Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1)

41 - Bad Answers

"Well, he would say that wouldn't he?"

"Because you and your bastard father would gut this whole city for an extra fucking crypt." Lenor spat out a mouthful of blood and saliva onto the floor and bared crimson stained teeth at Toran. "Tell me I'm wrong."

"Oh, we play the game." Toran let his amplifier drop, walking over and bringing his face close to their captive. "But we remember what happened. We remember the Schism. If my father were to catch someone – oh, I don't know – accessing outlawed tech schematics from the Skiltron secure archive, he might take that badly, don't you think?"

For the first time, Lenor's violent firewall of denial seemed to fizzle. "Wh-what?"

"Oh, yeah, you were almost smart enough to dodge it, Lenor." Toran's smile became thoroughly malevolent. "But not quite. Those firewalls are fitted with auto-tracebacks. Hidden in amongst the nasty stuff so that you don't notice it." A shrug. "Not your fault, really. Your dad really shouldn't have sent you in there."

"I don't know what they were, I swear." She looked desperately past Toran, her eyes finding Piper. "I just went, ghosted the files to a phantom drive and left."

"What does that mean?" Piper whispered to Arrow.

"Copied them, basically," Arrow said. "But in a way that normally wouldn't be detectable."

"Now that is interesting," Ferra purred. "So you have no idea what your father told you to steal from Skiltron's most prized archive of knowledge?"

"Some of us have a thing called trust."

Toran snorted. "And a lot of fucking good it's done you."

"Lenor," Odiye interjected, stepping forward and gently pushing both Toran and Ferra back. "I'm sorry that you've been dragged into this."

"Then open these bloody locks and let me go!" Tears were streaming down Lenor Karga's face and Piper felt a twang of discomfort.

Just wait.

She flinched, fists clenching.

We're close.

Piper forced herself not to reply.

"Lenor, we need to know." Odiye pointed back at Piper. "You know who she is?"

"Seems like she's the reason this is happening to me." Lenor's eyes flashed with fresh hate for a moment, but she couldn't sustain it. Piper could feel the sheet exhaustion in the young woman's body. She was close to breaking point.

"I just want to know why the wraiths are trying to kill me," Piper told her.

"Think, Lenor," Odiye urged, dragging her attention back to him. "I've seen the pay logs. Your father is paying Operatives here to keep the investigation into the wraiths away from everyone, not just Toran. It's not about them. It's bigger than that. These are ... desperate moves."

She rocked her head back against the seat, tears cutting thin streams down her cheeks. "I just... there's nothing."

"People only try to hide the truth when it can hurt them." Odiye glanced back over his shoulder, to where Ferra prowled impatiently back and forth. "Lenor, please. I don't want this to go any further than it already has, but you know something. I can see it in your eyes."

"I..."

"It's alright."

Piper felt it before she saw it, the faint shift in Lenor's body, in the energy churning through her veins. In that moment she wondered if Odiye had actually been in on this whole macabre scheme all along.