The Veil Page 118

It had been so crazy since War Night, I’d totally forgotten about the memorial. I couldn’t carry a tune, but I loved being so close to something so beautiful. It made me feel, just for a little while, closer to my dad.

“Can we stand here for a minute?” I asked, closing my eyes and letting the voices wash over me. “Just for a minute.”

I could feel Liam’s gaze on me, looking, questioning. And then he settled in beside me. “Of course we can,” he said, and he began to hum along.

•   •   •

As it turned out, Liam could sing pretty well. We listened for two more songs, swaying to the music before we turned back to our task.

Hawkins was at the gate again. If there were standing orders to look at me sideways, he didn’t act on them. He scanned our IDs without comment, and didn’t say anything until the warning speech.

The streets of Devil’s Isle were unusually quiet. “Where is everyone?” I asked.

“It’s memorial day for them, too,” Liam said quietly. “They have their own dead to mourn.”

I felt stupid and insensitive for not realizing they’d need to grieve, too.

We walked to Moses’s shop, found him deep in an argument with something he kept trying to hit with an old-fashioned flyswatter.

It buzzed through the air toward us, zooming right into my face, pausing long enough for me to get a look at a curvy green female with wings like a dragonfly’s, and probably twice as big as one.

She looked me over, flipped me off, and flew out of the store through a flapping pet door.

“Charming. Peskie?”

“Peskie,” Liam confirmed. “And a very unhappy one by the look of it.” He walked toward Mos, smiled. “Who’d you piss off this time?”

We walked to the back of the store, where Mos worked on what was left of his hair with a small plastic comb.

“No one. She wants unacceptable terms, she can get her electronics from somewhere else. Keeps messing with my hair.”

“I think you look devastatingly handsome.”

Mos looked up at me, blushed. “You shitting me or trying to get information?”

I grinned at him. “Telling the truth. Plus the information thing.”

He looked at Liam. “I like her.”

Liam made a vague noise that probably could have gone either way. “I got a message you have something for us.”

“I do,” Mos said. He spun in his chair, used the dark monitor behind him to check his reflection, finish his hair, then tossed the comb away. And then his hands were on the keys, and he was moving through layers of security like a knife through butter.

He got to a document, sent it to an old-fashioned printer that whirred back and forth across paper with holes on each edge.

“You are the master of technology,” Liam said.

Moses grunted. “Don’t I know it?” When the pages had printed, he ripped it off the printer, ripped away the edges, slapped them on the counter in front of us. “Poked around a little in the Containment files searching for the name you gave me, then moved into the files of some of those businesses they hired to do their work. This one belonged to a contractor called ComTac.”

Liam nodded. “Some of our acquaintances talked to them.”

We looked down at the page. It was clearly a list, but that was about all I could tell. They used the English alphabet, but the words themselves didn’t make any sense. Just jumbled bunches of letters.

“I don’t know what I’m looking at here, Mos,” Liam said.

“It’s a list of persons of interest,” Mos said. “Says so right at the top.”

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