Page 99 of Distinctly Daray
Unless technology was involved.
That thought in mind, Keegan kissed Phillip and left him to head to the special conference room reserved for the task force on his own. Keegan waved to Evergreen and Dudley but didn’t stop to chat with the pair since they’d get caught up on everything at lunch. Instead, he took the open staircase to the top floor of the Sentinel Brotherhood two steps at a time and charged down the hallway to Cassius’s office. Like the other sentinels, Cassius regularly worked with his door open. Keegan rapped on the glass decorated with a replica of Cassius’s dagger and went inside.
The Skeleton Lord glanced up. Sentinels were notorious for keeping their faces expressionless. But Keegan was mated to one, and Cassius was family. There was no fooling Keegan, and the guilt that crept into those ancient brown eyes didn’t surprise the Cinder Lord.
“Good morning, Cass.”
“Hello, Keegan. I thought you’d be at your task force meeting right now.”
Keegan leaned against the doorframe. “I thought we should have a chat first.”
“What about?”
“Oh, nothing major. Just the choices you’ve made since leaving the breakfast table this morning.”
“I really liked those pancakes Victor made,” Cassius said. “I wasn’t sure I would like dark chocolate chips in them, but I enjoyed them very much. Dark chocolate is okay, but I usually prefer sweeter stuff.”
“Not surprising you liked them; I think you ate twelve.”
Cassius sank into his chair. “I left plenty for everyone else.”
“I’m happy Victor found a way to give everyone chocolate for breakfast without irritating Chand. It’s a little frightening to think about you guys acting so bad after eating sugar that candy was ruthlessly outlawed for everyone in the condo.”
“Tev sneaks it in. He keeps it hidden from me, though, so I don’t have to tell anyone that he breaks the rules, but I know he does it.”
Amused, Keegan smiled. “That doesn’t surprise me; your mate marches to his own beat. I like that about him.”
“Me too. I like your mates too.”
“Are you ready to talk about what brought me up here yet?” Keegan asked.
“No, not really, but I suppose you’ll be late for your meeting if I keep stalling.”
“Punctuality is important.”
“Keegan, I thought the changes I made would be fine,” Cassius said with a frown.
The map project software confounded every sentinel who interacted with it, so Keegan knew the frustration and confusion were genuine—not that any sentinel had the ability to lie. But they could disguise their reactions. Keegan was happy they were comfortable enough around him not to, but mostly he wished they would ask questions before they made big messes for him to clean up.
“What happened?”
The grooves between Cassius’s eyebrows grew deeper. “I don’t know. The manual was open in front of me. I was doing what it told me to. Then, there was an error message. I tried to fix the mistake, but things got worse. I would have figured it out, but it kicked me out of the system.”
“It kicked everyone out of the system,” Keegan told the frustrated Skeleton Lord. “You crashed the server. I’m not rebooting it until I have time to figure out what you broke and fix it.”
“If I did what was in the manual, how did it break?”
If Keegan could answer that question, he’d probably be able to figure out why the sentinels were to technology what Evergreen was to plants. But he refused to get angry or yell at anyone—which was probably why the sentinels were so eager to hand the project to him. The reapers had lost their tempers with the sentinels on multiple occasions, according to Evergreen and Dudley.
“I’m not sure, Cass,” Keegan answered. “Give me your list of changes. I’ll add them today once I fix things.”
“You don’t have to do that; I can add them.”
The truth was, the entire thing would be far easier if the sentinels would hand the changes to Keegan to enter himself, but they refused. They wanted to complete the task themselves despite the number of times they fucked things up. But it was Friday, and Keegan didn’t want to work late or bang his head on his desk this close to a weekend, so he did the one thing sentinels could not. He carefully twisted the truth so his lie couldn’t be sniffed out by the perceptive Skeleton Lord.
“I need to try to replicate your error with the data you entered,” Keegan said, though his attempts would be few. “That way, I can ensure no one has the same issue in the future.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” Cassius replied. He thankfully handed Keegan his list of changes he’d gathered either from his own travels to Europe or ones given to him by the sentinels whose assignments were to travel across the globe to accurately map it. The mission was to find every tiny population and mark their race and current home. None of that information was shared with the Council.
