Page 84 (2/2)

I dunno.

The Orbital tried to process the response. Tried, and failed.

What do you mean, you do not know?

I dunno.

Do not disobey me, Chelsea. You will bring the destroyer if you talk to him. You must never, ever connect to him again.

I already told you once, Chauncey. You’re not the boss of me.

The Orbital felt the connection end. Chelsea had broken it. The Orbital hadn’t known that was possible.

Clearly, it had to make additional changes. Now it would have to divert yet another part of its processing to making sure Chelsea could not speak to the destroyer again.

She was already more powerful than projected, and that power would only increase as she connected to become more and more converted.

MURRAY AND VANESSA, BFF

The president of the United States of America sat in his Oval Office chair, holding a gla.s.s of sixty-year-old Macallan on the rocks. Vanessa Col-burn sat in a chair near the desk. She didn’t drink, Murray had heard. Except, maybe, for the blood of her victims. Or of random orphans. Or maybe a kitten.

The Macallan was an Inauguration Day gift from the Scottish amba.s.sador. It was rumored to cost upwards of thirty thousand dollars a bottle. You didn’t exactly give the president of the United States a bottle of Chivas Regal as a present. That gla.s.s alone was probably worth more than Murray made in a week. He would have loved to let Gutierrez savor the scotch, but now wasn’t a time for slow sipping.

“Mister President, we need an answer,” Murray said. “Doctor Montoya wants to operate on Bernadette Smith immediately.”

“So operate,” Vanessa said. “Ogden’s men got you the live host you wanted, but Dawsey won’t talk to the triangles. Kind of shoots the whole plan right out of the sky.”

In one sentence she managed to combine the success of her idea to send Ogden with the failure of Murray’s team to capitalize on it. Okay, so it was actually a compound sentence—that didn’t change how effortlessly Vanessa Colburn could make you look like an idiot.

“Montoya can still dissect a triangle before it decomposes,” Vanessa said. “We’re further ahead than we were before, even though Dawsey failed to communicate, so what’s the problem?”

“The problem, Miss Colburn, is that for three months we’ve also been trying to capture a live hatchling. Now we can achieve that objective.”

Vanessa stared at him. “Achieve that objective? What the h.e.l.l are you saying, Murray? That we should just let this woman die so we can capture a hatchling?”

“It’s an option that’s on the table.”

“It’s an option if you’re a f.u.c.king vampire,” she said.

She was calling him a vampire? Priceless. “We need information. Wars aren’t won with guns. They’re won with intel.”

She shook her head. “This isn’t a war, Murray.”

He’d had just about all he could take from her. This woman had the president’s ear? This woman was part of deciding the fate of the free world?

“Not a war?” Murray said. “What would you call it, then?”

“It’s a crisis situation,” Vanessa snapped. “No one in his right mind would call this a war.”

<script>