The gym bag she’d grabbed from her car must have been full of clothes, because she’d changed into a loose UNLV t-shirt and pajama bottoms so faded, Julius couldn’t make out the original design. He could, however, clearly make out the shape of her legs underneath, and he quickly looked away before she caught him staring.
“I’ll be done in a sec,” she said, wrenching her neck around to get at the hair on the back of her head. “I’ve been dying to straighten this mess out for days.”
Julius cleared his throat and walked over to put the tray down on the table by the window. “I hope you didn’t pay whoever gave you that haircut.”
“Trust me, this wasn’t my first choice,” Marci grumbled, carefully trimming the wispy trails of hair above her eyes into something like bangs. “Do you have any idea how long it took me to grow my hair out? But Bixby’s mage was using it as a material link to track me, so I had no choice. I chopped my ponytail off and used it as bait to lure his goons into my house. Then, when they went inside after me, bam!”
Julius arched an eyebrow. “Bam?”
“Blew them up,” she said fiercely, glowering into the mirror as she put down the scissors. “Trust me, it was better than they deserved for killing my dad.” She grabbed a brush next, running the stiff bristles through her now mostly even short-cropped hair. This went on for almost ten seconds before she realized what she’d just said.
“Oh, wow,” she whispered, going still. “I guess that counts as confessing to murder, doesn’t it?”
Julius put up his hands. “I’m not judging. If someone killed my parent, I’d do the same.” If anyone actually managed to take out Bethesda, getting blown up would look like a holiday compared to what the Heartstrikers would do.
Marci dropped the brush on the marble counter with a loud clatter and leaned forward, resting her head dejectedly against the mirror. “You know,” she said softly, “believe it or not, I was a nice girl before all this. Never blew up anything bigger than a car, never killed anyone or went spelunking in the sewers or got in alley fights. They say people come to the DFZ to reinvent themselves, but I think I’ve taken the idea a bit further than intended.”
“I think you’re doing great,” Julius said, grabbing the package he’d ordered for her off the breakfast tray. “Come over here, I got you something.”
She gave herself a final shake and pushed off the sink, padding over to the table by the window. When she came around the bed, he noticed that her feet were bare. They were also adorable, her toes painted with the same glitter polish that was chipping off her fingernails, creating little flashes of sparkle as she walked.
“What is it?”
Julius blinked, startled. “Sorry,” he said, quickly looking away. “Here.”
He handed her the cardboard box, which she ripped open with focused curiosity. But instead of being excited as he’d hoped, her face fell into a confused frown. “But Julius,” she said. “This is a…”
“A phone,” he finished for her, plucking the slim, purple rectangle out of her hand and turning it on. “Here, let me show you the best part.”
He flipped through the phone’s small AR, fumbling a bit with the unfamiliar interface. He’d already set this part up through his own phone, though, so even with the fumbling, it only took a few seconds to find and pull up her account and put it on the screen. When he handed the phone back, he was rewarded with the sight of Marci rendered completely speechless.
“You can change the security settings to whatever you want,” he said. “But as you see, it’s all there. That’s your half of this morning’s earnings plus your fee for the hours you’ve worked so far, full rate.”
Marci didn’t say a word. She just stood there, staring at the five-digit number that was her new bank account balance. “But,” she whispered at last, “How? This account’s in my name. You need a DFZ Residency ID to have a phone in the city. I never got one since Bixby could use it to track me, and it wasn’t like I had any money to put in it anyway, but this…How did you do this?”
“I used to play some pretty popular full-immersion MMOs,” Julius explained. “You meet a lot of people in games, some of whom make their living doing less than legal work. It just so happens one of my old guildmates works as a data merchant, and he was happy to sell me a fake Residency ID for you at a discount.”
Marci stared down at her phone again. “So this is fake?”
“The number is fake,” Julius said. “The money is real. As for the ID, my guy assures me it’ll pass any sort of routine check, though we probably shouldn’t do anything that might earn you a full background scan.”
He’d meant that last part as a joke, but Marci looked stricken. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“You earned the money,” he said with a shrug. “And I needed you to have a phone. Besides, I had to talk to this guy anyway since I’ve hired him to help us find Katya.”
He’d debated that move a lot, actually. Now that he had Katya’s number, he’d been tempted to just call her and try to work something out. After much back and forth, though, he’d concluded that contacting her would be a waste of time. She probably wouldn’t answer, and even if she did, a call out of the blue on a number she’d only trusted to a few people might cause her to bolt for good. But a good hacker like his guildmate could take a phone number and work backward to find the Residency ID and bank account it was attached to. And since phone enabled electronic transfers were used for everything from restaurants to car rentals, tracking Katya’s movements had just become no problem.
“He’s got a search going to for her ID right now,” Julius explained. “The moment she uses her phone to pay for anything, the tracking program will message us with the location, and then all we have to do is drive over and say hello.” And hope that Katya wasn’t so spooked she ran even from a sealed dragon. Still, Julius thought it was a pretty clever plan, and he was a little let down when Marci’s face remained frighteningly blank.
“So your friend did all of this for you just off a phone call?”
“Well, he’s not really my friend,” Julius admitted. “I don’t even know his real name, actually, but I was his healer in the game, and the bond between healer and tank runs deep. And it’s not like he’s working for free. I’m paying him like any other client would. He just did me a favor by moving me to the front of the line.”
Marci nodded, but Julius got the impression she wasn’t really listening. The whole time they’d been talking, she’d been staring at her phone with a closed-off expression he didn’t like at all. Clearly, it was time to break out the big guns.
“Here,” he said, sitting down at the table where he’d set the breakfast tray. “Come eat. I got you waffles.”
He lifted the silver tray covers with a flourish, revealing the beautifully arranged piles of sugar dusted Belgian waffles and fresh cut fruit. But when he looked up to see if he’d gotten a smile at last, Marci was still just staring at him, and then her bottom lip started to tremble. She turned away a second later, raising her hand to her face, but it wasn’t until her shoulders started to shake that Julius realized she was crying.
“What?” he cried, jumping up. “I’m sorry, what did I do? Do you not like waffles?”