It’s part of that shadow, Boss. That thing that’s darkening the realms.
Kazuma reached out and touched Netcat’s arm so she wouldn’t run off without him.
I don’t know Boss. But it’s getting bigger and it’s making everything dark.
Netcat’s window opened in his AR.
Netcat’s eyes widened in the dim light.
Yes.
I—can’t tell. He hides in the shadows.
Kazuma heard the soft, bell-like sounds of the wind chime he’d bought his grannie before she died. Hitori had gone missing the first time, and he told his grannie to bring it inside as a signal should anyone other than her be in the house.
Since her death, he’d kept it hanging on the porch as a tribute to her. But now, it wasn’t there. No one else knew that signal. Had he taken it inside during this last visit and didn’t remember it? Or had Hitori?
Netcat asked.
He entered the images that opened the door and the environmental host inside. Kazuma silently overrode the ‘lights on’ command as they crossed the street and padded up to the front door. The grounds outside looked freshly mowed, the white stone path leading to the front door swept, the shrubs outside precisely trimmed, and the porch cleaned.
Netcat looked at him. He could just see her features under the moonlight, shadows pooling in the hollows of her eyes and under her nose. “You okay?”
He shook his head. But he wasn’t sure if the feeling of being watched was because Ponsu had him on edge, or if they really were being watched. “You sense anyone around? All I can sense is that bird.”
“What bird?”
“The one on the roof.”
She tilted her head to the side. “I can sense him. No, her. Technocritter, all right. But as for anyone else around, no. And the house feels empty inside.”
With a quick look up and down the street, he grabbed Netcat’s hand and led her up the front steps to the door. The knob turned easily in his hand and the two of them entered.
“No lights?”
“I told them not to come on,” he said. “Just because no one’s near enough for you to sense doesn’t mean they’re not watching this house with other surveillance equipment.”
“Ah—good point. Hey, if you can sense the bird, ask it to let you know if someone comes toward the house.”
“I can do that?”
“Yes. That’s how Junior helps me—that is when I keep his kibble bowl full. Try it.”
Kazuma paused and thought about the bird on the roof. He actually felt the soft caress of the datasphere as he touched the bird and it responded with a look at the grounds from its point of view. He didn’t know if that was an okay, but it helped and he moved those images to a side window in his AR. Other than the wolf in Black’s office, he’d never encountered a technocritter, and wasn’t sure why this one was here. He admitted to himself he hadn’t physically been to the house since his grannie’s death. He missed Mama Risen more than he wanted to admit.
But he did know his way around the inside with his eyes closed. His grannie had the interior partially decorated in simple, traditional Japanese design. He slipped off his shoes in the porch level anteroom floored with smooth granite tiles. He watched as Netcat did the same and the two of them stepped up onto the hardwood living area. Two low couches with a hip-high table separated the kitchen from the main room. He pointed to the table where the wind chime lay. Apparently he had brought it inside, though he couldn’t remember doing it.
Kazuma walked around the couches and down a side hallway to his grandmother’s bedroom. There he reached out and gave a silent command for the lights to come on at forty percent capacity. There were no windows in this room, so he wasn’t afraid of being seen. The room was devoid of furniture except for a low table with an actual computer situated on top.
Netcat whistled when she stepped inside. “Wow…that thing’s gotta be circa 2058.”
Kazuma pulled off his jacket and crossed his legs as he sat down. His side reminded him it wasn’t finished healing as he settled himself in front of the computer. “It’s just a case—these things don’t go for much, even on the black market. Antiques like this are worthless.”
“So it’s got a screamin’ link inside,” Netcat said as she stood on his left.
He looked up at her and smirked. “You could say that.”
She pointed at the light overhead. “How come it’s okay in here and not out there?”
“No windows.”
“Oh, right.”
Kazuma faced the blank computer screen and held out his hands. “Grannie liked it dark when she slept.”
“Like a tomb.”
Yeah… With a deep breath, he tentatively reached out for the wireless signal emanating from the house’s host. There he spoofed a known ID, but kept his admin access as three windows appeared around him. He shot Netcat an invite as he accessed grannie’s mainframe—which through the AR windows resembled the house, only darker.
“That was pretty easy,” Netcat said as her living persona, a small black cat, twined around his legs. “No firewalls?”
“No,” He said as he directed his persona through the virtual living room to the kitchen and then turned right instead of left. “I’d already set this up for emergencies.”
“But you still could have gotten in without us coming here.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t want to risk anyone intercepting me in the Matrix, like the wolf-hacker did. I’d rather just grab it and go.” He brought the lighting up in the virtual version on the host and moved to a low hip-high freezer on the back porch. There he opened it up and looked inside. Packages of meat sat in neat stacks, each one of them carefully labeled and dated.
“Oh, hell,” Netcat said in a hoarse whisper as she jumped up on the freezer and balanced on the edge. “That’s gross. What’s with all the meat?”
“You don’t like meat?”
“I’m a vegetarian.”
He nodded. That seemed to make sense. “It’s not meat, of course. These are archived files. Ponsu knew where to put the data.”
The cat looked up at Kazuma with glowing green eyes. “In the freezer?”
“Well who’s going to look in a freezer for data?”
When she didn’t answer, he figured he’d stumped her. “I need you to keep your e-sense out there to let me know if anyone approaches the house, okay?”
“Right. Is the bird looking, too?”
He moved the bird’s window into focus. “Yeah…he’s still showing me the surrounding area. Oh, and don’t turn on any other lights.”
“I got that,” she said, her voice just a tad irritable.
Ponsu joined him in the freezer and he watched as his sprite dug up the data. The encryption, tight as he knew it would be, had the briefcase encased in meat and packed up as tightly as the other packages. Kazuma cracked the meat into six different images. One he gave to Ponsu with the order to encrypt it again and hide it in the Matrix at a prearranged location. Then he sent one as an a
ttachment to a dummy PAN address. After he sent the rest of them out, including one to Netcat, who downloaded it into her own commlink, he changed the encryption to make it resemble internal freezer controls and set it down in the inside of the freezer. He downloaded the last copy to the commlink he’d bought from one of Netcat’s contacts and closed the freezer.
With that he backed out of the system and shut the commlink off. No use for it now, as the whispers of the datasphere spoke to him without it, so he slipped back in to monitor activity. He felt Moon nearby, as well as Netcat and the bird. They were all watching the host.
MoonShine’s window popped up.
Netcat echoed.
Abruptly a light streamed in behind them. Kazuma physically turned from where he sat and cursed when he saw the hall light on at one hundred percent.
Boss! Ponsu was back. I noticed a surveillance set up on the building two blocks over!
Kazuma heard an echo in the host. It was small and rhythmic. He turned toward it.
“Shouldn’t you have done that before you logged us in?” Netcat asked as she stood up in the physical world and Ponsu vanished.
Kazuma stood as well. “Okay, so I got a little overconfident. I want to know who turned on the lights.”
Netcat moved to the hall and cursed louder. “All the lights are on.”
Kazuma stepped into the doorway from the hallway. He made a slow pan of the room, letting every item’s RFID tag pop up in his AR.
The only item that didn’t throw up any manufacturer’s information was the wind chime on the table.
To his horror, the thing stood up on spindle legs like a mid-size spider and looked at them.
Netcat came back into the room and motioned to him. “Uh…I feel someone. Let’s go—” she stopped when she saw the six-legged wind chime. “Remind me not to call you paranoid anymore.”
Laughter came through the vid speakers as the holo system activated. They turned to see a gigantic holovid pop into the air, but instead of a view of local transmissions, the ugliest hobgoblin Kazuma had ever seen stuck his face into the camera. “Netcat! So nice to see you again!”
Kazuma looked at her and then back at the vid. “You know him?”
“A little too well.” She looked angry, and being so close to her, he also felt her trembling. “Hello, Clockwork. Miss me?”
“Oh, you know it, doll.” He grinned, showing those needle-sharp teeth. “Better get ready, ’cause you and your new boyfriend here gonna have a new place to play. Can’t wait to tell Slamm-0! and that kid of yours that mama’s never coming home.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Near the Risen Residence
Powell sat back from his position on the roof of an apartment building two blocks from Myddrin Risen’s house. Twilight lingered a bit longer than usual as he adjusted the magnification on the binoculars, the specialized lenses catching the heat signatures of the two elves entering the house.
The room he sat in had once been a spacious penthouse apartment with a 360-degree view of the neighborhood. Powell hoped that when the place was new, the neighborhood had been worth seeing. Today, it was too near a collapsed bridge—the edges sticking up out of the city like broken bone slicing through skin. The rest of the building was home to vagrants, chipheads, drunks, and a few drug manufacturers. He could smell the brew cooking from below.
The houses in the neighborhood—the ones that had somehow survived looting—stood out like flowers in a desert. From his vantage point, Powell could see seven houses much like Miss Risen’s with nice roofs and fenced-in yards and gardens. The rest of the residences looked like the rest of the squalor of Los Angeles. Forgotten. Abandoned.
“How did he get through?” Shax said from his perch on the window seal. The glass was long gone—only bits and pieces remained—reflecting the hollow ork’s appearance. “I tried for ten minutes to get into that host.” He looked at Powell. “It has to be her, too. They’re doing it together.”
“It’s because it’s his house,” Powell said as he refocused on a slightly higher signature just outside the back gate of Mr. Tetsu’s house. “I’m sure he has administrator clearance on the system.”
Shax stopped and looked back at the house. “There’s a technocritter on the roof.”
But Powell was looking at something else through his lenses. The odd signature he’d noticed before moved slightly—then moved again. Lowering the binoculars, he adjusted the long-range settings, increased the spectral feed, and looked through them again.
There! Just to the right at the street lamp was a person. And from the readout on the binocular’s inner left panel—this was a human. Cyberized. And carrying a small arsenal to boot.
“Shax—we have company down there.” He shifted the binoculars over to the left. The house lights hadn’t come on—but he could see the two elves’ heat signatures in the lenses. They were sitting on the floor, facing something.
“What kind?”
Powell pulled the binoculars off and shoved them into their case. Shax grabbed the case when he was through, and the two of them proceeded to the steps. “Cyberized. Hacker is my guess. And he’s watching them. I’m pretty sure it’s Cole Blackwater. I don’t want him getting near Tetsu.”
“You want me to hack his stuff? The signal’s pretty weak in this area—but I think I can make a sprite nasty enough to cause some serious damage.”
“No,” the dwarf said as they hit the first floor landing. “I don’t want any technomancer involvement—or anything that can be traced back to us. Not now. You think you can get into one of the other systems? Take a look inside?”
“Piece ’o cake,” Shax replied.
The pair stepped out into dark, early morning. Their van was parked a few meters away—and to Powell’s surprise, it still had its tires. Of course, Shax did say he’d set a sprite in the onboard computer—and told it to prevent anyone from stealing the car.
And just as he rounded the front, he saw the fried carcass of another dwarf, maybe—or a child—smoldering on the pavement. And not a soul had come out to see what had happened.
Jabbing a finger at the corpse, he glared at Shax. “Was this necessary?”
“Well, he shouldn’t have been messing with something he didn’t own,” the technomancer said as he put the binoculars in the car. “You want to drive over?”
“You drive—I need to prepare myself.”
Shax chuckled as he waved at the car and the door opened for him. Once in the passenger seat, Powell considered what spell would work best to get rid of the nuisance, but not damage the two elves. He also didn’t want the house destroyed—bringing attention back to this location and thus planting Tetsu in the news.
His first instinct was to roast the bastard in a little firewater—but there was the consideration of the house again. And the possibility of setting the elves on fire, too. And if Shax was any indication of the physical strength of an average technomancer, there wouldn’t be much defense for either of the two inside.
First he had to cast a masking spell over the car. He did that as Shax turned the corner and pulled into the driveway just as all the lights in the house came on.
“What the—” Powell said. “Why did they do that?”
Shax sat up in the driver’s seat as he put the car into park. “Boss—I can feel him. He’s here. Sixty percent cyberization. He’s near the house now. And that bird’s watching him.”
Shax’s uncanny ability to sense the bio-field of living things was coming in handy. Powell held up a hand for the Shax to wait. “What bird?”
&nb
sp; “I told you there’s a technocritter on the roof.”
“Does it belong to anyone?”
“How would I know?”
Powell paused. “If we get out of the car, we’ll become visible to the hacker. Let him get past us. Let me know when he is.”
Several seconds passed before Shax said the hacker was close to the house. Then he paused. “There’s two of them.”
“Two of what?”
“Two with cyberization. The other one is smaller, but just as geared up.”
Powell gave a short, frustrated sigh. “So there are two outside visitors.”
“Yes, sir. The other one’s in the backyard. He’s actually at the back door.”
“You stay here,” he told the technomancer. When Shax’s expression promised to avalanche into a fit of pouting, Powell said, “I need someone to watch the car—and have it ready in case we need to get out of here fast. I can’t do that. You can.”
He seemed to consider it. “Yes. Yes, I can do that.”
“Good. And concentrate on getting into that host at the same time.”
Powell moved quickly around the bushes to the back porch and carefully moved up the steps, careful not to make a sound. Once on the porch, he peered into the back window.
Powell had a clear view of the scene—of Kazuma Tetsu standing in front of a small girl—her face obstructed by his arm. He looked pale—and flushed. Wearing a leather peacoat, white shirt, and black pants, he was favoring his right side.
What caught Powell’s attention was the weird-looking, spider-like drone facing them down. Both elves had small red dots on their chests as the thing targeted them. The holovid was on, and in it he could see an ugly hobgoblin talking to the two of them.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Risen Residence
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