Authors: Selene Edwards
“You don’t owe me an explanation,” he soothed. “You don’t owe me anything, actually. I, on the other hand, still have a debt to settle, and I think we both know there isn’t a lot of time left to pay it.”
She pressed her lips together. He was right, of course. Despite learning about Marivean’s presence and Avrick’s sudden defection, nothing had really changed. Her condition was the same, and Damien was still her only chance of figuring it out.
“All right,” she said after a minute. “We can ask Kronn to find us another safe house.”
“No reason, really. This place is empty enough now, and at least we’ll be close to the others if something goes wrong again.”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “Let me finish eating and then I’ll meet you at the dormitories.”
Damien nodded. “All right. I’ll meet you there, then.”
***
For a revolutionary, Corin Grey liked to consider himself a loyal man. He had only really been a part of two organizations in his life: the Valerian Syndicate, who had picked him up off the streets as an impoverished teenager, and the Asurans, whom he had fled to when he had finally escaped the former. Even as what essentially amounted to a slave in the Syndicate, he had never really made an effort to disrupt the organization, not until his very last days there when he and Shy had finally escaped. And during his four years with the Asurans, he had been as dutiful as any other member, doing everything he possibly could to keep them protected from the electronic and cyber wars everyone liked to forget they were constantly fighting.
It was why, when he had first stumbled across this blip on his screen, he had almost been willing to look past it. But while loyalty was one of his stronger characteristics, so was curiosity. He hadn’t been able to resist the temptation, and he had started tracing it back to its source.
Now, sitting with his back against the wall in the corner of what was left of their mainframe storage room, he had absolutely no idea what he was going to do.
He was probably frozen for a good ten minutes before Shyrah pushed open the door and dropped a case of blank data sticks on the only remaining table.
“I found these in one of the east storage rooms,” she told him. “I’m pretty sure they’re blank, but we might as well throw them together with the rest of this junk before we finish moving it all.”
He could feel her eyes on him when he didn’t respond. He started to say something, but nothing came out.
“Hey, you awake?”
He glanced up to her, to the face of the person he probably argued with more than anyone else in the world, but also the one he trusted implicitly. “I think we have a problem.”
She stepped towards him. “A security breach?”
“Not exactly,” he replied softly. “I was doing some last minute cleanup, and I stumbled across some concealed outbound transmissions from our network.”
“What do you mean ‘concealed,’” she asked, leaning down over him to glance at his screen.
“Buried amongst some other routine uploads and heavily encrypted. It’s good work, too. With a bit more care, there’s no way I would have ever caught this. The only reason I did now is because someone got sloppy.”
Shyrah frowned at the code on his screen. “So what’s the bottom line?”
“Someone inside the base was feeding information to an external relay. I’m not sure I can trace it any better than that.”
“Could it be a bug of some type?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “My normal sweeps would pick up anything like that. This was sent by a person—one who half-assed his protocols. He could have been piggybacking this stuff for weeks or months and I never would have caught it.”
Shyrah swallowed heavily. Dealing with the fact they may have had a security breach among them was bad enough, but she hadn’t even heard the half of it yet. Having seen her reactions to all kinds of bad news over the past decade, he knew this explosion was going to be particularly impressive.
“Do you know what was in it?” she asked. “The location of the new base, maybe?”
“That’s actually part of the problem. Like I said, it’s heavily encrypted—and I don’t mean the routine shit we use on a day-to-day basis. I’m talking about a serious fractal encryption scheme.”
“Covenant?”
He snorted, probably too loudly. “This is way beyond them. There’s only one group I know of in the city who could put something like this together.”
Shyrah’s eyes narrowed and she stood back up. “Elassian Intelligence.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Someone here is giving ESI data about us. I don’t know what, but I do know where it came from.”
“Well?”
“Kronn’s office.”
Ten minutes ago, Corin imagined his own face had probably looked pretty similar to the one she was making now. It was some combination of shock, horror, and rage—not necessarily in that order. He still wasn’t fully recovered, and telling her had actually made it worse rather than better.
“Like I said, I don’t know what was in it, and I don’t actually know if he is the one who sent it. A lot of people have been in his office and everywhere else in the last two days while we packed things up.”
“Right,” she whispered, eyes flicking back and forth as her mind raced to catch up with it. “Why the hell would ESI care about what we’re doing?”
“Well, we are officially terrorists,” he reminded her. “We just don’t blow up buildings or shoot people who don’t deserve it.”
“They’ve never cared about what we’ve done before—”
She cut herself off, and Corin assumed she had come to the same conclusion he had. If Kronn or someone else was reporting to ESI, it would go a long way toward explaining why the Asurans had mostly been left alone all these years. But what would ESI gain out of such a relationship? Information on slaver groups? Corin always assumed ESI would know more about most of these things than they would—they certainly had more resources to work with.
“It could be nothing,” he said softly.
Shyrah shot him a sharp glare. “It might not be Kronn, but it is definitely
not
nothing.”
“Yeah, I know,” he admitted softly. “I just don’t see what they’re getting out of it.”
“There’s no way to know without finding out what was in the transmission. You’re sure you can’t crack it?”
He shrugged helplessly. “Not without better equipment or a couple of months.”
“Or the encryption key.”
“Well, yeah.” He sighed and pulled nervously at his long hair. “So what do we do about it?”
“I could confront Kronn,” she suggested. “If it’s not him, we could start a sweep. As if we don’t have enough problems already…”
“And if it is him?” he asked tightly.
“If it is him, the Asurans are done either way,” she said flatly. She sighed and swore under her breath. “Is there any way you could dig around and try to find anything else?”
He nodded. “It will take time, but yeah. There’s a chance—albeit a small one—I might be able to find evidence of other transmissions now that I know what I’m looking for. They’ll all still be encrypted, though.”
“Unless he made a mistake somewhere else,” Shyrah said. “All right, keep looking around when you can and tell me what you get. I’ll see if I can squeeze anything out of Kronn without being too obvious about it.”
“All right,” he agreed, his voice small. “I, uh, I hope you weren’t right all along.”
She glanced away, and he could almost see the battle raging in her mind. For as long as she had been warning him about trusting anyone, he knew well she hadn’t really taken her own advice—especially not with Kronn. If this did turn out to be him…
“We’ll figure something out,” she said tightly after a moment. “Just get to work and let me know if you find anything else.”
With that she was gone. Corin stared blankly at the half-open door, trying not to think about their last days in the Syndicate. He could still hear her whimpered screams through their base’s thin walls as Garaldi’s men raped her for hours on end. It had driven him into a manic fury then, the first and only time in his life he had been so angry he had actually run up and confronted them—and gotten a broken leg as a reward.
His closed his eyes and blinked back the tears. Regardless of what had happened, they had survived then, and he knew they would survive now. They always did. And maybe, just maybe, he was wrong about this whole thing.
Sitting alone, computer on his lap, Corin shook away the ghosts in his memory and got to work.
***
Twenty minutes and three calming exercises later, Damien heard Sariel walk into the dormitories. She shut the door behind her and sat down on the edge of the nearest bed. It wasn’t exactly the same as the plush, giant-size mattresses and red silken sheets he was used to, but it would be good enough for what they had to do.
Actually, it was almost assuredly better. The farther he kept this from anything resembling a romantic dalliance, the better. He had a job to do and needed to focus on it.
“Do you need me to…change or anything?” she asked softly after a moment.
He smiled despite himself at the innocence of the question. His clients almost always wore something elegant and occasionally even something more risqué, but they could have been wearing a misshapen bodysuit and it wouldn’t have really mattered. Once he was in their mind, the petty details of reality ceased to be a concern. Still, sometimes dressing up got them in the mood beforehand and ultimately made his job easier.
But in her case…
“No, it’s fine,” he insisted. “Just take a few minutes to relax and calm your mind.”
She nodded and closed her eyes, and he made the mistake of envisioning her in something other than her shirt and jeans. A long, backless blue dress with a modern Louvettan-style cut in front just over her belly, a pair of ten centimeter Regante heels, her hair pulled up just a bit behind—
It was definitely a mistake, and he quickly pushed the thought out of his mind. As little of a chance as this had of working, he knew it wouldn’t have any at all if he couldn’t stay focused. He needed to slip inside and distract her as quickly as possible, then work in deeper to see if he could reach the spirit inside her. If he couldn’t…
Well, he knew those consequences perfectly well at this point, and dwelling on them wasn’t any more productive than his previous line of thinking.
“I’m all right,” she assured him after a minute. “It’s just the last few days haven’t really gone according to plan.”
“I’m sure that happens a lot for people who live this type of life.”
“I suppose so.”
Damien sat down on the bed next to her and reached out his hand. “I can try to help.”
She looked at him for the first time as she reached out and took his hand. The empathic spark surged between their flesh, and he did everything he could to send her the assurances he had spent the last twenty minutes building up inside himself. After a few seconds the stress in her muscles seemed to fade and she sighed softly.
“It’s…” her face strained and she shook her head. “God, I’ve never felt anything like this before. I swear it’s stronger every time.”
Damien was used to hearing such things from his clients. How they had never been touched like that before or felt such raw pleasure. But that’s not what she meant and he knew it. The spark between them was so strong it almost hurt; he felt his thoughts sliding into hers, like their very minds were coming together. He had never felt this before, either, not even with Vala.
“Just let yourself relax,” he said, doing his best to maintain control. He had known this was going to be difficult—the quicker he got on with this, the better for both of them.
Damien brought his other hand up to her forehead and burrowed himself deeper into her thoughts. So far, so good—the angelic spirit wasn’t flaring up to stop him, and her mental defenses seemed content to let him in. He sifted around through her thoughts and memories with practiced ease, searching for the one thing that would truly let him break through…
He felt himself gasp when he found it, but he managed to maintain their link. The memories were sharp and vivid, just as if he were truly there along with her. Sariel sat on a small bed not so different than the one they were on now, but the room was decorated with a smattering of religious paraphernalia. She wore the long, white robe of a temple priestess, and she looked different than she did now—her skin wasn’t nearly so pale, and her hair was a layered raven black. Her eyes were a bright blue.