by Martha Carr
Tomorrow night.
Cheyenne leaned back in her chair and rubbed her face. “Jesus. I need to find out who’s gonna be there.”
All the hints and vague descriptions pointed to something big. Not only big, but harmful to a lot of magicals with established lives on this side. Beyond that, she knew if she could tap into this network and find their databases beyond a few conversational updates and operating plans, she’d find Durg. The whole thing stank as much as the orc who’d shot Ember.
If I don’t find him, I can at least keep this deal from being made and help who knows how many magicals by crashing their giant party.
Cheyenne set up bloodhound programs to sniff out the actual IP addresses from all four pieces of this messed-up correspondence, then she pulled the encoded location sites from the list and ran those through a decoder that would match them with corresponding GPS coordinates.
“This hole keeps getting deeper.” The halfling stood, double-checked everything was set up to do the heavy lifting, and nodded. “I’ll get to the bottom of it. It’s just gonna take a minute.” She stretched her arms overhead, then made a sour face and sniffed her armpit. “Gross. Time for a shower.”
* * *
She passed the time after her hot shower by practicing her shifts from human to drow and back again. The first one was easier now with every attempt, but the cooldown was still a big issue. Cheyenne stood in front of her bathroom mirror with a towel wrapped around her, staring at the reflection of her purple-gray face and golden eyes flashing in the vanity lighting.
“I found the trick to letting this part out.” Her skin tingled with heat and magic. “So, what’s the trick to calming down?”
What an oxymoron of an assumption—that humans were calmer than anything non-human. Calmer than magicals. It was likely true only because humans had no idea these Borders letting magical beings into their world even existed.
Think of something. Cheyenne brushed her still-wet, bone-white drow hair away from her face and ignored her pointed ears. Something that makes this go away.
With a deep breath, she stared into the mirror and found herself thinking of the Virginia woods around her mom’s twenty-acre plot of land. Their family’s plot of land. All the maples and the rivers, the wildflowers bursting across the meadow in violet, yellow, red, and white. She thought of the family of deer she’d found in the thicket just over the hill behind the farm. Two fawns and their mother, lying in the dappled sunlight coming through the leaves. She’d been so quiet, moving through the woods on bare feet because it always felt better, more natural. She had paused a few yards away from the animals as they rested in the mid-morning sun. The doe had lifted her head and observed Cheyenne crouched behind the trees. No fear. No concern for her fawns. Just recognition that the girl who looked human but wasn’t—not quite—existed in this place with her.
The gray coloring filtered away from Cheyenne’s skin, and her eyes lost their golden glow as second by second, she returned to the form most people recognized but never truly saw—black hair, blue eyes, pale skin, full Goth.
Cheyenne studied her reflection for a few seconds, letting herself think about the doe and her fawns and the silence of the forest that had raised her as much as Bianca had. Her fingers drummed on the counter around the sink.
“Well, it’s better than singing Kumbaya.”
She tried again to shift to drow form.
She went through four rounds of shifting between human and drow, forcing her mind to flit from orcs with guns to a family of deer in the woods. The duck quacked in the living room. “That was fast.”
The message on her computer had nothing to do with her decoding programs or the original IP addresses from that encrypted conversation. It was a personal message, without a user handle or any way to identify who it was from.
It took up her entire screen.
We found your back door. Call off your search.
“Huh.” Cheyenne tried to minimize the message, but this asshole had frozen her monitor. She pulled everything but the new message up on her second monitor and made sure it was still running. She also copied the data that had come back with GPS coordinates and locations already and sent them to three different places on her server, just to be safe. “Might as well keep this guy occupied for a few more minutes.”
She typed a reply, amused to find her own handle appeared before her message.
ShyHand71: Congratulations. Sorry if I’m a little skeptical of someone who takes over my screen and won’t identify themselves.
Whoever it was, they’d opened this dialogue with a rude seizure of her system and no introductory etiquette. “So we’ll cut through all the politeness and get right to the point. My favorite way to do this.”
What you found doesn’t belong to you. You do not understand who you’re dealing with.
Cheyenne snorted. “Please.”
ShyHand71: Sounds scary. So tell me who I’m dealing with. If it sounds like a good enough reason to call it off, maybe I’ll listen.
You only get one warning. Don’t make us have to find you again. Shut it down.
She was ready to tell the ghost messenger to go to hell, but the blank screen of the message without a handle flashed and disappeared.
Chapter Twenty-Five
For a few seconds, Cheyenne’s fingers paused over the keyboard in disbelief. Then, she laughed. “Oh, it’s on. You want someone to back off a search on the dark web, buddy, you don’t seize their system and start making vague threats. Especially me.”
Huffing out another laugh, she shook her head and logged onto a private server she used to share with the group of hackers she’d met through GRND0. Turned out he’d started the system way before she was born and had kept it alive until his death. Then the rest of the group he’d brought in over time had taken it over and turned it into a space for mentoring young, eager hackers who thought they wanted to do this forever. The name hadn’t changed, though: Y2Kickass.
It sounded like a superhero fan group, but at least an awful name kept them off the radar. Whoever managed to find them knew what they were doing enough to be worth the group’s time.
Cheyenne sent a message to the guy she only knew as Todd, and that was enough.
ShyHand71: I need a favor.
The instant reply didn't make it like seem the guy sat in front of his screen twenty-four/seven just waiting for someone to chat with him. She almost rolled her eyes, then realized she was the same way at times.
T-rexifus088L: Look at this. You don’t call. You don’t write. And now you need a favor.
ShyHand71: Yeah, okay. Missed you too.
T-rexifus088L: What’s up?
ShyHand71: I need you to hold some information for me. Some douche canoe’s riding my ass and probably won’t stop until it looks like I stopped first.
T-rexifus088L: Whose Frosted Flakes did you piss in?
ShyHand71: They won’t tell me. I just need a storage space for 48 hours. You cool with that?
T-rexifus088L: ShyHand71 needs my help. Always cool. Is this monster in a cage gonna bite me if I open it?
ShyHand71: Probably. My guess is you wouldn’t even know it until it killed you.
T-rexifus088L: Thanks for the warning. Send it over. I’ll feed the beast for as long as you need.
ShyHand71: I just need you to keep it locked up. But give me a key.
Todd sent a thumbs-up emoji, followed by a link to a terabyte of storage on his own private server—or maybe the one that still belonged to Y2Kickass in general.
T-rexifus088L: Anything else I need to look out for?
ShyHand71: If you get any alerts that the programs finished doing their job before I do, just let me know.
T-rexifus088L: Got it. Hey, we have a couple new recruits wanting to learn from the best. You interested?
Cheyenne closed her eyes and couldn’t help smiling.
ShyHand71: Maybe later. Good to see there are still people like you willing to mold impressionable min
ds into the shape of delinquency. You’re good at it.
T-rexifus088L: You’re better. Catch ya later.
Closing out the chat, Cheyenne opened the provided link and dumped everything she’d found—the results of her searches, the decrypted conversation from four origin points, and the still-processing GPS coordinates—into the server space. The minute she hit upload, everything disappeared, including the link Todd had sent her. “He’ll get me something else when I need to dive back in.”
After that, she scrubbed everything off her server to make it look like she’d taken the hint from the anonymous jerkoff who’d tried to scare her away from digging deeper. “We’re not done, whoever you are. Just wait.”
* * *
After two packs of Ramen noodles and another round of meditating on guns and deer families, Cheyenne went to bed sometime before midnight and got more than four hours of sleep.
The next morning, an email from Professor Dawley sat in her inbox saying he expected her to be in his Thursday class after her absence on Tuesday, because “no one gets their graduate degree by skirting the system and insulting their professor’s intelligence.”
“Whatever. Like I owe him some kind of professional courtesy.”
Still, she resigned herself to sitting through a day of classes to placate the old jerk. She did care about getting her master’s and completing the program, after all. It looked good on paper if she wanted to open the pool of high-level careers that offered options for a life that didn’t bore her to death.
She pulled her long-sleeved fishnet shirt over a black tank top—the one that was mostly ripped to shreds—and painted on black lipstick again. “How’s that for professional courtesy?”
The chains on her wrist clinked as she snatched her backpack and slipped on her shoes. “Time to go play the game. At least until I figure out where that meeting’s going down tonight.”
The drive to the Virginia Commonwealth University campus gave her plenty of time to imagine finding Durg at this illegal meet-up of magical gangs and wringing his thick neck. She thought about baby deer in between each satisfying daydream.
The image of the doe and her fawns was a lot harder to keep in the front of her mind when she walked through the campus and across the quad for her next class. People were staring at her. Not like that was anything new, and Cheyenne was used to unwanted eyes on her, trying to put together the pieces of an expressionless Goth chick storming across the school to sit in her classes and pay attention. But that wasn’t what she felt this morning.
Someone’s watching me.
A few times, she turned around on the path to search the faces turned toward her that turned away when people realized she was looking for something. Just a bunch of college kids using their dulled imaginations to judge her based on how she dressed. Nothing else.
There’s no way anyone online figured out who I am. Not after I’ve kept that secret since I learned what a computer was.
Still, the feeling of being watched and followed didn’t go away. It didn’t help that Cheyenne almost knocked over a kid running across the path after a giant bouncy ball. She cursed and leapt out of the way.
“You need to watch where you’re going.” The kid’s mom glared at her with an impressive mixture of scorn and fear as she jogged after the toddler.
Right. Because two-year-olds belong on a college campus.
Her first class was with Professor Bergmann, which didn’t feel as awkward as Cheyenne expected. The woman spoke with her usual flair of apathy despite how excited she was to pick apart the aspects of the assignment she’d had them do on Tuesday. Mattie didn’t meet Cheyenne’s gaze more than once or offer any sign she also agreed Cheyenne didn’t need to be here. Except for when Natalie and her messy bun showed up fifteen minutes late and knocked the keyboard to the floor with her oversized, over-prized messenger bag.
“They leave those cords here for a reason,” Natalie muttered as she stepped over the keyboard and the dangling cords. “So we can use them.”
“Nice apology.” Cheyenne eyed the other student with a blank expression as Natalie sidestepped a row of tables and took a seat in the front. What is she even doing in this class?
A small tingle of heat flared beneath her skin, and Cheyenne sank farther into her chair, stretching her legs out under the table until they knocked against the fallen keyboard.
“All right, Ms. Arcady.” Professor Bergmann eyed Natalie and offered a tight smile. “While I appreciate you bothering to come to class today, I expect you to be on time. That’s something you should’ve covered before the last time you graduated.”
“Sorry. I had to stop for—”
“Excuses are for undergrads,” Bergmann interrupted. “I don’t care why you were late. I do care that you want to be here, and for that to be convincing, you need to be here at eight o’clock. Preferably before then, so everyone’s ready before I get here. So. Who learned something while you were building the programs you started on Tuesday?”
A lanky dude with a bushy red beard, who insisted on sitting in the last row, started talking about the next level of code he’d injected into what their professor had given them to work with, and Cheyenne had no problem tuning him out. Instead, she tried not to think of anything related to a gun when she heard Messy Bun whisper to Peter, “She can’t talk to us like that. That’s harassment.”
For the first time in two weeks, Cheyenne turned on the university-provided computer in front of her, pulled the keyboard onto the desk, and sneaked into the sadly vulnerable school servers to connect with Messy Bun’s computer. She pulled up the notepad and typed a little message to get the girl to shut up about lawsuits and getting Professor Bergmann fired.
Reminding you you’re an adult isn’t harassment.
It took a few seconds for Messy Bun to see the message. She glanced at her screen and stiffened, then stared at the professor at the front of the room. She tried to figure out how the woman had gotten a message into her computer without touching it and while talking to the class. Not to mention how she heard her.
Cheyenne fought back a giggle and sent one more note.
But I can harass you all day from anywhere.
Messy Bun stabbed the power button on the monitor until the screen blinked off, then she slumped in her chair and folded her arms.
The big guy named Peter leaned toward Natalie. “You okay?”
“I’m trying to pay attention.” The girl gestured weakly toward Professor Bergmann, then folded her arms again.
Cheyenne heard Messy Bun’s heartbeat racing between short, shallow breaths. That girl wouldn’t make it through a programming career if she had no interest in figuring out who’d sent her the message.
“And that’s what I…can I help you?” Mattie paused in answering somebody else’s question to lean sideways toward the door into the computer lab.
“Sorry. Wrong room.” The guy didn’t sound sorry or flustered for having stepped into someone else’s class. He didn’t sound anywhere near the same age as the other grad students, either.
A prickle of suspicion rippled along Cheyenne’s neck, and she turned in her chair for a look at the guy. But he’d already left, and the door shut again.
Mattie cocked her head with a confused smile. “Gotta love the second week of class. I swear, it takes first-graders less time to get used to a new schedule.” The students chuckled, and Professor Bergmann continued lecturing.
Cheyenne didn’t miss the look her professor shot her, even as Mattie kept speaking with zero indication anything might be wrong.
Why do I feel like something’s about to blow up in my face any second?
That feeling of being watched, either in person or through any computers she had access to, came back stronger. Cheyenne signed out of everything on the lab’s computer and turned her laptop off too.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Through her second class, she still felt watched. It made her itchy, and more than once, she found herself zeroin
g in on the memory of deer in the woods instead of trying not to fall asleep while her professor droned on about cybersecurity and why it was important. They should be teaching people how to hack into these systems instead of coloring inside the lines. You want a high-profile technology firm to protect their assets and keep their private data locked up, you hire the best hacker you can find. Nobody seems to get that.
None of her professors bothered to ask her to stay after class to discuss why she was skipping during the second week of grad school. They didn’t have an argument, because the work Cheyenne had sent via email before being absent was perfect. They all knew it.
She stopped at the Student Center for a lamb gyro and two bottles of water. Even here, with students and administrators of every age and academic subject milling around in a haze trying to get used to being in school again, the drow halfling couldn’t shake the feeling someone had eyes on her. She couldn’t find a single person who appraised her with anything more than superficial judgment.
There’s no way I’m just imagining this. Paranoia isn’t my style.
Her stomach had different ideas. Cheyenne wrapped the rest of the gyro and shoved it in her backpack, then downed a bottle of water and bagged the other one before heading to the IT building and Professor Bergmann’s office.
Useless classes and less-useless training. However, Mattie’s been on this side long enough that she’s bound to know something about how magicals find each other here. If there is someone following me.
It took her by surprise to see Mattie Bergmann behind her desk wearing yellow sweatpants, a navy tank top, and sneakers with her hair in a high ponytail. She looked more like another college student than a woman getting paid to teach them.
“Right on time.” Mattie stood when Cheyenne stepped through her office door. The professor clicked out of something on her computer.