At least my disguise wasn’t itchy.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Seeing as I looked like a perfectly normal member of the Faction, the fact that I had walked right into the R&D/Engineering departments wasn’t weird at all. I didn’t get any strange looks from the staff working up there, but that may have been because those guys and gals took their work way too seriously. Most eyes were glued to screens. The ones that weren’t were busy tinkering with trinkets ranging from high-tech gadgets to almost antique ornaments, each of equally unknown—at least to me—function and origin.
I found Jamie simply enough., Because of everyone working on this entire floor, he seemed to be the only one who had no idea what the hell he was doing, where to go, or what to do with himself. To his credit, Jamie probably looked like he knew what he was doing up here; I didn’t think anyone suspected him. But I liked to think I had gotten to know him pretty well during the time we had spent as friends, and I could recognize his completely lost face even through the disguise he had on.
I smiled as I approached, and when he saw me, he smiled in return. It was a strange sensation. Usually, Jamie’s smiles were bright, and they filled me with tingles. But he looked like a completely different, dark skinned man with thick eyebrows and brown eyes. Smiling at him felt weird, like smiling at a stranger.
“Settling in?” I asked as I got to his workstation. The entire desk at his hands was a computer, and on it was what looked like a large list of numbers.
“Yeah, absolutely,” he said, then he lowered his head and his voice. “I actually have no idea what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. My boss asked me to go and collect some blueprints, and he gave me these numbers. I guess they’re IDs, but I don’t know where to get the blueprints from… I’m a mess.”
“Well, I’ve had my ass grabbed once already, so consider yourself lucky.”
“You had your… what?” he asked, his eyebrows crossing. “Who did it?”
“Don’t worry about it. Anyway, I also don’t have a clue what I’m doing downstairs, but this I know. Come on, I’ll show you what to do.”
Jamie followed me as we headed away from his workstation. I walked along the floor to a room where a computer attached to a large machine covered in buttons and flashing lights stood. I swirled the chair around and let Jamie sit since he was, after all, the Engineering employee, and then turned his chair so he was facing the computer.
“Okay,” he said. “What now?”
“Password,” I said.
“Do you know it?”
“What day is it?”
“Oh, uh… September 25th.”
“So, the password is gonna be fall25.”
“You’re sure? If we get this wrong…”
“I’m sure. The Faction has done it this way for as long as I can remember. The password for the main computer system changes daily.”
“Really? Because the password for my workstation was static.”
“So was mine, but workstations aren’t linked to the main computer; they’re linked to a secondary computer network that acts as a buffer.”
“Buffer for what?”
“To stop people from accessing the main computer from any workstation.”
Jamie typed the code fall25 into the password box, pressed the OK button, and the computer system unlocked itself. “That’s stupid,” he said. “Why go through all of that trouble to stop people accessing the main computer from their workstations when everyone knows the password?”
“Well, number one, not everyone has access to the main computer. Number two, the Faction doesn’t save anything worth stealing in the main computer system. At best, we’re going to find a map.”
“Map?”
“A map that’ll tell us where we have to go to collect the information we want.”
“This… is hurting my brain.”
“Yeah, mine too. I’m working on old information that I really didn’t care for. My job was to do the hunting after the investigators and admin had done all of this legwork.”
The screen that popped up next was a search box, flashing and waiting for input. “Traders,” I said. “Let’s try that first.”
“Traders?” he asked, typing the word into the box.
“We know people get into and out of the city through the shield, people who go to and from other cities. I doubt there’s gonna be anything under great big shield; it’ll be subtle.”
Jamie hit the search button, and the screen began to populate with a list of results, including the closest match to the word we had been searching for. Traders, unfortunately, didn’t enlighten us much. These entries didn’t contain any information we could use besides pointing us to the directory and subdirectory of where the information was stored. So, when we looked for traders, we found several entries for import and export of goods and materials, import and export of personnel, import and export of arcane knowledge, that sort of thing.
We made note of where we would be able to find more information on each of these topics, even though finding the information was pointless without access to a system dedicated to storing it. When we were done with that, we continued going down the list of results until I spotted one that not only caught my eye, but it sent alarm bells ringing in my head. Traitor, Maxine Cartwright. The entry glared at me from the screen smugly, like an ex-boyfriend who had caught me on the street making the walk of shame back to my apartment.
“What the hell?” I asked.
“Looks like this is a file all about you,” Jamie said.
“Yeah, I can see that…”
My heart was pounding, and my head was thumping. They had a file on me. An entire file on me. And not just one, either; this one was full of subdirectory entries and references to other files. There was a world of information there about me; stuff I probably didn’t know they knew. I knew they had my last known address, last known location, and were by now perfectly aware of my powers and capabilities—so, what more did those files contain?
“Do you want to take any of this down?” Jamie asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I really do.”
“Alright, well, looks like—”
“Actually, no, forget about it.”
“Forget about it? Max, they have all of this information about you on a main computer for anyone here to see. Don’t you want to know what it says?”
“I do. You have no idea. But we came here for a reason. Anything the Faction already knows about me is unimportant compared to the mission.”
Jamie took a deep breath, then dismissed the search results. “Okay,” he said. “Your call. What now?”
I let my head drop and pinched the bridge of my nose. The screen’s brightness was starting to get to me. “You know what, screw it; let’s try looking for barriers and shield.”
Jamie nodded, then got to work searching for what we came here to find. Barriers, shield, protection, we tried all of them, collecting the indices and file numbers of anything that seemed even remotely related to what we were looking for. They were breadcrumbs, and we had a lot of them, but Jamie had access to Engineering, and I knew where the archive was, so it was a start.
“We should get back to our jobs and try to blend in,” I said. “I’ve already been gone for a while.”
“Right, me too. Shit—the blueprints!”
I turned to the computer and typed in one of the ID numbers I had seen on Jamie’s workstation before we came in here. Immediately, a file number popped up with the options to open, close, or print. I pressed print, and the machine next to the computer began to whirr. A couple of seconds later, it spat out a large, almost table-sized blueprint.
“See?” I said to Jamie. “Easy.”
“Yeah, only because you’ve worked here.”
I shrugged and smiled. My heart was still beating like a jackhammer inside of my chest, but not out of fear; it was the thrill of the situation. The thrill of getting caught, of doing something so dangerous and risky. It wasn’t the first time we
had infiltrated Faction HQ, which either spoke volumes about our abilities, or the Faction’s lack of security systems. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t exciting.
“Alright,” I said. “Get back to work. If anyone’s going to have access to these files, it’s someone with a high clearance in admin. I’ll try and work on my boss.” I got the impression he was going to say something else, so I didn’t immediately leave the room. “What is it?” I asked.
“Your boss… is it a guy or a girl?”
A playful smirk danced across my face. “Bye, Jamie,” I said, rolling my eyes before leaving him alone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Walking back to Isabella’s office took me past the archive room for the second time. There were only two places where the Faction kept its archives, and this was one of them; the second was a backup only accessible by those with the highest level of clearance. I had never been in the archive room because, well, I was a hunter. Why would a hunter need to go digging around in the archive? I also didn’t have the clearance to go into an archive, so the idea of setting foot in one hadn’t even crossed my mind. If I needed information from the archive, someone from administration brought the file to me.
I would never have that luxury again, nor would I ever have the chance to set foot in the archive again, so I decided to try my luck.
I slowed as I approached the door and scanned the hall. Empty. Quiet. Someone coughed in a nearby cubicle, but whoever was in there wouldn’t see me try to open the archive door. I pressed my ID badge against the door control panel, but the panel flashed red instead of green and bleeped loudly.
“Damn,” I said, under my breath. Of course, Isabella had no access to it. Luckily, no one had heard, so I kept moving down the hall like I had a purpose. As I walked past Margo’s office, I decided then and there what I needed to do to gain access to the archive.
I hurried across the hall into the kitchen and switched the coffee maker on. I didn’t know how she took it, so I made a generic cup the way I liked to drink coffee—black with no sugar. Careful not to be seen by anyone deciding to randomly enter the kitchen, I turned my back against the door, held my hand against the mug, and summoned my magic to manifest.
My hand began to glow a soft blue, and tongues of fire and sparkles erupted and began to dance around the cup. I tried to mute the glow in case anyone happened to walk in, but the magic was finished before anyone had a chance to see. I had concentrated on the coffee and willed a little sickness to go into it; not a lot, and not an actual sickness, only the feeling of being unwell. I’d never infused a feeling into an object before, but after three weeks with the Order of Prometheus, I had learned a couple of things.
The glow around my hand died off, and I shook away the excess flames and sparkles. Careful not to be seen, I made my way out of the kitchen with the cup of coffee in one hand, but I turned the corner so fast I ran right into the chest of a man who was stepping into the kitchen. The coffee cup became a coffee sandwich between us, spilling in all directions and scalding both of us.
I shrieked, not from the pain, but from the shock. My body had been so tense, wound up so tightly, and all of that tension had released in that moment of sheer and absolute surprise. The man looked at me, eyes widening, mouth drawing agape, his face going bright red. The coffee hadn’t been hot enough to burn him through his shirt, but the shock had gotten him too.
“Oh my God,” he said, putting his hands out as if to keep me at bay, “I’m so, so sorry, I didn’t even see you!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s fine, really, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been walking so fast with a cup of coffee in my hand.”
He shook his head in stark disbelief at what he had just done. The brown coffee had gone all over my white blouse, rendering it not only entirely unwearable, but also a little see-through, and I could see where his eyes were going. Again, he shook his head, only this time he met my eyes, too. He quickly turned around and headed into the kitchen, looking like he was going for the washcloth kept near the sink.
“Here, take this,” he said as he came back with the wet washcloth in his hand.
“No, it’s fine, this thing is stained. I’ll have to go home and change.”
“Everything okay?” Margo asked. She had heard the commotion and had come out of her office to investigate.
I turned around and gave her a helpless look. “Oh, honey,” she said. “C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up.”
My eyes went to the coffee maker and the mugs sitting next to it. I had a job to do, magic to work, but Margo had started ushering me into the bathroom. I had no choice but to go with her and try to figure out a plan B. That on its own wasn’t a problem, but I didn’t want her to smell even a whiff of any shady business, no matter how faint the smell might have actually been.
I walked into the bathroom behind Margo. “Take off your shirt,” she said, once the door had closed.
“My… shirt?” I felt a pinch of uncertainty and hesitated, then began to unbutton it.
“The coffee is still fresh; it’ll be easy to get out.”
I pulled my blouse off and handed it to her. I had never felt uncomfortable in the nude, and I wasn’t nude, I was wearing a bra, but the urge to cross my hands over my breasts was suddenly difficult to avoid. Maybe the illusion was too good, so good I was taking on some of Isabella’s traits and quirks. I tried not to think about it as I handed her the shirt.
Margo then set the shirt down on one of the marble counters and placed her hand on it. When I felt the pulse of magic enter the world, I knew what she was about to do; she was going to use magic to clean the shirt. It began to flutter, as if a breeze were filling it from below. Margo’s hand glowed a dull green, and I felt a pang of sadness for her. She was chipped, and seeing this was like seeing a puppy wearing a collar too tight for its little neck. But I couldn’t help her with that, not right now.
As soon as her hand began to glow with that dull, green light, knowing she’d be distracted manifesting the magic, I reached out and grabbed her wrist. Margo turned her head, and her eyes went wide. She prepared to shriek, but my hand began to blaze bright blue as my magic, much more powerful than hers, came rushing through. With magic I was able to not only stop her from shrieking, but also make her feel sick.
I hated this, manipulating people’s emotions. Throwing a fireball or an arc of electricity was a walk in the park compared to this. This was crude, and messy, and getting the magic just right was an exercise in patience and subtlety—neither of which I had much of right now. I could feel her essence pulsing beneath her skin, her life force becoming infected with the touch of debilitating magic. I let her wrist go almost immediately after I thought the magic had taken effect.
Margo then ran into one of the stalls and began throwing up her breakfast.
“Margo,” I said from the other side of the stall door, “are you okay?”
“I think so,” she said. “Oh my God, I don’t know what the hell just came over me.”
“Do you need me to get you anything?”
The toilet flushed, and then Margo emerged, her face ashen, sweat beading along her forehead. My heart was still pounding, my hands were shaking from the nerves, but a quick glance in the mirror told me my disguise was still intact, so that was something. I reached quickly for the paper towels and handed them to Margo, who patted her forehead down with them.
“Oh man,” she said, “I feel like crap all of a sudden. I shouldn’t have eaten those eggs; I thought they tasted a little off.”
I felt her forehead, thinking I would have to pretend to find a fever, but she really was burning up. “You’re running a fever. I think you should probably go home early.”
Margo put the back of her hand to her head, shut her eyes, and shook her head. “I wish I could,” she said, sighing. “I have so much work to do today… I can’t just leave. Otherwise it’ll be twice as hard tomorrow.”
“Well, look, I’m working pretty quickly with the records you�
�ve assigned me. How about you let me take on some of your responsibilities?”
I had no idea if Isabella had been hired for any of those reasons, but what I knew about the woman whose visage I was wearing like a Halloween costume led me to believe she was, if nothing else, efficient, neat, and confident.
She opened her eyes to look at me then, scanning my face. “I couldn’t. You’re new.”
“Maybe, but you hired me because of my background and skills. If you want, I’ll only handle your light duties, make sure anything that needs to go into the archives is put away, and just make sure everything else is filed nicely for you to dive back into tomorrow.”
“I don’t know, Bella. I really want to, but…”
My heart continued to pound, a constant drum beating against my temples. “C’mon, it’s just one day.”
Margo sighed again. “Alright, fine,” she said. “Come with me. I’ll need to give you my clearance, but I’m going to be a phone call away. If you need anything, you call me.”
Perfect, I thought, and after putting my blouse back on, I followed Margo out of the bathroom and into her office. Elevating my—Isabella’s—clearance didn’t take more than a few minutes. A short while after that, once Margo had given me a run-through of exactly what I needed to do and how I needed to do it, she was gone. I watched her make a short announcement to the rest of the department and then get on the elevator before allowing myself a moment to relax into the chair in her office.
“Wow,” I said to myself, staring at my ID with its increased clearance.
After waiting another couple of minutes, I stood up, grabbed a bunch of files, and made my way to the archive room door. I swiped my ID across the panel, and this time it flashed green. The door opened automatically, and a cool, dry breeze wafted out.
The archive room consisted of stacks and aisles containing books and digital storage devices intended to be used on computers. On one side of the room there was a computer with more input ports than I could count; its only function was to read every single piece of data it needed to read. I didn’t know if I would find anything of use in here, but it didn’t hurt that I had access.
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