“There’s no way to swing that and keep you safe. Just trust me, Tristan. I’ll be down soon.”
Tristan ducked out of the window.
Lila closed it behind him, resettled the drapes, grabbed her satchel, and padded downstairs, emerging into the humid twilight.
Thank gods Sioux Falls would be cooler.
A little flutter of shrubs caught her eye. She pulled Tristan from behind it, leading him through a maze of trees and cameras and blackcoats.
“Wait here,” she said, leaving him behind a tree near the garage. “I have to get my car.”
“I want to see inside.”
“There are too many cameras. I’ll be back soon.”
Lila opened the garage door, and the lights turned on automatically as they caught her approach. Three blackcoats startled several meters away and spun, hands going to their Colts. A German shepherd sniffed the air.
“Look alive,” she called out before they drew.
The group chuckled nervously. “Morning, chief,” they murmured sheepishly, putting away their Colts.
“As you were.”
She hurried to her roadster as the group pressed on, and pulled out her palm, waving it over the interior and exterior of the car, increasingly annoyed that she bothered with such formalities at all. She’d just driven to the High Council meeting, anyway. It wasn’t like anyone would have bugged her roadster between then and—
Her palm vibrated suddenly. Cocking her head, she swiped the screen and studied the weak wiggle of a needle displayed over a field of grid lines. The thin needle on the screen hopped again as she waved it over the back bumper.
Gritting her teeth, she crawled underneath the car, letting her palm guide her. Taking off her gloves, she poked and prodded, finally feeling a little lump behind the bumper, the size and shape of a ladybug. She pulled the device off her bumper carefully, studying it in the lig
ht of her palm. The silver lump might have been nothing but a poor weld, but no such shoddy work would have graced a car as fine as her Adessi. Her mother’s R&D department had decided to test their new hardware tonight of all nights, a night when she had little time to dawdle.
She grunted and tossed the damn thing on Jewel’s Firefly.
She spent another ten minutes carefully combing her car, then connected her palm to her car’s GPS and ran her snoop programs.
It didn’t take long to discover her mother’s second gift, a section of code that wouldn’t quite turn off the program when she requested it. If the bug hadn’t been on her car, she might not have run her full snoop program on the GPS. She might not have found it at all.
Lila’s eyes locked on to her mother’s beloved Blanc convertible, smooth lines and curves and an engine that didn’t so much purr as growl.
Payback was a bitch.
She’d have it soon.
Since Lila didn’t have time to wonder what else her mother’s people had done to her car, she downloaded a copy to a star drive, then wiped the entire car, reinstalling its systems from a second star drive she kept close.
At last, she pulled from the garage.
“What took you so long?” Tristan hissed as she stopped beside him, idling.
“Sometimes when I check for bugs, I find them.” She popped the trunk and joined Tristan outside the car.
“You can’t be serious.”
“It’s just for a few moments.”
“This is ridiculous,” he grumbled as he slipped inside, twisting and turning and curling. The car shook on its thick tires.
“I agree. It’s extremely ridiculous, but I’ll reward you later.”