The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up, following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking and weaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping Beauty Castle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes later, in Tomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappears again.
“Has anyone ID’d the girl?” I asked, once I’d finished reliving the events. The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists clenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.
Dan shook his head. “None of the girls she was with had ever seen her before. The face was one of the Seven Sisters—Hope.” The Seven Sisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second teenage girl wore one of them.
“How about Jungle Traders?” I asked. “Did they have a record of the pith helmet purchase?”
Lil frowned. “We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back for six months: only three matched the girl’s apparent age; all three have alibis. Chances are she stole it.”
“Why?” I asked, finally. In my mind’s eye, I saw my lungs bursting out of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like shrapnel. I saw the girl’s smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled the trigger on me.
“It wasn’t random,” Lil said. “The slug was definitely keyed to you—that means that she’d gotten close to you at some point.”
Right—which meant that she’d been to Disney World in the last ten years. That narrowed it down, all right.
“What happened to her after Tomorrowland?” I said.
“We don’t know,” Lil said. “Something wrong with the cameras. We lost her and she never reappeared.” She sounded hot and angry—she took equipment failures in the Magic Kingdom personally.