Page 46 of Travis
"Maude. He’s not in the compound, is he? Where did he go?"
"I can't discuss that with you."
Five words. No humor, no warmth, none of the dry wit she'd been directing at me for ten days over sandwiches and blood sugar readings. The voice of a system following an order.
"Is he in danger?"
Nothing.
"Maude. Please. Is he safe?"
"I can't discuss that with you, Sera."
She'd used my name. In ten days, she'd called me by name maybe a handful of times. Now it landed like an apology she wasn't authorized to give.
It also gave me confirmation that I was right on target.
I moved to his chair because mine didn't face the right screens. The data scrolled and updated, and I tried to read it the way he must have read it a thousand times, parsing every piece of communication for the thing you didn't want to find.
Most of it I couldn't fully interpret. His systems were more complex than what I'd been working with on my partitioned access, and the operational feeds moved fast.
It didn't matter. I wasn't reading the data. I was watching the screens because watching was all I had.
My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against the desk, and I waited.
Every minute was a minute he might not come back. He'd been doing this for eighteen months with no backup, no partner, no one sitting at these screens willing him to walk back through the door.
Except maybe Maude. Who had been here every time, following orders, keeping his secrets, watching a man destroy himself and unable to do anything about it because he'd programmed her to comply.
I didn’t know how long I sat there. An hour, maybe more. Long enough that my back ached from the chair and my eyes burned from the monitors and I'd bitten the inside of my cheek raw.
Then the screens shifted. A feed I'd been watching changed status. The garage sensor on the compound's perimeter log went from idle to active.
I didn't move. I didn't go upstairs and pretend I'd been asleep. I didn't close the screens or return to my workstation or give him the option of walking in and pretending normalcy for me one more time.
I sat in his chair, and I waited.
The control room door opened. Travis came through it and stopped. He was wearing dark clothes, nondescript. His breathing was controlled but too fast.
A scrape ran along his hairline above his left eye, and he was holding his left shoulder wrong, his arm pressed close to his body in a way I recognized by now.
His eyes found me in his chair, in front of his screens, and I watched him read the situation with the immediate understanding that the thing he'd been hiding was no longer hidden.
"I know what you've been doing," I said. "You're the Ghost."
