Nolan sat stubbornly at his own computer for another twenty minutes, pretending he was working, resisting the urge to break into Cerisa’s files. If he was caught, he would be fired; no question. He should wait till the next day, get Pakt’s permission, open Cerisa’s computer with the guldman standing by to oversee. Except Pakt would refuse to do it. Pakt never deviated from strict protocol within the office. Well, then, neither should Nolan. He knew it was wrong, and he didn’t need any guldman to tell him so.

But he honestly could not proceed a step farther without the previous model. It was a choice between a small misdemeanor that would harm no one and a week of wasted work. And Melina had practically ordered him to do it, and he had a long history of obeying the dictates of indigo women.

He came to his feet suddenly. All right. He’d do it. In and out in ten minutes.

Feeling a bit like a fool, he crept to Cerisa’s office and turned on only the shaded desk lamp, so no telltale light would spill out the windows (should anyone from the streets happen to be looking). In the semidark, he settled himself before her computer and switched it on. The amber graphics on the screen seemed much more baleful than the friendly teal he mixed on his own monitor. It was hard to be in this room and not feel Cerisa’s accusing presence all around him. It was hard to be at this screen and not feel as though her face was peering at him from inside the glass and circuitry. Hastily, he typed in the code that Melina had given him, and, when the screen prompted him with a new question, the second set of symbols she had written down.

And damned if he wasn’t in. Who would have expected Cerisa to be so slipshod?

But that was not the only sign of negligence that he came across immediately. Her files were in no discernible order, and the directory was almost useless. Some of her projects bore recognizable names; others were coded with letters and numbers that must mean something to Cerisa but held nothing but mystery to anyone browsing through her data. Nothing bore the ARS-B designation, or even Moro-1. He would have to open the files one by one and scan them.