This time, the power did go. Everything from monitors to computers went black, the entire system thudding audibly as everything came simultaneously to a halt.

Is there danger? Kid’s behavior, past knowledge of her misdeeds, past knowledge of her conversation style; the first thing she did was say hi.

Fucking tinkers.

Fucking kid.

Tattletale rose from her seat, wincing at the pain in her legs. When she moved, it was with one hand on a nearby table or piece of furniture, to steady herself.

Her phone had died with the press of the big red button.

In the darkness, the stream of everything now cut off, no means of communicating with her squads or contacts, and no means of seeing what was going on out there, she had only her thoughts.

Her first thought was that she should take every single piece of tech she had in her room here, drop it into the dumpster, and set the contents alight. She might have, if her legs had been fully healed, and if it wasn’t so late that it would draw attention from Faultline.

She’d been on the opposite side of too many hackers and tinkers to not have taken precautions. Some of those precautions were at home, like the emergency server.

Epeios had been the reason for the emergency server. He’d been a friend once, or he had pretended to be, and she had let him pretend. He’d found a way onto her computer, forcing her to find a means of stopping a computer tinker with resources from looking at her stuff.

The emergency server was four feet tall and four feet deep, only two feet wide. Too large to pack, too niche in use. It was where she stored her notes too comprehensive for the regular systems and too complex for her own brain to wrestle with on a long-term basis. It worked by creating millions of deceptive copies, forgeries, and variations on documents, and then randomly shuffling her files into it.

Epeios had been baffled, had hired thinkers to try and decode, predict, or surveil her means of picking the true files from the false ones. There wasn’t one. The only means was to use her power. To intuit her way through a thousand haystacks.

She had other resources. Other jury-rigged traps and tools. Some were still packed.

She would have to get her stuff and set up her security, verify there was no virus in a closed system… ugh. The kid could probably set up a virus to take a snapshot and communicate by cell lines or ambient electricity.

Her power bar doubled as a signal detector. If there was activity on any of the connected systems, it would sound an alarm.

No, nothing to do but go to sleep. The other issues could be tackled later.

She climbed into the bed that Faultline had offered her. A luxurious bed with fine blankets in a shitty apartment. The bed was wide enough for three people to sleep in comfortably.