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 persona, 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
