She shut the burner phone in the glove box and locked the car before she strolled out of the parking lot and headed for her apartment complex, which was close by. No way are they gonna call me right after drugging me and dropping me off in the middle of nowhere. They know I’m not playing around about no tails. Plus, I need some time.
After a fifteen-minute walk, the halfling unlocked the front door of her apartment and moved inside. Her backpack was where she had left it on the floor next to the kitchen counter. She fetched her laptop from inside it, then went to her room and yanked her phone charger from the wall socket. A glance at her tech setup in the living area made her pause—dual monitors, her small selection of specialized keyboards, the two desktop towers she’d built from scratch, and the private server hard drives on the wall behind the large executive desk. “I’ll come back to check things later. Right now, I have a burner phone in my car to make invisible.”
Fifteen minutes later, she reached her Focus in the Walmart parking lot. She turned the car on to charge her regular cell phone, then pulled her laptop from her backpack and logged on to the closest public wi-fi network.
Most burner phones were hard to trace by GPS or by pinging the cell signal, but she doubted the FRoE would give her something that wouldn’t let them keep an eye on her before they called the number-—which thankfully, they hadn’t done in the last half hour.
“Like GRND0 taught me.” The brilliant, innocuous hacker who’d formed the Y2Kickass group when Cheyenne was a kid had had much to say about rerouting cell phone signals, whether they were from prepaid burners or numbers with a monthly bill and more than enough of a paper trail. Before he’d died, the old man had shown the half-drow more helpful tricks than she’d expected she’d have to use any time in her immediate or far future. “That’s how it works, though, right? You learn everything you don’t need to know until you end up needing to use what you know.”
She opened the back of the phone and took out both the battery and the SIM card before she found the tiny tracking chip that wasn’t factory standard for burners. They can’t think I’m this stupid. No, they’ve got something else wired in here. She tossed the tracking chip out the window, then put it back together and hoped no one had tried to call in the last minute. They’re not that desperate, either.
She connected the burner to the open wi-fi in the area, then switched back to her laptop. GRND0 had sent her a small program eight years ago for slipping into cell phone databases and fiddling around with the signal directions. It was a simple program and wasn’t useful for anything besides disconnecting a phone’s SIM card from the cell towers long enough to inject a manufactured location. “Look at that. The modern conveniences of sharing an internet network with whoever happens to be right next to me. Like a friendly little shock collar the FRoE’s trying too hard to put around my neck.”
Cheyenne grimaced and synced the burner to her laptop with one-way encryption on GRND0’s program so the phone couldn’t read her IP address and send that information to whoever Sir had ordered to keep tabs on her. She scrambled the cell signal. If it worked, she’d still get their phone calls, and the FRoE would be able to trace her to only two locations: the tiny tracking chip she’d tossed out into the parking lot and a continually-shifting cell tower in the Richmond area.
“Who am I kidding? Of course, it’ll work.”
She took the phone off the public wi-fi network, dropped it on the passenger seat, and turned her attention to her laptop to check her VCU email.
“Crap.”
Five emails from five of her graduate professors, which was all of them. The one from Professor Hersh was full of its usual vitriolic snobbery.
I expect you to either bring in a doctor’s note to my next class on Wednesday or have a good reason for skipping two more classes within the first month of the semester. You’re an obviously gifted student, Cheyenne, but I don’t have the time or the patience for playing games. If you don’t want to be in my class, withdraw. If I don’t see your face in every single class for the rest of the semester, I will fail you, whether or not you turn in the assignments on time or send me your work in advance of said assignments. This is not an online graduate program.
There were two more paragraphs after that, but she didn’t bother reading the rest. The other emails were much the same, although they lacked the high levels of animosity. Two added a line that was supposed to show her professors’ concern over her absences: I hope everything’s okay, and this isn’t some type of emergency absence. If it is, please let me know as soon as possible, and we’ll see what we can work out.
Cheyenne opened the most recent email, which was from her Advanced Algorithms professor Mattie Bergmann—the woman leading a secret life as a magical from the other side, dressed up as a human with an illusion spell, and the person who had given her first semblance of magical training Cheyenne had found. “Mostly lucky, I guess. We’ll see what she has to say.”
Cheyenne,
We’ve discussed that your knowledge and experience with the course material of my class is beyond what I can offer you. I’m not upset you skipped my class this morning, but
