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It might even be an animal.

“What the fuck was that?” Black asked, clearly hearing it, too.

Nick’s voice rose, strangely loud after that other, softer, more animal sounds.

I realized now that it sounded like whimpering.

Or crying, maybe.

Something in that knowing chilled me to the bone.

“You’d better get up here.” Nick sounded grim. “Both of you. I could use Miri right now, especially, but both of you need to come up here as soon as you can.”

Black’s voice instantly matched Nick’s tone.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Upstairs. In the master bedroom… I think. This whole floor is basically one giant room with several balconies and abathroom the size of the entire fucking apartment I had in South San Francisco. The one Miri said always smelled like brine-soaked guy-socks.”

I grunted a half-laugh, unable to help it.

“Itdidsmell like that,” I informed him.

“Which floor?” Black asked.

“The very top. It’s the only room on this floor, like I said, apart from that massive fucking bathroom and a sauna. Oh, and there’s a big outdoor garden and an attached sunroom, but again, they’re, like, connected to the bedroom. Just walk straight ahead when you get to the top of the stairs. I’ll be on the left past the first partition. Near a balcony. On the floor.”

Black clicked off the comm. He frowned down at me.

“Can you leave that?” he asked, nodding towards the three screens I sat in front of. “Will it continue to copy everything over while we’re not here?”

I glanced up from where I’d been poring over file names, double-checking that I’d gotten everything, that there wasn’t anything hidden I’d missed. Black and I found the office not long after we’d snooped through most of the ground floor and walked up to the second.

We hadn’t looked through much apart from the computers, although Black had searched the walls and floors for a safe. Brushed steel bookshelves lined two of the walls, but I got the feeling the books themselves were mostly for show. The centerpiece to the room was the massive desk where I sat, dominated by the three curved screens and two different keyboards.

When we first came in, we’d found a number of controls that Black theorized turned the room into an augmented reality space when paired with a tablet, or possibly Rucker’s implant. After toying with those, Black reached into his jacket and tossedme a small external drive. He told me to copy everything I could find so we could go through it all back at the office.

I’d worried the drive would be too small, but he informed me it could hold several hundred terabytes of data.

Even so, I called Kiko about moving everything to a company server, just in case.

She gave me an address and I started with that, but Black’s external drive seemed capable of holding it all too, so I started that one as well, figuring, if nothing else, it might provide a decoy if someone from Rucker’s team showed up and had a shit-fit about what we were doing.

Honestly, though, I figured the risk was minimal.

Unless half the company wore those implants, or Rania Gorren showed up in person and raised a huge stink, there wasn’t a lot they could do to stop us.

Besides, what were they going to do? Call the cops on us?

“Miri?” Black’s voice was a soft growl. “It sounded urgent. With Nick. Can you leave this or not? I don’t want you down here alone.”

I was already rising to my feet.

“I’m coming.” I brushed off the front of my pants and jacket. “It’ll be fine as long as none of his people come in here, realize what we’re doing, and stop the transfer… or worse, try to delete it from the Black Securities network. Hopefully, if anyonedidcome in here, they’d just unplug the external…”

I was basically just thinking aloud at that point.

“…That wouldn’t matter much, as it’s a redundancy. We should probably look around down here some more, in case we missed something. Or have Nick take a look––”