Page 50 of Tangled

“It’s probably my fault. But right now, for uploading Anonymity Plus 1.0, maybe we could find somewhere just a skosh quicker?”

“Fine,”she huffed. “Not that there’s anything wrong with my setup.”

“Of course not. Your setup is perfectly capable of anyreasonabletask. My bloatware just needs faster internet to upload it.”

“Okay then.”

“So,” Tristan said, grabbing the trailing half of her blanket and tossing it over the seat of the computer chair before he sat his bare butt down. He tugged on her hand, and the blanket swaddled Colleen’s legs so much that she tumbled into his lap. “Where do you think we could find faster internet speeds? Do you have a friend around here with a server farm in their basement?”

She snuggled down in his arms, still a little offended.“No.”

“Can we slice into a fiber-optic cable somewhere?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Utilities in Phoenix are underground.”

“Dang it.”

“‘Dang it?’ Seriously? You sound like—”

“An Iowa farm boy?”

“Yeah, I guess so. But with a British accent.Dahng it.”

He mused, “Can we break into the university computer lab and steal some mainframe time? I saw the campus whilst we were driving here from the airport.”

“No, I was only an underclassman, and they deactivated my college ID card when I dropped out.”Break in?That got her thinking. “But come to think of it, I do know of a place with fantastic, crazy high-speed internet for commercial streaming, and it’s connected to a flippin’ enormous server farm that feeds directly into the river company with all the servers in the world.”

Tristan craned his head to look at her. “Yeah?”

“The GameShack store I got fired from. If we didn’t need the hardware, I could log in from here because I have admin access for their system. I stuck a mirror program on their computer at work a year ago so that I didn’t have to go in every time Miller didn’t know how to do something. Sometimes when other CSRs couldn’t handle some of the tech support, I’d log in from home and pinch-hit. That asshole didn’t even pay me when I worked from home. If it were just uploading to their system, I could do that from my laptop.”

“But the store has higher capacity?” Tristan prompted.

“It has ahugefibre-optic broadband internet service because we often have several people doing video chat help in there, plus all the stores are hub connectors for the game streaming platform.”

Of-freaking-course.

Colleen snapped her fingers. “And that’s why they’ve never gotten rid of the brick and mortar stores, because they’re hubs for the streaming platforms. But every one of them, including the one I worked at, has a fiber-optic cable the size of a dachshund coming out of the floor. It’s integral to the franchise operations terms of service contract.”

Tristan’s blue eyes were lighting up. “That would be optimal.”

“And it’s Saturday, so the stores in that strip mall will close at five instead of nine at night. Starbucks closes at seven, and the grocery store shuts at ten. So, the whole complex will be deserted by eleven.”

“That’s good.”

She grinned. “And Miller is such a stuck-up dork that he’s probably strutting around the store and preening at the reflection of his racist tattoos in the window instead of realizing”—she grabbed her purse off her computer desk and dug around in it until she came up with her jangly keychain—“that he never got my key to the store back when he fired me.”

27

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Colleen

Do you knowwhatColleen Frost was?