Rabbits(78)

Crow.

I’d been thinking about his warning, the fact that he’d mentioned Chloe specifically. That must have been when I passed out.

Did my concern for Chloe have something to do with my losing time? I’ve heard that stress can do crazy things to our minds and bodies. Could it be that simple? Did I just need to download a meditation app and book an hour of hot yoga?

Chloe sat down across from me and folded her arms.

I was just about to try to explain away my losing time, again, but there was something in the way Chloe was looking at me.

This was it.

If I didn’t come completely clean, Chloe was going to know it, and I was going to lose her. Whatever happened, whether she believed me or not, I needed to be honest.

But more than that, I wanted to be honest.

Chloe was scared, probably picturing me in an MRI machine with wide-eyed technicians staring at a brain tumor the size of a small grapefruit.

I was pretty sure I didn’t have a tumor—although when I started running over the wild story I was about to tell Chloe, I began to suspect I might be a bit overconfident about the tumor-free nature of my brain.

I told her everything.

I started with the mysterious man named Crow, how I’d originally met him in The Tower and how he’d gone on to pull a serious Moriarty move on a city bus filled with people he must have paid off. Then I explained how I’d been feeling recently—how the sensation I called the gray feeling had flared up again after being dormant for most of my adult life. Chloe sat there expressionless. Her eyes didn’t offer shock, worry, scorn, or support. She just nodded and listened.

Okay, so technically I didn’t actually tell Chloe everything.

I left out the fact that I’d seen my childhood friend Emily Connors. I did this because what had happened with Crow was crazy, but adding a childhood friend showing up out of nowhere just felt a little…unhinged.

When I’d finished, I leaned back in my chair and waited. A few seconds later, Chloe exhaled and ran her hands through her hair.

“Crow?” she asked, clearly still trying to come to terms with everything I’d told her.

“That’s what he told me,” I said.

“You and I met Sidney Farrow?”

I nodded.

“And we drank wine with her late into the morning?”

“Yeah.”

Chloe sighed. “That would have been amazing,” she said.

“It was.”

Gradually, I began building a picture. Chloe remembered Swan and the twins, but she had no memory of anything involving Sidney Farrow—including our visit to WorGames and the three of us examining the files Baron had uploaded. I didn’t have the guts to ask if she remembered our kiss. I couldn’t bear to lose that as well—though I’m sure we’d have to confront the issue eventually.

“K…?”

“Yes?”

“Promise you won’t get mad?”

“I know it’s…impossible to believe. I just wanted to be completely honest.”

“And I appreciate that,” she said. “But you have to understand how all of this sounds to me.”

I nodded. “I do.”

The two of us sat there in silence for a moment, then I remembered something. I pulled out my phone. “I got the plate number of the car that was following me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Do you think we might be able to find the owner?”

“Um…you’re a part-time day trader and I’m living off royalties from a song I wrote more than a decade ago. Who the hell do we know who can run a plate?”

“Fair point,” I said, staring at a blank screen on my phone. “It’s dead.”

I dug up a charger and plugged my phone into the wall. A few seconds later, the phone booted up and I opened the voice recorder application.

“What is it?” Chloe asked.

“I couldn’t open my camera, so I recorded the plate number using my voice recorder.” I showed her my phone.

Something didn’t make sense. The most recent file was thirty-five minutes long.

“That’s a pretty big file for a license plate.”

“My fingers were wet. I probably didn’t turn it off properly.”

“Wait,” Chloe said, excited. “When did you start recording?”

“Just before I met Crow on that bus.”

Chloe jumped up, her eyes were huge. “Fuck, K, play it!”

I positioned the cursor near the end of the file and pressed play. The sound of Crow’s voice warning me not to play the game spilled from my phone’s tiny speakers.

I pressed stop and looked up at Chloe.

“Play the whole thing,” she said.



* * *



—

Once we’d finished listening to the recording, Chloe sat back down across from me at the table. “That’s insane,” she said.

“I know.”

“Really, though…I mean, do you have any idea how much money and planning something like that stunt on the bus would take?”

I nodded. It was true—although I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms. There was something about the man called Crow, however, that made me feel like pulling that kind of stunt wouldn’t actually be difficult for him.