First order of business in any situation was to gather data. Raleigh always felt that urge, but activating her tech made the compulsion even stronger. Thankfully she’d thought months ago to ask Janni to disable her transmitter, so she wasn’t sending the warehouse’s details to all nearby consoles. She was pretty sure there were laws that forbade unauthorized broadcasting.

Even before Raleigh separated from the others, she had finished measuring off the warehouse and comparing the actual size and composition with the blueprints on file. No notable discrepancies appeared.

Scanning the inside of the warehouse took longer because she was naturally set for a deep probe, which the warehouse had tech and physical shielding in the boxes to prevent. She quickly duplicated the original macro, stored one copy of the original, and deleted the deep-scan parts in the code of the other, so she could just skim the surface and get the layout in there. She didn’t need to know the contents of all the boxes.

Pity she hadn’t thought of telling First she could do that. Maybe it would’ve convinced him to wait. Or maybe not.

Raleigh had to adjust a duplicate of yet another macro to pick up the people, and she had to tweak it a few times for it to work properly. If the Nameless could keep her from detecting them, Nev certainly could do the same, but Raleigh had yet to meet anyone who didn’t need to breathe.

Evaluating the motion of the oxygen inside the warehouse then took even more time, enough to make her almost feel frustration despite the tech controlling her body’s current hormonal cocktail. She grabbed at patterns in the motion and assigned filters and subroutines to organize them until she had a workable, if clunky, method to locate even ‘undetectable’ Nameless.

At least, she presumed it would work even when they were in ‘undetectable’ mode.

She was debugging that code as the others exited the warehouse. She climbed down and almost told them what she’d figured out, then decided to keep it to herself. “Where’s Kitten?”

“Nev grabbed her,” Janni said sourly. “Second does know she’s the target, right? You told her?”

TamLin looked at First. First looked at Janni.

Raleigh reminded herself that Nameless were conditioned to jump directly into action, rather than pause and think things through. “You didn’t even tell her she’s being hunted?”

“I haven’t seen her,” TamLin said, his nonchalant tone a troubling indicator of the type of situations he usually dealt with. “Looks like First hasn’t, either. Dasher—I mean, Second—is a navigator, which pretty much means she can easily teleport herself precisely when and where she meant to go.”

Raleigh parsed that through the detail that they hadn’t been able to get in touch with Second. “So it’s tough to contact her when she’s busy or disinclined to be found.”

TamLin’s expression said ‘Tough? Try impossible,’ but he just shrugged.

First stared at her bleakly. “I don’t even know when she is, right now, never mind where. She likes to practice on her days off work.”

Raleigh’s active mods normalized her hormones, so she didn’t feel too empathetic at the moment, but First’s expression was able to bother her a little. “Did you leave a message?”

He grimaced. “Yeah, but she won’t check it. She never does.”

“Leave another anyway,” Raleigh said briskly. “Don’t just sit and mope. Do something. If the worst happens, at least you’ll have tried. I’ve mapped out the warehouse interior. I’ll transfer that data to your consoles and see about getting a map of the surrounding area, get pings in place to alert us when Second shows up.”

She brushed off her palms on her coat and strode away, already getting started on the data transference.

Behind her, she detected First freezing for a moment, then he pivoted and hurried after her. Janni and TamLin went the other way. She assumed they were just avoiding redundancy of effort.

“It won’t work,” he said as he caught up. “Any of it. You know that, right?”

Raleigh paused, turned, and looked him in the eye. “Until your wife is dead, I’m not going to accept that, and neither should you. You have to try, because that’s all you can do. Do you want to spend the rest of your life regretting what you weren’t able to do, or blaming your sister for what she did?”

First went still, again, evidently processing her words.

Breath left him in a whoosh, and he nodded slightly. “All right. Where do we start?”

That was better.