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The butler-valet-housekeeper-assistant bowed a last time, then removed himself, walking away with his hands clasped at the base of his spine.

He didn’t look back.

I spared a thought, briefly, about the likelihood that we might get him fired, or possiblyallof these people fired, in the process of us bulldozing our way into Rucker’s house. We might have put Wicker in a bad position already, if not gotten him fired, as well.

It was difficult to care, given who they worked for.

That might not have been fair, but it was how I felt.

I’d never met this Lucian Rucker, never thought about him once, or wondered about him in any way before today, but I found myself hating him already.

I knew, somehow, that feeling would only intensify before this was over.

“Anything?” Black asked about an hour later. He hovered over me as I scanned through folders in Rucker’s computer.

I glanced up at him with a frown.

“I’m not going through the actualinformation,you know,” I reminded him. “I’m mostly just copying everything onto the external drive and sending it to Kiko and Alisha. We have no idea how soon someone might show up here and try to shut us down… I figured the priority was to get it all back to the office.”

“Yes,” Black conceded. “It is.”

I continued to frown at him.

His mind seemed to be elsewhere right now. Was he worried about someone breaking in on us here? Making us stop?

“A little,” he conceded, glancing down at me. “I’d feel better if we knew why they let us in here so easily.” Black glanced around the office with a frown. “It’s likely a pipe dream, but I’d hoped to find one of those implants here… an early prototype maybe, possibly in a safe or a locked glass case or something. Rucker seems like the type who’d want a physical token of his favorite tech as a display or a talking piece.”

I nodded, feeling my shoulders relax marginally.

I agreed with his assessment about Rucker.

“I could try going through some of this while I copy it over,” I said, doubtful. “But honestly, I think it would be faster to have Alisha and Jem do it. We’ll likely need at least one engineer to look at it as well, likely someone who specializes in biotech. The organic machines side would have to be Jem, too, right?”

“Probably, yes,” Black conceded. “Holo knows a bit, but Jem’s the expert.”

I waved a hand towards the monitor. “Anyway, there’s too much security on most of these files for me to be able to see much from here. I doubt I’d get past the encryption I’ve found on individual documents, or be able to understand most of it, even if I did.”

“Have you finished uploading everything?” Black asked.

“No,” I said.

“How long?” Black asked.

My eyes flickered to the progress bar. “Twenty minutes?” I guessed. “It kind of depends on whether we find more hard drives––”

But Black had already touched his ear.

“Nick? Where are you with your search? Anything interesting?”

The channel was open between all three of us, so I heard Black’s voice through my earpiece, as well as from him standing next to me.

There was a dense silence on the other end.

Then a scuffling sound.

I heard what might be a softchinkof metal on metal, but hollow-sounding, like he was underground. Where the hell was he? Inside a safe?

Out of nowhere, I heard hard breathing, but Nick didn’t breathe. I also heard low vocalizations, what could be human, and female. Thosedefinitelydidn’t sound like Nick. They sounded young, and higher-pitched, and definitely not like Nick at all.