by Dima Zales
As confusing as Nero’s motives are, there are other questions just as big.
How did Darian get caught by Nero in the first place?
He’s a seer, a powerful one, yet he let himself get into a situation where he was dangling in the air by his throat.
Was that part of some scheme, or did his seer abilities fail him in this, just as they did when he kissed Kit (a.k.a. fake me) at the club the other day?
Maybe he knew he’d get off with a warning due to my timely arrival—which wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t written his address on the package.
Perhaps this encounter was actually the best-case scenario for Darian. After all, only his pride was hurt in the end. For all I know, Darian might’ve glimpsed a multitude of futures and chosen the one where Nero’s assault becomes a catalyst for something bigger. Hell, that something bigger might simply be my attitude toward Nero.
Perhaps Darian wanted me to see Nero at his most ruthless to eliminate what he perceives as romantic competition.
No wonder people hate seers so much. All these plots within plots are exhausting.
Then, the most important question of all hits me like a sledgehammer.
How did Nero know about the VCR and the tape Darian sent me? I got both of those items in the mail and watched them in my room yesterday, all by myself.
With a sinking feeling, I recall the theories about Nero having cameras around the fund—theories that explain how Nero knew about the bruise the orc gave to me.
Is it possible that Nero has similar surveillance in my apartment?
In my bedroom?
Blood leaves my face as I recall all the times I’ve gotten naked in that room, or worse, my encounters with Copperfield—my Hitachi magic wand massager.
No. Even Nero wouldn’t be so—
I stop myself. Who am I kidding? If the last few days have proven anything, it’s that Nero is capable of all sorts of horrible things.
Was this what Darian intended? To expose Nero as a peeping perv?
Getting out my phone, I text Felix.
When are you getting home?
His reply arrives a few moments later.
Finished my workload, just about to figure out this phone number thing for you.
I debate if I should tell him to drop everything and come home, but the phone number issue is important, so I reply with:
Thanks! Please let me know what you find out.
Felix texts back with an affirmative, and for the rest of the cab ride, I practice breathing for seer meditation—which has a nice bonus of calming me down as well.
I definitely need that.
I’m walking into our building when Felix’s text arrives.
I figured out who that number belongs to. Or more accurately, which business. It’s Izbushka Na Kurih Nojkah. It’s not their main number, but it’s theirs nevertheless. I wouldn’t answer it if I were you. I’m going home now. Talk soon.
In a haze, I enter the elevator.
When translated from Russian, Izbushka Na Kurih Nojkah means “a hut on hen’s legs.” It’s the name of the restaurant that belongs to Baba Yaga—the witch who helped Fluffster remember his last owner, Rasputin, in exchange for, and I quote both the witch and the Godfather, “…someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service…”
Looks like that “someday” is today, the day after our meeting.
Great.
Now that I’ve had more sleep and no near-death encounters for a few hours, I’m certain that agreeing to grant Baba Yaga a favor was a bad idea. Not that I had much choice last night, but still. I stipulated that she not ask me to do something illegal, but with my mind now clearer, I can easily think of a number of unpleasant things that wouldn’t be strictly illegal, like, say, eating tapeworm larvae.
On that cheerful thought, I enter my apartment.
Fluffster prances over and mentally says hello.
“Hey, bud.” I bend down and rub under his chin. “You hungry?”
“I could eat,” he says, so I give him some organic hay in my room.
Despite the earlier thoughts of tapeworms, my stomach rumbles as Fluffster dives into his dish. I make my way to the kitchen, toast a couple of bagels, and garnish them with cream cheese and lox.
As I’m doing that, an idea forms in my mind.
Taking out my phone, I text Felix again.
Let’s have a little picnic in Battery Park.
The reply from Felix is a single character—the question mark—so I text back, It’s time for me to feed you for a change.
Once we settle on a particularly picturesque location, I pack the bagels and a couple of water bottles into a big brown bag and put on my shoes.
Just as I open the front door, the now-familiar, but no less unpleasant, dread overcomes me, and I get the phone out.
As expected, the infernal device rings a few heartbeats later.
It’s Baba Yaga.
Again.
Chapter Seven
I don’t pick up.
Instead, I put the phone on top of the shoe rack and head out the door, all the while wondering whether my powers will still give me panic attacks if Baba Yaga calls when the phone is far away from me.
Planning my conversation with Felix in my head, I make my way to our meeting spot. It’s near a scenic grill-oriented restaurant that Ariel always drags us to.
Felix isn’t there yet, so I grab a seat on the bench and do my best to calm down.
“You’re alone?” Felix says a few minutes later—startling the bejesus out of me. Seeing my hand on my chest, he lifts his unibrow. “Jumpy much?”
“You can’t just creep up on people like that,” I tell him as he sits next to me on the bench. “And yes, it’s you and me. Ariel wasn’t home.”
“Hmm.” Felix takes off his backpack and places it on the bench, then reaches into the brown bag and gets a bagel. “Ariel should be home by now.”
“I’ve never been home on a Tuesday at this time, so I didn’t know that.”
“Fair enough.” Felix takes a bite of his bagel and looks around, as though to make sure Ariel isn’t hiding behind him. “There’s no pattern to her new, Gaius-contaminated schedule.”
I get my own bagel out. “That thing parents always tell you about bad influences—there’s something to it, I guess.”
Felix shakes his head and chews contemplatively as he stares at the soothing New York Harbor view.
I follow his gaze to the Statue of Liberty. “Thanks for figuring out that phone number.”
He looks back at me, his face unusually serious. “Whatever Baba Yaga wants, it’s bad news. Here.” He hands me a phone. “This is brand new. It should take her a while to figure out your new number—assuming she ever does. Meanwhile, you have plausible deniability. After all, you can’t break your promise to do a service if she can’t ask it of you.”
“That’s a great idea. Come to think of it, my current phone is my old work phone. I should’ve given it back to Nero when I quit. Now I will do just that, and it will deepen the plausible deniability you speak of.”
“I knew you’d be good at this deviousness game,” Felix says proudly. “So, what’s up with this picnic?”
I tell him about my encounter with the b-hive and with Nero, and how the latter led me to the conclusion that I have a camera in my room.
Felix looks thoughtful as he absentmindedly breaks his bagel in half. “Why do you think it’s video surveillance? In contrast to an audio-only bug, I mean.”
“I guess I was thinking about your surveillance in our hallway and assumed Nero’s would do the same thing.” I take out one of the water bottles and take a big gulp. “Plus, he knew about Darian’s tape, so I figured—”
“If Nero had an audio bug, he could’ve recognized Darian’s voice when you played the tape.” Felix takes a bite of the bagel half in his right hand. “In any case, I find the whole idea of a bug—video or audio—improbable.”
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��But you yourself—”
“I don’t know if you know this about me, but I’m very paranoid when it comes to Wi-Fi devices.” Though the bagel portion in his right hand is unfinished, Felix bites the half in his left hand. “I know what every wireless device in the building does, and to whom it belongs. That makes me fairly sure there isn’t a bug, or at least, not one that uses Wi-Fi.” He bites his right bagel half. “That makes Nero’s job that much harder,” he says through a mouthful. “Just think about it, when would he have planted such a thing?”
“When we were at—” I don’t finish the thought when I realize that Fluffster makes planting anything in our absence impossible. “Maybe it was there before we moved in?” I suggest instead. “Nero does own the building.”
“How did he know which room was destined to be yours?” Felix looks at both bitten halves in his hands, shrugs, and stuffs what’s left of the right half into his mouth.
“All our rooms might be bugged,” I say. “That’s what I’d do if I were Nero.”
Felix shakes his head as he finishes chewing. “There was never such a thing in my room,” he says with unshakable confidence. “And I, in general, find it hard to believe he could’ve had hardware in our apartment all this time, recording and passing along info without me noticing. As you know, I’m quite familiar with surveillance equipment.”
“Familiar” is an understatement. Felix could stand in for Q in a James Bond movie when it comes to tech. Like hacking, it has to do with his “technomancer” powers.
“I’m glad you brought that up,” I say. “Because it’s actually your skills that I wanted to talk to you about outside of Nero’s possible earshot.” I inadvertently squeeze my bagel, and some cream cheese drips on the pavement at our feet. An aggressive pigeon eats it up as I continue. “I think it’s time we turn the tables on Nero and hack his ass. Not just to find out if he’s been spying on us, but to learn his secrets, in case some of them are useful.”
Staring at me as though I’ve grown horns, Felix tries to bite into a bagel in his right hand and gets his empty palm instead. “You want me to penetrate Nero’s security.”
Trying to radiate calm, I bite my bagel, take a sip of water, and casually nod. “Yes.” With a fake smile, I add, “I want you to penetrate Nero.”
Felix chuckles humorlessly. “In other words, you want me dead.”
“Why would you be dead?”
“Because Nero would catch me ‘hacking his ass,’ as you put it, and he’d kill me.” Felix scoots away from me on the bench.
“Why don’t we place all the blame on me? Can’t you set up the hack or whatever so that it looks like I’m the only one responsible?”
“So he kills you instead of me? That is, until he figures out I was involved, and then kills me too.”
“I don’t think he would kill me.” I take another bite, but the bagel no longer has any flavor. “And as I said, I’d bear all the blame.”
Felix unscrews a water bottle. “I designed Nero’s security in the first place. It’s—”
“Awesome. Use some backdoor,” I say. “You left one for yourself, didn’t you?”
“I was working for a walking, talking polygraph exam who could squish me like a cockroach at any point.” Felix puts his unfinished bagel back into the brown bag. “Of course, I didn’t leave any backdoor. And I’m glad I didn’t because he asked me if I left a backdoor after I was finished. I truthfully told him no, and look, I’m still alive.”
“But you’re always preaching that no system is uncrackable.”
“I didn’t say the setup I made for Nero is uncrackable.” Felix gulps some water. “It’s just the best security I’ve ever set up—without a backdoor.”
“So you can do it?” Deciding to play dirty, I make puppy eyes. “Pretty please? I swear I’ll take all the blame.”
“It’s too difficult,” he says, displaying an amazing resilience to the puppy-eyed look.
“But not impossible.” I upgrade the look to that of a hungry basset-hound puppy, one with big, droopy ears.
Felix’s unibrow dances on his forehead as he thinks for a good half a minute. Then he looks around again, as though Nero might be lurking in the bushes. “You’d have to get a physical device near his workstation and keep it there until I’m done, which could take hours.”
“What kind of device?”
Felix rummages through his backpack, takes out a circuit wafer of silicone the size of a playing card, and hands it to me.
“Did you get that out of a phone?” The card magician in me notes that the gizmo weighs as much as ten cards, is as thick as about four, but the dimensions are actually smaller, which would make palming it both harder in some respects and easier in others.
“I made that.” Felix sits up straighter. “I call it Felix’s Extranet Low Latency Access Trojan Input Output. Or F.E.L.L.A.T.I.O for short.”
I look at him for any signs of humor and find none. “Let me get this straight. This is called fellatio?” I make the gizmo vanish as I did the seven of clubs for Rose and Vlad, then make it come back with a flourish. “Don’t you find there’s enough sexual innuendo in hacking already? Penetration. Backdoor—”
“You’re the one who said we should ‘hack his ass.’” Felix snatches the gizmo from my hand. “It’s just easier to remember this way, and besides”—he scratches the back of his head—“this FELLATIO is pronounced ‘fella,’ as in, young fella, ‘t,’ like Mister T, and i.o., like in computer parlance.”
“Sure it is,” I drawl, and a possibly hysterical chuckle escapes my lips. “And you’re sure that fellatio”—I use the more traditional pronunciation—“is required to penetrate Nero properly?”
“I’d need it near Nero for hours before I could get in,” Felix says with a trace of a smile. “Hence, this is impossible.”
“Let’s say the gizmo magically got into Nero’s pocket,” I say, though a bunch of nervy butterflies divebomb my stomach as I vividly imagine implementing such a feat. “Would that help?”
Felix takes out what remains of his bagel, takes a small bite, and chases it with some water, looking thoughtful throughout. “Yes. If FELLA—I mean, this device—made its way into Nero’s pocket, I think I could pene—I mean, get into—his system.” He stares at the New Jersey skyline across the Harbor. “Maybe.”
“Sounds doable,” I say with a certainty I don’t feel. “Except, what happens if Nero finds the FELLATIO in his pocket?”
“I’ll be as good as dead.” Felix looks back at me. “But I can use my power to command the silicone in the device to turn into dust at any point I wish, so there’s that.”
“For that, you’d need to see him going for his pocket.”
“I can get a visual of Nero fairly quickly through his own security cameras,” Felix says, some color returning to his face. “Triggering a security alert is a bigger concern, though—”
“But you put the security in, so you wouldn’t trigger any such thing,” I say confidently.
“I guess not.” There might be a glimmer of something like excitement in those black eyes.
“Great.” I grin and outline the beginnings of my insane plan.
“You better hope you’re right when you say that Nero wouldn’t hurt you,” Felix says when I finish. “Because you’re going to put that to the test.”
“I don’t think he would,” I lie.
“Okay,” Felix says and goes into his backpack again.
He takes out his laptop and types on it so fast I’m half-certain he’s just pressing random keys to make himself look impressive.
Then, the FELLATIO device makes a loud beep.
“Here.” He hands me the gizmo. “Do not take it out or speak of it once we get home.”
I nod solemnly, take out a deck of cards, throw away the advertising cards and the jokers, and stash the FELLATIO in the freed-up space.
“It might be best if we don’t even return home at the same time.” I pocket the cards and get up.<
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“You go there,” Felix says. “I’m going to go do a little shopping, fill up that empty room of mine.”
“Sounds good.” I start walking back, and over my shoulder say, “Thanks, Felix. I owe you one.”
“A big one,” he grumbles and leaves.
I make my way home and catch Ariel just as she’s leaving the apartment. She’s wearing the dominatrix-meets-Catwoman outfit from our Earth Club outing and is clearly unhappy I caught her in it.
“So, you got a chance to finally change your clothes,” I say caustically.
She hides her gaze. “I’ve got to run. We’ll catch up soon.”
“Sure,” I say with a deep sigh and watch Ariel strut to the elevator.
My roommate isn’t acting like herself. Soon, Felix and I will have no choice but to stage some kind of an intervention.
Making my way into my bedroom, I give Fluffster more hay.
“How is the job search going?” he asks mentally, oblivious to the reality of communicating with his mouth full. “The bills—”
“Let me check on that.” As graciously as I can fake it, I add, “Thanks for the reminder.”
I soon discover something odd happening with my job search. My inbox is chock-full of replies from the companies I applied to.
I open the first one, from a hedge fund that’s Nero’s minor competitor and the most promising job opportunity for me.
The email regrets to inform me that the position has already been filled.
That’s strange. Usually, if you apply for a job and they don’t want you for whatever reason, you never hear from them. Maybe they saw where I worked and wanted to be extra nice in case they want to recruit me later?
I open the next email.
“We regret to inform you the position has been filled,” writes the Director of HR at a major investment bank.
That’s weird.
Frantic, I open the next email, then another and another.
They are all informing me about filled positions.
I go online and look up some of these job postings at random.
All are still posted on the job search site.