The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

either he or Tangent still existed when this was over.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
    Her name was Lauren. She was sitting in Paige’s office, almost on the spot where Travis had been standing when his bonds were removed a day earlier. She was twenty-three, but looked a lot younger than that at the moment. She looked like a lost child.
    Travis was standing with Paige. Crawford and a few others were in the room too. For half an hour they’d asked Lauren all the questions about her father that the computers hadn’t answered for them. So far, nothing useful had emerged.
    There was something in the girl’s eyes that Travis recognized. He’d seen it in people before, during interrogations. An eagerness to reveal something, stifled by fear of doing so. Fear because she didn’t trust them.
    Travis leaned close to Paige and whispered a question in her ear. She looked at him, understood his idea, and nodded. She stepped out of the room, taking out her cell as she went. Lauren’s dark eyes followed her out, then returned to Crawford as he asked her to clarify something she’d already clarified twice.
    A few minutes later, Paige returned. She was carrying a black plastic case. An entity case.
    Travis waited for another exchange between Crawford and Lauren to end, then said, “Can I speak to her?”
    Crawford nodded. Travis took a step toward Lauren, met her eyes, and spoke softly but directly.
    “You don’t believe your father killed himself, do you?”
    She shook her head, her eyes never leaving his.
    “There’s no way,” she said. She was quiet a moment. Then she looked at the floor, and continued. “Everyone’s been telling me I need to accept what happened, or else I won’t be able to deal with it. They said people always feel the way I do, when this happens. And they said it’s normal for there to be … no warning. They told me they reviewed the security footage from all over the estate grounds, before and after it happened, and nobody came or went. But my father didn’t kill himself. And I don’t care whether you people believe me—”
    “We know he didn’t kill himself,” Travis said.
    Her eyes came up again. Stared at him. He turned to Paige, and she handed him the black case. He set it on the table next to the door and opened it. It looked empty. Travis reached in and took hold of what he knew was inside it. He couldn’t be sure which part he was grabbing, but the effect was identical to picking up an article of clothing with his eyes closed. He felt something like a shirt sleeve at once, and a second later his hand found the hem at the shirt’s bottom.
    He turned back to Lauren.
    “The man who murdered your father was wearing this,” Travis said, and shoved his arm through the open bottom of the shirt, as far as it could go. He saw the arm and most of his shoulder vanish into nothingness.
    Lauren’s body jerked. She stared at the empty space where Travis’s arm should have been, her eyes huge. Head shaking now, just noticeably. Her mouth formed a question, but it didn’t come out. She only stared. Five seconds passed. Then ten.
    When she did speak, her voice was barely audible. “Where is he now?”
    She was looking at Travis again by the time she said it. He met her gaze without blinking.
    “Dead,” Travis said. “I killed him.”
    He watched her reaction, and saw what he’d hoped for. She knew he was telling the truth.
    “We’re not the bad guys, Lauren,” he said. “Whatever it is you’re afraid to talk about, you can tell us.”
    She looked at him a moment longer, then turned her eyes to Paige and the others, one by one. Each nodded.
    Her attention came back to Travis, and after another moment she returned to staring at her own knees.
    “My father belonged to a group of people you’ve never heard of. You won’t find anything about them by looking at his tax records, or his phone logs. The other people who were killed, these past several years, were part of it too. I’ll tell you as much as I know.”
    As much as she knew wasn’t a lot. Her father had sought to protect her from what he was involved in.
    The group had no name, she told them. That was supposed to be a security measure. Among its members, it did have a nickname—something of a joke—which was never written down: The Order of the Qubit. Travis didn’t know that word. Everyone else in the room did. Qubit stood for “quantum bit.” A computing unit of a quantum computer. For the better part of the past decade, a