The halfling looked up from the black screen as it cycled on and shot him a deadpan stare. “Please. You can’t keep me out.”
“This is ridiculous!” Matthew tried to go after her again before remembering the fae’s finger pointed at his face and the nightstalker woman’s deadly claws still extended from her fingertips. “What do you think you’re gonna find in there, huh?”
“Your proof.” Cheyenne studied the log-in screen, her eyes darting back and forth as the activator fed her what she needed to sign into Matthew Thomas’ private laptop. If I could take a screenshot of code, I better be able to pull up a lot more than that. The log-in screen disappeared, replaced by his desktop screen and the background image. “Oh, hey. Good-lookin’ dog.”
“Yeah, she’s my mom’s. Wait a minute.” Matthew’s eyes bulged. “How did you—”
“Shh.” Cheyenne held up a finger for him to wait. Her activator prompted her with every command she needed, and it only took a second of thought before the tech piece pulled up a mostly circular view in her vision of the grass right outside the Computer Sciences building on campus. It was a still frame, but the tips of both tunnel machines’ spiraling noses were unmistakable. “Oh, yeah, here we go.”
“What are you talking about?” Matthew’s voice broke. “What are you doing? Hey, what is she doing?”
“Relax, will ya?” Maleshi shot him a playful frown. “If she’s not throwing attack spells at your face, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
His mouth opened and closed soundlessly.
Cheyenne grinned when the activator prompted her with the option to download the video of her fight with the war machines onto Matthew’s laptop. I knew it. This thing does it all. She accepted the prompt and had to log in again with an access code on the laptop, also provided by the activator, and hit download.
“All right, neighbor.” She slid the laptop off the counter and carried it toward the table. Wiggling her eyebrows, she set the laptop down and snorted when he flinched away from her. “I did not expect you to get this jumpy. Just hit play and everything will be perfectly clear.”
“What?” He glanced at the screen and the still frame at the beginning of the video. “Did you just download something?”
“Clearly.”
“Great. I’m gonna have to run a system scan after this. Do you know how much valuable and sensitive information is on this laptop? Jesus. And you just took some random file and stuck it on my—ah!” He jerked away when Cheyenne leaned toward him, and she gave him a warning look before stabbing her finger down on the space bar.
“Watch the damn video, Matthew.”
Slowly, he focused on the circular view of Cheyenne’s fight with the war machines and the sprouting portal ridge. She’d scrubbed the audio on purpose, but it didn’t matter. Everything Cheyenne had seen less than an hour before played out exactly as she remembered it on the thirteen-inch laptop screen.
Matthew’s mouth fell open when a slashing, whirling Maleshi Hi’et came into view, complete with her four-inch claws and sparks bursting from the black metal diggers.
Corian leaned toward the general and muttered, “Did you know she was recording that?”
“No, Corian. I don’t generally ask if a drow halfling plans on recording an emergency response to something like that.” Maleshi squinted. “My guess is the activator.”
“Didn’t have that feature last time I used one.”
She snorted. “The last piece of O’gúl tech you used was as much of a dinosaur as you are.”
The recording ended with the final sputtering explosion of the last machine that ended the magical battle. Cheyenne propped her forearm on the dining room table and leaned on it. “There you go, man. Proof.”
Matthew cleared his throat. “I don’t believe it.”
Ember shook herself out of her awe after watching the whole thing and folded her arms. “You need to start believing it right now, and then you need to give us those names.”
“No, I had no idea this is what my system was being used for. This isn’t what they told me.”
“You mean, the O’gúl loyalists smuggling war machine parts over the Border, demanding to do business with you and refusing to take no for an answer were supposed to be the good guys? They did a number on you, didn’t they?”
“They told me it was to help the other ones.” Matthew scrunched up his face. “The other magicals.”
“Dude.”
He spun in the chair and looked down at Ember. “I am so sorry.”
“Stop apologizing and give us what we need to stop this from happening again.” The fae girl nodded. “That’s the only thing that matters right now.”
“Yeah. Okay, yeah. I can’t believe this.” Shaking his head, Matthew pulled his laptop closer and started clicking through files to get to the information he wanted. “I mean, I don’t believe everything I see in recordings like that until I’ve had a chance to go through the data and look for tampering. You know, like video editing.”
“I’m well aware of what you mean.” Cheyenne glanced at Maleshi and Corian. Corian glanced away and turned to study the rest of Matthew’s apartment so he wouldn’t laugh.
“But that she was in there.” Matthew gestured at Maleshi without looking away from his screen. “You can’t doctor something like that.”
“Well, feel free to pick apart that video file all you want.” Cheyenne drummed her fingers on the table. “You won’t find anything.”
“I know, I know. I believe you.” He opened a file and scanned through it. “Who am I sending this to?”
Corian stepped forward and set his cell phone on the table beside the laptop. “That server address, if you don’t mind.”
“Yeah. No problem.” Matthew’s fingers flew across the keyboard, and in under a minute, he jerked his hands away from the laptop and leaned back. “There. It’s in there.
