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leaning against the wall.
    Her eyes trailed down to my hand, where I was still clutching the remains of a squished hot dog. “Thanks for asking if I wanted something.”
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter Three
    “This place is sick!” Gavin let out an impressed whistle as he strolled through the entrance of Fortress 9, one of my smaller compounds on the northern coast of Newfoundland.
    I was equally impressed. I’d never been here before, either. After picking up Gavin and Peyton from the rooftop of Excelsior by helicopter, we switched to a private jet in the Hamptons. Karin then set the auto pilot for Canada, where we could regroup at one of the fortresses in my recently acquired collection. When I’d won Cameron Frost’s entire estate in a lawsuit following the Arena Mode tournament, I was awarded more luxury condos, vacation homes and high-tech hideouts than I could reasonably manage – this just happened to be the closest one that was outside the US border.
    We rounded a narrow spiraling staircase that opened to a cavernous room the size of a cathedral.
    “How many of these places do you have?” Karin asked, running her hand along the illuminated wall.
    “Thirty...I think. I still haven’t visited most of them.”
    Built into the side of a rock wall overlooking the Atlantic, Fortress 9 was sleek, ultra-modern, and offered a stunning but somewhat unnerving view; the frigid waves crashed into the towering glass window with such ferocity that it seemed as if we were floating in the ocean, always in danger of being washed away with the tide.
    The expansive room was sparsely decorated, with just a handful of couches surrounding a circular table beneath a low-hanging light fixture. The seats were protected by plastic tarps, having never been used. I yanked the covering from the sectional, sending a plume of dust motes into the air.
    Once seated, Gavin, Peyton and Karin all stared in my direction.
    “So...” Gavin said flatly, “you knocked out a government agent, stole his gun, and fled custody. That was...an interesting choice.” He sure had a way of stating the obvious.
    I nodded. “It was that, or get black-bagged and locked in a dungeon until the end of time.”
    “How did you know?” Peyton asked. “You seemed so sure on the flight over here. You were positive that they were going to take you away, even though you’re innocent.”
    “When the director of the STC was interrogating me he mentioned that I’d been a suspect since April, back when The Kremlin was attacked. Not many details had been released since then, but it hit me that something linked me to it: a black jet that was photographed at the scene.”
    I unlatched my wrist-com and positioned it at the center of the table, commanding a satellite imaging system to activate. It was a recording from a weather camera – part of Cameron Frost’s network that monitors his cloud-seeding program. One of his few humanitarian efforts was a silver nitrate delivery system that generated man-made rain clouds for the most arid and desolate countries around the world, offering relief from the ever-worsening droughts. He used satellites to track their progress, and there weren’t many spots on Earth that he didn’t have eyes on. On this cloudless New York afternoon, one satellite had an unobstructed view of The Fringe, and recorded the entire altercation.
    “See this?” I motioned to the floating screen. “This is the jet that took off after the battle in The Fringe.” The paused video gave an overhead view of the shimmering black aircraft, just before it disappeared.
    “ Sweet! ” Karin shouted. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” My diminutive teenage pilot leaped from her seat so quickly that her crop of blond hair flopped into her eyes. She tore off her leather bomber jacket and leaned in, getting as close to the projection as possible. “See these?” She traced her index finger along the jet’s wings, where two glowing rods pulsed with