Page 34 of Never Lost

“You’re supposed to be in bed, kiddo!” Ivy called back.

“I know, but you have to hear this!”

“Hear what?”

Though I didn’t know why, my heart began to pound as the kid threw open the door, waving a phone wildly. They clicked “play” on a news video and turned up the volume.

“…An apparent road rage incident this afternoon has left two dead and one in critical condition after a car was run off I-10 and Ventana and into a wash by a vehicle that then fled the scene.”

The newsreader continued, but a second later, even that voice had been drowned out by Thalia’s frantic barking, which was thundering ever closer to the bathroom.

Then the door flung open wider, revealing not only the collie but Erica Muller herself, holding the hand of a saucer-eyed teengirl with glossy dark brown skin and a jumble of skinny black braids dangling over a bloody bandage on her back in desperate need of changing.

“Louisa, what happened to you?” Erica demanded.

“What do you mean,what happened to me?” I exploded back through my parched throat. “Are you listening to this?”

“The two dead were later identified as recently suspended social sciences professor Erica Muller and Alma Mensah, a nineteen-year-old woman from San Diego who was reported missing last year.”

Though my eyelids were open, I could barely see. My fight-or-flight had taken over, my heart beating out of my chest, my throat closing up.

Dead.

“Breathe, Louisa,” said my very-not-dead professor. “You can see with your own eyes that the report is wrong. It’s all wrong.”

But I couldn’t breathe. It was just that word,dead, ringing in my ears.Dead, dead, dead.

“But what about Maeve, and Milagros, and—” I gasped.

“Louisa.”

Erica’s face barely changed, but it did change. Still, she spoke with a miraculous level of calm as she settled who had to be the also very-not-dead Alma on the chair with the towels.

Meanwhile, Ivy leaped up and grabbed the medical kit she had taken out earlier, rapidly unrolling a spool of gauze.

“I’ll explain everything,” Erica said. “But you need to get your anxiety under control first. Because it would be dangerous for me to tell you anything else until you do.”

9

HIM

“Ididn’t know about the dead girl,” Langer said before I had the heavy door to the roof all the way open.

He turned away from the edge, where he’d been standing in a semicircle of whatever fluorescent light source existed there. The glow reflected off the bare cement, casting a bright yellow ring around him. Beyond it, the city grid unfurled in a sprawl of light, swallowed by desert on three sides.

My boss was stripped down to a light blue dress shirt and suit pants, his usually sculpted, gravity-defying hair hanging in dark, loose strands around the faint lines of his face. He looked simultaneously older and younger—human, instead of the levitating forcefield of pure neodymium I’d first perceived him to be.

I hadn’t known there was a helicopter landing pad up here. Then again, I’d never asked.

Suddenly unsure where to stand, what to do with my hands, I walked to the edge and gazed down at the mostly empty parking lot below. Mostly empty except for a dark, nondescriptJapanese-made sedan. I’d watched it in the rearview mirror the entire still-one-handed drive here. I knew who was inside: Noam.

If Resi thought I was stupid enough to let my guard down, she was even stupider. But I wasn’t. And she wasn’t.

“Holy shit, kid, what did they do to you?” Langer asked, apparently finally getting a good look at me.

I hadn’t checked a mirror, but I knew. The flashy, peacocking tech bro I’d pretended to be when I left? Gone. In his place: a throbbing, bruised, bedraggled, abraded, barely upright disaster—though probably still, for once, in better shape than Louisa, wherever she was.

The roof hadn’t been my first stop when I got back. I’d made a few others, the last to the break room fridge for an ice pack, which I’d ripped off my hideous-looking wrist in frustration after less than a minute. I hadn’t even attempted to deal with my shoulder. No time for comfort. Not for me.