“So…coworkers?” Skepticism coated each syllable, as much for myself as for him. Was that possible? “Nothing else?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a scout,” I muttered.
“Okay, but I swear it. You don’t want me, and that’s okay-”
“It’s not that, it’s just-” He silenced me with a finger to my lips, looking down at me from his great height, and my voice died away with the touch. It was gentle, the scent of him warm and spicy on my lips, but it was firm too.
“It’s okay,” he said, lifting his finger away. “Besides, I was getting tired of being cooped up in that oversized shoe anyway.”
Now he was talking. “All right,” I said, like I had any other option. But my relief was evident in my smile.
He smiled back, cracked his knuckles, one fist, then the other. “So where do we start?”
“Well, I thought someone might show up here, but if you’ve already been here…” I trailed off, looking around.
“Three days, yeah,” he said, sighing. “Besides, if we were just going to sit around and wait we might as well be back at the boneyard. I called work, said I’d reconsidered quitting my job. They told me to come in tonight for the swing shift. Apparently they’re short-staffed at the moment.”
“I can imagine,” I said, nodding. “So you go back to investigating things from inside Valhalla. We need to track down that lab again, see if the antibody to this thing is still on property.”
“That’s easy enough. I’ll make an excuse to patrol the building. If that doesn’t work I’ll find a portal somewhere-they’re constantly moving, though. It might take a couple of days.”
“Well, everything in its time,” I said, half to myself. “Meanwhile I need to figure out who broke in here and why.”
“My guess is they wanted the computer,” Hunter said, earning a steely look from over my shoulder. He grinned in reply. It looked wolfish-and I fucking loved wolves-but if he could make an honest effort at sexual restraint, so could I. “What was on it, anyway?”
Every secret Olivia ever had, I wanted to say. The passwords and logs detailing her cyber life, the information she’d collected in folders, journals, notes…everything about her that wasn’t girly and pink and expected. Something worth knowing, I thought, looking around at the rest of the room, as pristine and untouched as the day I left it.
“I don’t know,” I told him, before bending down and scooping up the handbag I’d let fall beside the bed when he’d appeared. I took out the disks Cher had given me weeks ago, and tapped them against my other palm. “But I’m going to find out.”
25
I couldn’t turn the fucking thing on.
With the Shadows on vacation and the Light side in hiding, I’d arrived at the shiny new Net café just off the Strip without worry or problem. I’d taken a seat in a dimly lit booth with my back to the wall so I could watch the rest of the crowd, mostly tourists buzzing in to check their e-mail. A few students were thrown in the mix, backpacks tossed at their feet, earphones hijacking their heads and necks with whatever music made them do that collective bobblehead dance. A homeless man was slumped in a corner booth, snoring away, apparently getting better rates here than he would at the Holiday Inn, though I’d have gone to the library if I were him. At least that was free.
Meanwhile I’d already wasted a quarter of my hour’s bought time staring at the unresponsive screen, pushing every button on the machine that looked important, and inserting my disk in the only slot where it would fit. I didn’t understand.
I glanced through the clear glass separating my console from the next, but the guy there was a gamer, and looked and smelled like he’d been parked there for the last twenty-four hours. There were empty sandwich wrappers, crushed Coke cans, and a bevy of cellophane candy wrappers scattered at his feet. If he couldn’t tear his eyes away from killing mutant alien giants long enough to clear off his table, I doubted he’d be too anxious to help me. Olivia’s looks could only influence men who liked their action three-dimensional.
I scanned the rest of the booths for some sign of life. Everyone was hunched over their rented computers, islands unto themselves. Same with the frosted glass-top tables set up in the middle of the room for laptops; each person a planet orbiting around their own sun, unaware of and uninterested in existence outside their personal universe. I’d never seen a café with so little socializing going on.
Meanwhile, with a newly enforced quarantine keeping visitors from leaving the valley in effect, what the place really needed was a revolving door. There was a wall of people lined up waiting for a booth, and I glanced over to find one man giving me a particularly hard look, so I went back to randomly pushing buttons on the machine in front of me. After five more minutes of expensive and wasted time, I finally cried uncle and headed back to the front desk, where yet another college student was getting some studying done while getting paid to be an electronic babysitter.
I waited for the desk jockey to acknowledge me. When I saw this wasn’t going to happen voluntarily, I placed my hip on the desk, and my palm flat on his opened physics book. He looked up.
“I need help,” I said.
The kid let his bloodshot eyes run from my face down to my hand, still perched on his homework, and back up again. Then he flipped a lock of greasy hair from his forehead and rose reluctantly. “Of course you do,” he muttered, coming around the desk.
Pretending I didn’t hear, I followed him back to my booth, thinking that if I’d turned up here six months ago as myself, he probably wouldn’t have taken that tone with me. There was something about Olivia’s looks, though, too bright and bold and unapologetic, that made some people unable to resist striking out at her. Never mind that she could probably outprogram anyone in this room.
“Well, somehow you managed to turn it off,” he said, hands moving so quickly over the machine, I couldn’t be sure what he’d done. “It was already running when you sat down.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
He ignored me, fingers flying. “You also need to wait to boot the disk until after the system’s stabilized.” He snapped the disk from its drive, and it was all I could do not to wrest it from him physically. He must have sensed my anxiety, because he tossed me an inquiring look over his shoulder, then continued to punch at the keyboard. “There. Try not to touch anything but the keyboard.”
I touched him, none too gently, when he turned to leave. “My disk.”
And that’s when he saw past the designer dress, the glossed lips, and retro powder blue eye shadow (Cher swore it was making a comeback), and found me. I didn’t pull any paranormal hoo-doo on him. That’d be too easy, and unfair. No, I just let him see me, Joanna Archer, pissed-off computer illiterate who might not know a pixel from an axel but who’d kick his ass if he so much as gave me a reason. The guy mumbled something unintelligible and handed me the disk before beating a hasty retreat. I settled back in my booth to warily face the greater foe.
I began by scanning the disk’s contents by filename alone, hoping to come upon something that said “Olivia’s secret life” or “Hey, Jo! Look here.” Unfortunately, most were coded numbers, and the lettering might as well have been in Greek. The disk obviously didn’t contain the entire contents of Olivia’s cyber life, but as she’d given it to Cher for safekeeping-like giving a hen over to a fox if you asked me, but no one had-there had to be something on here that required special backup. Whether the break-in at the condo was a reflection of this, or whether it was just an uncanny coincidence, I couldn’t yet say, but I’d learned to always expect the worst-case scenario. That way I was never disappointed.
When the filename search came up empty, I started from the top and began to work my way down. I’d just begun scrolling through the first file when a chime sounded from the computer, and an additional screen popped up. I jerked back, wondering what I’d done. Then, words appeared: