The gray coloring filtered away from Cheyenne’s skin, and her eyes lost their golden glow as second by second, she returned to the form most people recognized but never truly saw—black hair, blue eyes, pale skin, full Goth.
Cheyenne studied her reflection for a few seconds, letting herself think about the doe and her fawns and the silence of the forest that had raised her as much as Bianca had. Her fingers drummed on the counter around the sink.
“Well, it’s better than singing Kumbaya.”
She tried again to shift to drow form.
She went through four rounds of shifting between human and drow, forcing her mind to flit from orcs with guns to a family of deer in the woods. The duck quacked in the living room. “That was fast.”
The message on her computer had nothing to do with her decoding programs or the original IP addresses from that encrypted conversation. It was a personal message, without a user handle or any way to identify who it was from.
It took up her entire screen.
We found your back door. Call off your search.
“Huh.” Cheyenne tried to minimize the message, but this asshole had frozen her monitor. She pulled everything but the new message up on her second monitor and made sure it was still running. She also copied the data that had come back with GPS coordinates and locations already and sent them to three different places on her server, just to be safe. “Might as well keep this guy occupied for a few more minutes.”
She typed a reply, amused to find her own handle appeared before her message.
ShyHand71: Congratulations. Sorry if I’m a little skeptical of someone who takes over my screen and won’t identify themselves.
Whoever it was, they’d opened this dialogue with a rude seizure of her system and no introductory etiquette. “So we’ll cut through all the politeness and get right to the point. My favorite way to do this.”
What you found doesn’t belong to you. You do not understand who you’re dealing with.
Cheyenne snorted. “Please.”
ShyHand71: Sounds scary. So tell me who I’m dealing with. If it sounds like a good enough reason to call it off, maybe I’ll listen.
You only get one warning. Don’t make us have to find you again. Shut it down.
She was ready to tell the ghost messenger to go to hell, but the blank screen of the message without a handle flashed and disappeared.
Chapter Twenty-Five
For a few seconds, Cheyenne’s fingers paused over the keyboard in disbelief. Then, she laughed. “Oh, it’s on. You want someone to back off a search on the dark web, buddy, you don’t seize their system and start making vague threats. Especially me.”
Huffing out another laugh, she shook her head and logged onto a private server she used to share with the group of hackers she’d met through GRND0. Turned out he’d started the system way before she was born and had kept it alive until his death. Then the rest of the group he’d brought in over time had taken it over and turned it into a space for mentoring young, eager hackers who thought they wanted to do this forever. The name hadn’t changed, though: Y2Kickass.
It sounded like a superhero fan group, but at least an awful name kept them off the radar. Whoever managed to find them knew what they were doing enough to be worth the group’s time.
Cheyenne sent a message to the guy she only knew as Todd, and that was enough.
ShyHand71: I need a favor.
The instant reply didn't make it like seem the guy sat in front of his screen twenty-four/seven just waiting for someone to chat with him. She almost rolled her eyes, then realized she was the same way at times.
T-rexifus088L: Look at this. You don’t call. You don’t write. And now you need a favor.
ShyHand71: Yeah, okay. Missed you too.
T-rexifus088L: What’s up?
ShyHand71: I need you to hold some information for me. Some douche canoe’s riding my ass and probably won’t stop until it looks like I stopped first.
T-rexifus088L: Whose Frosted Flakes did you piss in?
ShyHand71: They won’t tell me. I just need a storage space for 48 hours. You cool with that?
T-rexifus088L: ShyHand71 needs my help. Always cool. Is this monster in a cage gonna bite me if I open it?
ShyHand71: Probably. My guess is you wouldn’t even know it until it killed you.
T-rexifus088L: Thanks for the warning. Send it over. I’ll feed the beast for as long as you need.
ShyHand71: I just need you to keep it locked up. But give me a key.
Todd sent a thumbs-up emoji, followed by a link to a terabyte of storage on his own private server—or maybe the one that still belonged to Y2Kickass in general.
T-rexifus088L: Anything else I need to look out for?
ShyHand71: If you get any alerts that the programs finished doing their job before I do, just let me know.
T-rexifus088L: Got it. Hey, we have a couple new recruits wanting to learn from the best. You interested?
Cheyenne closed her eyes and couldn’t help smiling.
ShyHand71: Maybe later. Good to see there are still people like you willing to mold impressionable minds into the shape of delinquency. You’re good at it.
T-rexifus088L: You’re better. Catch ya later.
Closing out the chat, Cheyenne opened the provided link and dumped everything she’d found—the results of her searches, the decrypted conversation from four origin points, and the still-processing GPS coordinates—into the server space. The minute she hit upload, everything disappeared, including the link Todd had sent her. “He’ll get me something else when I need to dive back in.”
After that, she scrubbed everything off her server to make it look like she’d taken the hint from the anonymous jerkoff
