1. The Cat in the Parking Lot

The television was already on when Ellis opened his eyes.

He hadn't turned it on. The screen glowed in the corner of the motel room, a square of pale blue light that made the shadows twitch. A newscaster with lacquered hair was speaking in the measured tones of professional concern, her voice barely rising above the hum of the window-unit air conditioner. The volume was set to three, maybe four. Just loud enough to seep into sleep and color it with fragments of disaster.

"—shares of ApexCare Holdings fell an additional seventeen percent in pre-market trading this morning, following the sudden disappearance of chief compliance officer Alexei Stahl. Federal investigators have declined to comment, though sources close to the probe indicate the Valdorian Securities Commission may widen its inquiry into allegations of systemic referral fraud. In related news, the body of senior vice president Kurt Voss was discovered early Tuesday at the company's Meridian Tower headquarters. Authorities have not yet ruled on the manner of death."

Ellis sat up slowly. The sheets were damp and smelled of bleach and someone else's cigarettes. His shirt was buttoned wrong. His shoes were still on.

Across the room, Maia Frost stood at the window with her back to him, holding the curtain aside with two fingers. Morning light fell across her forearm, illuminating the fine blonde hairs and a small scar just below the elbow. She was wearing a grey cardigan over green surgical scrubs. Her hair was pulled back into a loose knot that had come partly undone during the night. She did not turn around.

"The cat is still there," she said.

Ellis rubbed his eyes. "What cat?"

"In the parking lot. It's been sitting next to the ice machine since four in the morning. A calico. One eye blue, one eye green." She let the curtain fall. "It watches the door like it's waiting for someone."

Ellis swung his legs over the side of the bed and looked around the room. Starway Motel, the sign outside had read. Twenty-two units arranged in a horseshoe around a cracked asphalt lot. They were in Unit 14, which smelled of mildew and old upholstery. A suitcase lay open on the dresser, half-packed. Beside it, a nickel-plated revolver and a black flash drive.

He remembered the gun. He remembered the drive. He did not remember the cat.

"How long was I asleep?"

"Three hours." Maia finally turned. Her face was calm, but there was something flickering at the edges of her expression, something Ellis had learned to recognize over the past seventy-two hours. The look of a person who was holding a great deal of information very tightly and very still. "We should go. The morning clerk is awake. He's been watching us since sunrise."

Ellis stood and walked to the sink. He splashed cold water on his face and avoided the mirror. In the reflection he would see a man of thirty-four with tired eyes and a bruise spreading across his left temple, a bruise shaped vaguely like the corner of a glass desk. He had no desire to look at that man.

"Did you sleep?" he asked.

"No."

"At all?"

"I sat in the chair. I watched the door." She paused. "Sometimes I closed my eyes and listened to the highway. But I didn't sleep."

Ellis dried his face with a towel that smelled of industrial detergent. He picked up the revolver and turned it over in his hands. It was heavier than he remembered. The serial number had been filed away, leaving a rough silver scar across the metal. Maia had produced it from the glovebox of her car on the first night, when they crossed the county line. He hadn't asked where she got it. He was learning not to ask questions he did not want answered.

The flash drive went into his jacket pocket. The jacket was grey wool, vaguely academic, bought three years ago at a department store in the capital. It still carried the faint scent of the office—paper, stale coffee, the synthetic lavender of the air fresheners that hung from the ceiling vents on every floor of Meridian Tower. He had spent five years in that building, reviewing financial statements and compliance reports, building models that charted the company's spectacular growth. Five years of quarterly earnings calls and PowerPoint presentations and the quiet, persistent hum of money moving through systems.

Five years of not asking the right questions.

"The car," Maia said. "The sedan at the end of the lot. Blue, four doors. There's a hide-a-key under the rear bumper. I checked."

"Whose car?"

"The license plate is registered to a rental agency in West Meridian. The contract expired six days ago. It hasn't been reported stolen yet." She handed him a set of keys. "I took these from the office. A woman at the front desk. She was asleep. I didn't hurt her."

Ellis wanted to believe that. He put the keys in his pocket.

Outside, the morning was pale and cold. The parking lot stretched out before them, its surface cracked and buckling in places where weeds had pushed through the asphalt. A row of vending machines hummed against the far wall. The ice machine stood beside them, its metal surface beaded with condensation. And there, sitting on the warm concrete with her tail wrapped around her paws, was the calico.

Her eyes were exactly as Maia had described: one blue, one green. She watched Ellis approach with the detached interest of a creature who had seen a great many humans come and go and had learned to expect nothing from any of them. When he was close enough to touch, she stood up, stretched, and walked slowly around the corner of the building without looking back.

"Told you," Maia said, already moving toward the blue sedan.

The car was a Renard Lumière, an early 2000s model with peeling clear coat and a crack in the passenger-side mirror. The interior smelled of cigarette smoke and cherry-scented air freshener. A plastic rosary hung from the rearview mirror, its beads the color of old ivory. Ellis slid into the driver's seat and adjusted the mirror. The crack split his reflection down the middle.

Maia got in beside him. She placed the revolver in the glove compartment and closed it gently. Then she sat very still, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on the road ahead.

"Where are we going?" Ellis asked.

"North. The Trans-Valdorian Highway. We stay on it until we reach the Nordican frontier."

"That's twelve hundred kilometers."

"More or less."

"And then?"

Maia didn't answer. She reached into her cardigan and produced a cassette tape, its label yellowed and blank. She slid it into the car's tape deck. The speakers crackled. Then a piano began to play, slow and melancholy, the chords falling like rain on a dark lake. Ellis recognized the piece: Thelonious Monk, "'Round Midnight." Maia had played it often in her apartment, back when they were still colleagues, back when none of this had happened. She would put the record on and stand by the window, looking out at the city lights with an expression Ellis could never quite read.

He pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto the access road. In the rearview mirror, the Starway Motel shrank and became just another collection of rectangles against the flat grey plain. Beyond it, perhaps half a kilometer back, a dark shape moved onto the road.

A van. Black. No markings.

Ellis watched it for a moment, then looked at Maia. She had closed her eyes. Her lips were moving slightly, not in prayer but in something that looked like recitation—names, perhaps, or dates, or the details of transactions she was trying not to forget.

He turned onto the highway and pressed the accelerator. The Renard's engine whined in protest but obeyed. The speedometer climbed. The black van kept pace.

The road stretched ahead, straight and empty.

Ellis thought about the night Kurt Voss died.

It had been raining. He remembered that now, the way he remembered things from a long time ago: in fragments, disconnected images that surfaced without warning. He remembered the pattern of rain on the window of the compliance department, the way the lights of the city blurred into watercolor smears. He remembered the smell of ozone from the copy machine that had been overheating all week. He remembered the sound of Voss's voice on the phone, urgent and strange, asking Ellis to meet him in the executive suite at nine o'clock.

He remembered Maia, already there when he arrived. She was standing by the window. The balcony door was open. Rain was blowing in, darkening the carpet. She turned when he entered, and her face was the same face she had worn in the motel room: calm, composed, with that flicker of something held very tightly at the edges.

"He's gone," she said.

"Gone?"

"Over the railing." She said it flatly, as if reporting a change in the weather. "About three minutes ago. I was in the hallway. I heard him shout."

Ellis had crossed to the window and looked down. The body was a dark shape on the pavement, twenty-seven floors below. Already there were lights coming on in the surrounding buildings, shadows moving behind glass.

"Did he jump?"

Maia had looked at him then, and for the first time Ellis had seen something raw and unguarded in her expression. It was there and then it was gone, replaced by the careful mask she wore the way other people wore jewelry.

"I don't think so," she said. "I think someone helped him."

Now, on the highway, she opened her eyes. The tape deck clicked, and "'Round Midnight" began to play again from the beginning. She had set it to loop.

"The cat," she said, "had the same eyes as the vice president. One blue. One green."

Ellis kept his eyes on the road. "That's impossible. Kurt Voss's eyes were brown. Both of them."

"I know." Maia turned to look out the window at the flat, treeless landscape sliding past. "But so did the cat's. And I don't know which fact disturbs me more."

The black van was closer now, perhaps three hundred meters back. Ellis could make out two shapes in the front seats, their faces invisible behind the glare of the windshield. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and pressed the accelerator a little harder.

The Renard shuddered and pushed on into the empty morning.

Behind them, the van followed.

Ahead, the highway ran straight toward a horizon that never seemed to arrive, its white lines ticking past like the seconds on a clock Ellis could no longer read. The tape deck hummed. Maia was silent. And somewhere in the distance, a calico cat sat in a parking lot, watching a door that no one had opened yet, waiting for someone who might never come.