“I try every day not to think about it.” Demi tried to laugh, but it came out more a sigh. “If they are, I’d rather not know.”
Cora bit her lip and looked behind them again. “Really?”
“I have enough to deal with,” she said. “I feel like if I knew I was being spied on or phone tapped or followed, I wouldn’t even know how to function.”
“I guess,” said Cora, eyes still on the car behind them. She switched the station back to NPR, but the report on The Broken Seal had already come and gone. “Lu says we’re always being monitored.”
“I know she does,” said Demi coldly. “I know.”
Cora decided to drop it and tried to keep her focus on the Dodge Stratus in front of them. Living under The Broken Seal’s shadow was a source of chronic fear that had only worsened since the Ampersand Event and subsequent leak of the Fremda Memo. Like the fan belt on the verge of snapping, The Broken Seal was a time bomb that would inevitably blow up in their faces. Again, she looked into the passenger-side mirror for the Town Car but saw that it had vanished. She couldn’t shake the dread that this was the day the bomb would go off.
Once Demi had dropped her off at the Kaiser building downtown, Cora tried not to think about the Town Car, trudging through four hours of mind-numbing data entry during which, owing to company policy, she was not allowed any internet access. On her way to lunch, however, the dread only now starting to subside, she spared a glance out the window, at the roof deck of the parking garage several stories below.
There was the Town Car.
Seeing the car briefly stunned her into a stupor; she had not actually expected to see anything there. Why hadn’t she turned the station back to NPR? Why, God, why had she listened to “Fergalicious” instead of the news?
She whirled around, scanning the mostly empty cubicles, half expecting the Town Car guys around any corner to throw a bag over her head and stuff her in their trunk. She considered leaving work altogether before deciding it would reflect poorly on Demi, and she was already on Demi’s shit list. Besides, the Town Car was there, the men were not. They were likely somewhere in the building. Perhaps they were waiting for her to leave. Probably, this was nothing.
Possibly, it wasn’t.
Cora stiffly brushed past the few other people in their cubicles who had decided to work through lunch. By the time she made it to the elevator, half convinced a couple of FBI agents were waiting in ambush at the exit, she decided to go to the cafeteria on the third floor rather than find lunch anywhere half-decent. But when the elevator doors opened, a large brick of a person stood on the other side. His face lit up upon seeing her, and Cora struggled not to wince in return.
“Sabino!” It was Eli Gerrard, one of the only people at Kaiser she knew by name. Eli was not a temp but a college graduate who worked in IT. “You okay?”
“Um,” she managed. The door began to close, but Eli smashed the Door Open button, smiling like he’d done her a big favor as the door bounced back open. He fancied himself part of the hacktivist crowd, and, like most of his peers, he adored Nils Ortega.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
She wasn’t sure whether Eli was the best person she could have bumped into or the worst. She grimaced, conscious of how suspicious she looked, and moved inside the elevator. “Well …”
His eyes lit up as the doors closed behind her. “Is it something to do with The Broken Seal?”
“Maybe?” she said, now kicking herself for being in a situation where she was trapped in an elevator with this man. Even at a distance of a couple of feet, his eagerness, his overfamiliarity, felt like a violation of her personal space.
Eli was a scene kid, the type that was just a little too into Panic! at the Disco to be trusted. Ever since she’d started temping here a couple of weeks ago, Eli had been one of the first people who had taken a special interest in her, and for the worst possible reasons. At first, he saw her as an in where The Broken Seal was concerned and then, when he realized she wasn’t, he turned cold. She saw him sometimes talking to other people while staring at her. She was always waiting for him to accuse her of being a traitor to the cause, an enemy of free speech.
Hell, people like Eli were more than their share of the reason she was so paranoid. Back in July, she’d made the mistake of doing an interview for the Los Angeles Times. She’d answered their questions as diplomatically as possible—had Nils Ortega been a good father to her, her brother, and her sister? No. No, he had not. There was a reason he hadn’t been in their lives for half a decade. Oh, the outrage in the hacktivist community that she had dared insinuate that their god-king was fallible. She’d had to delete all her online profiles, both the ones with her current legal name as well as the old ones that still bore the name “Cora Ortega.”
But Eli had never been beastly to her as so many others had, at least not to her face. She figured she may as well see what he knew. After all, he actually followed this junk. “I think I’m being followed.”
His eyes twinkled. “Really? By who?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’m a little freaked out.”
“Where?”
“They’re outside. Or at least their car is.”
“Is it the feds?”
“Maybe? Probably? I don’t know.”
“Oh, man, this could be huge,” he said as the door to the third floor at long, long last opened. Cora all but fell out of the elevator, and he followed. “All that shady stuff the feds have done that’s come out—up in Altadena and Pomona. You know?”
Cora stopped in front of the women’s room and restrained the urge to roll her eyes. “I’ve heard rumors.”
“People saw some stuff. Real witnesses after the Ampersand Event. But then the government fried their brains and erased their memories so they couldn’t say what they saw.”
“Yeah, I heard that one.”
“Why would that have happened if they didn’t see something they weren’t supposed to see?”
Despite deliberately trying to avoid all things Nils-related for her own sanity, she was well aware of that conspiracy theory. People like Eli thought the Ampersand Event was a spaceship or something, a UFO or a scout, or at the very least a probe. Cora, like most people, believed it was a rock that fell out of the sky and landed in the hills north of Pasadena. “I don’t think that has anything to do with who’s in the parking lot.”
“It might,” he said. “What makes you think they’re following you?”
Cora almost started moving toward the cafeteria, but stayed put next to the women’s room in case she needed a place to escape where he wouldn’t follow. “They were behind our car on the way here. Then, just now, I saw the car parked on the roof of the parking garage.”
“And you assume they’re here because of you?”
Another batch of people unloaded from the elevator, and Cora kept her voice down. “I don’t know, maybe? I mean, there was something on the news this morning.”
“Oh, right. That.” He watched her while she waited for him to continue, a tiny smile starting to form.
The spike of fear, the same one that always came with the mention of Nils, prodded her in the gut again. “What?”