by Martha Carr
Cheyenne rolled her eyes and squatted beside the fallen orc. This time, she grabbed the arm she hadn’t dislocated and draped it over her shoulders.
“What are you doing?”
“Cleaning up.” She pulled the huge magical’s chest and upper torso off the ground and dragged him back through the shop, his pants mopping up the floor behind him.
The goblin stared at her. “Drow.” He shook his head and moved after her. “Your kind are surprisingly strong. Oh, look at this place!”
By the time Radzu reached the back room, Cheyenne was out the back door of the shop and dragging K’shul toward the dark-gray van in the parking lot. She dropped him on the asphalt and opened the sliding door into the back, then got to work pushing and pulling him inside.
“So, is beating up orcs in consignment stores a regular thing for you, or…”
“Huh.” Cheyenne grabbed the bundle of zip-ties in the backseat cupholder and had to link a few together to get them around both of the orc’s meaty wrists. Then she jumped out of the van and stalked past the goblin. “Just yours. So far.”
“Okay.” He followed her back toward his shop. “But why’d you come here? Is there somebody watching me? I’ve been doing everything right. Followed the code. K’shul and his…whatever they are make their rounds, but I didn’t think I’d put out enough of a signal to bring a—”
“Look.” Cheyenne turned on him and gestured toward the van. “Did you want help getting these assholes off your back or what?”
“Well yeah.”
“Great. So you get what you want, and I still have to find the orc who put my friend in the hospital.” She stormed back inside and went to the blue-skinned dude. He had a goose egg on his temple where she’d struck him. His hand looked worse, mangled, charred, and raw halfway up his wrist.
Cheyenne knelt and picked him up. He was much lighter than K’shul.
“Hey, wait.” The goblin stepped over the destruction in the backroom. “Did gu@rdi@n104 send you?”
She paused for a split second, then tossed the blue guy over her shoulder. “No.”
“Oh. ‘Cause, I mean, I don’t know how anybody else would think to come here. Just for orcs. If he sent you, I have money for—”
“Never heard of the guy.” Cheyenne grunted when she stood, carrying a magical who weighed close to twice her size. She headed for the door again. “Never heard of you, either. And I don’t need your money.”
The goblin blinked. “Are you kidding?”
“Nope. Do you know this guy?”
“The troll?” The shop owner shook his head. “Just another thug trying to take from the rest of us who follow the accord.”
“Right.” Great. We got trolls now.
Cheyenne stepped outside and headed for the van again.
“Wait. Did the FRoE send you?” The goblin hurried after her. “I thought they would’ve sent more people. I mean, not that you couldn’t handle it, but—”
“Stop.” Cheyenne dumped the troll into the van and grabbed another zip-tie. “I came to help with your problem and maybe get some answers. That’s it. You need to cut it out with the questions, dude.”
The goblin took a deep breath and paused, then just couldn’t help himself. “I’m just trying to understand why a drow would…”
Cheyenne straightened and turned with a raised eyebrow. The still-burning heat in her body filled her palm with another whirling storm of sparks.
The shop owner swallowed. “Uh. Got it. I’m Radzu, by the way.”
“Good for you.” Cheyenne walked around him for her third trip depositing unconscious magical thugs into their magical-thug van.
“You have a name?”
“Yep.”
Radzu stopped asking questions after that.
Chapter Eighteen
Cheyenne slammed the driver-door of the orc van shut and dusted off her hands. Whether the five idiots knocked out in the back woke up anytime soon wasn’t her problem, but they’d have a few—mainly untying each other and figuring out which ones among them had to drag their vehicle out of the ditch by the river.
She stepped away and surveyed her message, which she’d written in melted chocolate from a bar she’d found under the seat. It was smeared on the inside of the windshield so they’d see it first thing, but seeing it backward from the outside wasn’t any less satisfying.
‘Back Off.’
They probably won’t listen to that kinda warning. Not even from a drow they don’t know is a halfling.
Either way, she’d done her part, which was more for the goblin named Radzu, consignment boutique owner, of all things. She still hadn’t found Durg, and she was saving her worst for him. That didn’t mean she didn’t feel a sliver of pride when she studied the van.
Her skin tingled with her drow blood coursing through her. I broke my record for holding it all together like this. With a smirk, Cheyenne flashed her middle finger at the orcs and their van, then took off down the street toward the consignment shop and her car.
“Yeah. My happy place.”
The fifteen-minute drive from the shop to where she’d ditched the van took her a little over five minutes on foot. She stopped twice to catch her breath, once in a dark parking lot, and the second time on a side street. She was exhausted, and she still had to drive home.
By the time she made it to her apartment, the anger and heat in her veins had cooled. The pale-skinned, dark-haired, human version of Cheyenne Summerlin stepped out of her Focus, and it was only 10:08 p.m.
“Who said fighting a bunch of orc jerks had to take all night?” She snorted. “No one ever. But now I have a few more names.”
Once in her apartment, Cheyenne kicked her shoes off by the door and dropped her keys on the counter. She took a bottle of water from her fridge, then sat at her computer and put her hand on the mouse to wake her monitor. The first thing in front of her was a message from gu@rdi@n104.
You like what you find?
It was time-stamped 9:31 p.m., which would’ve been right around the time she’d climbed into the orc van and booked it out of the lot behind Radzu’s shop. She narrowed her eyes. The goblin had mentioned this guy by name.
She responded as ShyHand71. That’s a little nosey. Thought I had to keep my opinions to myself for 48 hours?? Cheyenne sat back and waited for a reply, which took about five seconds.
gu@rdi@n104: Took you long enough. Have fun?
“What the hell? Why does he assume it was me?” There was nothing tying her handle on this forum to her car or her phone or the fact that she’d had them both with her when she stopped by a goblin-run boutique. She sucked on her teeth. This was not good. “Maybe… Could he have somehow hopped through my VPN and saw I pulled up the address?” She groaned. “Dammit.”
She chewed on the inside of her bottom lip and figured she should play the game a little longer. She needed to find Durg and give the orc what he had coming.
ShyHand71: Yeah. Took a long shower and put on my fuzzy slippers.
gu@rdi@n104: Hope you cleaned out those pointy ears.
“Shit!” Cheyenne jerked her hands up off the keyboard and rolled backward in her chair. “Bastard. He hopped on my bloodhound bot. That fucking goblin can’t keep his mouth shut.”
She took a deep breath and shut her eyes.
Maybe this gu@rdi@n104 is just good at lucky guesses.
Or the community of magicals between here and Washington and this stupid Borderlands forum were a lot more interconnected than she’d guessed. Gotta be more careful. Step away for a bit, let it all cool down.
That was impossible, though, with Ember in the hospital and Durg still running around doing to other magicals what he’d done to her. And now this? “No, I can’t stop now.”
Cheyenne slid her chair forward when she got another message.
gu@rdi@n104: The 48-hour rule still applies. But you can look as much as you want. Just don’t forget we’re watching.
She went for the prickly hacker pers
ona, mostly because she did not understand who these people were, and as far as the rest of the world knew—magicals and humans—halflings were a myth. So, she’d be one.
ShyHand71: While I’m in the shower? Nice try.
gu@rdi@n104: When people want their pets to stay close, they keep ‘em on a leash. Maybe yours got away. Don’t worry. Nobody’s gonna call the pound on you. Yet. You have a few more tricks up your sleeve.
She frowned. “Oh, now he’s cocky. Hate this.”
Cheyenne closed the chat window. Whoever gu@rdi@n104 was, he wouldn’t be screwing with her like this if he wanted an answer. Which meant he thought he knew who she was and what she was doing. “Yeah, but the only person who knows who I am is lying in the hospital. Not like anyone else can be able to pick me out of a lineup or anyth—”
A chuckle bubbled up her throat. She dropped her hands from the keyboard, stared at the frame of her monitor, and grinned. “That’s the best part. The Goth grad-level programmer looks nothing like a drow vigilante beating up magical asshats. Huh. Good thing I never considered wearing a mask.”
She slapped the arm of her computer chair and gave a bombastic shout-slash-laugh. “Okay. One more point for the halfling. Let’s go score some more.”
After another two hours of looking through Borderlands for mentions of Durg or K’shul—now that she had one more name that might connect her to something—her searches still turned up dry. Cheyenne glanced at the clock. Midnight, and she was still wired. “There’s no way I’m gonna make my first class tomorrow.”
Sure, she was worming her way through the dark web looking for one very specific orc, and she’d already gone out once tonight to put a few in their places, but no one could call Cheyenne Summerlin irresponsible. It took her fifteen minutes to go over the syllabus from her Applied Cryptography class, put together a few lines of code way beyond what the professor of this class would have even considered asking of them, and pulled up an email.
Professor Dawley,
I’m not coming into class today, but based on the structure you laid out on Monday about enciphering with block ciphers, the next logical step would be deciphering them again with block ciphers or block cipher modes or both. So I’m attaching a file with the code I built to address deciphering with both. This should show it won’t be necessary for me to provide any other work you might ask for today.
Cheyenne Summerlin
She would’ve emailed that to any of her current professors, but it gave her more satisfaction to send it to Professor Dawley, the short, thin, red-faced man who thought screaming out every code character he outlined on the whiteboard would make his grad students understand better. “And he needs to update his course material. He’s totally stuck in 2015.”
Cheyenne closed her email and knew she wouldn’t check it again for a reply. Beyond everyone seeming to know who her mom was, there was no way Dawley could argue with what she’d sent him. He’d have to ask someone else to explain it to him.
Cracking her knuckles, Cheyenne scooted forward in her desk chair and got back to work on the forums. Despite gu@rdi@n104’s not-so-subtle warning-turned-invitation, it didn’t dampen the energy she had after holding her drow form for over an hour and a half.
And she’d promised Ember she’d set things right.
She’d find Durg and whoever else was with him in that skatepark. If she ended up helping a few magicals getting their asses handed to them by a bunch of other magical jerks, all the better. Maybe that was the price to pay for finding the orc she wanted.
Cheyenne was more than willing to pay it.
Chapter Nineteen
Just before 2:00 a.m., one of her original searches pinged with an entrance to another forum that had nothing to do with Borderlands. Cheyenne finished her third water and couldn’t help but poke around.
The site was called F-ed Up Realm, which made little sense at all until she found a post there that made her stop.
FRoE Alert Updates.
Both Ember and the goblin shop owner had mentioned this FRoE, though in different contexts. “What the hell is it?”
Cheyenne squinted at her screen and scanned the post. Most of it only made sense if the person reading it knew what all the terms meant—Reservation Patrol, FRoE Raid and Return, O’gúleesh Assimilation, Ambar’ogúl Rehabilitation and Reform. She clicked on that last one, caught by the first word she’d seen.
The document was password-protected. She snorted and ran through her decryption programs. She’d built three of the five she had. The other two had been gifts from another hacker she’d met online when she was fourteen. More like counter-hacker. Their little group of like-minded computer nerds had worried about the guy when he’d dropped off the face of the earth. But Pandora2k had found GRND0’s identity in the real world—a ninety-eight-year-old hacker who built decryption programs had died in his sleep a week after sending Cheyenne two of them.
Two of her programs and one of his beat against the site’s security until they unlocked the password protection and let her in.
“Thank you, Ground Zero. Wherever you are. Enjoying unrestricted access to all information everywhere.” She snorted and killed the other programs before they left too much of a trail.
The document in front of her now made no sense. It was written in English, all right, but it looked more like a dossier than anything else—some convict escaping from a max-security prison called Chateau D’rahl, plus a whole outline of updated protocol and guard qualification requirements.
“This has nothing to do with—”
There it was. Her last name.
B. Summerlin—suspected interaction with Inmate 4872. Exact date and time unconfirmed.
“Uh, what?” Cheyenne blinked and shook her head, but the words were the same when she opened her eyes again. “What the hell is Mom doing in a prison incident report?”
She paid a lot more attention to the rest of the document, but B. Summerlin wasn’t mentioned again. There was, however, an addendum to the writeup dated January 3rd, 2000.
Project FRoE started at 1100 hours. First successful operation for Border control at Rez Alpha 1 and Rez Charlie 4. 72 non-human entities detained, cataloged, and entered the exchange system. Results still pending. *See Reports C-182 and CM-014 for further analysis.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Cheyenne scrolled through the initial report, then went back down to the addendum and had to get up out of her chair. “FRoE and Bianca Summerlin on the same report about non-human entities and escaped convicts. What did she do?”
The only thing Cheyenne could do was pace around her small living room while trying to put the pieces together —her mom, Inmate 4872, the FRoE, which started the year Cheyenne was born. “That makes it sound like she was gettin’ it on with a convicted non-human. Jesus, was that what happened?” She spun around and stared at the back of her monitor, then brushed it off and kept pacing. The chains on her wrists clanked against each other in succession as she shook out her hands and studied the carpet that hadn’t been replaced since before she was born.
“Beyond turning into someone else for a night and gettin’ freaky with a drow, what could she have to do with Border patrols? And these reservations, and the damn FRoE. Man, I had to dive deep into this.”
A wry chuckle escaped her, and she mussed her hair on the back of her head, trying to get rid of the jitters that hit every time she put the pieces together of a big puzzle. “She’ll tell me. She has to tell me. Maybe I just found the right question to ask…”
Cheyenne jerked her phone out of her pocket and texted her mom. Although it was almost 3:00 a.m., she had no issues with texting. The woman kept the cell phone in her office and didn’t take it to bed. Urgent calls were to go to the house number, the landline. I don’t wanna talk to her right now. She’ll find it in the morning.
Call me when you’re up. I have some questions. Big ones.
She’d get a call, most likely at 8:00 a.m. sharp. Bianca Summerlin might have retir
ed early from the political spotlight, but she still kept pristine office hours out of her home, having done so the past twenty-one years.
“I need to get out.” Cheyenne shoved her feet into her Vans, grabbed her keys off the counter, and rooted around in her backpack for her wallet. Then she locked the door behind her and headed to the convenience store on the corner.
The gas station was open twenty-four-seven, which had helped her through many a sleepless night. Plus, they carried every single package of junk food and instant meal she’d fallen in love with way more than she should have during her freshman year at Virginia Commonwealth University. She had Ember to thank for most of it. And it’s not like anybody expects grad students to be eating organic, locally-sourced, sustainably-grown meals made by their in-house chef every single day. Nope. I got to leave all that behind me at the Summerlin farm.
She caught her reflection in the glass door of the gas station. I look insane. The last twenty-four hours have been insane too.
The electric bell by the checkout counter dinged when she pulled open the door. Katie looked up from her yoga magazine and jerked her chin up at her latest customer in the middle of the night. “Hey.”
“Katie,” Cheyenne muttered, giving the convenience store’s night-shift employee a nod and a fleeting, distracted smile. She headed for the chip aisle, craving Funyuns.
“Got anything interesting going on tonight?”
“Not really.” Cheyenne didn’t think she could look at the girl who was her own age. Sometimes, she’d spend a few minutes telling Katie about the random programs she was building or the ridiculous things some people thought they could hide on the internet. Not like Katie understood any of it. But Cheyenne didn’t mind someone else her own age, with no connection to her life beyond the fact that she worked at the closest gas station to the half-drow’s apartment, to talk to in two-minute bursts before not having to think about her again. At least until the next time she came in to stock up on food that would make her mom scowl.