stiff lips. “You’ll move faster alone.”