Page 18 of What Remains (John Worthy #3)

Four hours later.

He did another headcount just to be sure. Maybe he’d made a mistake. As it turned out, he hadn’t, which sucked.

He wandered into an adjoining chamber. As with all the tunnels and chambers here, this was lit with LED units placed atop lips chiseled from stone.

This room was a little larger than his and opened into other parts of the complex through one of three arched openings.

The two smallest were at nine and three o’clock, respectively. The largest was at noon.

Roni was listening to a young boy’s lungs while another older child watched.

As John slid up behind the kids, her green eyes ticked up: Yes?

When he pointed at his watch and then inclined his head back the way he’d come, her eyebrows arched and then puckered into a slight frown before she held up a finger. One minute.

Nodding, he turned and retraced his steps, counting off the children here. He did this twice, hoping he was wrong.

He wasn’t.

She took more than a minute, which was fine. Leaning back against the corridor’s stone wall, he thought of how he could present this in a way that didn’t come across as an accusation. Even though, that was precisely what he was doing. He didn’t think she was the one who’d lied, though.

He thought they’d both been lied to .

“Hey.” Roni ducked into the tunnel. “What’s up?” But then when she saw the look on his face, her own clouded. “What?”

He couldn’t blurt it right out. Maybe inching his way up to the problem would be best. “How’s it going?”

“Well, a lot to get through.” Roni lifted a hand in an unconscious gesture to brush away hair that wasn’t there.

An old habit, which John had noticed whenever they had been on-call together, and a surefire indicator that Roni was harried, overworked, in need of a break.

Paperwork, of course, and then addressing each of the kid’s problems. “Like that boy with the asthma. I don’t have many inhalers on me, but…

” She stopped herself. “This isn’t what you want to talk about. ”

She knew him well. “You do a head count?” he asked.

“Do a…” She shook her head. “No, I just got down to work. Why? John, what’s the matter?”

“The numbers. They don’t add up. There are too many kids, Roni.”

“Too many…?” Her voice trailed off as her eyes widened. Her mouth formed a small, astonished o. “You’re sure?”

Would we be having this conversation if I wasn’t? “Twenty-seven kids. That’s what Shahida said. Tell me I didn’t hallucinate that.”

“You didn’t hallucinate that,” she said, her voice faint. “But…?”

“But that’s not how many I counted.”

“How many? I’m assuming you counted the boys in my group, too.”

“Yeah.” He pulled in a long breath. “Thirty-two.”

“What?” The word dropped from her mouth. “You’re sure? Shahida said?—”

He interrupted. “Roni, we’re not talking relativistic equations. I got eighteen boys. Counted them twice. You’ve got fourteen. In my land, that adds up to?—”

“Oh, my God.” Turning, Roni slumped back against stone, closed her eyes, and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Oh, my God.”

“I don’t think a deity’s gonna swoop down to save us here.”

“Don’t joke.”

“I’m not. Roni, we’re in some deep doo-doo here.”

“What are we going to do?” She gave him a stricken look. “John, we don’t have enough room. With only four vehicles, we barely have room as it is. What are we going to do?”

He hooked a thumb over a shoulder. “Let’s go talk to Driver and Mac. Then we all four go find Shahida. She’s got some ‘splaining to do.”