Cybermancy by Kelly McCullough Page B

not Monteverdi’s L’orfeo ?”
    “Joy to the World” was just ending, and Kira paused a heartbeat before going on to her next track. “Does he really look like an opera fan?” Then she started into Temple of the Dog’s “Wooden Jesus.”
    I shook my head and, moving with exquisite caution, followed Melchior to the dock where I’d left my scuba gear. As I slid beneath the waters, I took one last look at the sleeping mountain that was Cerberus.
    Orpheus might have been the greatest musician who ever lived: with only a lyre he’d eased the hound of hell’s insomnia. I didn’t have that kind of talent. But I did have a heck of a hardware advantage and a bottomless supply of tunes. Play a song for a hellhound, and you’ll give him music for a day. Teach him to pirate MP3s, and you’ll give him music for eternity. Couple that with Kira’s alarm clock function, and I figured he might even thank me someday.
    Though it was almost 1:00 A.M. when I got back to the Decision Locus where Cerice and I currently made our home, she wasn’t in the apartment. After I returned myself to human-seeming and grabbed a snack, I got ready to head for the lab and my much-deserved reward. I’d actually opened the front door when a gentle chime from Melchior announced that the e-mail I’d sent myself from Hades’ computer had arrived.
    “You want to read it now?” he asked.
    Dear Hades, I hope this finds you dead. As always, I hate you . . . The memory of those words seemed seared into my brain, along with the goddess’s pain. I didn’t need that right now. I wanted to enjoy the high of the ultimate hack job, successfully cracking Hades itself, and I couldn’t think of a bigger downer than reading Persephone’s hate mail and thinking about what she might ask of me later. I shook my head.
    “No thanks, Mel. Park it in a password-protected folder for later inspection.”
    “Can do,” he said.
    Then we headed out. When we got to Cerice’s building, I picked the various locks myself instead of getting Melchior to magic them open for me. I felt fabulous and couldn’t resist the pure mischief of it. I took extra care with the lock on her door, opening it as silently as possible. I wanted to surprise her.
    “Ta-dah!” I said, stepping inside.
    Cerice was sitting in a chair on the far side of the room, her feet propped up on about a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of custom mainframe. She looked even more weary and stressed than the last time I’d seen her and barely seemed to register my presence. Finally, she turned her head my way.
    “Ta-dah?” She looked confused. Then hope bloomed in her tired eyes—hope and the first hint of true happiness I’d seen there in a long time—and she leaped to her feet. “Where is she?”
    “Isn’t she here?” I could feel the ground under my feet going spongy, lab tile about to turn to quicksand. “I sent her ahead.”
    “You what?”
    “Sent her ahead.” I glanced at Melchior for support. “We e-mailed her.” Cerice looked at me like I was totally out of my mind. “We did! When was the last time you checked your e-mail?”
    Cerice pointed at the monitor hooked to the mainframe. An open mail window was clearly visible. To any normal person it would have looked like another typical UNIX e-mail client, but I recognized an mweb-enabled program originally written by Clotho.
    “You’re sure you haven’t gotten an e-mail from Hades with a really huge attachment?” I sounded like an idiot, but I couldn’t help myself. “Maybe it hit your spam filters and—”
    “Ravirn,” said Cerice, “anything over ten meg is going to trigger a query on whether or not I want to download it. How big a file are we talking?”
    “I don’t know, a couple of terabytes maybe?”
    “Two-point-two-nine,” said Melchior, whose silicon memory was much more precise than my own faulty organics. “Sent at 9:38 Olympus Standard Time. And before you ask, yes, we sent it to the right address.