Nodding, she stroked the top of Ember’s hand and gave it a little squeeze. “I’m gonna go, but I’ll be back. You work on all that healing stuff, and you better call me when you—”
The softest, slightest pressure of Ember’s fingers closing around hers made her stop. A gasp of disbelief escaped the half-drow, and she blinked the last few tears away before pulling herself back together. “Yeah, sounds like a plan.”
She slipped her hand out of Ember’s, which she set back on the hospital bed, then patted the comforter. “I felt that. So don’t think you can deny it later. You’re gonna be okay.”
Cheyenne pushed herself to her feet, wiped her damp cheeks, and slipped out of the hospital room. She had both earbuds in and Diva Destruction playing full blast before she’d gotten halfway out of the ICU. A few of the nurses on staff slowed on their way to other patients just to stare. The half-drow felt their gazes on her, and she shoved her hands into her pockets before picking up the pace.
Guess I have to make my angry place and my happy place the same thing. And then I’m gonna kick that orc’s ass.
Chapter Sixteen
“Ow!” Cheyenne jerked the forkful of microwaved lasagna out of her mouth and glared at it. “Either still frozen in the middle or burn-your-tongue-off hot. Someone’s gotta make a microwave that does what everyone expects. Or I should quit buying these.”
She blew on the food and stuck the whole thing in her mouth. A quick slurp of energy drink cooled it off enough to keep most of her taste buds, and the rest didn’t matter. “Okay. Time to hunt some orcs.”
The dark-web searches she’d had running all day had pulled up four different hits. None of them mentioned Durg, but they all had O-class in them somewhere. One of them came from a forum called Borderlands, which had a lot of rabbit holes Cheyenne had to fight not to dive down right now.
“Man, what is this? Facebook for racketeers?”
The forums with names so stupid—like Fight the Power—had to be blind fronts for law enforcement just hoping to crack down on as many morons as they could find. Just distractions for the angsty teenage hacker trying to find meaning in places most people didn’t know how to access. She moved through these, scanning the titles and discarding the ones that had more than a handful of comments. This wasn’t about hopping on the most popular discussion for wannabe badasses or way more conspiracy threads than she could count. “Where’s that O-class?”
Five minutes later, she’d found the OP’s bulletin entitled ‘Third-Quarter Projections’ and snorted. “Sounds boring.”
She sent a polite enough message asking for access to the comments. The reply was immediate from a handle she hadn’t seen before.
gu@rdi@n104: Welcome, ShyHand71. Friendly admin reminder—Users with first-time access keep their opinions to themselves for the first 48 hours.
“Aw, bummer.” Cheyenne rolled her eyes.
ShyHand71: No problem. Thanks for the open door.
gu@rdi@n104: Looking for anything specific?
Cheyenne jammed another steaming forkful of lasagna into her mouth and washed it down with Blueberry-Buzz-flavored energy. “Hey, somebody’s bringing back old passwords.” Her fingers clacked on the keys.
ShyHand71: Wouldn’t tell you if I were.
The cursor on the private message blinked a few seconds, then the admin’s message came through accompanied by a thumbs-up emoji and an A+.
gu@rdi@n104: Have fun.
“Oh, yeah. Loads of fun. You could save me time and give me that orc’s head on a silver—”
The private message disappeared from her screen, and the entirety of the Third-Quarter Projections forum rearranged itself into a different conversation. “That’s more like it.”
Grinning, Cheyenne scrolled through the message board. They were ordered by race, apparently—G-, GM-, N-, O-, and T-class labels. “Guessing it would be D for drow if they had any. At least it’s alphabetical.”
She dove into the G-class boards first. No one explicitly said anything about goblins, but it was implied. Gobbling as Free Market Trade. Gobs Pushed Off Rez. G Biz Needs an Interpreter.
“Obviously not for English if they’re writing in it.” She clicked on that last one, took ten seconds to read the bulletin, then scrolled through the comments. “Jackpot. Goblin businesses being hit by orcs. Sounds like the same problem that Trevor guy had. Except for the O’gúl threats. Whatever those are.”
There wasn’t an address listed for the place, which would’ve been stupid. If she wanted to hang around the forum to monitor things, she wouldn’t be able to send anyone anything for two days. “Yeah, since they’re monitoring everybody in here, good thing I can be invisible.”
The VPN decryption she’d built a few years ago still worked the way it needed to, although it didn’t have any fancy code attached to make it look pretty. Which was the point. “Nobody’s looking, anyway.” Cheyenne released the thing and let it sniff its way through the OP’s backtrail. It hit four different rerouted IPs before settling on the fifth and bringing it up on a map of Richmond and the surrounding areas, flashing in a bright-red circle.
“Bloodhound found the scent. Good work. My turn.”
The lasagna called her name, so she shoveled the rest of it in her mouth with her usual efficiency. Until tonight, that efficiency meant she had more time to poke around in all the dark places she’d learned to navigate from behind her desk. Now, it meant she was out of her apartment two minutes later to locate that last IP address and hunt an orc in the flesh instead
