by Wren Weston
She would lose him the moment she told him. She already knew it.
Turning to her desktop, she pulled up the crimson logon page for Randolph General. She entered a user ID and password from one of her dummy accounts so that what she searched for would not get back to anyone. After typing in Dubois’s name on the patient search screen, she pored over the results, hoping the senator had done his initial fertility testing at Randolph General. Most interns did.
Lila was rewarded with a hit. Though Dubois’s test results did not mean much to her in detail, it did confirm that his doctors had ruled him fertile several years before. From what Lila could tell, the records had not been altered, not unless the original doctor had lied in his report. In addition, Dubois had not been seen for any major illnesses at the hospital.
That didn’t mean he hadn’t been treated elsewhere, though.
She retrieved her star drive from her secret compartment with Dubois’s most current test results, then redacted Dubois’s name from the files and saved his past fertility test.
After sneaking into BullNet and downloading his medical files from the onsite health clinic, she pulled up her snoop programs. Once she and Sutton had concluded their meeting the night before, she’d checked her search results on the stolen Bullstow data. Unfortunately, she’d gotten no hits. In a drowsy haze, she’d written a quick but very general search to run during the night, all in the hopes of finding more traps in the code.
Her search hadn’t revealed anything.
Lila drummed her fingers upon her knee as she contemplated her search parameters. She’d looked for a similar trap to the one she’d found in the BIRD. Unfortunately, she had no idea if the BIRD had been Reaper’s first hack in BullNet or his last.
Lila hoped it was his last. The BIRD trap had not been that sophisticated. It would be easier for her to find something cruder.
But the fact that she had not found anything in her first two searches didn’t bode well.
After she set up a new search, Lila took a quick shower and dressed in a dark sweater, dark trousers, and her heavy motorcycle jacket. Then she grabbed her star drive and a scarf and padded downstairs.
A footman opened the front door of the great house with a flourish, his boots shining as the sun peered over the horizon, reflecting off the polished leather.
Lila shivered as she stepped out into the morning and adjusted her scarf.
A sharp whistle caught her attention.
Sutton jogged past the fountain toward her. Streams of water sprayed into the air, gurgling and bubbling as they dove and hit the surface.
“You’re up early,” Lila called out.
“I could say the same for you. Figured you’d be up and about, though. I hoped I might have a word,” Sutton said as soon as she reached the door.
“Always.” Lila tugged her jacket around herself, hoping Sutton didn’t notice the servant’s garb underneath. The commander would complain that she was too ill to meet with spies today.
Fortunately, the commander’s mind had traveled elsewhere.
The pair walked down the gravel path between the great house and the garage, their feet crunching the rocks, the wind rattling the leaves of each shrub and rose as they prowled past. At last, Sutton paused and sat upon one of the stone benches, a wordless request for a moment’s conference.
Lila joined her, the cold seeping through her woolen trousers. She was reminded of her perch on the senate building’s ledge the month before, right after she’d downloaded the BIRD. Things had gotten so much more complicated since then. Her life had drifted so far off track.
A cold wind seeped through her scarf.
“Sergeant Davies contacted the security office early this morning,” Sutton said, her fingers thumping on the bench.
“Again? What did he want?”
“The same thing. I told Commander McKinley that I’d speak to you personally. I wanted to make sure you were awake and well before I told you.”
Lila crossed her legs against the cold and watched the trees bend in the wind. Knuckle-sized golden leaves fell in her hair, tangling amid the strands. “Did he have a warrant?”
“No. I tried to pump him for more information, but he was tight-lipped. He wanted to know if the Randolph security office had reconsidered cooperation with Bullstow, and he hoped that his messages were being passed along to those who would more carefully weigh the implications of refusal. The asshole is threatening the family.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time. I’ll handle it.”
“No, it’s part of my duties. I’ll—”
“You can take the next one. You’ll take them all soon enough.”
Sutton handed over a piece of paper with Sergeant Davies’s contact information scribbled upon it. “I figured you’d say something like that.”
Lila retied her scarf around her neck more tightly. “Is that all?”
When Sutton nodded, Lila stood and gestured for the commander to follow. The pair walked toward the great house garage.
“So how are your ovaries?”
Lila cringed. “Oracle’s light! Never ask me that again.”
“When my daughter Chloe had her CUT reversed, she said it felt like a mule kicked her for days. It hurt to stand up, to sit, to pee, to eat. It hurt worse when she threw up what she ate. They never tell you that before you get them.”
“I’m fine.”
“You look it. I’ll tell Chloe. She’ll hate you for it.” Sutton clasped her hands behind her back. “You’re barred from the gym for a week, just so you know.”
“I’m barred from it forever. Members only.”
“You’ll always be part of the militia. You’ll always be welcome.”
“It’d be weird.”
Sutton nudged her shoulder. “Work out with me as my guest.”
“Because you do so love to work out?”
“I might develop a taste for it, given the right partner.”
Lila eyed her.
“I might.”
“And the chairwoman might turn into a pretty little fairy and frolic in the fountain,” Lila muttered.
Sutton let out a snort before composing herself.
“How’s being chief treating you so far?”
“It’ll go better when I can tell Commander McKinley to go jump in the—”
“She’s practically your new partner. You have to coexist peacefully with your partner even when they’re a pain in the ass.”
“Was I a pain the ass?”
Lila winked. “I’ll be along this weekend to clean out my office. I’ll have to leave it boxed up for a bit until it’s official.”
“One office is as good as another. Take your time, madam.”
“Madam?” Lila grumbled, stopping before the garage. “Has it really come to that? I’m to be madamed to death?”
“Literally. You’ll be on your deathbed at eighty years old, and some young doctor—”
“Eighty? I’m to die at eighty?”
“Eighty is respectable.”
“So is ninety!”
“So is a hundred.” Sutton gave an overly exaggerated bow, her blackcoat rustling and fluttering in the wind. “I will message you if Bullstow calls again.”
The commander gave a stiff nod, turned, and headed toward the security office.
Lila wished she could follow.
Instead, she pulled out the slip of paper as Sutton’s footsteps receded on the gravel. The calls from Davies could have been a coincidence. Bullstow’s tech department might have asked him to do them a favor. They might have asked him to fetch some small piece of information before they informed Chief Shaw of her hack. But Lila didn’t believe in coincidences, and it didn’t seem likely that they would have asked a man outside their department for assistance.
Another explanation seemed fa
r more plausible, now that her mind had cleared from the fog of wine and anesthesia. She had rattled the blackmailer by stealing into BullNet again. She had been seen. And Sergeant Davies had found himself a new employer, only a few weeks after being disciplined by his superiors for the very same thing.
Or perhaps he and Muller had worked for Reaper’s partner all along, rather than Reaper. Whoever had found her in the BIRD that night had gone by the name Zephyr. But what if she’d been wrong in assuming that Reaper and Zephyr had been the same person? Reaper had boasted he was Zephyr, but only after she’d pressed him.
Just because he’d claimed to be Zephyr, didn’t mean he was.
Reaper had never been that great a hacker, anyway. What if the real hacker still lurked in New Bristol?
Lila punched Davies’s contact information into her palm.
“Sergeant Davies,” he answered, voice honeyed with the highborn drawl.
Bullstow had served the lowborn well.
“This is Chief Randolph. My commander informs me that you have twice demanded a list of my family’s logins.”
“That is correct,” he said with barely contained amusement.
“Do you understand how irregular that is?”
“Bullstow has asked such things before.”
“Asking and receiving are two different things, sergeant. Would you mind telling me why you’d like the list?”
“Yes, I would mind.”
There was a pause. Lila expected him to offer up something besides smug arrogance, but she received nothing but silence. “How many other families have assented to this highly illegal and evasive demand?”
“We’re not looking at other families. We’re looking at yours. I assumed that as chief, you would be concerned about illegal activity within the Randolph household. I assumed you would want Bullstow to resolve the matter quickly and quietly.”
“What matter? What illegal activity?”
The officer quieted on the other end of the line.
“No comment, sergeant? Fine. Here’s mine. The only thing I’m concerned about this morning is keeping my family’s rights protected from very vague accusations. You’ll not get any logins from me without a damn good reason.”
“Your rights are not at risk,” Sergeant Davies grumbled, his veneer of professionalism slipping. “We can get a judge’s order. I was extending the opportunity as a professional courtesy. Warrants tend to be intercepted and misinterpreted by the media so easily these days. Ask the Holguíns how much a scandal can cost a family.”
“You let me worry about that. Bring me a warrant and a reason for wanting the list before you trouble me again.”
“As you wish,” he said curtly, and disconnected.
Acting on instinct, Lila searched for his contact information in Bullstow’s official directory. As a member of the government militia, he should have given Sutton his office line.
The hit she received did not surprise her. The number hadn’t come from Bullstow.
Chapter 9
The garage door opened with a creaking rumble in the quiet morning. At least a dozen cars had been parked in two rows, half classics, half new. Lila ignored them and slipped her leg over a silver motorcycle parked on the end. Her Firefly glinted in the beams of the early morning light. Drawing out her palm, she pulled up her snoop programs and waved the device over the bike. It beeped, signaling that a GPS chip had been tucked away in the seat cowl. It beeped again as she waved it over the front fairing, alerting her to an audio bug.
Lila picked them both from her Firefly as if they were chunks of vomit, her face crinkling in disgust, and thumped them across the garage. Her mother’s spies had been at it again.
Once Lila judged her bike to be free of bugs and GPS, she popped her helmet over her head, tugged on a pair of riding gloves, flexed her mostly healed fingers, and sped out of the compound, dodging the few early risers on their way to the bullet train or their offices in the northern half of the estate.
Nodding to Sergeant Hill at the gatehouse, she zipped through the southern entrance and turned toward downtown. The streets were thankfully free of fog, and few people were out so early in the morning. It made Lila feel more confident on the motorcycle. Though she loved the Firefly and enjoyed how powerful it made her feel to ride it, the one embarrassing consequence of riding the bike was when she occasionally tipped the damn behemoth on the street and needed help righting it before she could go farther.
Crowds tended to laugh at heirs in distress, even unofficial ones, and they rarely did anything to alleviate the problem. The only balm was a few well-placed bribes, which Lila had waiting in her pocket.
Resolving not to tip the motorcycle when few people were around to take her cash, Lila flexed her legs and rode on to her destination, squirming a bit on the seat as it roughly vibrated the soreness between her legs and her belly.
Perhaps she should have taken her Adessi roadster instead.
As she was already halfway to her destination, Lila stubbornly rode on. She had never visited her doctor outside of the hospital. Helen did not live on the family estate like nearly every other Randolph in New Bristol. Instead, she chose to live among the poorer classes in a condo near the hospital. It was close enough to be convenient, but far enough away not to be chained to her work. She claimed that she needed to live downtown because the hospital called her out of bed at all hours to tend to patients, but Lila saw it for what it was—a bid for freedom away from the family and the hospital.
Lila respected it, and her, immensely.
As such, she would traverse the city without complaint. There were too many eyes and ears at the hospital, and since Helen’s workday did not begin until ten o’clock, they would have plenty of time to talk without interruption. Even if she asked questions the doctor did not want to answer, Lila trusted Helen to point her in the right direction. If there was one thing the doctor hated, it was subterfuge, which was why Lila’s mother would never control her.
It was also why Lila would never try.
She entered the condo’s parking lot and stopped in front of a building neither gleaming with its tidiness nor particularly grimy in its disarray. No trash littered the grounds or crumpled under her wheels, and the grass had not grown over the sidewalk. That was about all that the place had going for it. It must have been quite an adjustment for Helen after growing up inside the pristine walls of the Randolph estate.
Lila settled the Firefly quickly, giving herself plenty of room to turn the bike around again. She had barely stretched her leg over the seat when she heard furious barking in one of the condos, echoing off the windows. The beast made such a fuss that Lila feared it might wake the neighbors.
Certainly, Helen could not sleep through such an announcement.
Thin fingers pulled down the blinds on the first floor, then quickly snapped closed as Lila passed by, a shadow startled by her nearness. The barking only intensified when Lila climbed the stairs, and when she raised her hand to knock, she realized that the dog was on the other side of the door.
Lovely.
There was nothing like trying to have a conversation while being slobbered upon.
Helen answered the door in sweats and a robe that were both several sizes too large for her frame. Her natural gray hair was mussed. She possessed the oft-coveted silver hue that colorists promised their clients all over the commonwealth, even though the doctor was only a dozen years Lila’s senior. Even unbrushed, it moved like silk across her face.
A black Labrador sat next to the doctor and licked his nose with a short sigh, well behaved now that he had run out of any argument against Lila’s presence. His tail swung back and forth, mouth thankfully free of drool.
Helen took one look at her visitor and shook her head. “I should have expected to see someone like you today.”
“I’m sorry. I know you’re not well, but it
is important.”
“Come in, come in,” Helen said with a yawn, stepping away from the door. “Would you like some hot chocolate?”
“Always.”
Lila entered the condo as the doctor turned on a few lamps with a tinny snap, then parked herself on the sofa out of the doctor’s way. The room was comfortably furnished, far more practical than frilly, and Lila spied no piece of furniture that did not serve some purpose. It was not neat, nor overly large, but it felt like more of a home than the Randolph great house.
Lila liked it immensely.
Helen bustled into the kitchen, preparing two mugs of hot chocolate with a clatter of cheap porcelain rather than china. The dog remained uncertain of where to go. He answered the confusion by plopping himself in the center of the room so that he could watch both women with his large brown eyes.
Helen reentered the room and handed Lila a mug, then excused herself to find clothes befitting an audience with the Randolph militia.
“Are you feeling better today?” Lila asked when Helen reappeared, dressed in slim trousers and a crimson sweater.
The doctor cocked her head to the side. “Was I sick?”
“You weren’t at the clinic yesterday.”
“I’m guessing you were, and you weren’t there for a simple walk-through. I presume your mother struck again. Have I missed some bit of mischief?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, I didn’t figure out her scheme until after it was over. I blame the wine.” Lila took a sip of the hot chocolate, letting the warm sweetness coat her tongue.
Helen settled on the opposite side of the sofa and lifted her mug. “They told me that Dr. Carver needed to swap his schedule, and they hoped I might help him out. I figured Scout would not mind the imposition too much.” She scratched behind the dog’s ears while he nosed at her thigh. “What was the real reason they wanted me away from the hospital?”
