“Ashley?”
“Hi, Alfred,” she said, and then she hugged me. I smelled lilacs. I looked down and there were those enormous blue eyes looking up at me.
“They told me you’d changed,” she said.
“The dress wasn’t my idea,” I said.
“I don’t mean the dress.”
She stepped back—the hug had lasted about four seconds too long.
“I thought you quit,” I said.
“They made an offer I couldn’t refuse.” She glanced toward Abby.
“Ashley agreed to return to the Company on the condition we assign her as your extraction coordinator.”
“Oh,” I said. “What’s that mean?”
“It means Ashley is in charge of coordinating your extraction from our interface.”
I looked at Ashley. “I hate OIPEP,” I said.
She laughed. “Why don’t you change, Alfred? I’ll meet you outside.”
She left, a bouncing swirl of golden-haired blondness.
“Bathroom over there, clothes in the closet beside it,” Abby said. She looked at her watch. “We need to leave in the next fifteen minutes to stay within security parameters.”
She patted my arm and started to go.
“Abby, wait,” I called after her. “About Samuel.”
“Samuel?”
“You know, Op Nine . . . Samuel. Is he okay?”
“Yes, Alfred. We’ve moved him to a safe location.”
“Well, if I’ve learned anything from the past, there’s no such thing.”
Abby laughed.
“I wasn’t making a joke,” I said. “So he’s not here.”
“There’s no reason for him to be, is there?”
I thought about it. “No, I guess not. It’s just, we kind of had an argument the last time I saw him. Can you let him know I’m okay—that everything’s going to be okay now?”
“Of course, Alfred.”
“Who is Sofia?”
She looked at me for a second without saying anything, reminding me of Nueve’s stone-faced stare at the dairy farm.
“Sofia?”
“He said she was a ghost from his past.”