Page 41 of Sherwood
“I’m not being moody.”
“Youare.” He looked over to Marian. “She’s the moodiest. Do you remember this? The goddamn moodiest.”
I threw up my hands. “I’m only moody when it’s called for! Like when the NSA ishereand waiting for us to fuck up!”
“The good news is that you know those assholes, and you know how they think,” Will said. “And we’ve already dodged them for a year. We’ll be fine.”
Jove stared at him. “I thinkfinemight be stretching it.”
I agreed. Will didn’t know Rafe like I did, and I knew he hadn’t made a mistake tonight. Maybe the private room hadn’t been part of the plan, but it hadn’t hurt his plan, whatever that was. Even Marian coming with me hadn’t seemed to bother him in any capacity other than as a dominant and a lover. Which meant she wasn’t essential to what came next.
“Now that we’ve gone over the whole being hunted part,” Will said, “have you told our fair maiden the good news?”
“There’s good news?” Marian asked, a winged brow lifting high. I could imagine her giving someone in a boardroom that same expression.
“Yes,” I said, grabbing her hand again and pulling her. “The good news is that you’re now among the best and cleverest thieves in the world. Come on.”
Passing by a few of the others still behind their computers, I gave Marian their names—Alana, Doncaster, Bland, and Tinker—and then explained that the latter three were hackers Jove, Will, and I had recruited in our first month on the run. Alana had come on board as our machine expert, and then when we returned to Sherwood, I reached out to Tuck and Much, both of whom worked in private cybersecurity, to join us. Together, we’d formed the Merry Men, stealing from the government to—hopefully—find a way to fix it.
Not that we knew the best way to do that.
Even a year out, we were still divided on how to use what we’d stolen.
But I wasn’t going to worry about that right now. I was going to show Marian the scope of what we’d managed to accomplish here in Sherwood Forest instead.
The first thing that hit us when I pulled open the door to the last pod was the warmth, a thick blanket of it settling over our shoulders as we stepped inside, and then there was the near-darkness, filled with thousands of blinking green and red lights. Our footsteps echoed on the perforated flooring as we walked down the central aisle. Rows and rows of black shelves housed CPUs and GPUs capable of ingesting, processing, and storing data, their cords bundled in neat black and yellow twists, their fans whirring silently. The nearby air-conditioning units were caught in a continuous, throaty roar.
Marian came to a stop, blinking as she looked around the room. I could see the lights from the rigs caught in her dark eyes. They sparkled like stars.
“What are all these?” she asked over the noise of the air conditioners. “What are they for?”
“Secrets,” I said simply. “Secrets that we’re not supposed to have.”
Her lips parted as she put it all together. “This is the treason. The secrets belong to the government.”
“In a loose sense, yes,” I said. A red light flashed nearby, and Will and Jove walked over to check it out. The sensor lights for that aisle kicked on as they approached, and in the new glow, I could see the glittery sheen of sweat misting on Marian’s neck. I wanted to lick it off. “It’ll be easier to explain if I start from the beginning.”
“Your treason story is a long story, then?” she said with a little laugh.
I smiled and somehow managed to drag my eyes up from her lickable throat. “It’s actually not as long as you might think. All told, it took me less than a day to decide what to do. But it still wasn’t an easy decision.”
Ahead of us, Jove and Will were poking at the rig, Jove’s long braids and Will’s floppy hair waving from the drafts created by all the whirring fans.
“At first,” I said after a minute, “I thought they were mistakes. Errors. Something getting fucked up in the ingestion of data. Rafe and I were partnered together in a few different regions to plant secure communication and listening devices in neutral or hostile territory, and so it was my job to get those systems up with very limited time and under significant pressure.”
I still remembered installing surveillance equipment and their upload links in a block of flats in Carpathia, a river town called Bassas that had been mostly blasted to bits during the war and hadn’t been rebuilt since. Even though the new Carpathian president Svenchenko had managed to bring some semblance of stability to the country, the extremists proved especially stubborn to root out, and were under our constant surveillance. Bassas had been a hotbed of radical activity at the time, and I’d installed the equipment while Rafe stood with his back to mine, his hand on a gun with the serial number filed off. We’d made it out of the building, but then got caught by rebels at a checkpoint on the road out of town. It had been the first time I’d fired a weapon since leaving the Ranger battalion and I’d been sick after, throwing up the moment we’d stumbled to safety in an abandoned gas station. Even now, I couldn’t tell you why.
“So at first,” I went on, “I thought maybe I’d fucked up. That the data had gotten…I don’t know, compromised or corrupted in such a way that would make it look like what I was seeing. And then I double- and triple- and quadruple-checked, and no, the equipment was fine and the algorithms securing the information were fine. So then I wondered if it could have been intentionally planted misinformation. So again I checked sources and authentication, and no. It was all verifiable.”
Will and Jove walked back toward us, the aisle lights shutting off behind them, leaving us in the eerie glow of the rigs.
“We’re going to make grilled cheeses,” Will said. “Do you want any?”
“Maybe later,” Marian said politely.
“Your loss. I make them the French way.”
“And what does that mean?” I asked. “You sing Patrick Bruel to them while watching a depressing movie?”
