“Cheyenne.”
“What?” She shifted her weight onto one hip and widened her eyes at him.
“Let’s talk about this somewhere else. Where it’s safe.”
“Fine.” Cheyenne gestured toward the couch in the living room. “The leg thing’s over there.”
Corian moved in a light-brown blur. The next second, Cheyenne’s hair scattered away from her face. The folded paper in the trashcan fluttered in the breeze of the nightstalker’s return. He lifted the black metal bar and nodded at the oval of black light hovering midair behind him. “Let’s go.”
“Yep.” She brushed past him, stepped through his portal, and found herself for the second time today standing in front of Persh’al’s open-ended square of computer tables. Glancing down at her feet, she frowned. “Did you run out of candles?”
“No, I ran out of warding stones.” The portal closed behind Corian as he stopped beside her. “Candles are the next best thing, and that’s all I had on me at the time. Apparently, Byrd’s been growing quite the collection.”
Leaning against the left end of the closest six-foot table, Byrd cocked his head with a little shrug. “They make me feel safe. Maybe we should’ve lined your pockets with them, huh?”
“I was safe,” Cheyenne muttered. “Still am.”
“You’re safe here because we have the right tools at our disposal.” Corian nodded at the ring of glistening stones of every color and rough, unsanded cut encircling them. “You were relatively safe before you gave that machine everything it needed to track you down and make the Crown’s objective a hell of a lot easier to reach.”
“Okay, first, how the hell was I supposed to know that trackers work with magic, too? Those canisters or whatever that you took from the smuggled crates worked with blood. Everything else works with blood. I haven’t been doing this for centuries, which you know. If you want me to make sure I don’t go handing out my personal calling card to everything that attacks me, you should’ve told me that was possible.”
Sitting in his executive office chair in front of his monitors, Persh’al scratched his head beside the neon-orange mohawk. Then he spun in his chair and met Cheyenne’s gaze. “We screwed up on that one, kid.”
“Yeah, you did.”
Corian frowned at her, clenching his jaw. “You’re not the only one who’s allowed to make mistakes.”
The halfling folded her arms and met his gaze. “I’m fine with that as long as you guys stop acting like you don’t ever make any.”
“Until you came into the picture, we didn’t.”
“See, that’s the opposite of what I just said.”
Persh’al lifted a finger and waited for the half-drow and the nightstalker to turn their scathing glares on him. “I just wanna remind everybody that what’s happening right now is new territory. L’zar’s kid passed the trials. Portals are popping up like daisies in the fall, which isn’t a thing anyway. And we’ve got O’gúl tech up and running and pursuing an objective before we can figure out how the hell that’s possible or how to stop it. There’s more than enough room for mistakes when we have no idea what we’re doing, but a really big one would be to keep standing there blaming each other for what’s already done. Right?”
Neither of them said a word.
“Oh, come on. Right?”
Cheyenne shot Corian a sidelong glance and slipped out of her drow form, feeling the heat of her magic drain slowly into the base of her spine. Then she pulled her gaze away to study the opposite side of the warehouse and shrugged. “Yeah. You’re right.”
“Corian.”
The nightstalker stared at the open iron beams of the ceiling and raised his eyebrows. “Everybody makes mistakes.”
“I’m gonna take that as consent, and I don’t give a shit if you like it or not. So let’s move on and quit treating this like it’s the end of the world.”
Byrd snorted. “It might be.”
“You’re not helping, goblin.” Persh’al pointed at him and raised a warning eyebrow. “Bright side is now we know at least one of those machines was already up and running and looking for something, presumably Cheyenne. If that’s the case, we need to figure out how the hell its programmer knew to send a piece of obsolete tech after her without using any kind of magical tracker first.”
“Not obsolete anymore.” Cheyenne stepped out of the ring of stones and gestured toward the war machine’s broken leg dangling from Corian’s hand. “I figured bringing something back that’s been activated might help.”
Persh’al’s eyes widened. “From Peridosh?”
“I seriously hope I wasn’t supposed to fight off another one of those things somewhere else.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the strange, almost S-shaped metal cog. “And this.”
The blue troll caught it easily when she tossed it at him. Squinting at the metal piece, he sucked in a long, hissing breath. “I’m gonna need some time to pick these apart. If there’s any stored memory, I should be able to find it. I can run it through a human system, but the O’gúl analysis will take some time.”
“Complicated language, huh?”
Persh’al looked at Cheyenne, and his squint deepened when he grimaced. “Not really. I just have to do all the comparisons by hand.”
“Ew.”
“Tell me about it.”
Corian stalked across the warehouse, dropping the black metal bar on the table with a clang as he passed it. “In the meantime, we’ll dig around for our own information. Who knows? That might be faster.”
“Sweet. Time for round three.” Byrd
