by Martha Carr
Prince Frederick, Maryland. Highway 402 past Wilson Rd. 1100 hours.
And that was it.
Awesome. Cheyenne slipped the phone back into her pocket, folded her arms, and slid farther down in her chair until the soles of her black Vans touched the back of the seat below and in front of her. The last thing I need right now is Hersh crawling all over me again. I can sit through the rest of the class and take care of everything else afterward. No problem.
The problem now was not falling asleep to the sound of the man’s droning voice. He didn’t look at the halfling once, but if he had, he would have seen her chin falling toward her chest.
Chapter Sixteen
The sound of students in Hersh’s class slipping their laptops into their bags and rustling in their chairs jolted Cheyenne from her power nap. She shut her laptop, stuffed it in its sleeve and in her backpack, and got the hell out of that room. Thankfully, Hersh was so fed up he didn’t try to make her stay.
Not the kind of guy who’s gonna apologize for overreacting. Also not the kinda guy who likes being told no. Two and a half weeks down. Three months to go in the semester. We’re gonna have so much fun.
Instead of heading across the quad to her next class, Cheyenne found herself a nice, comfy armchair against the wall next to a power outlet in the Student Center. She plugged in her laptop, opened it on her lap, and froze.
There was that feeling of being watched again.
The prickling tingle started at the nape of her neck and curled around the back of her head toward her ears. On the VCU campus, huh?
The drow halfling logged into her laptop and looked up, scanning around. Undergrad students strolled by with their heavy backpacks full of textbooks and notebooks and whatever else. One girl with hair all the way down to the small of her back pulled not one but two little briefcases on wheels like Professor Bergmann’s as she raced across the Student Center. Someone else threw a football, and Cheyenne wanted to blast the tapered hunk of leather right out of the air.
Where are you?
But she didn’t find anyone interested in staring down the Goth chick sitting alone with her open laptop. The cool tingle faded some beneath her scrutiny. Cheyenne pursed her lips and turned her attention to her laptop.
If I’m gonna make this stupid meeting with Rhynehart and his thug with a magical attitude problem, I need to focus.
The VCU wi-fi wasn’t public. She logged into it with the password all students received during enrollment. It wasn’t the most secure network in the world, either. The school’s servers were wide open. All instructors, TAs, and professors were required to use them for everything related to their courses.
They have no idea how unsecure this whole setup is. Not like university staff expects anybody to hack into their system in the first place.
Cheyenne Summerlin had been hacking into school systems since she learned she could apply to colleges at fifteen. Of course, her mom was adamant her only daughter would attend college at the same age as her peers, despite Cheyenne surpassing her “peers” in every way by the age of twelve.
I wonder how many other students break into their professors’ class plans to preemptively turn in assignments and make skipping class less of an issue?
She grinned at that thought and muttered, “It’s probably just me.”
Two girls wearing the same hot-pink joggers and matching zip-up hoodies stopped at the closest table to the half-drow and shot Cheyenne confused glances. One of them frowned and touched her eyebrow, clearly having a hard time fathoming that piercing, plus the others. Cheyenne met the girl’s gaze, then glanced at her almost-twin. One of them rolled her eyes and pulled out a chair before sitting pertly at the table.
It was easy enough to find her professors’ files on the VCU network. Given that they were university staff teaching advanced computer science classes in the graduate program, they were fortunately smart enough to back up all their class plans in the cloud. Good thing, too. Or we’re all here learning from the wrong people.
She located the next assignments her other two professors for the day were planning to give later. It hardly surprised her that they were simple tasks for grad students. They each took her twenty minutes, which made her chuckle. The syllabi stated the assignments should take most students between two and three hours to complete.
“Maybe I should be teaching these classes.”
The pink twins at the other table turned halfway around in their chairs to give Cheyenne blatantly disapproving looks.
Okay, that’s enough. Cheyenne stared back and shot them a tense grin that was more of a sneer. “Is there a problem?”
“Yeah, actually.” The pink girl on the right shot the pink girl on the left a wide-eyed look of disbelief. “You keep talking to yourself like a weirdo, and we’re trying to study.”
“Oh.” Cheyenne glanced around the Student Center and all the other college kids walking back and forth, talking, laughing, and high-fiving each other. “Sorry. I’m new here. Is this the library?”
The other pink girl rolled her eyes. “Do you go to school here?”
Cheyenne laughed, shook her head, and looked down at her computer. The girls whispered uncomfortably about the crazy Goth chick who didn’t know how to put on eyeliner the right way, but she drowned them out while writing the emails to her professors. It was pretty much the same thing she’d sent them all last week when she’d opted to stay home and search the dark web for anything on that dead orc walking named Durg. Instead, she’d found the Borderlands forum.
The difference this week in the preemptive absentee emails, which included attachments of the finished assignments both professors had yet to issue, was three extra lines Cheyenne hoped would keep them off her back a little longer.
‘My best friend was in an accident last week and might not walk again after her life-saving spinal surgery, so I’ve been helping her adjust now that she’s awake. I don’t plan to miss any more classes after this week, but I will keep you updated on the situation with my friend. She doesn’t have any family in Richmond, so I’m the only one who can help her.’
Yes, it was a little heavy-handed, but it wasn’t a lie, either. Cheyenne didn’t expect Hersh to have many sympathetic bones in his body, and Dawley wouldn’t be much better. She was banking on LePlant and Beckwith having spent more time interacting with other humans. Maybe they wouldn’t penalize her for assisting people who needed help.
“Other humans,” Cheyenne muttered and shut her laptop. “That’s ironic.”
She ignored the nasty looks Pink One and Pink Two shot her as she grabbed her laptop and charger and stuck everything in her backpack. When she stood from the armchair, the girls at the table turned back around toward their “studying,” neither bothering to hide their misplaced disgust.
Cheyenne slipped her arms through the straps of her backpack and headed toward the Student Center’s entrance. She peered over Pink One’s shoulder to see the Advanced Calculus textbook open and the mess of an equation the chick had been working on in her notebook. When she passed the table, the half-drow pointed at the calculus problem Pink One was trying to solve—with a pen—and muttered, “That’s wrong.”
“Excuse me?” The face Pink One pulled with that question made her look like she needed a bathroom break and a calculator.
“It’s not wrong,” Pink Two added with a scoff. “And you’re not in our calculus class, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Nope. I took the class when I was sixteen.” Cheyenne shrugged and stepped away from the table without looking at either of them. “The solutions are in the back of the book if you don’t believe me.”
Then she was winding her way through the growing crowd of college kids rushing into the Student Center to study, meet friends, grab a quick bite to eat, or kill time between classes. One…two…three…
“What?” Pink One screeched over the growing echo of voices filling the Student Center. “How did she… That can’t be right!
”
Cheyenne ducked aside as a nineteen-year-old bro shoved his friend toward her, and she let herself smirk. I’d be the worst teacher in the world.
It took her fifteen minutes to walk back to her Focus in the student parking lot. She unlocked the driver’s side door and slipped the burner phone out of her pocket to check the time: 10:13 a.m.
“Great. I couldn’t drive two hours away in forty-seven minutes even if I had a Corvette instead of this thing.” She gave the Focus, with its peeling coat of matte paint and red-brown rust stains, a loving pat. “But I don’t need a car to get everywhere, do I?”
Shifting into her drow form for speed wasn’t an option in the packed student parking lot on a Wednesday morning. Cheyenne moved her backpack to the passenger seat, slipped behind the wheel, and started the car. “Okay. We’ll take turns.”
Chapter Seventeen
The clock on her dash read 10:37 by the time Cheyenne pulled into the Mechanicsville Park & Ride off Interstate 295. She turned the car off and grabbed her backpack to stick it in the trunk. This time, she locked her car and took the keys with her. Almost got the cigarette smell out. Definitely don’t need anyone else squatting in my car for however long this stupid meeting with Rhynehart takes.
With a last glance at her car, she reviewed a mental checklist, then Cheyenne headed across the Park & Ride toward the long stretch of open partially landscaped grass along I-295. No one else occupied the lot, and she waited for a lull in the highway traffic. With no cars nearby, no one saw her transformation from pale skin and black hair to purple-gray skin and bone-white hair. She shook her hands out, the chains on her wrists clinking together, and broke into a dead run. The half-drow all but disappeared in a streaking blur of gray, black, and white, a handful of weeds and tall grasses ripping from the dry earth in the aftershock of her departure.
Cheyenne ran as fast as she could, considering the bullet wound in her hip was still giving her problems. The trees and bushes lining the highway appeared as a continuous line of green and brown. On her right, southbound traffic made a gray line in her peripheral vision.
Three minutes later, she paused and braced her hands on her thighs, gulping huge breaths of air. A giant black Ford with tires that belonged on a monster truck honked three times, the horn blaring as it passed her.
“Yeah, okay.” Cheyenne shook her head. “Idiot.”
Then she was off again. A Nissan Altima at a comfortable seventy in the sixty-mile-per-hour stretch of highway jerked left when a black, gray, and white blur shot past with a startling crack. The trees beside the highway bent toward the blur, leaves and pine needles stripping off the branches.
A residential painter’s van blared its horn as the Altima veered into the middle lane. The accountant behind the wheel shrieked and jerked her car back into the right-hand lane, and from there to her client’s office in downtown Richmond, she drove fifty miles an hour instead of seventy.
Cheyenne stopped several minutes later to take the exit from I-295 onto Route 207 toward Maryland. Her hip ached, but she couldn’t spare time to rest it. Breathing heavily, although less winded after her second stretch, she brushed her white hair out of her eyes and watched the uninterrupted traffic rushing past.
“Great. I get to cross the highway. Fun times.”
Cars honked as they passed, although whether it was at the chick standing dangerously close to the lane or at the person with purple-gray skin and pointy ears, she didn’t know.
Cheyenne slipped the burner phone out of her pocket. Okay, fifteen minutes. I can make it.
She watched oncoming traffic for a little while, then made her move. Another crack split the air over 207, and she darted out at the perfect time to avoid being taken out by a Bugatti Veyron barreling down the passing lane. The shockwave of her speed made the Veyron fishtail a little, but the driver corrected and floored the gas pedal to get away from whatever had nicked his rear fender.
Cheyenne sucked in a breath and pushed herself across the highway and down the on-ramp while avoiding two SUVs driving side by side in the middle and right-hand lanes. The man behind the wheel of the first SUV stared at her with a blank look, his index finger two knuckles deep in one nostril. The woman in the second SUV froze mid-shout, the light on her Bluetooth headset illuminating the side of her face, her right hand poised to slam down on her steering wheel. Cheyenne safely got past and sprinted onto the off-ramp for Highway 234.
The next time Cheyenne stopped to catch her breath, she was a few miles away from the spot Rhynehart had indicated in his text.
Not an address, but whatever. I can make it.
The air around her popped when she slowed, peppering her hair and face with leaves and twigs and discarded food wrappers. A semi barreling down the right-hand lane rocked sideways with the shockwave and laid on the horn for a full five seconds before it stopped its dangerous fishtail and corrected.
“Sorry.”
Another wave of leaves and trash fluttered around her as a second semi blasted past, and the half-drow stumbled into the shallow ditch on the side of the highway.
I have a whole new appreciation for roadworkers.
She pulled out the burner phone and puffed a massive sigh through loose lips. “Five minutes. Yeah, I can make it in five minutes. If I stay away from all the cars.”
Rolling her eyes, she returned the bulky phone to the back pocket of her tight jeans and lifted her feet for quad stretches. Then, Cheyenne leaped over the metal highway barrier into the wooded area alongside 231. Shaking out her hands again, she revved herself up for one final push and took off running at full speed.
The metal highway barrier screeched and pulled outward away from the highway, leaving a rippled dent as if a car had smashed into it from the other side.
A man in a red pickup saw the streaking blur of gray and white before the metal barrier jerked away from the road. He slapped his buddy in the passenger seat, who jolted awake. “Dude. Dude! Look at that.”
“You woke me up to show me how windy it is? Man, go fu—”
“You ever seen wind hit one strip of trees like that and nothing else?” The driver pointed toward the snapping, rocking trees on the side of the highway stretching miles ahead of them now. “That ain’t wind.”
“Huh. Maybe it’s a bear.”
“Shit, Donnie. Ain’t no bear out here ripping out trees faster’n sixty-five miles an hour.”
“Well, I don’t know what the hell it is!”
“Bigfoot.”
“Man, get outta here—”
“I told you, Donnie. I told you Bigfoot was real. You owe me twenty bucks.”
“Man, I don’t owe you jack!”
Cheyenne slowed considerably to dart around trees. She’d had plenty of practice moving through the woods like this when she lived with her mom in the middle of nowhere out in Henry County, but her damn hip frustrated her. Twice, she slipped on the thick foliage. The first time, her shoulder crashed into the trunk of the closest tree and ripped a chunk out of the bark. The second time, she slid sideways into another tree and snapped the thing in half. The broken top of the tree shot after her for a dozen yards, slamming into other trees.
Gritting her teeth, Cheyenne pushed faster. When it looked like she was getting close, she emerged from the woods and ran through the tall grass beside the highway. Two streets blurred past, and she had to swerve to avoid hitting a black Jeep parked on the shoulder. When she passed the next street, she stopped. The trees bent and creaked beside her, swinging wildly in the shockwave. “Seriously? I passed Wilson Road!”
Rolling her eyes, Cheyenne turned around and shot back the way she’d come.
The black Jeep hadn’t stopped rocking from the drow halfling’s wake when the streaking blur of gray and white passed the vehicle from the opposite direction. It bounced on its tires as leaves and pine needles and a spray of pebbles from the shoulder pelted the hood and the windshield.
Cheyenne stopped and grimaced as the spray of debris h
it her from behind, but it was nothing compared to her screaming hip. She braced her hands on her thighs again to catch her breath, then glanced at her scraped right shoulder.
Blood’s still red, no matter my skin color.
Her scratched shoulder and the top half of her arm were numb from crashing into the tree, but they had nothing on the bone-deep ache in her hip. She straightened with a grimace and pulled up the hem of her black tank top with satin straps and metal studs through the satin bows at her shoulders—at least, the right-shoulder used to have studded bows. Now it was a mess of shredded ribbon.
She peeled down the top of her tight black jeans for a view of the shiny, puckered scar. It was red and chafed from all the running, but it hardly compared to how much her hip ached on the inside.
The driver’s side door of the Jeep shut, and Rhynehart’s heavy boots crunched across the gravel on the shoulder of the highway. “You should’ve been here two minutes ago.”
Cheyenne dropped the hem of her shirt and glared at him. A little breeze blew against her back, ruffling her bone-white hair and making the leaves caught in it scratch her cheek. She brushed her hair aside, then tugged out the twigs and whatever other plants had hitched a ride.
She tossed the twigs on the tarmac. “Seriously?”
“I said eleven hundred hours.”
“Yeah, and I ran all the way out here from downtown Richmond in forty-seven minutes.” She cocked her head. “Okay, forty-nine.”
Rhynehart hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans, which were clearly not FRoE issue, and cocked his head. “How’s the hip?”
“Peachy.”
“You might wanna invest in some running clothes.” Rhynehart sniffed and pinched his nose. “I heard yoga pants are pretty good.”
Cheyenne blinked at him. “I don’t do yoga pants.”
“Your call. Get in.” The man slid behind the wheel of the black Jeep again.
The half-drow scoffed. “Yoga pants.”
