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Would you have cared if I had died?
Lila barely paused before hurriedly erasing the message, chiding herself for writing it at all. In the end, she replaced the text with a simple, noncommittal question mark. The vague symbol held every single question she wanted to ask.
She was curious to see which one Tristan would answer.
Lila tossed the palm across her desk and rubbed her forehead. At some point, she had forgotten what Tristan truly was. A criminal. They weren’t friends. They could never be friends. The man hated the highborn. He hated their money; he hated their lifestyle; he hated everything they stood for. He only worked for her because it suited his agenda, and the money was too good for him to pass up.
“Should have gone with ‘What were you thinking, asshole?’” Lila grumbled to herself as she logged into her desktop computer.
BullNet was an easy hack. Though the government kept strict controls over the net, Lila always managed to find a way through Bullstow’s network. Even Unity’s network had never presented much of a challenge.
It was the not-getting-caught part that made it slightly more difficult and time-consuming. Despite the controls on private networks, no public content was censored on the net, except for what might be inappropriate due to age. Every citizen left entries in logs, though, regardless of class. A citizen’s logs could be scrutinized with a warrant as long as the officers in question had a case number and narrowed down their interests to a certain date range. Such a warrant trapped the individual, just as firmly as the iron bars of a cage.
Lila simply stepped around such measures. Her first snoop programs had constantly scrubbed her logs clean and substituted innocent content when necessary. Unfortunately, there were also logs on the other end to worry about, and her programs could not always alter them. The easiest and most low-tech way to get around that was to use someone else’s account, but the user might figure out that their logon had been compromised.
The more difficult—and ultimately more secure—option was to create a fake account, separate and hidden from one’s own identity. Barely traceable, it remained illegal and dangerous if any part of it led back to the creator, but Lila had enough skill to evade that trap.
Very few others in Saxony did.
Using proxies, Lila slipped into the Bullstow militia network with one
of her fake logins. She snuck through the logs, first searching for the data from the sergeant’s DNA pen.
Lila breathed easier as soon as she opened the file. It was short. Nothing much had been transmitted. It did not even contain enough of her DNA to mark her as female, much less compare it to her samples within the Saxony DNA database. It surprised her, but perhaps the male sergeant had not kept the pen charged. Perhaps it just didn’t have enough time to send anything to Bullstow before the blast knocked out the power.
In any case, no one had opened the file.
Lila erased the data and the accompanying logs, then read over the sergeant’s report. Bullstow had pulled in their sketch artist to work with him and his men, none of whom had been seriously injured in the blast. Clearly their memories had focused more on the size of Lila’s prosthetics than on her features. No one would confuse her with the sketch, much less the facial-recognition software. Lila didn’t bother to alter the report.
She skimmed through the rest of the file that focused on the bombing. Bullstow had managed to keep the true cause of the explosion from the press, not wanting to cause a panic. They had used extra men from the local militias to create a wide perimeter until every flyer had been retrieved by Bullstow. Luckily, the damp had kept the flyers from blowing too far.
Bullstow knew nothing about the American Abolitionist Society other than its name. Lila wondered how long it would take them to find the hotel, or if they’d find it at all. She imagined Sergeant Perv questioning the workborn about the flyer, a flyer that extolled freedom for all slaves. Such an approach wouldn’t take him very far. Slaves didn’t help the militias in the best of times, and most servants had at least one relative who had been condemned to a slave’s term. Both classes of workborn would be more likely to hinder the investigation than help.
She was safe, at least for now.
Lila signed out of BullNet, for she had work to do for her client. She retrieved her star drive from its hiding place, still glinting on its golden chain. The entire BIRD fit into the palm of her hand. For such a small thing, it was certainly worth a great deal of money. Some of the files in the BIRD, the Birth Identity Records Database, would fetch a high price if offered to the right people, for the parentage of everyone in all four American states had been recorded inside it.
Most of the data was public knowledge, but secrets abounded within. Sometimes mothers, usually highborn or wealthy lowborn, kept the father of their heir or subsequent children private. Bullstow sealed the records but allowed citizens of any class to query the database for their own records by their fourteenth birthday, inputting the name of anyone they had intentions of bedding. Submitting a potential lover’s name to the BIRD ensured that the pairing would provide a good genetic match in the case of non-private births, but it also ensured that an individual did not inadvertently bed one’s own half-sibling. Of course, Bullstow might visit if too many requests occurred in too short a time, for it was illegal to use the feature as a means of ascertaining a hidden father’s identity.
Blackmail was always an option for anyone who could hack the BIRD. Not that Lila needed the money. She wasn’t interested in blackmail, and neither was her client.
She put the star drive into her computer’s port and, for the next hour, reviewed the data captured by her snoop programs. It did not take her long to untangle the code and figure out how Zephyr had hidden within it. The trap had been woven into the BIRD itself, the strands of code suspended like crude spider webs, waiting for a juicy fly to walk inside.
Lila had activated the program, and likely alerted the snoop, the moment she logged into the BIRD with a fraudulent ID. Zephyr knew exactly what files she had taken, knew when she had been inside the network, and knew when she had gotten back out again. What would the snoop do with that information? What had the snoop already done with it?
When Lila attempted a trace on the snoop’s counterfeit ID, she didn’t get far. Although she was somewhat mollified by the fact that she found so many telltale signs of fraudulence, the ID was good enough that she couldn’t penetrate the identity behind it. Not quickly, anyway.
Lila cocked her head, and was considering another way of tracing the snoop when her computer beeped. A window popped up on her screen flashing from red to green and back again.
Her client.
Lila cursed. She pulled on her VR spectacles, flipped the switch on the earpiece, and clicked Initiate on the browser window before hopping up from her chair. The bug-eyed lenses curved around her nose and cheek and forehead, making it difficult to see anything around their edges, not even her body. Her room disappeared slowly, devoured by smoke until nothing remained.
“Lila, girl.” A deep voice rumbled into the void.
The fog cleared. Lila found herself standing in the middle of an office, not unlike Senator Serrano’s in style, though this office had been carved from cherry rather than mahogany. A man sat at the desk, surface covered with papers, pens, stacks of documents thicker than novels, color-coded folders, hastily scribbled notes, paperclips, and star drives. He dwarfed it all, though not with his size. His mere presence and keen stare were enough, as though he were a prizefighter only a week from his last fight.
His body resembled it as well.
