"I'm telling you I've got a line on it, but you're squeezing me. They'll block me out. They'll block me and my team and the department out. They'll scoop you up like hamsters, you and anyone else like you they can find, and put you in a fucking habitrail so they can study you. You'll be back to where you started."
"Why would you care what happens to us? We've killed."
So had she, Eve thought. To save herself, to escape the life someone else planned for her. To live her own.
"And you could've gotten out of this without taking lives. You could've gotten your kids and poofed. But you chose this way."
"It wasn't revenge." The one who spoke closed those strange and lovely lavender eyes. "It was liberty. For us, for our children, for all the others."
"They would never have stopped. They'd have made us again, replicated the children."
"I know. It's not my job to say whether or not you were justified, and I'm already going outside the lines. If you won't give me Deena, find a way to contact her. Tell her to stop, tell her to run. You're going to get most of what you're after. You've got my word."
"What of all the others, the students, the babies?"
Eve's eyes went flat and blank. "I can't save them all. Neither can you. But you can save more if you tell me where she is. If you tell me where the Icoves have their base of operations."
"We don't know. But..." The one who spoke looked at her twins, waited for their nod. "We'll find a way to contact her, and do what we can."
"You don't have much time," Eve told them, and left them alone.
Outside, the air was cold on her face, her hands. It made her think of winter, the long, dark months coming.
"I'll drive you home."
Peabody's tired face brightened. "Really? All the way downtown:"
"I need to think anyway."
"Think all you want." Peabody climbed into the car. "Gotta get ahold of my parents in the morning. Let them know we'll be delayed if we make it out there at all."
"When were you going?"
"Tomorrow afternoon." Peabody yawned, enormously. "Maybe beat the most insane of the holiday shuttle traffic."
"Go."
"Go where?"
"Go as planned."
Peabody stopped rubbing her exhausted eyes to blink. "Dallas, I can't just take off to go eat pie at this point of the investigation."
"I'm telling you that you can." Traffic was blissfully light. She avoided Broadway and its endless party, and drove through the canyons of her city nearly as alone as a lunar tech on the far side of the moon. "You've got plans, you're entitled to keep them. I'm stalling this," she said when Peabody opened her mouth again.
Peabody shut it, smiled smugly. "Yeah, I know. Just wanted you to say it. How much time you figure we can buy?"
"Not that much. But my partner's off with her face in the family pie. I got Roarke's relations zeroing in on us. People start scattering with turkey on the brain, they're harder to get in touch with, get balls rolling."
"Most federal offices are closed tomorrow, and through to Monday. Tibble knew that."
"Yeah. So maybe it slows things another few hours, maybe another day if God is good. He wants the same thing, so he'll make noises, but he'll stall, too."
"What about the school, the kids, the staff?"
"I'm still thinking."
"I asked Avril, well one of them, what they were going to do about the kids. How they were going to explain that there were three mommies. She said they'd be told they were sisters who'd found each other after a long separation. They don't want them to know, not about them. Not about what their father was doing. They're going to go under, Dallas, first opportunity."