“Built like a fridge,” Matt repeated as if the comment had triggered a thought. He pointed toward the large black sculpture Ally had admired earlier. “Did any of you look under that one?”

  “That thing has to weigh two hundred pounds,” Tee answered. “At least.”

  “Exactamundo,” Matt replied. “Help me with it.”

  He and Tyler approached the large statue. Together, they managed to shift it on its pedestal.

  “Sensors just picked up a power surge beneath the statue,” Meg reported.

  “Ally, go check,” Matt said.

  She hurried into the office, returning to the doorway with a huge grin on her face. “You did it!”

  CHAPTER 14

  I could barely contain my excitement as we entered Levain's secret room. It was smaller than I expected, most of the space taken up by rows of computer servers with flickering lights and soft electrical hums. A single terminal with a relatively low-tech display screen sat at the end of an aisle between two banks. Other than that and a few stacks of dust-coated boxes in one corner, the room was sparse. Sterile. There was only a small vent high on one wall to cool the equipment.

  “Noah, you’re the guy in the chair,” Matt said, pointing to the large seat. Dropping into it, I had to search for an adjustment to raise it in order to view the monitor placed at Levain’s eye level. Raising it all the way still left me looking up, but the viewing angle was adequate to see the text. My eyes registered English, but I doubted the interface was written for Earthers. Why hadn’t the Warden’s pill translated text for me before? I wondered if maybe it required a certain amount before it went through the trouble.

  "Can our little buddy crack this terminal too?" Tyler asked from behind me.

  "Only one way to find out." I held the Aleal toward the interface, hoping it understood what I needed. Its tendrils danced over the silent keyboard for a few seconds before coming to rest.

  Nothing happened.

  “I guess not,” I said, deflating anew. I looked back at the others in frustration.

  "You'd think he might make security a little more accessible to his second in command," Matt observed. “Ally, Tee, start checking those boxes. It seems kind of odd that Levain would have paper documents.”

  “Does it, though?” Ally replied. “There are benefits to paper. Harder to track, easier to know if it’s been tampered with, and definitely easier to destroy.”

  “As long as nobody makes a copy,” Tyler said.

  “It’s easier to make a copy of digital data,” I said. “Especially here. I haven’t noticed any scanners or copy machines.”

  “We haven’t been here that long.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure interplanetary faxes are a thing.”

  “Digital data can still be encrypted,” Tyler pointed out.

  “Encryption can be cracked. Besides, paper messages can be encrypted too.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  “Just start looking,” Matt repeated. “If you’re right, it may be that the most sensitive data isn’t on the password-protected mainframe. It’s sitting in boxes on the floor.”

  “I think I might enjoy proving you wrong again,” Ally said with an embarrassed grin.

  “I hope you do,” Matt replied. “Let’s get to it. We’ve already been here way too long.”

  While the others began going through the boxes of hardcopy documents, I entered random password guesses based on what little I knew about Levain. After a few tries, a new message appeared on the interface, locking out the next attempt for thirty seconds.

  “So much for the totally random, one-in-a-million approach,” I said. “Meg? Leo? Any ideas?”

  “We can try to bypass the interface,” she replied over the RFD. “Then use Levi to attempt to break the encryption without limits to the number of entry attempts. We’d have to physically access a data port, and wiring everything to Head Case might take some time, given the size differences.”

  “How much time?” Matt asked.

  “A few hours.”

  He grimaced at the thought. “I wanted to be out of here thirty minutes ago.”

  “Sorry, Boss,” Meg said. “That’s my only idea.”

  “It doesn’t hurt to look for a data port we can use,” I said, glancing at the servers on either side of me. “Where do I start?”

  “Check the back of the display first,” Meg said. “Not likely, but you never know.”

  I stood and leaned forward, angling my face behind the display. It had a flat back, with only a single thin wire running into the wall. “No go.”

  “Okay. Those servers look like they should just slide right out for maintenance. Let’s see how their backsides are organized.”

  I glanced at Tyler, waiting for a comment in response to Meg’s mention of backsides. He grinned to himself but held back his response, hopefully following Matt’s advice to think a little more before embarrassing himself with poorly executed humor.

  I turned to the nearest server, using a pair of indents on the side to get a grip and pull it forward. The rack expanded out far enough for me to look at the rear of it. A single cable connected it to the server above.

  “There’s only one cable,” I said.

  “Damn,” Meg replied. “Some kind of Power-over-Ethernet. We can’t remove the data cable without disconnecting the juice.”

  “The first server must be getting power without data,” I said.

  “Yes, but we’d only be able to recover the information stored on that one since unplugging the cable would kill the power to the rest.”

  My heart sank. We'd come so far chasing possibilities only to hit another wall. "So much for that approach. Thanks for the idea, Meg.”

  “Any time. Sorry it didn’t work out.”

  I turned to Matt. “The terminal’s a dead end unless we can figure out the password.”

  “Levain didn’t leave it taped under the keyboard, did he?”

  I checked, just to be sure. I even got excited, hoping it would be that easy. It wasn’t. “Nope.”

  “Then I hope there’s something useful in those boxes,” Matt said. “Ally, Tee, anything?”

  “Not yet,” Tyler replied, holding up some of the papers. “These all look like building contracts, but who knows what for?”

  “I think I may have found the hit list you were looking for, Tee,” Ally said, holding some other papers. “These are handwritten payment agreements, stamped with numbers but otherwise unsigned, attached to a profile of an individual. All the profiles are crossed out.”

  “Really?” Tyler replied. “How many are there?”

  “It looks like it might be this entire box.”

  My stomach lurched at the idea of how many individuals Levain had paid to have killed. While the others continued sorting through the haphazard collection, I turned my attention back to the Aleal perched silently on my shoulder, tendrils limp with defeat.

  “I’m sorry, little bud. We'll figure this out somehow." Its tendrils quivered, lifting toward my face before resettling despondently. I gently stroked its rubbery flesh, hoping it found the touch reassuring. It seemed to shiver under my finger.

  “Okay,” Matt said after some number of minutes had passed. “Time’s up. We can’t stay here forever. We’ll get a nice room at a nearby hotel, chill out until tomorrow, and then set a course for Gemmen. That’s our best chance.”

  “This is our best chance,” Ally said. “We can’t quit now. We’ve only gone through half the boxes.”

  “It’s not safe here,” Matt argued. “Zariv’s murderbots could be here at any second.”

  “I’ll go out and watch the door. I can headshot anything that tries to get in.”

  Matt hesitated, considering the possibility.

  “Uh, guys,” Tyler said before he could answer. “I think I found something.”

  My heart leaped. “What is it?” I asked, voice cracking with excitement.

  "Letters,” Tyler replied. “Correspondence between Levain, I think, and someone else. They’re all handwritten and unsigned. No names. No addresses. No dates. No identification.”

  “And how is that supposed to help?” Matt asked.

  He held up one of the letters, written in small, perfectly aligned print despite the unlined paper. “Because this one mentions the Warden’s ship.”

  We quickly surrounded him, jostling eagerly to glimpse the page. My pulse raced as Tyler read a few snippets aloud. Intrigued, we joined forces going through the adjacent pages, quickly assembling a series of missives that created a general sequence of events.

  Apparently, Levain’s salvage crew had informed him of the Warden’s crippled ship nearly two years earlier. At that point, rather than bringing the ship back to Cacitrum, Levain had commissioned the construction of a space station closer to where they discovered the vessel. The letters detailed the progress over time. Once the station was completed, they’d towed the Warden’s ship there for examination. According to the last few letters, the Warden’s vessel was in good condition outwardly, but all of the interior systems were badly corrupted. By whom, or what remained unknown, as did the fate of the clones or the Prall who may have once crewed the ship. The salvage team had found it empty.

  Of course, none of the correspondence mentioned anything about where to find the station, which, as Levain had put it, was as useful as a third nipple.

  “Lots of cool backstory but nothing actionable,” Tee said, reaching the last page of the related stack. “We just wasted another hour on another dead end.”

  “Maybe we missed it,” Ally said. “I can’t believe Levain wouldn’t want to know where to visit if he wanted to see the ship for himself.”

  “I’m sure Levain knew where to go,” Matt said. “Like you mentioned earlier, paper is easy to destroy. He probably set fire to the ones he didn’t want so no one would ever see them.”

  “So why keep these?” Tyler asked. “Why not just burn them all?”

  ”Maybe he thought he might need to double-check something critical later on," I suggested. “There are a lot of details about the layout of the Warden’s ship that we skimmed over. We can use those, for sure.”

  “What good does it do to know the layout of a starship we’ll never see?” Ally asked.

  “I’m not giving up that easily,” I replied.

  “Let’s collect the associated documents,” Matt said. “We’ll bring them with us and see if we might have missed some important details that could reveal the location of the station. Tee, bring those building contracts, too. I think they’re related.”

  “It might look a little suspicious to carry boxes out of here,” I said.

  “It’ll look a lot suspicious,” Matt agreed. “But we don’t have any other options.”

  I nodded, jumping into action to help the others stuff a single box with everything we wanted to keep. We were so busy with the task that not one of us noticed the new presence in the room until we heard the soft whine of a plasma rifle powering up near the doorway. I looked up to see a woman standing there.

  “If any of you even think about moving a muscle,” she said, “I’ll burn you all to ash.”

  CHAPTER 15

  My breath caught at the sight of the young woman standing in the doorway, her long white-blonde hair spilling loosely from the hood of a crimson cloak. She was likely close to my age, with delicate features and startling blue eyes. Unfortunately, her plasma rifle was pointed directly at me.

  My heart thumped wildly even as my brain scrambled to make sense of this new twist. Who was she? One of Zariv's agents? She seemed too young. But then, Tee and I were here. Why shouldn’t she be? An assassin then? I couldn’t think of another reason why Levain’s rival would use a person over an entire squad of murderbots. But assassins were supposed to be silent and deadly. They didn’t make threats.

  "Take it easy," Matt soothed, hands lifted placatingly. "We don't want any trouble."

  “You have a strange way of showing it,” the newcomer replied harshly. Her aim switched to Matt and remained steady, index finger resting lightly near the rifle's trigger. Given an excuse, I didn't doubt she would fire without hesitation. “First, you break into my father’s apartment. If that’s not bad enough, you know about his secret room and how to enter it.” Her eyes flashed to the terminal display, quickly recognizing we’d failed to gain access. “I hope for your sake that you can tell me where he is.”

  Her assertion left me even more confused, my bewildered expression mirrored on Tyler and Alyssa’s faces. But not Matt’s. Understanding lit his eyes even as sympathy softened his features.

  "You’re Levain’s daughter,” he guessed.

  The young woman nodded. Her attention shifted briefly to Tyler and Alyssa before returning to Matt and me. “Where is he?” she repeated. “Who do you work for? Zariv?”

  “Ugh, no!” Tyler said, earning the muzzle of the girl’s rifle pointed at his chest. He glanced at me, not wanting to be the bearer of bad news with the business end of the plasma shooter facing his way.

  “Miss…” I trailed off. “Do you have a name?”

  The gun swung back toward me. “I don’t need pleasantries from his murderers at worst and thieves at best. Just tell me where he is.”

  I swallowed hard, not eager to answer her question. “He’s…well…he’s…”

  “Dead,” Matt finished. “I’m sorry. Your father is dead.”

  “No,” she replied, her voice losing all of its harsh edge. The rifle dipped slightly, and I sensed Matt tensing beside me, ready to make a move. “That can’t be.” She regained her composure, rifle re-engaging with my sternum. “So it’s murderers then.”

  "Whoa, hold up! We didn't kill your dad!" Tyler threw both hands up as if to ward off her accusation. “Honest!"

  She spared him the barest glance while her knuckles whitened around the rifle stock. “Then how do you know his fate?”

  "He speaks the truth. We didn't kill Levain." Matt seconded. “But we were there when he died. The Warden sent us to deliver a message. Zariv ambushed him while we were there. We barely escaped with our lives.”

  The woman studied him, desire to believe warring with suspicion. Finally, her rigid posture relaxed a hair. “Yet somehow, you made it out alive while my father is dead. How do you explain that?”

  “Zariv sent his bots for your father, not us. We slipped out while they were preoccupied with him and his guards.”

  “So you fled like cowards instead of coming to his aid?” She thrust the rifle forward until the muzzle pressed against my chest. “How could you?”

  “The Warden sent us to Levain,” I repeated. “No offense, but we weren’t friends of his. Not even business associates. Just a group of people in the wrong place at the wrong time.” I considered adding something about how her father had been about to pummel me at the time, but I thought that might give her more of a reason to shoot me, rather than lower the rifle.

  “Sent by the Warden,” she said in a low voice. “No wonder you made yourselves as useful as a third nipple.” The comment alone proved she was Levain’s child, even though she bore no resemblance to him, whatsoever.

  “Funny, your dad said almost the same thing about us,” Tyler said.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” I said. “We were only doing what the Warden told us to do.”

  “Of course,” she replied, using her last ounce of anger to spit out the words. Her arms fell limply at her sides. Tears spilled over pale cheeks as the plasma rifle clattered to the floor. "First Mother, now Father,” she whispered brokenly. “I can’t believe it.”

  My earlier fear melted away. Weapon lowered, she no longer seemed threatening. Just a scared girl mourning lost parents. I understood that pain all too well.

  Matt crossed to gather the abandoned rifle before she changed her mind about using it on us. I came to my feet, reaching a gentle hand out to the weeping girl and placing it on her shoulder. She didn’t wriggle away or toss it aside. “I lost both my parents, too,” I said. “Three weeks ago.” I didn’t tell her about Jaffie’s involvement. It would only give her a reason to further question our motives. “I know it sucks right now, but it gets better.”

  She glanced at me. “Has three weeks made it better?”

  My cheeks flushed. I shook my head. “Not really. But I assume it will get better one day.”

  She stared sadly at me for a moment. Then the anger returned to her expression. She reached up and shoved my hand off her shoulder, setting her jaw. She would probably have stuck her rifle in my gut again if Matt hadn’t already claimed it. “Did the Warden send you here to steal as well?”

  “No,” I said. “The Warden didn’t send us here. We came in search of a way home. A way back to Earth.”

  “I’ve never heard of Earth. Which sector is it in?”

  “It isn’t in Warexia,” Ally said. “It’s billions of light years away.”

  “Your father knew how to travel from here to there,” I said.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “We were kind of hoping you might be able to tell us that,” Matt said. “I guess he never mentioned Earth to you?”

  She shook her head. “No. He’s long sought a way to prove the Warden isn’t as powerful as he seems. I wonder if he believed the Warden came from Earth.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. “From what I gather, the Warden is older than Earth civilization.”

  “We really just want to go home,” Ally said, turning the conversation away from the Warden and back to our primary goal. “We aren’t supposed to be in Warexia. So we came here hoping your father left something useful behind.”

  “How did you know about this apartment? About this room?” Levain’s daughter asked.

  The Aleal had ducked out of sight when she’d snuck up on us. It made its presence known now, crawling up my back and onto my shoulder.

  She flinched at the sight of it. “What is that?”

  “It’s called an Aleal,” I said. “It led us here.”

  “How?”

  “It absorbed Jaffie’s essence, including his memories.”