Page 37 of Redstone
He hadn’t been looking for anything other than that. The faint lines of fuzz that floated across his screen were, at first, taken as spatial interference. Nothing important, nothing vital. Except …
Demarcos blinked and looked at the lines again. Was that a … dash? Not an actual dash but appearing in a rhythm that seemed familiar. And then a dot, a dot, and another … what thefuck?
He launched himself away from his desk and hunched over the comm unit, tracking the interference and trying to make sense of it. Was that a … it was a word.
Good.
The fuzz vanished after that, no more to be seen even though he held his breath waiting for it. Demarcos finally exhaled, but he didn’t relax. That was genuine code, ancient code, which meant that someone here was passing notes that they didn’t want the powers that be to know about. Demarcos wasn’t sure what that meant, but he knew one thing.
He was going to find out.
Chapter eighteen
Wyl was feeling … antsy. It was the kind of feeling he got right before he either did something crazy or something athletic, and unfortunately, the only person he wanted to be athletic with right now was working another insanely long shift in the prison. Wyl could have gone out, but his tormentors seemed to be ever present, and despite having ZeeBee with him, Wyl wasn’t quite sure he felt safe enough to tempt fate. The chances were too good that one of these guys would make a wrong move, and he’d respond badly and end up getting himself or Robbie, or both of them, thrown into the Pit.
No, going out wasn’t the answer right now and doing so would have worried Robbie anyway. Wyl felt like his brain was running in circles, though, considering the problems laid on him by Tamara and, therefore, by Garrett, and wondering if he was going to be able to deliver. He always delivered,always, but this time he just wasn’t sure how to manage it.
It wasn’t about the mechanism for getting into the office or even cracking into Harrison’s private data files. Wyl was a mechanic at heart, but he had the mind of a hacker, always upgrading his work with the latest and greatest electronics. He had figured out how to make a pocket-sized warp machine, for fuck’s sake. If he could bend space-time to his will, there was no way a little thing like a locking mechanism was stopping his device. (So what if the thing he’d sent through his little warp machine had never come back out; the point was that he’ddoneit.) He’d already put something together that cracked the coded entrance to his own room and on the cryptographic interface he’d been fiddling with for his next personal hovercycle. No problems.
No, there weretwoproblems. One was the issue of connecting with Tamara. This wasn’t just software, it was hardware, and as small as it was, he still had to find a way to physically hand it off to her. The warden was rigorous about keeping the various parts of his resident populations separate, and try as Wyl might, there were just too many layers of bureaucratic and metallic bullshit to cut through to get to Tamara’s part of the prison. He’d be stopped too easily, unless he figured out a way to take out everyone in a position of oversight and control, which was thenextproblem.
How did he clear the way for Tamara? It wasn’t enough to give her a device that would get her access; he had to make it so she could use it without being found out. There were no computer ports in this part of the facility with that kind of reach, and the best bet for erasing all signs of her coming and going—namely, Harrison’s computer—was exactly the place she had to get to unseenbeforebeing able to wipe all signs of herself. It was a classic chicken-and-egg scenario, and in this case, neither of them was going to be coming first anytime soon.
“Okay, fine.” One problem at a time. Wyl got up and began pacing. It wasn’t riding a hovercycle at five hundred kilometers an hour or making love to Robbie until he thought his bones were going to dissolve, but it was something to do with himself. “First issue: how do I meet up with Tamara? ZeeBee, ask me that question.”
“How do you meet up with Tamara?”
“It can’t be due to a blackout. Even if I could figure out how to take out all the observers in this place, human and machine, I need to save that for her to use later. Once is an accident, twice is sabotage. Ask again.”
“How do you meet up with Tamara?”
Wyl rubbed his hands together as he thought about it, callouses catching on each other. “We need a reason to be in the same place. Somewhere we’re both allowed to be. Where in the prison can we both be? Ask me.”
“Where in the prison can you both be?”
“Well … the prisoner part of the prison. I guess. But that’s a bad choice.” Wyl shook his head. “The Pit’s out of the question. Ask again.”
“Where in the prison can you both be?”
“Hmm … emergency escape routes, in case the prison has to be evacuated?” Wyl considered it, then huffed dejectedly. “But that’ll cause a panic and increase surveillance, not decrease it. Ask again.”
“Where in the prison can you both be?”
“Other emergency services … like … the infirmary.”Oh, yes. It suddenly clicked in Wyl’s head, and he grinned fiercely. “That’s it. We need to be in the infirmary at the same time. Small place like this, it probably has a central room we can interact in, or at the very least, I can stow something for her there to pick up later. We need to be in the infirmary. I’m going to have to fake an injury.” He grimaced. “Or get a real injury. Fuck.”
Well, maybe he could hurt himself with one of his tools. Only he needed it all to be above board, not the sort of thing that Warden Harrison could use as an excuse to come into their room and go through their belongings. The last thing Wyl needed was that man finding the incredibly illegal equipment he’d smuggled in here. “Robbie’s not going to be happy.”
“Why won’t I be happy?”
“Holy shit!” Wyl whirled around and gaped at his husband. “How the fuck did you get in here so quietly?”
“You were talking to yourself,” Robbie pointed out with a little smile. He looked tired, the lines around his eyes and next to his mouth deeper than Wyl was used to seeing. The gray in his short hair, that usually looked so distinguished, seemed to make him look older now, uncomfortably so, and he moved like a man who felt every long year of his life. “You never pay much attention to anything else when you’re in the middle of a monologue.”
“I wasn’t monologuing, I was talking to ZeeBee,” Wyl said. “And you won’t be happy because”—and he didn’t want to bring up the real reason right now and see Robbie’s fatigue deepen, so instead— “I’m going crazy, trying to figure out how to get Tamara into Harrison’s office without being seen, or heard, or interfered with in any way either before or after. I can give her the tools to wipe herself from the system once she’s in, but getting there in the first place?” He grimaced. “For all I know, Harrison sleeps at his fucking desk.”
“He might; he always seems to be around,” Robbie said absently. “He’s the reason I’m off early, actually, something about me having poor vital signs. I’m fine,” Robbie added when Wyl’s fingers twitched toward him, “just tired. But you’ve got a point.”
“I know.” Wyl ran a hand through his dark hair, frustrated with himself. “I don’t like Tamara being the one to do this, but if things go to hell, she’s got a better chance of weathering it than Iwould if I were the one caught. Not to mention she doesn’t want me to baby her. But I can’t figure out how to get past this hurdle, and if I can’t do it …” He shrugged helplessly.
