audiopath like Cadence to help, but I’ll manage. We figure out what I saw, we can cut him off at the knees.”
Dagan settled in the rickety chair at the small wooden two-seater table and foraged through the fast food bag like a rabid squirrel looking for a stash of nuts. He grunted his appreciation as he pulled out a couple of breakfast sandwiches and hash browns.
“You bought a lot.”
“Tricks must’ve figured Shadow Elites burn through nourishment fast. Dare and Rider do.”
“And you don’t?”
“Only when I power up.”
“You burned out yesterday. Were you on while running from Conver?”
“For a while–traffic cams, surveillance systems, anything that gave me eyes on his guys.” Then they’d sprung up like a den of quickly mutating roaches. “Fortunately you and your team intervened.”
She didn’t bother mentioning the week before, when she’d gone dark and rogue, fleeing Chicago to have better focus to delve into the files she now wanted to access again. Leaving the safe haven of Indigo Order’s underground compound seemed foolish in retrospect, but Devyn knew she wouldn’t go deep enough with her team at her back. They wouldn’t have let her. Besides, she hadn’t been ready to share her latest chapter in the Destroy Everything Conver endeavor.
Dagan nodded. “Anything I need to know before you ‘go inside’?”
The insightfulness and concern surprised her. It’d taken her team a while to fully grasp how her abilities distorted her surroundings. For her, the web she chased was a pulsating, humming reality. When she tapped its darkest, grungiest layers, she could suckle on the bits and bytes of knowledge for days without sensing time passing.
“I lose awareness of my surroundings easily, become unresponsive.”
His jaw twitched, and his lips thinned. “I don’t like this. I’ll call Kaeden. We’ll get a safe house and some support if this goes south. Tricks had mentioned him wanting one established in the area for the time being.”
“What support? Cadence is a no-go. I don’t want him getting eyes on her or any of my team.”
“I was thinking of our guy Ace. He’s not like you, but he’s savvy. He could help analyze stuff.”
“Agreed. Let me do this, and then we’ll work that angle.”
“I don’t like it, but we need eyes on the cause before we can handle it.” He bit into the breakfast sandwich and chewed a few times. She tracked the swallow down his throat with her gaze then studied his chest. She recognized the shirt he’d donned while she’d zoned out a moment ago.
Rider’s.
Funny, she didn’t remember him filling it out quite like that—lots of bulges and barely concealed ridges of abdominals. The same abdominals she’d worked, not so stealthily, at memorizing just moments ago as he’d prowled from the bed—their bed. The one she’d woken up in, curled into him like a kitten.
She should’ve stretched, turned around, and….
Focus.
She took a couple of deep breaths and shut down the protective barrier she maintained between herself and her abilities. It’d taken her over a decade to perfect the thin, but resilient and dynamic barricade that enabled her to lead a somewhat normal existence when she wanted. Living without it had been hell. Constant bombardment from every technological ping had only compounded as advances were made. Now, with the existence of metadata, Devyn would be like a diabetic in a sugar factory if she didn’t wall in her powers.
The distance from a decent data network didn’t bother Devyn—she was the network. Bypassing the useless Internet typically accessed by normal people, she entered the dark net, an area of the web unsearchable and unreachable unless you knew how and where you were going. That wasn’t her destination. Those databases and users were questionable at times, some downright disgusting.
Buried within the deepest corner of the dark
Dagan settled in the rickety chair at the small wooden two-seater table and foraged through the fast food bag like a rabid squirrel looking for a stash of nuts. He grunted his appreciation as he pulled out a couple of breakfast sandwiches and hash browns.
“You bought a lot.”
“Tricks must’ve figured Shadow Elites burn through nourishment fast. Dare and Rider do.”
“And you don’t?”
“Only when I power up.”
“You burned out yesterday. Were you on while running from Conver?”
“For a while–traffic cams, surveillance systems, anything that gave me eyes on his guys.” Then they’d sprung up like a den of quickly mutating roaches. “Fortunately you and your team intervened.”
She didn’t bother mentioning the week before, when she’d gone dark and rogue, fleeing Chicago to have better focus to delve into the files she now wanted to access again. Leaving the safe haven of Indigo Order’s underground compound seemed foolish in retrospect, but Devyn knew she wouldn’t go deep enough with her team at her back. They wouldn’t have let her. Besides, she hadn’t been ready to share her latest chapter in the Destroy Everything Conver endeavor.
Dagan nodded. “Anything I need to know before you ‘go inside’?”
The insightfulness and concern surprised her. It’d taken her team a while to fully grasp how her abilities distorted her surroundings. For her, the web she chased was a pulsating, humming reality. When she tapped its darkest, grungiest layers, she could suckle on the bits and bytes of knowledge for days without sensing time passing.
“I lose awareness of my surroundings easily, become unresponsive.”
His jaw twitched, and his lips thinned. “I don’t like this. I’ll call Kaeden. We’ll get a safe house and some support if this goes south. Tricks had mentioned him wanting one established in the area for the time being.”
“What support? Cadence is a no-go. I don’t want him getting eyes on her or any of my team.”
“I was thinking of our guy Ace. He’s not like you, but he’s savvy. He could help analyze stuff.”
“Agreed. Let me do this, and then we’ll work that angle.”
“I don’t like it, but we need eyes on the cause before we can handle it.” He bit into the breakfast sandwich and chewed a few times. She tracked the swallow down his throat with her gaze then studied his chest. She recognized the shirt he’d donned while she’d zoned out a moment ago.
Rider’s.
Funny, she didn’t remember him filling it out quite like that—lots of bulges and barely concealed ridges of abdominals. The same abdominals she’d worked, not so stealthily, at memorizing just moments ago as he’d prowled from the bed—their bed. The one she’d woken up in, curled into him like a kitten.
She should’ve stretched, turned around, and….
Focus.
She took a couple of deep breaths and shut down the protective barrier she maintained between herself and her abilities. It’d taken her over a decade to perfect the thin, but resilient and dynamic barricade that enabled her to lead a somewhat normal existence when she wanted. Living without it had been hell. Constant bombardment from every technological ping had only compounded as advances were made. Now, with the existence of metadata, Devyn would be like a diabetic in a sugar factory if she didn’t wall in her powers.
The distance from a decent data network didn’t bother Devyn—she was the network. Bypassing the useless Internet typically accessed by normal people, she entered the dark net, an area of the web unsearchable and unreachable unless you knew how and where you were going. That wasn’t her destination. Those databases and users were questionable at times, some downright disgusting.
Buried within the deepest corner of the dark
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