“Thank you.” She pushed past him into the room. She’d learned the less you said, the better. Act like you’re supposed to be there, and you’re bored with the procedures in place, and the world opened.

Robin avoided the window into the room, took in the boy on the bed. A dirty white haze struggled around his body, trying, and failing, to get in. Alone, broken, clinging to life. The last person to be with her sister.

They’d trached him, the air tube rising out of his throat like a triton from the sea. His face was waxy and pale, his eyes taped closed. Arterial ports ran plasma and medicines; the ventilator hissed with obscene regularity. A quiet but steady beeping came from the heart and pulse ox monitor; the volume had been turned down. Alarms would blare if there was a problem.

This was a waste of time. There’d be no talking to him; he was clearly not going to wake anytime soon. Whether he was in an induced coma or landed himself there naturally, she wasn’t going to get anything from him in this state.

She crossed the room carefully, touched his hand. The flesh was slack, inert, cold. As the unhappy mist that clung stubbornly to him indicated, Tommy Cattafi was, for all practical purposes, dead.

A wave of grief passed through her. This man had a connection to her sister. He knew something, knew why she’d been killed. And who’d done it.

She gritted her teeth against the scream that rose in her throat, fury at the senseless deaths.

The young cop at the door looked at her searchingly as she came out. She shook her head, an indication that things hadn’t changed and she didn’t think they would. He nodded in return, a brief frown crossing his face, but workmanlike, understanding. Maybe not so young and inexperienced, after all, she thought. He’d seen enough death to know when it was staring him in the face.

To the elevator, ignoring a look from the charge nurse, though her heart sped up a little, just a teensy shot of adrenaline. As the doors began to close, she heard an alarm begin to go off, saw nurses start rushing down the hall. Someone called a code blue.

It couldn’t be. Could it?

She needed to get out, now.

The elevator was fast, not stopping on its descent, and she was whisked back downstairs, made her way out the door and walked calmly back to her car. She’d been careful not to park near the hospital cameras, taking a spot on the street instead of in the garage across from the hospital. But she grabbed a cab, just in case, had him drop her three blocks away with a five-dollar tip for the short fare, walked a block and ducked into a Starbucks to change. In two minutes flat she was hoofing it back to her car as a flowing Victoria’s Secret–haired brunette version of herself, in glamorous sunglasses, skinny jeans and knee-high boots.

She didn’t think the precautions were absolutely necessary, but old habits died hard.

Now, she had to figure out what to do about Girabaldi.

Her instincts told her to keep gathering information. Going in with all chambers loaded was the only way to approach her old boss. She’d worked with the woman long enough to know she wouldn’t admit a damn thing, so Robin needed proof, and lots of it, to force her to talk.

Because torturing her old boss for information felt wrong.

Bromley was the logical choice to talk to next, especially since she was so close to his office. But she itched to march into State and demand answers from Regina Girabaldi. They’d have words today, no matter what.

She texted Lola.

TC pointless, he’s permanently out of commission. I’m going to Bromley next.

Lola hit her right back.

Be prepared for security.

OK.

Also, overheard Metro. They’ve been up on the Hill, found the bodies. IDK details. Running call through our system.

Well, hellfire. They were moving quicker than she expected. She needed to get a move on.

Exact coordinates for DB?

Lola sent her the address in latitude and longitude, which, on their personalized phone system, kept encryption codes better than street addresses. She was even closer than she’d realized; it would only take a couple of minutes walking. She set off, keeping an eye out for tails.

The rain was past, the city smelled fresh and clean. She hadn’t been to this part of town in a while. It had changed, ever so slightly, in the way people age, a sudden shock at the sparse gray hair and expanded waist and wrinkles, then in a blink, the person you knew was back. Foggy Bottom would always be the same, regardless of the slight alterations to the veneer.

Her ears pricked. Something else that would never change in this city—the constant underlying wail of sirens.

She stretched her legs, hurrying. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, but evading detection was ingrained in her DNA, so she wanted to get off the radar, off the streets, as quickly as humanly possible.

She was less than a block away now. A cop car came barreling down the street and she casually stopped and turned toward the building on her right, adjusted her sunglasses, reached into her bag like she was looking for something. The patrol kept moving, turning onto Twenty-third with a screech, and she resumed her walk.

Bromley’s lab was on H Street, just around the corner from the hospital. She entered the building, noting the security cameras in the corners, and even though she’d been warned, stopped short when she saw the security desk and metal detector.

Damn it. You could have warned me what kind of security, Lola.

She wasn’t going to be able to parade in here without some sort of story. She counted four guards behind the desk, a number of screens with clear shots of the building.

There was a building directory to her right. She glanced at it surreptitiously as she walked past, and breathed a sigh of relief. There was an OB/GYN office on the sixth floor. She noted one of the doctor’s names—Thornburg—then marched to the visitor’s log, wrote a fake name, inverting the names of the people before her, and Thornburg’s suite number, then got in line for the metal detector, mentally running through her current state and the odds of making it through undetected—namely, the Glock under her left arm, the knife in her bag and the variety of weapons she always carried on her person. She and metal detectors were not friends.

Three people in front of her, two now. Only one thing to do.

In her purse, she had a mini-EMP—one of her own design, perfect for just these situations. Meant to work in a five-foot radius, the electromagnetic pulse was relatively simple technology, and had saved her ass more than once. As she dumped the bag on the conveyer, she discreetly hit the button, then smoothly withdrew her hand and, under the guise of undoing her belt, dropped the mini-EMP down the front of her pants.

Without so much as a squawk, the entire apparatus around her ground to a halt.

“What the hell?” the guard nearest her muttered. “This damn thing is going down again?”

“That’s twice this week,” the man next to him said. “Piece of crap.”

There was luck. Of course, these devices were notorious for malfunctioning; she’d just played into that knowledge. They started to mess with the controls, turning the machine off, then on again, to no avail. The line of people coming into the building began to grow. After a few moments, a man behind her shouted, “Hey, I gotta get upstairs, I got an appointment.”

More security guards poured out from behind the desk and a back room, messed with the mechanism of the metal detector, tried to get it working. After a few minutes, when it was clear they weren’t in for an easy fix, they started waving people through, doing a brief visual scan in purses and gentle pat downs.

So, not that serious about their security, she thought as the man gave her buttocks a squeeze but neglected to reach under her arms. Good thing, too. She wanted to stay under the radar, and taking hostages and fighting her way in wasn’t the way to go. She could have turned and left, but that would have drawn more attention than she’d like.