Page 109 of Martyr

“How can you be certain?” Beck asked, frowning at the screen. “I can read it just fine.”

“Unless your darling dad opened a bakery recently,” West drawled, “they’re using code phrases to communicate. ‘Has the delivery driver dropped off the ciabatta?’ is definitely not something I expect Hendrix to be asking a random university student. Dew isn’t Essential.”

There was another ping and a new window popped up. West clicked it and then froze.

“Is that…” Nix covered his mouth, eyes scanning the familiar text. He’d read through that same chat log so many times he could probably act it out verbatim. “Why does he have the chat logs for Iris and Serendipity?”

“Did he hack into Enigma?” Lake demanded to know, but West vehemently shook his head.

“I caught Nix,” he reminded, “and Nix is good. There’s no way this guy is better than him and managed to slip under my radar.”

“There’s always someone better out there,” Beck stated, then winced and bowed his head toward Nix. “Apologies, that wasn’t meant the way it sounded. “

“No, you’re right,” Nix said. “We can’t be sure of anything at the moment.”

“Except we can,” West disagreed, “because these aren’t copies.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is the real thing. The Enigma app is linked to this computer instead of a multi-slate.”

That didn’t make any sense. “But I’ve seen Dew’s account. He’s shown it to me. His username is RedHotLover and he’s only in the Knight tier.”

“Remember the change you implemented two years ago?” Lake asked West. “Do you think this account was created before then?”

“Hold on.” West clicked a few more keys and then grunted. “Yeah. This account was activated a month before I revamped the app's system.”

“You used to be able to create more than one account,” Beck noticed Nix’s confusion and explained. “But then it became apparent people were creating multiple accounts so they could fake Favors between them and rise up in rank. West reprogrammed it so that now, only one account will be recognized by the same biometric scanner.”

“Dew has mentioned struggling to rise in tier rank before,” Nix said. Could Dew be the real Serendipity? Since it was possible to make multiple accounts at one point, he now understood why West had also checked time stamps to help clear Rase’s name. “Dew made it sound like he was desperate to get into the King tier. But if he’s Serendipity, he already was.”

Branwen had gotten involved with a King, someone who she could meet with at the library without anyone batting an eye. Both she and Dew were members of the art department, which meant it would be easy for them to move about campus in each other's company so long as they avoided any of their close friends.

“Is Dew a member of the intramural sports club?” He waited while West searched through the computer to check.

“Yeah. How’d you know?” West quirked a brow.

“The guy who shoved me into the waif stall was wearing a pair of shoes that all of those members received last year.”

If Dew really was Serendipity, then it would add up that he was the one who attacked Nix…

“We need to get into his multi-slate,” Nix decided.

“You think he’s unknown.”

“Don’t you?”

Serendipity had tried to get Iris to help him poison West and Yejun, but she’d been caught in the act, meaning there wasno way a plan like that had any chance of working a second time. The “hacker” in charge had to have known that, so he’d switched gears and sent his accomplice to rattle Nix and distract them all instead.

“They want us too focused on in-fighting to see what they’re really up to,” Nix surmised.

“Which is?” Lake crossed his arms.

“I don’t know. That’s what we’ll have to figure out.” They were finally on the right track though. Everything could cleanly be linked back to Dew. There was enough evidence to prove it, now they just needed to actually find the guy and speak with him.

Even if they couldn’t get him to break and expose the hacker, at least Nix would have accomplished what he’d set out to do. He would have found the person responsible for pushing Branwen over the edge. All of the questions he’d been wanting to ask circled in his mind.

Why had Dew done it?

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