by Wren Weston
“Mother. Isn’t it a bit early to discuss security arrangements for the Wabash Fundraiser?”
“Why would I summon you on your day off for that? Especially so early.” She dropped her gaze down to the proffered chair once more, hinting.
Lila sat and removed her gloves for the meal.
The chairwoman picked up a bowl and offered it to Lila. “Would you like some blackberries? Chef reminded me of how much you like them. They’re quite fresh.”
Lila took a few and piled her plate with more food than she really wanted, pretending an appetite. She tried not to wince around her injured tongue, still sore from where she had bitten it in the explosion.
“Leave us,” Chairwoman Randolph said to the slave in the corner.
He bowed immediately and left the room.
“You’re up early,” Lila said, stabbing at her pancakes, soggy with maple syrup.
“I could say the same for you. The explosion woke me, just as I’m sure it woke everyone in the city. Didn’t wake you, though, did it? You were already up.”
Lila schooled her face into blankness and sipped her orange juice. “What do you mean, madam?”
“What do you know about the disturbance?”
“Disturbance? That’s a strange way of referring to a gas explosion.”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me something that’s not already on the news, Lila.”
“Okay. There are about a dozen members of the Randolph militia assisting Bullstow at this very moment. I’ll know more when they return. That’s not on the news.”
“Good. What about your spies?”
“It’s still early yet. I’m sure they’re still out there. Spying,” Lila said, waggling her fingers. “I suppose yours have already reported in?”
“A few have. One told me they saw something rather interesting a few hours ago. What were you doing, sneaking through the tunnels under the estate at half past four this morning?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It had taken a great deal of money and cajoling to flip one of her mother’s best spies, but she had done it. Finally.
The fake alibi couldn’t have come at a better time.
“I checked the cameras, Lila. You snuck out. What were you all night?”
Lila picked up her glass and focused on the pulp that stuck that to rim. “What do you think I was doing, Mother? I was testing my people. I’m afraid Commander Sutton is the only one who can confirm it, though, for the rest of my people were in the dark. Supposing your spy is employed by the militia, they might have gotten a promotion for spotting me if they had come to me instead of you. I hope you’re paying them well enough to make up for that.”
“Testing?” Her mother snorted, knowing of Commander Sutton’s impeccable honesty. “You and your tests. You only engage in them because you’re bored with your position. You think I don’t know that?”
Lila had no desire for a lecture when she had so many other pressing matters to attend to. She stood, breakfast half eaten, and bowed her head curtly. “A pleasure as always, madam.”
“Sit,” the chairwoman commanded. The word was a leg swinging at Lila’s knees.
She toppled back into her chair.
“Yes, you abdicated your role as prime heir. Yes, you will no longer take over the role of chairwoman when I retire. Yes, your younger sister has taken up the whitecoat and become the president of Wolf Industries because you continue to shirk your duty. Yes, you have abandoned your responsibilities to the entire Randolph family—”
“Yes, sometimes I cheat at cards,” Lila said, threading her fingers together and propping them on her knee. “Yes, I drink far too much hot chocolate and eat too few vegetables. Yes, I sometimes chug milk straight from the carton. Yes, I—”
“Elizabeth Victoria Lemaire-Randolph, it would be wise not to bait me so early in the morning.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you were listing every single fault you have with me. I was only trying to help. Yes, I am sarcastic when—”
“I allowed you to circumvent your birthright in order to engage in this foolishness,” the chairwoman said, waving absently at Lila’s uniform. “I thought you’d tire of it and eventually accept your duty by my side. A decade has passed while I’ve waited, a decade spent clawing your way to the top of the mountain, but I see the boredom on your face, child. You’re not having much fun at the summit.”
“It’s a job. It’s not meant to be fun—”
“The right job is.”
“It’s meant to be meaningful. I never wanted to become chairwoman of Wolf Industries, or its president. You know that.”
“Yes, and haven’t I been a benevolent matron in allowing you to play in your security office?”
Lila frowned, unsure how to answer the question. “Your security office, madam. We have a contract. What exactly do you want from me?”
“Want? Need is more like it. I need a lot of things. I need a competent prime, yet you refuse, leaving your little sister to flounder with every decision she makes. I need a granddaughter, an heir for the next generation. Yet Jewel has not been able to produce one, and you continue to insist that you will remain childless.” The chairwoman poured herself a glass of wine. “Since I can’t have either of those things, I want the best chief of security in all of Saxony. This explosion happened hours ago. You should know more by now.”
“My people are on it. Let me remind you, chairwoman. You have the most secure estate in the country. Out of forty-seven attempted intrusions last year, only three even made it over the wall. My people caught each of them in less than sixty seconds. We had one hundred and eighty foiled attempts by hackers on our system, and those are only the serious intrusions. In fact, the last successful large-scale attack on our system was six years ago before I was promoted from sergeant to captain of our tech division. If you remember, that’s why I became the captain.”
“I remember, Lila.”
“Good. I didn’t become chief because I’m your daughter. Don’t talk at me as if I don’t know my job.”
“Fine, but one day, you’re going to look at your life and wonder why you settled for the security office instead of Wolf Tower.”
“That’s unlikely. I don’t have any regrets.”
“Not now, perhaps. But later? I suspect you will, Lila. What am I supposed to do when I don’t have enough time to teach you all that you should know?”
“I don’t want—”
“You don’t want, you don’t want, you don’t want. It’s always about what you don’t want. That’s what got us both into this mess. Ms. Wilson wanted a lot of things. Now her entire family will fall because Chairwoman Wilson has no prime and the woman is too old to bear another daughter. That’s where wanting gets you, Lila. That’s where—”
“We’re not a dying family like the Wilsons, and I’m not the only heir to Wolf Industries,” Lila said, annoyed that she must rehash a very old and frequent argument. “Alex lost her mark because she was the only heir left in a generation, a daughter surrounded by half a dozen boys.”
“No, she lost it because her business failed.”
“It failed because you helped tank it. Then you scooped up her mark at a discount. Now you’re gambling that her mother won’t bear another daughter. You’re hoping she won’t since you control the only living Wilson prime. They were our friends.”
“Ms. Wilson was your friend. Her mother is an embarrassment.”
“Alex didn’t even have a real chance.”
“That’s business. That’s competition. We live on a razor’s edge, Lila. Within one generation, the Wilson Empire will fall and come into our hands because we control its only heir. We will assume possession of all their interests because they could not manage them effectively.”
“I’m glad you’re not reveling in their misfortune,” Lila said be
fore swallowing a blackberry.
“You think they wouldn’t have reveled in ours? Ms. Wilson’s current position is due entirely to her own poor choices and your friendship. How many other matrons would be so fair to a fallen heir? She still wears fine clothes and might even be in charge of the great house staff after Ms. O’Malley retires, so long as she continues her good work and discretion. I’m nothing if not fair. More than.”
“It’s not Alex’s fault.”
“Not all of it, no. It’s also the fault of her grandmother for trifling with German princes and not having more daughters. Her mother, too.”
“She had three.”
“Yes, and two are dead. Drunk drivers should all be hanged.” Her mother shivered and snatched up her glass once more.
Lila fiddled with the end of her short sword, watching her mother’s face. The rumor was that her mother had been behind the accident, just to leave Alex exposed and ripe for the plucking. Neither Lila nor Alex believed it, of course. A smart matron would have bought Alex for a song at auction and then arranged for the accident to take out the other two.
And Beatrice Randolph was very smart.
Sometimes Lila had to wonder what her mother was capable of, though, especially when she became so terribly blunt and pragmatic.
“Ms. Wilson erred when she didn’t birth an heir to the Wilson-Kruger line,” the chairwoman said. “She should have had one and signed it over to her mother before striking out on her own if that’s what she wanted to do. Now any child she bears will be born into slavery. All the while, her mother takes a basketful of medication while chasing senators and meeting with doctors to harvest her eggs. It’s unseemly and desperate at her age, and her business is suffering for it. Our business, in another fifteen years or so, if anything is left of it.”
“Sooner or later, one of those eggs will take,” Lila said, pouring her own glass of Gregorie. She considered Chairwoman Wilson, a woman of nearly sixty, fighting against hot flashes and time in order to bear another daughter. Science had given her extra time and a better chance than most, but it could not work miracles. Even if such a child was born so late in life, Chairwoman Wilson would not have long to teach her any business sense. The only saving grace of such a plan was that the child would have so many well-placed brothers and cousins in the senate to assist her. They had enough political acumen to smooth over a few mistakes of youth, but they could only do so much.
Besides, it wasn’t as if the woman had that much sense or decorum to pass on. Lila could never figure out how Alex had come from such a ridiculous line, for her friend’s grandmother hadn’t been any better. Alex was one of the rare instances of a well-bred father making up for the mother’s lack. Perhaps it was fortunate that Senator Craft had died before he witnessed what had become of his daughter.
“None of her eggs will take. I control the woman’s doctor. Once the chairwoman dies, we will own her company, her capital, and the land underneath.”
“Hooray for us,” Lila said halfheartedly. It was a pity that Chairwoman Wilson had never gone to Randolph General. Lila never would have allowed one of the doctors at her hospital to take bribes that impacted patient care.
Unfortunately, the Wilson matron obviously did not trust it.
Lila couldn’t blame her.
“Yes, hooray for us. I’ve tripled the profits of the Randolph family in the last thirty years, but do you honestly think I wanted this responsibility at fourteen when my mother died? Do you honestly believe there weren’t other things I wanted to do before taking up the position? I didn’t have enough time with my mother to learn what I needed to know. I made mistakes in my youth that I shouldn’t have made. I—”
“You’re doing just fine. You’ve tripled our profits, remember?”
“Yes, and I had to figure out too much of it on my own. It’s all just a game, Lila. And it’s a far better game than the one you’re playing now. I can only correct for Jewel’s mistakes while I live. Once I’m gone, the full extent of her carelessness will be in full view. You’ll be forced to take over then. Your own sense of duty won’t allow for anything else. You should drop this nonsense now while there’s still time.”
“You don’t lack for sisters and nieces, Mother. One of them will be more than happy to do the job whether or not you’re too stubborn to accept it. Go have this conversation with one of them.” Lila stood up from the table, straightened her uniform, and bowed, as befitting the chief of security to her matron.
Lila then stalked out of the room, leaving her mother and the rest of her breakfast behind.
Chapter 5
Lila changed out of her formal uniform and into cargo pants and a black sweater, which had a coin-sized Randolph coat of arms stitched on the left breast. Rifling through her desk drawers, she found a packet of stale chocolate chip cookies to tide her over until lunch. Popping one into her mouth, she turned on her desktop computer, readying herself for the first part of her to-do list.
The first and most unpleasant task of them all.
Lila snatched up her palm and typed out a message. What on earth do you think you were doing?
Frowning, she read her first attempt again, then shook her head and deleted it.
I could have been killed!
Lila deleted each letter of her second try, her scowl deepening.
Where did everyone go? Where are you?
The words stared back at her, much too simple to reflect the soup in her mind.
Would you have cared if I had died?
Lila barely paused before hurriedly erasing the message, chiding herself for writing it at all. In the end, she replaced the text with a simple, noncommittal question mark. The vague symbol held every single question she wanted to ask.
She was curious to see which one Tristan would answer.
Lila tossed the palm across her desk and rubbed her forehead. At some point, she had forgotten what Tristan truly was. A criminal. They weren’t friends. They could never be friends. The man hated the highborn. He hated their money; he hated their lifestyle; he hated everything they stood for. He only worked for her because it suited his agenda, and the money was too good for him to pass up.
“Should have gone with ‘What were you thinking, asshole?’” Lila grumbled to herself as she logged into her desktop computer.
BullNet was an easy hack. Though the government kept strict controls over the net, Lila always managed to find a way through Bullstow’s network. Even Unity’s network had never presented much of a challenge.
It was the not-getting-caught part that made it slightly more difficult and time-consuming. Despite the controls on private networks, no public content was censored on the net, except for what might be inappropriate due to age. Every citizen left entries in logs, though, regardless of class. A citizen’s logs could be scrutinized with a warrant as long as the officers in question had a case number and narrowed down their interests to a certain date range. Such a warrant trapped the individual, just as firmly as the iron bars of a cage.
Lila simply stepped around such measures. Her first snoop programs had constantly scrubbed her logs clean and substituted innocent content when necessary. Unfortunately, there were also logs on the other end to worry about, and her programs could not always alter them. The easiest and most low-tech way to get around that was to use someone else’s account, but the user might figure out that their logon had been compromised.
The more difficult—and ultimately more secure—option was to create a fake account, separate and hidden from one’s own identity. Barely traceable, it remained illegal and dangerous if any part of it led back to the creator, but Lila had enough skill to evade that trap.
Very few others in Saxony did.
Using proxies, Lila slipped into the Bullstow militia network with one of her fake logins. She snuck through the logs, first searching for the data from the sergeant’s DNA pen.<
br />
Lila breathed easier as soon as she opened the file. It was short. Nothing much had been transmitted. It did not even contain enough of her DNA to mark her as female, much less compare it to her samples within the Saxony DNA database. It surprised her, but perhaps the male sergeant had not kept the pen charged. Perhaps it just didn’t have enough time to send anything to Bullstow before the blast knocked out the power.
In any case, no one had opened the file.
Lila erased the data and the accompanying logs, then read over the sergeant’s report. Bullstow had pulled in their sketch artist to work with him and his men, none of whom had been seriously injured in the blast. Clearly their memories had focused more on the size of Lila’s prosthetics than on her features. No one would confuse her with the sketch, much less the facial-recognition software. Lila didn’t bother to alter the report.
She skimmed through the rest of the file that focused on the bombing. Bullstow had managed to keep the true cause of the explosion from the press, not wanting to cause a panic. They had used extra men from the local militias to create a wide perimeter until every flyer had been retrieved by Bullstow. Luckily, the damp had kept the flyers from blowing too far.
Bullstow knew nothing about the American Abolitionist Society other than its name. Lila wondered how long it would take them to find the hotel, or if they’d find it at all. She imagined Sergeant Perv questioning the workborn about the flyer, a flyer that extolled freedom for all slaves. Such an approach wouldn’t take him very far. Slaves didn’t help the militias in the best of times, and most servants had at least one relative who had been condemned to a slave’s term. Both classes of workborn would be more likely to hinder the investigation than help.
She was safe, at least for now.
Lila signed out of BullNet, for she had work to do for her client. She retrieved her star drive from its hiding place, still glinting on its golden chain. The entire BIRD fit into the palm of her hand. For such a small thing, it was certainly worth a great deal of money. Some of the files in the BIRD, the Birth Identity Records Database, would fetch a high price if offered to the right people, for the parentage of everyone in all four American states had been recorded inside it.