Or how to find him.
She pulls her hair behind her ears. “Romer—”
“We don’t need to talk about it.”
Neve turns to face him, but he has already rolled onto his side, facing the other way.
She rummages through her mind for something to say, anything to fill the void, but nothing fits. So she turns to face her sleeping city as rain gently drizzles down, more felt than it is seen.
All of a sudden, Neve can’t shake the feeling that something horrible is about to happen.
She scans the surrounding buildings, all of which are significantly taller than the Convention Center.
She and Romer may be off the streets, but they’re still in full view of countless vantage points.
“You know, I’m not too sure we’re safe up here.”
A slight pause. “We’ve been safe enough,” he says, his voice cold and detached.
“We could’ve just gotten lucky,” Neve rises to her feet and rubs her arms in the chill of the night. “Just because we’re off the streets, doesn’t mean we have reduced visibility.”
“Visibility from where?”
“From all the towers around us.”
“These are all residential towers.”
“What if one of the residents reports us? Thinking we’re vandals, or something?”
Romer exhales a louder, huffier sigh. “Unless they want to arrest us for grazing, I think we’ll be fine.”
He’s definitely mad.
Neve pulls her cardigan in and walks over to the edge of the roof. She gradually cranes her neck over the rim, and looks down to street level.
There are a handful of taxis parked below in front of Pacific Rim Hotel. And further down the block, a drunken couple is staggering along the sidewalk.
Nothing suspicious, as far as she can see.
“Well—” Neve backs away from the edge, “at least from up here we’d be able to see them coming. That is unless they—” she turns around to find Romer has vanished.
Chapter 30
The Glitch
Gone. There isn’t a single trace of Romer. Neve looks to the rooftop’s exit. Did he leave? He wouldn’t. And even if he ran, he wouldn’t be able to make it to the exit in the brief while Neve had her back to him.
And panic sets in.
“Romer?” Neve’s wide eyes dart about the space, desperately hoping he’s playing a prank on her. But there’s nowhere for him to hide, even if he was.
“ROMER!?” she finds herself shouting, impervious to the consequences.
She races back up the slant to where they had just lain. To the flattened patch of grass, where it’s still dry compared to the rest of the sodden rooftop.
“RO—” a sudden grip on her shoulder makes her choke on his name. And then, like flipping a switch, her surroundings shift: and she’s elsewhere.
In the blink of an eye, she’s gone from standing outside in the dark, to inside a light-filled room. In the span of a gasp, the fresh air has become stale.
Her eyes are stung by the brightness. Her head is spinning from the sudden shift in perspective.
Panicked, she swats the grip on her shoulder off and stumbles backwards onto the floor.
Squinting against the light, she backs away from her captor—from a man in dark clothes whose face is concealed behind a black mask. Just like the man who attacked her at Galen’s.
Romer’s groan gives him away.
Neve turns her head around to find him lying onto his belly, gripping the back of his neck.
The floor moans as the man in black takes a small step forward.
Neve swings her head in his direction. She then starts to back up, shielding Romer from the man who ripped them both out of space itself.
The stranger in black stops two feet shy of Neve, then suddenly swoops down.
Neve screams and recoils on instinct, but realizes the man dived down to dodge an attack from behind.
An attack from—
Neve’s eyes widen, and she stares as Dylan strikes again at a speed too quick for her to even register.
The man in black easily neutralizes the attack, but Dylan launches another, and another, and another until there is a barrage of strikes and counterstrikes the likes of which Neve has never before seen—a hybrid of multiple styles of combat too advanced to even be real.
Neve stares at Dylan, struggling to recognize him. The boy battling before her has an arsenal of skills of unimaginable caliber. Tactics she would only expect of spies and assassins. Strikes so swift, they blur into the air, but powerful enough to crack a boulder.
But Dylan’s opponent is no force to be reckoned with, either.
He waits for the right moment, and with one swift motion traps Dylan in a tight chokehold.
Dylan grips the man’s arm, drops to his shins, and uses his weight to flip him over his shoulder. He rolls with the momentum and pins his opponent down, pulling his gun in the process. He cocks it and aims between the eyes, but suddenly drops to the floor as the man in black vanishes from right under him.
A few seconds drag by with nobody flinching. The silence stretches, swells, until it’s too suffocating to stand.
Neve feels a hand on her upper back.
She swings her head around, and then unclenches when she realizes it’s Romer.
They carefully rise to their feet, barely registering the details of the box they’re in.
Neve looks at Dylan who is stiller than a statue.
She takes a step towards him, but the palm of his hand flies up and pins her in place.
He is staring at the floor: at the shoeprints of the man he had in his crosshairs not ten seconds ago.
“Get back—” Dylan orders, firm and commanding, at which point Romer pulls Neve back behind him.
With his eyes still glued to the shoeprints, Dylan slowly rises as well.
His eyes are unblinking. It’s as if he’s anticipating something. His intensity seems savage—like that of a prey and a predator.
He suddenly swings his arm around and begins to fire at the phantom spawned behind him at the far end of the room.
At the onslaught, Romer shoves Neve back against the wall and shields her with his body.
Neve closes her eyes and wraps her arms around Romer, her hands shielding his heart and the back of his head. And she jolts with every blaring blast of Dylan’s gun, the echo of ricocheting bullets ringing in her ears.
Surviving this will be a miracle.
Standing between his enemy and the only people in the world he’d die for, Dylan fires with impeccable precision. But it’s no use. His target keeps dodging his bullets by vanishing and reappearing elsewhere.
And if he keeps jumping out of harm’s way, what is Dylan going to do once he has run out of bullets?
And the specter unwittingly reappears in the path of a stray bullet. His right shoulder jerks back, and his blood splatters all over the wall behind him.
Gotcha. Dylan aims at his head.
“WAIT!” the man’s hand flies up, and when Dylan hesitates, he pulls off his mask.
Shocked. Relieved. Confused.
“You…” Dylan gawks at the last person on earth he’d expected to see. At the first face he saw after an eternity of agony. At the man who rescued him after five hours of suffocating in a dark coffin. The man who unearthed him from his early grave with three broken ribs and an irreparable spirit.
“I know you…” Neve’s voice reaches Dylan’s ears from behind. “You were at my exhibition.”
What? Dylan frowns while holding the gaze of his wounded target. “I don’t—” he involuntarily lowers his gun a bit. “Why are you here?”
“You know him?” Romer asks.
As though in a trance, Dylan nods microscopically. “Victor Young. He was the—” he hesitates, knowing neither Neve nor Romer knows a thing about what happened that night. “He was my drill sergeant back at the academy.”
Dylan’s gaze drops down to the shoeprints o
n the floor, and suddenly he is sick to his stomach.
Wide-eyed, he looks back up at Young.
“It was you,” he nearly whispers. “Wasn’t it?”
It’s all making sense now: the clusters of trail-less shoeprints at his place… his memory loss right up to the moment he woke up at the academy’s infirmary… “I never flew to New York, did I?”
“No.” Young presses his mask down on his wound. “You didn’t.”
His response ignites the truth, and Dylan’s doubts melt like candle-wax, filling the void inside him that no lie ever could.
And when he glances at Romer and sees the shock in his eyes, a part of him feels healed.
Vindicated.
“Explain this room,” Dylan lifts his aim back onto Young’s head, but he holds his ground, unfazed.
“You know me, Holt,” Young says with unshakable conviction. “You know you can trust me.”
“What exactly were you doing at my exhibition?” Neve’s voice nears.
“The world doesn’t revolve around you, princess,” he replies without even looking at her.
Dylan cocks his gun.
Young’s eyes narrow, his brows creasing. “Is this the thanks I get for protecting you?”
Protecting..? “What are you talking about?” Dylan asks, his wielding hand atremble.
“What do you think I’m talking about?”
“Say it,” Dylan demands and watches Young’s face darken. “I want to hear you say it.”
Young closes his eyes. “Your worst nightmare.”
Dylan’s eyes dart over to Neve’s sketchbook, and straight back to him. “Who is he?” his voice breaks. “What the FUCK does he want from me!?”
“Relax,” Young assures. “He won’t find you here.”
“If you’re just looking out for us—” Romer steps up, gripping Dylan’s switchblade, “then why are your clothes identical to the guys that jumped us earlier?”
Dylan eyes Young’s uniform.
Romer is right. The men who arrested him were wearing the exact same outfits.
Young tilts his head back, exposing his neck—a tell Dylan knows all too well: his patience is wearing thin.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you,” Romer says, his inquiry, much more of a statement.
Young looks at him. “It’s complicated.”
“Simplify it for me.”
He holds Romer’s gaze as a condescending smile colors his stern expression. “I needed to get them off your tracks. So I infiltrated their organization.”
“What organization?” Dylan asks.
Young hesitates for a moment, and then exhales a deep breath that deflates his chest. “Synchrony.”
Synchrony..? The word bounces around in Dylan’s skull. He isn’t sure why, but it sounds like something he’d find in Alex’s book: Resonance… Synchrony…
“If you’re not with them,” Romer’s voice disrupts Dylan’s train of thought, “then who the hell do you work for?”
Young diverts his gaze back to Dylan. “Come with me, and I’ll explain everything.”
Romer can’t help but snicker. “How dumb do you think we are?”
“Well—you are rejecting my help without having the slightest clue as to what you’re up against,” he says. “Does that more or less answer your question?”
“Listen, asshole—” Romer takes a step forward.
“Romer—” Dylan shoots him a cautionary glance, but it’s too late. All evidence of humanity has already drained from Young’s face.
“On second thought—” Young drags his gaze back onto Dylan, “it might be fun to watch you be torn from limb to limb.”
And with that, he vanishes into thin air.
Chapter 31
The Cage
Neve stares at the spot where Young had stood not a moment ago, as ‘torn from limb to limb’ echoes in her mind. What did he mean by that? Is that the sort of thing this ‘Synchrony’ does to people? Or was Young referring to something else entirely?
She feels a grip on her arm and turns to Dylan as he pulls her into a firm embrace.
Neve’s hands glide up his back and clasp onto his shoulders. And she nestles her chin in the hollow of his neck with eyes wide open.
Despite holding him in her arms, it still hasn’t hit Neve that she’s found him. That merely minutes ago, Dylan was a world away.
And now, the only thing between them is Neve’s utter disbelief. She has found him…
“I was so worried,” Dylan whispers in her ear.
Neve starts to well up, but she bats her eyes a few times to keep the tears from collecting. And then, through a thin veil of bitter-sweet sorrow, her focus closes in on a massive panorama spanning the entire room.
“Where are we?” Neve pulls out of Dylan’s arms, her gaze glued to what reminds her of a detective’s investigation wall.
“I’m guessing Young’s hideout,” Dylan says.
No, she thinks. This is way more than that.
Even with the networks of thread aside, patterns of all kinds keep jumping out at her, demanding to be deciphered—from layers of color-coded notes at the smallest scale, to giant aerial maps at the largest.
There is rhyme and reason to these walls, but not the sort that sheds light onto Young’s intentions.
Is he a friend, or foe?
Are his claims fact, or fiction?
She doesn’t know. The truth could fall practically anywhere along the full spectrum of possibilities.
“We need to get out of here,” Romer’s voice brings her back. “Like yesterday.” He places his hand on a sheet of paper, and then forms a fist and pounds the same spot. “Is there like—a door to this place?” his gaze darts from wall to wall.
“Yeah…” Dylan responds with a bit of a lag.
“Where?” Neve asks.
“Behind the bodies.”
“The bodies!?” Neve and Romer both exclaim.
Staring into space, Dylan nods.
“Are you alright?” Neve asks.
“I only checked the top one,” Dylan looks up at the body bags. “It was one of the cops that arrested me.”
“What happened?” Neve’s brows crease.
“I woke up all tied up and gagged in their trunk.”
“Are you serious!?” she gawks.
“How’d you get away?” Romer walks over.
“I think Young ambushed them. Shot ‘em up.”
“So he did save you?” Romer’s eyes widen beneath his furrowing brows.
“I don’t trust him, either,” Dylan says to let Romer off the hook. “He probably thinks I don’t remember, or that I didn’t catch it, but right after he opened the trunk, he stuck me with a needle, and I passed out.”
Needle..? Neve thinks back to the EMT and how he tried to do the exact same thing to her. “Did you see what color the drug was?” she asks.
Dylan mulls it over. “Light blue, I think?”
Neve looks to Romer with a knowing smile.
“Well, there you have it,” he smiles back.
“What?” Dylan asks.
“We think we’re probably dealing with some sort of crime syndicate,” Romer says. “One with enough pull to influence law-enforcement, hospitals—”
“Synchrony?” Neve suggests, then turns to Dylan. “Do you think your sergeant was telling the truth?”
“I don’t trust the prick,” Romer says as he makes his way to the far end of the room. “Something was really off about him.”
Dylan follows suit, and then the two of them start to un-stack the body bags.
Neve cringes at the sound of cold blood sloshing around inside the bags. Her mind rushes back to the man she killed in Galen’s parking lot, remembering how his blood was leaking out the crack in his skull.
It takes everything she’s got not to double over and throw up.
She rips her gaze away, and diverts her attention to the wall of intel. Might as well get some answers while they’re still here.
/>
Her eyes are initially drawn to a large network of red thread. A quick inspection, and she realizes it’s a visual representation of Dylan’s whereabouts.
No surprise there. Young has already admitted to keeping an eye out for Dylan.
So she shifts her focus onto the blue network.
This one’s tricky. She doesn’t recognize any of the locations marked down on this network. Except one: the Gastown gallery where she held her exhibition.
From there, she follows a short blue thread that terminates at an industrial building.
Romer’s shop, she nods to herself. Where the men in black—the men from Synchrony—were waiting to grab him.
Compared to Dylan’s network, Romer’s is really lacking. But there is a rather long thread extending south, terminating at British Columbia Penitentiary.
Prison..?
Neve looks at Romer, trying her best to keep this revelation from painting him in a new light.
But she can’t stop wondering about what he did.
Is this the secret he was keeping from her? Did he and Dylan both do something, and Romer somehow wound up with all the blame?
Suddenly, the sight of Romer handling corpses is unnerving. He just seems so unfazed by it. He almost looks like he’s helping Dylan move his furniture.
Neve looks away, banishing her paranoia.
What she’s seen of Romer should be enough proof of the kind of man he really is.
Before Neve takes her attention off the network, however, she notices a note pinned right next to the penitentiary. The scribbles on it look like arbitrary numbers at first, but she soon realizes they are dates corresponding to Romer’s incarceration and release.
Three years… Which happen to coincide almost perfectly with Dylan’s absence.
Neve backs away from the wall and stares at both networks simultaneously.
If she’s right to assume that Dylan’s disppearance and Romer’s imprisonment are linked, then it’s quite likely that Dylan’s return had nothing to do with her.
After all, he was in New York, not the North Pole. He could have reached out to her.
If he really wanted to…
And suddenly, something else dawns on Neve—a glaring discrepancy she glossed over in the moment: