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“Thanks, Ayana.” Fox received the first glass of champagne. I grabbed the second, offering my thanks, too. We stood in a tiny circle, the three of us holding bubbling flutes of golden champagne. Ayana lifted her glass first.
“To cracking cases—” Her lips quirked. “—and to dancing hearts.”
We clinked our glasses and drank. “Dancing hearts?” Fox asked.
“Yeah, I read it in a book somewhere, I don’t know.” Ayana shrugged and chuckled, her eyes glittering. Outside, the sun was beginning to set, throwing huge streaks of orange and purple across the cloudless summer sky.
“All right, so we’ve got this to trade for your excellent champagne.” Fox pulled the beat-up drug dealer’s phone from his pocket.
“Aw, you two shouldn’t have.” She grabbed it like she was grabbing a dirty sock. “Really.” Her voice was flat before she laughed again. “Whose is it?” She pressed a few buttons, flipping it over and reading the information on the back panel.
“We’re working on getting that new Dragon drug off the street,” Fox started. He gave Ayana a rundown of the case, her face twisting in surprise when Fox got to the part about how we got the phone in the first place.
“Jeez, a knife? And a gun? That could have been real bad, Fox. Good thing it wasn’t, shit.”
“For real,” I added, emphasizing a little more than I meant to. Both Ayana and Fox seemed to find it funny. Fox’s eyes, those striking hazel eyes I could look into for hours, lingered on me for a moment before flitting off to settle across the room. I wondered for a second what he was thinking, what private thought had hit him just then.
“All right, so it looks like your dealer definitely has messages here talking about Dragon.”
“Wait, you already unlocked it?” Fox’s eyes jumped to Ayana. “How?”
“Hacker, remember?” She gave a cocky smile before turning around and starting down a hallway. “Follow me, guys. I’ve got to check something out in my office.”
We went down the short hall, our shoes clicking against the gray hardwood floor, and entered into the corner room at the end of the hall. This room was very different compared to the one we’d come from. This one was pitch-dark, the only source of light coming from a single blue button blinking on the tower of her computer.
Scratch that—her computers. Ayana turned on the lights, although it was still dim, but I was able to see the seven different computer screens she had above and around her silver desk. It looked like a futuristic control center, made for scanning alien planets and commanding spaceships.
“Wow,” I said, looking around at the rest of the room, which was full of more tech stuff than I could possibly even know what to do with. There were windows, like the ones in the living room, but these had all been altered to have some kind of tint to them, a dark one preventing any of the setting sunlight from getting in.
“This is my hub. Come a long way from the scratched-up Lenovo I’d work on with a keyboard that constantly got stuck and a hard drive that was constantly crashing.”
She grabbed the phone and another device from a cabinet that had seemed to be part of the dark gray wall. She brought those to the desk in front of the computer screens, all of them already up and running even though she had powered them on seconds before. Ayana pulled out the rolling leather chair and sat down, a queen about to dive into her kingdom. She cracked her knuckles and got to work. She connected the phone to the device and the device to the computer.
Fox and I stood by, asking questions as Ayana worked. At one point, I admit I was hypnotized by whatever Ayana was doing on one of the monitors. It felt like watching an artist working on a piece everyone knew was going to be great. There was an excitement and a buzz that came with every click of the keyboard, every new letter added to the sinewy wall of code on the screen.
“All right, so I’ve scrubbed everything, from the guy’s email accounts to his old Neopets accounts. Shit, you guys remember those? Pretty sure mine is dead from famine. I think it was an Eevee? No, that’s Pokémon. Shit, anyway, back to this,” She pointed at the screen toward the lower left. “I’ve got his text messages loaded up here, with filter words triggering those little red flags you see. This message here…” She leaned in, tapped the screen, and the message magnified. “This conversation is sending up the most alerts.”
On the screen was a series of texts. They all followed a similar format: date, name of a place, day, and the words “time sent.”
“June seventh, Grove, Last Sunday, Time Sent.” Fox read the most recent message out loud, none of those words meaning much to me, and judging by the befuddled looks on Ayana and Fox, it didn’t make much sense to them either.
