J.C. took out his gun, for all the good it would do, and nodded for me to obey Zen. Getting into the back would put me into a better position to engage her.
She moved to the far back seat—scrunching Ivy and Audrey to the sides—as I moved, her gun on me at all times.
“Your weapon,” she said.
I removed it, just as I had in the alley, and placed it before me on the floor. Why was I even carrying the blasted thing?
“Phone next.”
I passed it over.
“Good job on finding the bug,” she noted to me. “We will discuss the matter further, Mister Leeds, as we go for a stroll together. Young Maheras, you are not involved in this. Move to the driver’s seat of the car. Once we are out, you are to leave. I don’t care what you do—go to the police, if you wish—but stay away. I don’t like killing people I haven’t been hired to hit. It’s bad business to . . . give away too many freebies.”
Dion was all too quick to move, scrambling into the driver’s seat, where I’d left the keys.
“This is good,” J.C. said softly. “She’s letting the boy go and is moving us out into the open.” He scrunched up his face. “I can’t figure out why she’d do either one, but I think it indicates that her superiors have demanded she not actually kill anyone.”
I nodded, sweat trickling down the back of my neck. Zen waved with her gun and I opened the side door, letting my aspects file out, J.C first, then Ivy, then Tobias. Audrey rested a hand on my arm encouragingly and I nodded, then moved to climb out before her.
Zen snapped forward, grabbing me by the shoulder and throwing me back. She snatched the door and slammed it closed.
“Maheras,” she said, turning the gun on him. “Drive. Now.”
“But—”
“Go or you’re a dead man!”
The kid floored it, running over a parking lot divider. I lay stunned against the side of the car, blinking, tracking what had happened. Zen . . .
My aspects!
I cried out, turning and pressing my face against the window. Ivy and Tobias stood out in the parking lot, looking baffled. Zen instructed Dion to pull out of the parking lot onto the street, and then told him to continue at a normal speed—no trying to get picked up by cops, please.
I barely listened. She’d lured my aspects out, then isolated me from them. Only Audrey was left, and that was by a fluke. Another moment, and she’d have been gone too. I turned, stunned, to look at Zen, who had settled into the seat by the now-closed door, her gun held on me.
“I do my research,” she said. “As a side note, the amount that has been written about you in psychological journals was quite useful, Mister Leeds.”
Audrey sank down onto the floor between us, wrapping her hands around her knees, whimpering. She was all I had, for now, and—
Wait.
J.C. I hadn’t seen J.C. out the window. I turned, searching, and there he was! Charging along the sidewalk at a full run, gun in one hand, look of determination on his face. He kept pace with us, barely.
Bless you, I thought toward him. He’d reacted when the other two were caught flat-footed. He dodged around some people on the sidewalk and leaped a bench in an almost superhuman move.
Audrey perked up, looking out the window. “Wow,” she whispered. “How is he doing that?”
The car was moving at around forty miles an hour. Suddenly, I couldn’t pretend any longer. J.C. ran out of breath, lurched to a stop on the sidewalk, his face flushed. He collapsed, exhausted from a run he shouldn’t have been able to manage.
The illusion. I had to keep the illusion. Audrey looked at me, then seemed to shrink upon herself, realizing what she’d done. It wasn’t her fault, though. I’d have eventually noticed how fast we were going.
“You,” Zen said to me, “are a very dangerous man.”
“I’m not the one holding the gun,” I said, turning to face her. How was I going to do this without Ivy and Tobias to help me interact? Without J.C. to pull me out of a deadly situation?
“Yes, but I can only kill the occasional individual,” Zen said. “You bring down companies, destroy hundreds of lives. My employers are . . . concerned about what you’ve done.”
“And they think having you grab me is going to help?” I asked. “I won’t find Panos’s key for you at gunpoint, Zen.”
“They’re not worried about the body anymore,” she said, and sounded faintly troubled. “You’ve toppled their fortunes and sent the government after them. They don’t want to be associated with this hunt any longer. They just want . . . loose threads to be pulled out and disposed of.”
Great. My plan was working.
Too well.
I tried to come up with something more to say, but Zen turned from me, giving Dion a series of driving instructions. I tried to get her talking again, but she refused, and I wasn’t about to try anything physical. Not without J.C. to give advice.
Maybe . . . maybe the other aspects would find their way to wherever we were going. Given time, they probably would.
I wasn’t sure how long that would take.
Audrey spent the ride seated in the middle of the floor between our two seats, arms wrapped around her legs. I wanted to talk to her, but didn’t dare say anything with Zen watching. The assassin thought she’d isolated me without any aspects. If I let her know that one was still here, I would lose a big advantage.
Unfortunately, our drive took us to an area on the outskirts of the city. There were some new housing developments out here, as the city’s creeping expansion slowly consumed the countryside, but there were also big patches of fields and trees waiting for condos and gas stations. Zen had us pull into one of these large wooded spots, and we drove on a dirt road up to a solitary house of the “my fathers farmed this land for generations” variety.
This was far enough from neighbors that shouts would not be heard and gunshots would be attributed to the removal of vermin. Not good. Zen marched Dion and me to a cellar door set in the ground and ordered us down the stairs. Inside, sacks slumped against the wall, spilling potatoes so old they’d probably witnessed the Civil War. A bare lightbulb glared where it hung from the center of the ceiling.
“I’m going to go report,” Zen told us, taking Dion’s phone from him. “Get comfortable. My expectation is that you’re going to be living down here for a few weeks while things blow over for my employers.”
She walked up the steps and locked the cellar door.