“Well at least let me cover it.” He held out folded sheets of gauze, and Cheyenne approached him just long enough to take the gauze from his hand and the roll of medical tape from the desk.
“Yeah, good idea. Have a good night.” She lifted the supplies in a hurried salute and marched toward the door.
“Wait, you can’t just… You have to keep it clean!”
The halfling waved him off before she disappeared. Dr. Andrews frowned, scratched his head, and turned slowly to look at Ember. “I don’t suppose you know anything about that, huh?”
She smiled and tilted her head. “About what?”
He chuckled in disbelief. “Yeah, that’s right. Like it never even happened.”
* * *
Cheyenne made it back to her apartment half an hour later. Her shoulder, now covered with the gauze she’d taped down in her car, felt a million times better already. Or maybe it was just a placebo effect. “Mind over matter, right?”
She dropped her backpack beside the half-wall of the kitchen counter and headed right for Glen and everything her desktop setup had to offer. The thought of Sir or Rhynehart or some other FRoE operative looking for her on the side of the freeway where she’d tossed the tracking device out her car window made her smile.
The main monitor of the two on her desk blinked on when she woke it up, and the halfling had something else to smile about. “Bingo. The Bunker is still reigning champion.”
Her reinforced decryption program had done exactly what it was supposed to do with the massive file gu@rdi@n104 had sent her yesterday. Cheyenne clicked out of the notification alerting her to the finished process and froze.
“You gotta be kidding me.” She sat in her executive desk chair, rolled it toward her keyboard, and scanned the file the Bunker had taken over twelve hours to unwrap for her.
It was a whole bunch of nothing. The file didn’t even make sense. On the surface, it looked like a large text of simple CSS code formatting, except for none of the commands were closed off, and what would have been words were just more broken lines of code with no apparent ending. One more layer of encryption, and she didn’t even know where to start breaking this down. Good thing she had friends in hacker places.
Cheyenne logged on to the Y2Kickass server and pulled up a private message to her old friend Todd.
ShyHand71: Hey, buddy. I have another favor to ask.
The halfling sat back and watched for a response. Todd was usually pretty quick about getting back to her. She had a feeling the guy stayed in the server all the time to keep an eye on things after GRND0 kicked the bucket. She was right.
T-rexifus088L: Okay, you know I love you. But if you’re trying to send me another one of those files that sits around on my network like a grenade with the pin pulled, you can suck it.
Cheyenne laughed and typed her response.
ShyHand71: I said sorry for that one, didn’t I?
T-rexifus088L: Briefly.
ShyHand71: It’s not anything like that. Somebody who might turn out to be a friend sent me on a little scavenger hunt. It’s stupid, but it’s kind of the only option I have to get what I want. I decrypted the first layer, but there’s something else keeping me out. Code that looks broken but somehow isn’t. Think any of our friends could take a look and tell me what it is? Or at least where to start?
T-rexifus088L: Weird. Maybe. I can ask. Any particular way you want me to sell it?
ShyHand71: Just tell them I can pay. With real money. If that makes a difference.
T-rexifus088L: Real money? What’s that?
ShyHand71: Haha.
Cheyenne shook her head. The members of GRND0’s Y2Kickass team hadn’t branched out much since the halfling had come aboard as a new wannabe hacker over six years ago. These people weren’t looking for paid work. They hung around, just like Cheyenne did, in case one of the others pulled something up that looked remotely interesting. Maybe offering to pay someone to decrypt something she hadn’t seen before wasn’t quite enough.
ShyHand71: And throw in an extra little gift, I guess. Say I’ll owe them one.
T-rexifus088L: Yeah, that might get somebody to take a look, at least. I’ll let you know if I get any bites.
ShyHand71: Thanks.
The chat window closed from his end, and Cheyenne logged out of Y2Kickass to keep that part of her life separate from what she was about to get into next. Sure, she had complete faith in the VPN she’d set up and her tight firewall layers, but there really was no such thing as being too careful on the dark web.
One more jump through the site titled Third Quarter Projections and onto the Borderlands forum. The hidden site was one giant, virtual hangout for the magicals on this side of the Border trying to find a little bit of solidarity in a world where no one knew they existed. Where no one could know, except for other magicals and the FRoE. There were a ridiculous number of new post topics at the top of the screen, but she ignored them all to find the one and only post she’d made so far—that she was looking for the orc named Durg.
That was the most important thing on her list right now, especially while Todd talked to their pals about decrypting the rest of gu@rdi@n104’s stupid treasure map. gu@rdi@n104 leaving the very first—and only—comment on her post had definitely scared all the other users away from even trying to talk to her about it. gu@rdi@n104 had staked his claim to the information, apparently, and now the halfling’s only option with that was to play along with the guy’s ridiculous game.
She skimmed back through the newest topic threads, and the post that caught her attention next made her pause. “Woah.”
It was titled Someone Needs to Murder That Skaxen, which would have been intriguing enough. But the real kicker with
