Scorched by Erica Hayes

Author:Erica Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007594610
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

19

"Honey, I'm home." I plopped onto the sofa and kicked off my boots.

Glimmer didn't look up from his console. Seriously, was his butt glued to that chair, or what? "Come look at this."

"My day was fine, since you ask," I grumbled. "Witch attacked Caine's press conference. It was awesome. Sorry you missed it."

"So I heard. Your name's all over the news. Verity Fortune, intrepid reporter, hero of the day. Nice work," he added, with a glance that could have meant the opposite.

"Yeah, well, I didn't exactly get the chance to slip into a phone booth and costume up, did I? Did you see that Sentinel thing? Got the slick treatment from this Caine dude, too. He's good, unfortunately. Manages to make his rotten hater crap sound reasonable. I'd say Equity's in trouble." I squinted at the images on Glimmer's screen, and my heart thudded cold. "What's that?"

But I knew what it was.

A FortuneCorp science lab. That fuzzy monochrome footage we'd noted before, the resolution digitally limited to protect company secrets. Benches cluttered with high-tech equipment, drafting tables, filing cabinets, supercomputer terminals with flickering LEDs and fat data conduits stapled to the floor.

I rose and peered closer, leaning over Glimmer's chair. The time stamp in the top corner showed a date last year, only a few weeks before Dad died. Early morning, just before business hours, and the place was ghostly, eerily deserted. No activity. "What am I looking at?"

"Wait for it… There you go."

A fuzzy figure walked in. Dark tapered trousers and jacket, narrow waist, shaped shoulders, a curved figure. A woman.

The outline was fuzzy, her facial features obscured. But I knew who it was. Her hairstyle, before she cut it, caught in a clip and flowing down her back. Her kind of suit, no-nonsense power. Her dark spectacle frames, her favorite set of golden bracelets she wore on one wrist.

Equity, in the lab at 6:45 a.m. I frowned. "What's she doing?"

"Wait and see." Glimmer hesitated. "I couldn't sleep, after what you said about FortuneCorp and Pyrotox. But I couldn't hack into their lab computers, at least not in this lifetime. It's too deeply encrypted. So I ran a search algorithm on the lab cameras."

I watched, fascinated and horrified. Equity walked up to the computer terminal and sat in the padded chair. She clicked something small and rectangular into a slot on the console, and typed something into the machine. Data flashed up, too fuzzy to read, and she did something to her mobile device that made menus and dialog boxes flick up.

I swallowed on hot sickness. She was copying files, or deleting them. But probably copying. No prizes for guessing what they contained.

"Can you be sure?" I demanded. "Can we find out what's in those files?"

"No. Like I said, it's too deeply encrypted."

"She got in, didn't she?"

"She's a board member. She probably has a password. In any case, if she's smart she's copying a whole pile of stuff, to obscure what she really wants."

He was right, I realized. Not

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