The fae grinned up at her best friend, but her smile died when she saw the fury growing in Cheyenne’s eyes. “Whoa, okay. Sorry about the chair.”
“I don’t give a shit about the chair, Em. You’ll never guess what I just found.”
“Well, you’re usually right about that, so I’m not even gonna try.” Ember folded her arms and sat back in the wheelchair. “Go ahead. Spit it out.”
“I traced a piece of that war machine’s data back to one of its programming sources.”
“Okay. Why are you wearing your seriously pissed face?”
“Because that source is registered under ThomasSafe.”
Ember laughed and dusted off her hands. “Good one. Try again.”
“I’m dead serious.” Cheyenne pointed slowly toward the far wall of the mini-loft and the hallway of the apartment building’s top floor on the other side of it. “Our dabbling neighbor is powering O’gúl tech for the Crown’s goddamn loyalists.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
“What?” Ember whipped her head toward their front door and blinked. “No. Uh-uh. No way.”
“I’m sitting here staring at the information.” Cheyenne lurched from her chair and thrust her hand toward the monitor. “I knew it. I knew there was one thing that asshole was missing in his little private conglomerate. When I checked, he had everything covered except for weapons. He’s obviously got that one under his belt too.”
“That’s insane.”
“I know!”
“Wait a minute. Just hold on.” Ember pinched the bridge of her nose, blinking furiously. “I don’t even see how that’s possible. He’s so nice.”
“You need to get over that, Em.” Cheyenne snatched the metal sphere on her desk and leaned over the rail, thrusting the broken war machine toward her friend. “Because nice guys don’t write the programming that lets shit like this work in our world. Nice guys don’t get involved in powering up technology controlled by magicals from Ambar’ogúl who keep sending war machines to kill us while the Crown’s getting ready for an Earth invasion via the same goddamn tech.”
She chucked the metal sphere over the rail, where it landed in the puddle of Ember’s conjured rainwater nestled in the corner of the recliner. A few drops splashed on Ember’s bare arms, but she hardly felt them. She took a deep breath. “There’s no way he’d do that on purpose.”
“Stop trying to defend him.” Cheyenne ran a hand through her bone-white hair, her drow magic fueled further by her anger, and turned to stare at the information on her screen. “So you guys spent some time together while he unpacked all our crap in this place and hung artwork on the walls for you. That’s not enough to clear him, Em. Matthew Thomas knows exactly what he’s doing. A guy like that with his fingers in so many industry pies doesn’t do stuff by accident.”
“But we didn’t find any cameras,” Ember protested. “No purple dots, remember?”
Cheyenne shook her head in frustration. “That only proves he’s not spying on us. You and me specifically. But he’s shit. The guy who figured out how to meld O’gúl tech with Earth technology is our fucking neighbor. Right there. Right next door. I don’t care if he knows who we are or what these machines are used for, he’s the reason these things work!”
“Stop yelling at me, Cheyenne.”
“I’m not yelling!” A burst of purple light flared behind the halfling’s eyes. Ember tilted her head and raised an eyebrow. “At you. I’m not yelling at you.” Cheyenne tossed her hair out of her face and folded her arms. The silver chains around her wrists dug into her arms and her ribs, the small pain pulling her back to the present. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine. We just need to think this through.”
Cheyenne sat at her desk again and scanned the new data. “I shouldn’t be this surprised. I knew there was something weird about the guy, like perfume trying to cover the smell of rotting meat.”
“Okay, you can break out the ‘I told you so’ after we’re a hundred percent sure this is real.”
“Oh, I’m a hundred percent sure. Here. I’ll show you.” Cheyenne copied all the information she could find and sent it to her printer. As the apartment filled with the drone of the laser-jet printer buzzing across sheet after sheet of blank paper, she dove a little deeper into the update history for the first encrypted file with Matthew Thomas’ company name all over it. “You won’t be able to deny any of this when you see it. Neither will he.”
Ember waited for the printer to stop. When it was still going five minutes later, she rolled her eyes and wheeled across the living room before heading into the kitchen. Cheyenne sat in her desk chair, arms folded as she glared at the printer pumping out pages and pages of incriminating evidence against their neighbor. I got you now, asshole.
* * *
By the time Cheyenne had gathered all the printed data and stacked it into something as close to a neat pile as she was going to get, she had almost fifty pages in her hands. Pulling off the activator, she ignored the sharp pinch and shoved the silver coil into her pocket before heading down the stairs.
Ember sat at the far end of the coffee table, calmly sipping a half-empty glass of water. “Think you went a little overboard?”
“No.” Cheyenne glanced at the stack of papers and snorted. “This is just the beginning. I pulled this all up without having to crack into a single thing. I mean, relatively speaking.”
“You mean, your version of cracking.”
“Yeah.” The halfling handed over the stack of papers still warm from the printer and jabbed a finger at them. “He’s got no excuse, Em.”
The fae rifled through the pages, shaking her head.
