I tilted my head in her general direction, aware of her, even though my attention was fixed on the glass partition between this room and the next. She was a distraction. She could wait. Ethan Swift lay on an operating table, surrounded by the best surgical team in the city, his chest wide open and a machine pumping blood for his heart. It had taken ten minutes to get him out of the rubble that had buried him alive, and for a moment, I’d thought him dead. I’d screamed when I saw the blood mixing with cold water—it looked like more than a body could stand to lose. His surviving this long seemed like a miracle; surviving surgery would be a blessing from whoever looked over us. “How are the others?” McNally asked. “Alive,” I said, cringing as one of the doctors dropped a blood-soaked towel into a wastebasket. Couldn’t she have found someone else to ask for a damned status report? “Ga—Cipher is sore and headachy.
