“Cool,” Ember muttered.
The halfling looked at her and frowned. She didn’t even hear me.
Unfolding her legs from the recliner, Cheyenne stood and tossed the metal sphere a few times in her hand before palming it and heading for the iron stairs up to the mini-loft.
Ember leaned forward in her wheelchair, muttered the incantation laid out on the page, and twisted her right hand in the same patterns diagrammed in Maleshi’s precise drawing. The leather recliner rocked on its legs before lifting a foot in the air.
Cheyenne stopped halfway up the short staircase. “Whoa.”
The recliner thumped back down, ruffling the pages at the edge of the coffee table.
Ember looked at the halfling and grinned. “See? Easy. Good thing you’ve got a best friend who can pick up the slack for you, huh?”
Cheyenne narrowed her eyes. “Were you just waiting for me to get up so you could try that?”
“I was going for levitating you and the chair at the same time. Didn’t notice that you got up.” Ember spread her arms, her face lit up with excitement, and started studying the next spell. “This is awesome. I’ll be done with these spells in three days.”
“I’m pretty sure they’re only useful if you can remember how to cast them after the fact,” Cheyenne said, laughing as she dropped into the hard office chair in front of the wobbly desk. I need new furniture up here.
“That’s the thing, though.” Ember pulled another printed sheet of paper toward her, replacing the previous spell. “First time for a levitating spell, and I feel like I could do it again in my sleep.”
“I’m just gonna chalk that up to intrinsic fae skills and remind you to keep your door closed if that’s your plan.”
The fae let out a short laugh but was already submerged in studying the next spell in the book.
Cheyenne set the metal sphere on her desk and stared at it. The activator resumed with the next layer of scrolling data winding around the O’gúl machine part, and she leaned down to power up her computer rig before punching the power button on the monitor. Glen whirred to life, and the halfling shifted around in the chair with a grimace. Or at least bring a pillow up here or something.
She drummed her fingers on the plastic armrests, and when her rig was ready to go, she pulled up her VPN access and set up to do some more dark-web diving. The activator fed her mashups of data lines everywhere she looked. Even a glance at her computer tower on the floor beside the desk brought up scrolling lines in flashing blue light. Still gotta sift through all the useless stuff, huh?
Cheyenne flicked her fingers away from her and the activator responded, shutting down the data stream showing her the inner workings of the hard drive and half the system she’d built herself. Then she pulled up access to the dark web and got to work.
I know I’ve seen that encryption before. Would’ve been nice to have this activator’s screenshots back then.
Without typing a site address or a command in her system, the halfling found herself led down the rabbit hole she wanted almost faster than she could follow.
Her activator responded to her thoughts, pulling up the saved bit of encryption she’d inadvertently filed away and searching for the routes to the same data on the dark web. The piece of tech nestled behind her ear didn’t do any of the actual work for her, which she figured out pretty damn quickly.
Enter command.
The words flashed in her vision, and Cheyenne opened the command program she’d rewritten five years ago to make life as a teenager half-drow hacker a hell of a lot easier. She copied the code the activator had sent her and pressed Enter.
“Holy shit.”
Without the activator, she wouldn’t have been able to see the pages’ worth of addresses, user history, encryption banks, and fairly useless firewalls that one simple command had taken her through in an instant. Then she got a prompt to input a new command she didn’t recognize. I can’t go wrong by following step-by-step instructions, right?
Four more times, Cheyenne input what the O’gúl tech behind her ear prompted her to type, and the results took her through the dark web without stopping. This is like warp speed through space. This is like… Okay, I already used The Matrix, but still.
When she added the final command, which was only a third the size of the others, her screen pulled up the back end of a seriously enhanced firewall and dozens of securely encrypted files. Each of them would take her a few days to parse out in the Bunker, but Cheyenne wasn’t trying to decrypt access files. She scanned the information on her monitor, every line bringing up a new burst of code from the activator until that line of encryption she’d filed in the headpiece’s database lit up in bright yellow at the center of the screen.
“There you are.”
She highlighted the line enmeshed in jumbled data on her monitor, then typed in the new command the activator prompted. The second she activated the command, she knew what she’d found even before she had the chance to read through all of it.
File updated: 09-30-2021
Next update: 10-30-2021
Registered Source: Combined Reality, Inc.
Source Owner: ThomasSafe
Below that were three different IP addresses, most likely for the physical server banks owned and operated by ThomasSafe, but Cheyenne didn’t need a physical location anymore.
“That sneaky sonofabitch.”
A bright flash of purple light came from the living room below the mini-loft. A muted thunderclap filled the apartment, followed by the patter of water on leather upholstery, the area rug, and the hardwood floors.
“Yes!” Ember pumped a fist in the air and stared at the tiny thunderstorm she’d conjured above the second leather recliner. “Wait, what sonofabitch are you talking about? Seems like you know a few.”
Cheyenne leaned sideways in the office chair and
