Audrey sat down slowly in the high-backed chair, watching Noah, who leaned forward and waited.
“You’re pretty intrusive,” she told him. “I didn’t ask you to become my friend. I didn’t ask you to come over here tonight, when I have so much else to worry about.”
“I came here because I like you,” Noah said.
Audrey felt the beginning of some feeling in her stomach and quickly crushed it. “I like you, too,” Audrey said. “Less now, but I can’t truthfully say I don’t think you’re interesting.”
“I don’t know,” said Noah. “You’re much more interesting than I am.”
Audrey frowned and shook her finger at him. “You see, that’s exactly the kind of thing I mean. Most people find me not interesting, which works very well for me, and then you come along ...”
Something occurred to her. “You know,” she said, “if I wanted to set a trap for someone like me, you know what I’d bait it with? Someone like you.”
“I’m what you see,” Noah said. “Nobody’s setting a trap for you.”
“Oh, that’s not true at all,” Audrey said. “I mean, you may be genuine, but the trap ...” she laughed, but it came out sounding angry. “The trap is already sprung.”
“Will you explain that to me?” Noah said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
Audrey clasped her hands together, noticed she was jiggling them, and made herself stop. “I haven’t had time to make decisions,” she said. “Everything’s changed now. It changed tonight. Why don’t you go home, give me time to sort all this out and maybe get some rest? We can talk in the morning.”
She wasn’t being entirely honest, she realized. There was no way she was going to get any rest that night, and she might be long gone by morning.
“No,” Noah said. “I think it should be now.”
“So, you don’t trust me.”
“I trust that you’re a good person,” Noah said. “I don’t trust that you’ll still be here tomorrow.”
“If you trust that I’m a good person, why not trust me to make the right choice about what to tell you and when?”
“Because I think you need help, and I don’t think you’re the kind of person who usually asks for help. And because something’s going on that I feel that I’m morally obligated to understand.”
“OK,” said Audrey. “So, what are you going to do? Will you call the police?”
Noah shook his head. “I’m going to rely on your good sense and ask you to let me know what’s happening,” he said. “You said everything’s changed. To me, that sounds like you’re in trouble. Who with? The police? Criminals? Someone in America?”
As muddy-headed as she still was from the wine, Audrey forced herself to step through her options. She wasn’t armed and had only basic self-defense training. Even if she did have some way to physically overwhelm Noah, she was sure that would be the wrong move, and even the idea of it turned her stomach.
Running was an appealing alternative, but Audrey wasn’t sure how that could work. Even if she got out of the room and out of the building, where would she go, and what would Noah feel like he had to do in response? It was nice that he was deferring to her judgment for the moment, but if she fled without talking to him, she’d be pushing him to take some other kind of action.
Yet telling Noah anything about her situation would mean declaring an absolute break. She couldn’t continue with the project if Noah knew: he couldn’t let her, and sharing that information would put a permanent end to her intelligence career. America wasn’t partial to spies getting drunk and spilling secrets. The consequences of breaking with the Agency like that, once they found out, might be prompt and violent.
The more she thought about it, though, the clearer it was that her intelligence career was already over. Someone—probably Godbout himself, though possibly one of his allies or underlings—had turned on her. She couldn’t continue the mission any more than you could continue petting a dog whose jaws were crushing your arm. It was disappointing and infuriating to suddenly realize that the decision she’d been fretting over the most, whether or not to abandon the mission, was already made for her—and by Tyler Godbout, of all people.
She glanced at Noah. He was simply waiting, giving her time. She could see from the tension in his body that he wasn’t waiting patiently, but you can’t have everything. A man who was interesting and interested and waited for you to think about what you were going to say ... No wonder she hadn’t done what she obviously should have—cut him off at the beginning.
She did have the choice of trying to salvage her career. As high as Godbout was, there were people she could go to who were officially over his head, and much of his power was influence rather than chain of command. She could contact the head of her agency, a woman she had never previously spoken with or met, explaining that her mission had been compromised from within the organization, and by whom. She could go to one of the safe houses and wait for extraction. Hell, with the war on, she might not even need to be extracted. America might come to her.
It was the war that settled it for her, not just that they hadn’t given her mission a real chance, not just that she had been allowed to run an operation everyone at the top knew was doomed to fail. It was that those who were making the decisions in America were willing—eager might be the better word—to go to war with Cascadia in the first place. Someone—many someones—had decided that rather than playing the hand America had been dealt, they were willing to cause untold harm, destruction, suffering, and death. They were willing to burn the forests of the Pacific Northwest, to take a nation that had figured out many of the problems America still had and crush that nation, to drag it back to the political morass and stagnation that America had become. There had been a time—say, back in the 2020s—when America had the opportunity to become something new, something profoundly better. The Cascadians had seen this opportunity, and they had embraced it, but America had turned away. Audrey liked to think that somehow, somewhere, there was a different America, a braver America, one that had never split or gone down that troubled road.
She had no mission now, no place in the American scheme. The one question that remained was what she would do for herself. Should she turn herself in, or run, or ... something else? Was there a something else?
If there was, she realized, that something else might well involve Noah. She looked back up at him, tilting her neck to try to stretch away some of the tension that had accumulated there, and took a breath.
“All right,” she said. “I’m going to tell you what I came here to do, and why that changed.”
And she told him.
Once the words started spilling out of Audrey, she couldn’t stop. She talked about being recruited back in the 2040s, about her career in American intelligence, and about the work she’d done. She talked about how they’d brought her the sabotage mission and asked her to take charge and about the mission itself, though she gave no identifying details. She talked about searching for her family, about her mother and about the brother she’d hadn’t thought to look for, about growing up left behind with her dour father, about meeting Noah himself, about how it felt to come to this strange yet strangely welcoming country, about not being able to speak to anyone. She talked about Godbout’s dismissive manner in Tucson and about what he or someone close to him had done to her, about the CitDiv money being sent to her brother and to people like Marley Jun. She talked about Gene Ajou being set up as a scapegoat, about wrestling with what to do when she realized her project had been compromised, and about how meaningless it had all become with the beginning of the war. Until now, there had been no one to talk to, and as well-regulated as Audrey was, her dammed-up need for human connection rushed in and took over. Everything had shifted. She wasn’t quite the same person she’d been just hours before.
Noah listened intently, stopping her only a handful of times to clarify details.
It was about ninety minutes before Audrey ran out of things to say and went silent. She was exhausted, but she also felt cleansed in a way, like the feeling you get after having cried.
Noah sat looking at her for a stretch, his brow creased as if he was trying to do complicated math in his head. Audrey was too empty to be worried about his reaction.
In the end, he spoke.
“Can you explain to me again,” he said, “why you agreed to take the mission?”
“To prevent a war,” Audrey said. “If we could make Cascadia look like it was faltering, it would quiet some of the voices in the U.S. who were demanding basic income and other Cascadian-style policies, and it would make Cascadia less threatening.”
Noah just kept looking at her, frowning.
“I know it was a terrible thing to undertake,” she said. “I know that even if it had worked, it would have perpetrated a lie that affected millions of people. But all that was nothing compared to war. This war could be terrible. The weapons we’ve seen so far are nothing compared to what we may see if either country gets truly desperate, and already the destruction is staggering. If they had just given me time to finish my work, and if my mission had helped delay the war long enough for something to change the course of relations between Cascadia and the U.S., it would’ve been worth it. Good people would’ve gotten hurt, and I’d have regrets for the rest of my life—I know that. But it would have been better than this.”
Noah nodded. “And what do you plan to do now?”
It wasn’t an entirely sensible question, because what he did in response to what he’d heard would shape what Audrey did next—although he had offered to help.
“Well,” Audrey said, “tell me what you’d suggest.”
“The first thing?” he said. “The first thing I’d do, if I were you, would be warn ... the man you talked about. The scapegoat.”
“Gene Ajou,” Audrey supplied.
“Yes, Gene Ajou.”
That wasn’t what Audrey had been expecting. To be honest, she didn’t know what she’d been expecting. She did like his answer, though. She’d helped cause a lot of harm, harm that had turned out to be pointless and unnecessary. The least she could do was limit the damage.
“That’s not a bad idea,” she said. “Do you mind if I make a call?”
“No,” said Noah. “Do you mind if I stay and listen?”
Well, why not? “Go ahead,” Audrey said. “Actually, why don’t you make the call, voice only, and conference me in?”
“Why me?” said Noah.
“Because it would help me if I weren’t making any on-the-record calls revealing state secrets,” Audrey said.
Noah thought about it for a moment. “All right,” he said. “Give me the name again?”
Audrey did, spelling it out, and then she engaged a voice substitution application. She’d be able to speak at an inaudibly low volume, and the application would re-speak her words using a completely synthesized voice and speech pattern.
“I sent a call request,” Noah said. “I wrote that I was acting as an intermediary for someone who wanted to share some important information. Ah ... he’s asking who. Don’t worry, I’ll just tell him it’s not safe for you to say ... and I’ll put him on the room speakers.”
Noah gestured up a keyboard, typed something, then made more gestures to transfer the call to the house audio. They waited, and after a moment, Ajou spoke in a clear, resonant voice.
“This is Dr. Ajou.”
“Hello,” Audrey subvocalized, and the voice substitution spoke almost as fast as she did, like a simultaneous translator. “I’m sorry to disturb you like this, but there are some things I think you should know. You’re in danger. You’re being set up.”
“By Bennet Culkin?” Gene said. “Thanks, I heard about that. Who is this, exactly?”
Audrey was stunned into silence. She glanced at Noah, whose expression said well, there’s a twist.
“I’m the head of the mission that made you the scapegoat,” she said. “I’m in charge of sabotaging the Cascadian Citizen Dividend for the benefit of the United States.”
“And you’re calling to tell me about it?” Gene said.
“I’ve always had some ... reservations about the mission,” Audrey said, “but the whole point was to stop a war. Now, there isn’t any point. I’m just trying to limit the damage.”
“I’d love to know how attacking another country’s economic system is supposed to prevent war,” Gene said, “but I don’t think we have time for a long conversation right now. I do need to ask, though—aren’t you going to get in trouble, talking to me like this?”
“I’m already in trouble,” Audrey said. “One of my superiors set a trap for me, and actually, I suspect he’s trying to game the whole process to make himself a bundle of money.”
“Really?” Gene said. “That’s interesting. Can you hold for a minute?”
“You’re asking me to hold?” Audrey said.
“Just for a minute. I might be able to help you with something. Hang on.”
What did he think he could help her with? Gene was gone for more than a minute, and Audrey very much wanted to disconnect. It was probably a terrible idea to let the call continue, but she waited.
His voice came through again, finally. “I know some people who’d like to work with you,” he said.
“Work with me on what?” she said.
“Undoing some of the damage you’ve done. Also helping to end the war, and maybe even bringing down Tyler Godbout.”
“How do you know that name?” Audrey demanded. “Who are these people you’re with?”
“This isn’t the best way to talk,” said Gene. “They said they’d get right back to you.”
“I don’t want to keep this going through my friend,” Audrey said. “Why don’t you tell me how I can get in touch with them instead?”
“Don’t worry, Audrey—they won’t involve Noah,” Gene said. “You’ll get a call you directly.”
Then he hung up.
“What was that?” said Noah.
“I ...” Audrey said, shaking her head. How did they know who she was? Who were “they,” even? Did she need to run? If she did, would Noah let her go?
It was down to that non-secure call. If it were her on the other end, and if she were speaking to someone unknown through a known individual’s connection, she would probably try to determine where the known person was and to trace their recent contacts, if she could get access to that kind of information. From there, it might not be difficult to guess who the third party was. She herself might be able to do it, given resources, luck, and a week or two. Who was Gene with who could do it in two minutes?
It had to be the Cascadian government. Gene knew much more than he should have known. Either he gained that information by being much sharper and more inquisitive than anyone gave him credit for, or someone was helping him, or the government had somehow already figured out he wasn’t behind the CitDiv fraud and was aiding him in finding out who was. None of those situations seemed safe for Audrey, and to imagine that Gene was with someone who had that power but who was willing to help Audrey seemed so far-fetched as to be laughable.
“I’m concerned,” Noah said.
“I’m concerned, too,” said Audrey. “Actually, concerned doesn’t begin to describe it. I think I’d better go.”
“Come with me, then,” said Noah.
“Where?” Audrey said. “And why?”
“To my house. We can figure out what to do next.”
“Noah, we called using your lenses. They know who you are, whoever they are. And now that we’re talking about this, I’m getting worried for you. Maybe you should go to the CBI and turn me in.”
“Is that what you want?”
“It’s not my first choice, but if you do that, you can tell them I confessed to you and supported you going to them, so you’d be in the clear, and I’d be ... Well, they might not come down as hard on me as they would otherwise. Also, you’d be safe, if you were with the CBI. Oh, here we go.”
An icon had appeared on her lenses—an icon she hadn’t approved. It was a black half-circle over an uneven red background. Investigating the application it invoked didn’t reveal anything useful. The account that had created it was a one-off that had no other history. Under normal circumstances, Audrey would have extracted the app into an analysis environment, where she could use an AI to find out more about it without the danger of it actually executing.
“What is it?” said Noah.
“Something from ‘them,’ I assume,” Audrey said. “I guess this is how they get in touch.”
“But talking to them ... is that wise?”
“I doubt it,” Audrey said, “but I need more information. Wait here. I’ll be in the bedroom.”
Noah didn’t look enthusiastic about the plan, but he stayed where he was, and Audrey went into the bedroom and shut the door. Matilda, who had probably been put off by all of the talking and the presence of strangers, was curled up at the foot of the bed, stretched out and fast asleep. Audrey was irrationally annoyed that Matilda could be so relaxed, given the circumstances.
Audrey sat on the bed and, suppressing all of her security instincts, gave the icon an activating long gaze. The icon began to pulse in different colors: red, green, mauve ... then someone picked up, and the room around her went black. She was in a projection of a featureless, inky bubble, and across from her was a cartoon or a sketch of a tall woman with a mahogany complexion. Audrey looked down at her own hands: she was a sketch, too.
“Audrey! I’m so glad to meet you,” said the sketch-woman. “My name is Alice.”
It was something like fifteen minutes before Audrey and Alice were done talking, by which time Audrey was fairly convinced they could work together. That was the outcome she had least expected.
She took an oversized shoulder bag down from her closet, went to the bedside table, and packed her data tab readers, her data tabs, and some other pieces of useful electronics. Her AI scarf was in her dresser, and she packed that next. Then she went to the kitchen, holding up a wait just a minute finger for Noah as she passed him, and got two bottles of filtered water, some protein bars, and four pouches of cat food. It might have been helpful to bring some clothes, but her bag was nearly at capacity, and she didn’t want to look like someone who was traveling with luggage. Whatever was ahead, she’d make do—assuming she even got out of her apartment.
Next came the part she knew was stupid. She took the folding cat carrier out of the hall closet, brought it into the bedroom, and transferred Matilda inside before the cat could wake enough to protest. While she was closing the carrier, Noah entered the room.
“Vet appointment?” he said.
Audrey almost laughed. “An appointment.”
“With ‘them’? You know who that is, now?”
“I know what they call themselves. I don’t think they’d like me to tell you.”
“Why does it matter what they’d like?”
Audrey set the carrier and the shoulder bag on the floor, walked over to Noah, and kissed him on the cheek. “They might be new friends.”
“You’re trying to leave?” he said.
“Are you trying to stop me?”
Audrey didn’t wait for an answer but picked up the bag and carrier and headed for the front door. Noah ran after her, catching up and blocking her exit.
“Audrey, stay here. We’ll work this out together.”
“What is there to work out?” she said. “This isn’t between us: it’s between Cascadia and America. That’s all that matters right now.”
“You can’t do anything about that,” he said.
“It turns out that maybe I can.”
She tried to shoulder him aside, but he was about as movable as a utility pole. Audrey looked into Noah’s eyes, and he looked directly back at her. Neither of them flinched, or moved, or spoke for a long, terrifying, naked moment. As it passed, Noah’s brow wrinkled, and he opened his mouth to speak. Audrey finally looked away.
“I think most people underestimate you, Audrey,” Noah said, “and I like to think that I don’t do that. But are you honestly telling me that if I move, if I don’t stop you or call someone else to stop you, that you might be able to help stop the war?”
“It’s probably a long shot,” Audrey said.
Noah guffawed, not cheerfully. “Of course it’s a long shot. As a matter of fact, it seems to me like an impossibility. What is it you think you can do?”
“I have information about my side that ... Well, it could be valuable.”
“If you want to stop the war, why not turn yourself in and give it to the Cascadian government?”
“It’s not that kind of information.”
“I’m having trouble believing you,” Noah said.
Audrey looked back into his face, where his gentle eyes contradicted his stern brow. “Believe me anyway,” she said.
He scanned her face, for what she didn’t know. Finally, he reached out and pried the handle to Matilda’s carrier out her hand. Then, holding the carrier, he stepped aside.
“Are you taking a hostage?” Audrey asked hoarsely.
“Ha,” Noah said. “What kind of food does she like?”
Audrey felt a flood of relief. It wasn’t just that Noah seemed ready to let her leave; the other part was that she couldn’t remember the last time someone had offered to assume a responsibility so that she wouldn’t have to.
“Jen-Marie’s,” she said. “Ocean fish flavor. It comes in the green pouches. Here.” She fished the four pouches she’d packed out of her bag and handed them to him. “It’s not my fault if she claws your furniture.”
Noah didn’t respond to that. Matilda meowed plaintively. Audrey grabbed the door handle and made herself step outside. Closing the door behind her, her eyes felt hot, and tears trickled down her face for reasons she didn’t entirely understand. Her nose running, she hurried down the stairs and out to the road. Within minutes, probably due to help from the Louvre, a half-sized public bus pulled up. She got on it.
Audrey followed instructions through her lenses when the minibus dropped her off at the train station. According to what she was being told, she would take the first train that arrived, transfer, take another train, and travel the remainder of the way in an autonomous car that would meet her at a transit hub.
She had time as she traveled to imagine her future, but her attempts weren’t promising. There was the scenario in which the train suddenly stopped, and she was dragged away by Cascadian counterintelligence, or by someone worse. There was the scenario in which an American agent who’d somehow been clued in to her betrayal boarded the train and escorted her off with some kind of tiny weapon poised to kill her if she made a wrong move. There were several scenarios in which someone simply showed up and shot her. There was also the scenario where she arrived at the Louvre location and they killed her. All in all, she hoped her future was something beyond the possibilities that were coming into her head.
She imagined herself somehow past all this, the war somehow over and Audrey herself free and out of danger. What would she do? Retire, she thought. Then she would probably devote some time to intensive therapy. If she stayed in Cascadia, the counseling would be free, whether she worked with a human therapist, an AI, or a human-AI team. In the U.S., fees were through the roof and often weren’t covered by medical insurance, at least not for people without serious mental illnesses.
What else? She couldn’t imagine. She had purposely kept from picturing what life might be like after her mission, and now probably wasn’t the best time to start. There was no way to know what was coming next, so none of the dangers chasing each other around her mind could be settled or set aside. Anyway, the main question was what to do about Godbout. Alice had made it sound like though the Louvre had some ideas, which was a good thing. There wasn’t much Audrey could do to reach him on her own.
When she boarded the first train, she turned off her seat light to gaze moodily out the window the whole ride. She got off at the appointed station, waited in near silence for the next train, got on it, and gazed out the window again. She wasn’t used to traveling into the future without having a course set, and she wasn’t used to not knowing for sure what was going on. She didn’t like either feeling, but one way or another, soon she’d move on to the next thing, whatever that was, and then maybe she could start making decisions again.
She arrived at Sakura Grill in the wee hours. The building was dark, but she’d expected that. Alice met her at the door.
“It’s nice to meet you, Audrey,” Alice said.
“Well, I hope it’s nice to meet you, too,” Audrey said. Alice showed her into the dining room, where despite the hour, the room was alive with people crowding around tables using keyboards, specialized controllers, physical displays. There were two objects on the floor that looked like picnic coolers, though based on the cables connected to them, they were most likely self-contained specialized computers or self-contained AIs, like her scarf—though considering their size, these might have much greater capabilities. Audrey guessed the group was working with a host of networked AIs as well, but there would be no way to know just from looking.
Audrey counted fourteen people in sight, including Alice and a man Audrey knew from images in her files to be Gene Ajou. He sat at a table in the corner with a young woman and a man in his seventies or thereabouts. Apart from those at the table with Ajou, everyone seemed to be hard at work on, Audrey assumed, some kind of hacking.
“This is just one cell,” said Audrey.
“Of course,” Alice said. “One of many. Most of us never meet anyone from other cells. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to join Tobias-Henry’s. We’re sort of the flagship.”
“Doesn’t look like much,” Audrey said.
“No,” Alice said, “but you know as well as I do that appearances can deceive.”
That was true enough. “What kind of mischief are we up to tonight?” Audrey asked.
“Oh, all kinds,” Alice said. “We’re especially busy now that the war’s started. One of the things we’ve been doing for the past ten or twelve years has been placing honeypots for black hat hackers and foreign cyber military operations, and the American attacks today fell into a boatload of them. You know what a honeypot is?”
Audrey nodded, wondering whether she was being probed or if Alice was just being a good host. “A trap that looks like a prize,” she said. “It attracts people and AIs to hack it, to get them to expose their information or vulnerabilities.”
Alice nodded. “We spread ours everywhere we can, with no up-front plan of action,” she said. “We gather information that lets us access systems, and then we get into those systems and establish more durable back door access, or we compromise AIs and leave them available for us to co-opt as needed. We like to play a long game.”
“That’s surprisingly patient for a bunch of anarchists,” Audrey said. She realized she was being contentious. Reflecting on that, it occurred to her why: if this group wasn’t what she thought it was, then whoever they really were, they were a great danger to her. If they were who they said they were, though, then the danger was much greater. She was trying to establish that they shouldn’t try to play around with her, like a cat trying to big by making her fur stand on end. It was a little sad, the way Audrey was puffing up. Then again, even if there’s puffing up involved, a smart person knows not to fool with an angry cat.
“We aren’t as much anarchist as loosely organized activists,” Alice said. “We have procedures for starting and governing cells, a mission, and a set of non-negotiable principles. Apart from that, we just accumulate access and leverage, and we share that, and each cell uses it as they see fit.”
If Alice was actually sharing meaningful details about the Louvre’s operations, that was a either a sign of trust or a sign that Audrey wasn’t ever going to have a chance to share that information. Another possibility was that Alice was feeding Audrey misinformation and hoping Audrey would spread it around, maybe encouraging someone to attack the Louvre in the wrong place or in the wrong way—ironically, a strategy not too different from a honeypot.
If Alice was offering trust, that would be bold, but appropriate if the Louvre wanted Audrey on their side. It’s much easier to trust someone who’s already shared secrets with you.
Normally, Audrey would have bet on the misinformation scenario. Offering sensitive details of your operation to someone you’d just met seemed reckless. With the Louvre, though, the situation was different. It was very likely that they had access to detailed behavioral profiles for most of the people they dealt with. If they made a point of using AIs or expert systems that specialized in psychological and behavioral analytics, they might have a fairly good idea how Audrey or anyone else they targeted would respond in most situations. In other words, they might trust Audrey simply because their data made it clear she was trustworthy.
Or maybe it was simpler than that, and they just knew Audrey had no one to run to. Godbout had made her a sacrificed asset. She could also be considered a defector.
“We have another advantage that’s proving to be very helpful, too,” Alice said. “Years ago, we began infiltrating third party companies that handle later phases of computing hardware manufacture. At the tail end of the manufacturing process, after most of the inspections, we modify or add on to some of that hardware, providing ourselves with built-in, hard-wired back doors. The components we’ve compromised then get used in computers around the world by corporations, universities, governments, private individuals—anyone.”
That was disturbing—shocking, actually. That kind of access could give the Louvre enormous power, and Alice, if she was being truthful, had made it clear that nobody in the organization was really in charge. Given a choice of having the people with that power working with her or against her, though, Audrey knew which she’d go with.
“So, you’re not relying so much on exploits and software vulnerabilities as you are on access you’ve gotten through your honeypots and on interventions in manufacturing,” Audrey said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Alice. “We do a lot of things. We have world-class hackers and AI wranglers, and we’re just starting to involve some people like me, who are responsible for planning a series of actions that can accomplish more of our goals than simply doxxing or damaging a target. We have custom-developed AIs that are unlike anything anyone else has—governments, militaries, and big corporations included. Actually, one of the meanings ‘The Louvre’ has come to take on is a place full of works of art, meaning our specialized AIs.”
“That’s where the name comes from?”
“No,” said Alice. “Here, let me introduce you to Tobias-Henry—and Gene, for that matter. Tobias-Henry can give you an idea of what we’re about. Technology is only a means to an end for us. At heart, we’re revolutionaries.”
Along with the interference in equipment manufacture, the word “revolutionary” was Audrey’s second red flag. Who were these people she’d so abruptly chosen to trust?
Well, she was about to find out.