Sometimes, the only way to really deal with a situation you’d really rather avoid was to just get it over with in one fell swoop. That was why I’d told the Chief Judge I was available at the Court’s earliest convenience for the sentencing of Caleb Holder — and obviously he was too, given he’d been shoved right back into the Moonshot holding cells in the basement.

  And apparently Chief Judge Farley was thinking similar thoughts, as he scheduled sentencing for Thursday, May 20.

  No matter how much anyone asks, this wasn’t something I was comfortable sharing. Some things are too solemn, too somber, too deeply grim for me to be comfortable letting anybody see that side of my life. It… ugh. Okay, look. Sentencings are never fun, even when the penalty being levied is the most absolutely banal slap on the wrist you could possibly imagine. The moment a sentence carried real weight, the severity of the event grew. Add victims, and things got worse.

  But nothing, nothing, outweighs just how awful it is to be party to the victim impact statements for a capital crime. Everybody present knew that the death sentence had been on the table. Everybody knew that the only reason it had been taken off the table was because Caleb Holder chose to plead guilty. And beyond that, the Chief Judge had been very careful to let everybody know I was only still standing beside the current most infamous murderer in the country because nobody else could have done what I was there to do. Because I wasn’t there as his lawyer anymore — that job was done the moment he gave the court his guilty plea. In a situation like this, where the only options were “life in supermax” and “death”, there was nothing more for me to do as a lawyer, and I made sure he knew that.

  When I stood beside Caleb Holder at his sentencing, I wasn’t really there as his attorney. I was there as his jailer.

  And it was only when the Chief Judge brought his gavel down and sentenced him to life in prison at ADX Florence in Colorado that I was relieved of this duty, and able to get on with the errand I actually wanted to do that day: getting my two federal criminal cases formally assigned to me, and having all the information available delivered to me.

  Oh, and filing a motion to have Casey admitted as a student attorney under my supervision, because I wanted his involvement in these two cases to be fully above board. The more experience I could get into him early, the better.

  Once that was over with and we had some case files to look over, I had Casey pick me up from the District Court and decide where we’d go for lunch (which was, yes, on the company card). As I was technically inheriting both of these cases from another attorney, I didn’t have to deal with the hassle of arraignment, thank God. That meant I was able to call ahead and see if the first client I’d inherited, who’d been released on a rather hefty bail, was free to meet and discuss her case. The terse response I received was that she’d be free at three o’clock at the earliest, which meant Casey and I had enough time to both fill our bellies and get a basic idea of what we were up against.

  We spent two and a half hours sitting in a quiet little corner of Mastro’s Steakhouse, which was a special treat for Casey as my own personal congrats for getting his term paper fixed up and resubmitted before Georgetown Law even finished up with finals. During those hours, we gave the documentation as thorough a once-over as we could manage in such a limited amount of time, bounced thoughts and ideas off of one another, and, after Casey finished his first cursory look into the client’s social media presence, spared some thoughts and prayers for the headaches our future selves would be enduring over this. Casey, to his eternal credit, didn’t take the obvious option to back out and leave it all on my plate, and for that I probably owed him yet another special treat.

  Fellow attorneys, let this be a lesson: invest in your juniors! Be the senior attorney you wished you’d had, the kind that you could only have dreamt of having served as your mentor! Each and every one of the country’s best attorneys all started as new attorneys at some point, people!

  We left the restaurant with what should have been more than enough time to go just under two miles. But, DC traffic was ever a mercurial creature: we had to deal with the combination of a motorcade and another fire on the Red Line clogging up the streets, leaving us already nineteen minutes late as we got to our destination and had to fight the other perennial battle for all DC residents: parking.

  See, shit like this? This was why I didn’t own a car. Okay, that and my ability to just teleport across town as needed… but it was mostly the misery of inner city parking!

  Three times we circled the block, looking for a spot, and three times we came up empty. And I would’ve been happy to keep going if not for the texts coming in every couple of minutes, demanding to know my ETA, then my exact location, and then demanding my DC Bar number so she could lodge a formal complaint against me for tardiness.

  And at that point, I just stopped caring.

  “Just hang a right and go in the Harris Teeter parking lot,” I finally told Casey. “Yeah, we’re gonna be here longer than an hour, so if they tow us, they tow us.”

  “That the client?” Casey asked as he turned, then signalled left to let everybody behind him know that he’d be turning left into the parking lot once it was clear and to not honk at him to keep moving.

  “Yup.” Oh, there went my phone again. Oh, joy, she’d graduated to all caps. Right, best to have my various responses ready to handle the absolute torrent of vitriol that would probably be headed my way, and be ready to shield Casey from it. Not that I should have had to, but, well, people in stressful situations tended to lash out against the first person who gave them the time of day, and as her court-appointed lawyer, I was a captive audience.

  We got out of the car (and I took a moment to stretch my poor, cramped tail, ow…) and left the parking garage, heading across the street to the oldest apartment building in the surrounding three blocks. The area surrounding the NoMa-Gallaudet metro station had received quite a bit of development in the last few years, with several once-dilapidated buildings having received complete overhauls into something shiny and new, including four new apartment complexes. Plus, we saw quite a few signs advertising that the buildings accepted DCHA housing vouchers — which hopefully meant that they’d gotten the lesson from my last major case, and knew how not to be the next corporate landlord facing the financial guillotine.

  But we weren’t going into any of those brand new buildings. No, we were going into one that had been here since 2005, and was stuck in that limbo between “not profitable enough to promote” and “too profitable to renovate yet”. Given this awful foundation, the building’s owners decided to push every vacated rental into a new niche: short-term furnished rentals.

  And as it turned out? That was a profitable choice! Realistically, this shouldn’t have been surprising, given that the building was a crosswalk away from a metro station…

  Anyways, that was where we were headed: one of those short-term furnished rentals, to which our client had retreated after posting bail because her soon-to-be-ex-husband refused to let her back inside their fancy home at the border with Chevy Chase.

  The outer of two doors to the apartment building was open to the public, but the second required either a key fob or calling the front desk. Paging the call box to get the doorman’s attention resulted in a double-take at seeing me, followed by the man cleaning his glasses and realizing that no, no he wasn’t seeing things, that woman in the nice pantsuit really did have animal ears and a tail. Thankfully, I had my NMR-issued flier’s license at the ready for photo ID, and that was enough to get the doorman’s head on straight enough for him to fob us up to the top floor of the apartment building.

  “Pro tip, by the way?” I started as Casey and I exited the elevator, took a right, then simultaneously turned around once we realized we’d needed to hang a left. “If an apartment building has central air and heating, never go for the top floor. It’s right under all the HVAC units, and if you hold real still and listen carefully…”

  Casey got the hint and stopped there with me in the hallway, and used the direction I twitched my ears as a hint for where to focus.

  “Oh,” he murmured, surprise evident on his face. “Wow, now that I know it’s there… why would anybody want a penthouse when they have to hear that hum all the time?”

  “Nicer buildings will have a rooftop clubhouse, and put the HVAC atop part of that,” I told him. “But this is a thing to keep in mind when you’re hunting for an apartment. Or more likely a condo, once you’ve passed the bar and we can pay you your share of attorney’s fees.”

  Casey let out a sound that I wasn’t sure how to interpret — somewhere between “glup” and “hurk” — and seemed to forget how to breathe for a moment. I walked past him and waved my tail in his face, which got him moving again, and led us to apartment PH21.

  I knocked out a quick shave-and-a-haircut on the door, then lowered my ears close to my scalp and stood close enough to the peephole that anyone looking through it couldn’t see more than my face. Casey raised an eyebrow at this, but didn’t actually comment.

  Even holding my ears almost closed, I still caught the sound of shuffling behind the door, and the sound of something heavy falling with a thunk-clack-crash into a very full metal sink. Then there was the stomping, the heavy breathing of the woman on the other side failing to control her temper, and a bit of movement obscuring the peephole.

  “You better be the fucking lawyer!”

  “Rachael Cruz?” I asked through the door. “Naomi Ziegler, attorney at law. We spoke on the phone earlier? I apologize for the delay, but traffic and parking are always—”

  The sound of the deadbolt was all the warning I needed to get my one-two punch ready: I stepped back from the door, let my ears stand tall, shifted my stance slightly sideways so my tail was plainly visible, and retrieved my DC Bar card and flier’s license from my briefcase.

  “I don’t care why you’re—”

  The door swung open, the woman on the other side clearly wound up to spew some vitriol my way, only to suddenly pull up short once she actually got a good look at who, and what, stood on her temporary doorstep. And that sudden stop, that brief reprieve as the other Moonshot’s brain rebooted, gave me enough time to give this client a proper once-over.

  Rachael Cruz, or Rachel Cruise as she called herself on anything that wasn’t a legal document, was similar to me in that she was a white-passing mixed-race woman. Thankfully for me, aside from us being both mixed-race Caucasian and other, that was about where the similarities ended. She was a rather… ahem, buxom woman, if artificially so, going by the way that there was absolutely zero sag on boobs that were individually bigger than her head, and straining to get out of the tight graphic tee proudly advertising her podcast, “Cruise’in For a Bruisin’”. And the more I looked at her, the more plastic she seemed — her lips, her butt, the fact that a woman in her late forties had absolutely zero wrinkles… it all spoke of extensive plastic surgery, of chasing a dream that had long since faded and that her powers were ill-suited to helping her attain. The biggest shame of it all was that per what information was available online, Cruz lucked out on the appearance lottery with vivid red hair in a deep, vibrant shade that bottles only wished they could capture... only to trade that out for blonde from a bottle some time in the last three years.

  All that together… I wasn’t impressed. A babydoll t-shirt, leggings, and wearing shoes indoors, even if they were flip-flops. God… at that point, an ankle monitor would have been an improvement. But no, no ankle monitor.

  Because trying to hold down Wiretap with an electronic tracking device was about as effective as threatening me with a blowtorch.

  “As I was saying.” I waved my DC Bar card and flier’s license in the ex-heroine’s face, which seemed to snap her out of her surprise long enough to at least not completely fill the doorway. “Naomi Ziegler, your new lawyer for this, ah, unpleasantness before the District Court. And this is Casey Allen,” I waved at my newest junior, who just offered a stiff half-bow, given that his hands were full. “He is a new hire at the firm, who I have shadowing me when he’s not preparing for the Bar Exam. Now, may we come inside?”

  Rachael Cruz finally shook herself free of the mild stupor that my appearance seemed to have caused. And while her face settled into what I could only call an ugly sneer, she did back away from the door to let us in. Now, if she had actually held it open for us instead of just turning around and walking inside…

  “What happened to my lawyer?” Cruz demanded from the apartment’s kitchen the moment the front door closed, already closing the cabinet with just a single glass in her hand. Wow, she wasn’t even gonna offer us water? What an awful host, wow. “Why am I stuck with you?”

  Well, I could be delicate about this one. But, if she wasn’t going to extend the bare minimum of courtesy to me, then why bother offering her any?

  “He died two weeks ago.” The plastic woman froze with one hand on the door of her fridge, and looked at me with clear surprise. “So unless you want to go and pay for a new one, you get me.”

  “Hmph. Of course they gave me the fucking diversity hire.”

  I pinned my ears back in annoyance, my tail lashing behind me. You know, I hadn’t been quite sure what to expect when I saw that my client was one of the few people that the NMR actually kicked out, but all of two minutes in the woman’s presence was enough to clue me in on how someone with such a useful power could be too much of a liability to keep around.

  “Ma’am, this ‘diversity hire’ is probably the best damn lawyer you’re going to get for a Moonshot case,” I replied, barely resisting the urge to fire back with a tone as vicious as Cruz’s own. “Now, unless you want to send me away and try to find someone who’ll accept an IOU because all your assets are frozen, I’d recommend you offer us both a seat so we can get started.”

  Rachael Cruz seemed to mull that over for a bit, eyes flicking between Casey and me. Then she sighed, waved over to the dining table in the middle of the apartment’s living room, and opened up the fridge to get herself a drink to fill that glass she’d gotten from the cabinet. I looked at Casey, nodded slightly towards the table, and led him over to it. We set ourselves up to have the front door to our backs and the window in front of us, and pulled legal pads and tablets out of our briefcases while we waited for the client to mosey on over towards us.

  I didn’t hear any movement from Rachael beyond what it took to get her a drink until after Casey and I were both situated (him sitting normally, me with the straight-backed chair at an angle to not crowd my tail), at which point she finally came over to the table, the noise of her flip-flops echoing obnoxiously loudly on the faux-wood flooring. She slid her tall glass of sparkling water over to where she’d be sitting first, ensuring the beverage passed in front of the two of us on its way towards her seat. And then, finally, she sat down, and took a long sip of the beverage she hadn’t offered her guests before saying anything further.

  “What do you need from me?” she demanded, the frown tugging at her lips feeling oddly artificial in how it didn’t spread across the rest of her face. Too much botox? Too much plastic surgery? Both? Who knew, but the effect was uncanny. “Didn’t the judge give you everything?”

  “Documents only ever tell the story as their creator saw it at the time of creation,” I told her. “Somebody had to write those documents, and in the process of drawing them up, they made countless choices regarding what to include, what not to include, and how to emphasize, distort, or otherwise portray the information contained therein.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “Or maybe you just think you can catch me in a lie and leave me hanging,” she accused.

  “If that’s what you want to think,” I said with a shrug, and just waved her on to keep going.

  “Hmph.” Cruz took another sip of her sparkling water, set it down, then crossed both her arms and her legs as she glared at me. “I’m innocent.”

  “That’s a start.” I wrote down a quick “NG” at the top of my legal pad, then underlined and circled it before looking her in the eye. “Well? Don’t stop there.”

  Several seconds of silent scowling followed, broken only by an exasperated huff.

  “If I’d actually wanted to steal from my husband, I wouldn’t have done anything so stupid as an electronic wire transfer,” she began. “I’m not an idiot. All that would’ve done is make everyone think the ‘bionic woman’ did it from the get-go…”

  The sequence of events came together from there, and every extra minute of talking just worsened the already uphill battle ahead of us.

  Before anything else: Rachael Anderson-Cruz, more commonly known as Rachel Cruise nowadays, used to be known as NMR superhero Wiretap. She was an A2 Moonshot, an unpopular, nerdy girl who grew up in the earliest days of what would come to be known as the internet, who one day realized that she was able to just understand what her clunky old Commodore 64 and HAM radio were doing, and control it all just by thinking about it. Her powers weren’t obvious or flashy, but when every kid who’d been bullying her in high school suddenly went from at least decent grades to straight failing? Well, it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together that somebody had broken into the school’s fledgling computer system and changed a few lines of an Excel spreadsheet, and it took even less time for the police to figure out who it was. The only thing that baffled them, however briefly, had been her airtight alibi — she’d been babysitting for her younger siblings all night, miles away from her school.

  But this was the late 90s, right after Lady Liberty had arrived on the scene. And the Fumblers, riding high on the ‘victory’ of ‘finding’ Lady Liberty, weren’t about to let a cocky teen beat them. So they set up a trap, and put out fake arrest warrants for her uncle, who, unlike her parents with their fancy green cards, had been living in the US illegally. These arrest warrants originated on airgapped computers — devices connected to power and nothing else. Then, they were copied to floppy disks, which were sent to Cruz’s local police.

  Sure enough, the girl took the bait, and the warrants disappeared from not just local PD computers, but also from the airgapped computer on which the warrants were drawn up in the first place. And this was all the excuse the Fumblers and NMR needed to snap Rachael Cruz up.

  Now, recruiting Cruz was a major stroke of luck on the part of the US government. With how inevitable the onward march of technology had become since the turn of the millennium, Cruz’s powers only grew more useful, and with that increased utility came three important things: privilege, press, and pay. By the time I got dragged into the NMR in 2004, Wiretap was almost as much of a household name as Lady Liberty — at least, among those who cared about more than just “which hero punched out what last week”.

  Then it all came crumbling down in early 2005.

  There was some or other ‘unrest’ in the Middle-East throughout most of 2004 — and no, don’t ask me what it was about or what set it off, I don’t know. I hadn’t been in the right mental or emotional place to look into it back then, and by the time I was, it had all faded far enough into the “no longer newsworthy” background that I had more important things to care about… regardless, there were only two important things your average person cared about. One, it started in Egypt, and spread from there to the rest of North Africa.

  And two: Lady Liberty was originally from Tunisia, so when the conflict arrived there, she decided to do something about it. (This, by the way, was the other, other reason I didn’t care to find out more about the conflict itself — my hero worship of Lady Liberty had died a tail-achingly miserable death just a couple months earlier, and if it wasn’t obvious, we foxes hold grudges!)

  Anyway — my then-newfound disdain for Lady Liberty aside, I’d at least been able to respect the plan she came up with. Rather than fly on over to Africa and start cracking skulls or something similarly idiotic, she went and cashed in most of the favors and goodwill she’d accumulated to set up expedited processing and special approval for refugees from Tunisia. With Lady Liberty’s help, the US government managed to get fifteen thousand refugees out of Tunisia and over to America. It was quick. It was clean. And there were shockingly few problems involved. Everything was smooth sailing.

  Or it was, at least, until the moment that the departments of Citizenship & Immigration Services and Homeland Security tried to process those fifteen thousand refugees, and found out not a single one of them existed in any US government computer system. Not even the classified ones.

  Let’s recall two little details about Rachael “Wiretap” Cruz. One: the NMR initially caught her when she deleted an arrest warrant from a computer that was only connected to a power outlet. And two: she was the daughter of legal immigrants. Now, I didn’t do immigration law myself, but I’d heard time and time again that the absolute worst judges to have a case before in the immigration courts were the legal immigrants and their kids, because in those former classmates’ and colleagues’ experiences? The single most racist and xenophobic demographic towards illegal immigrants… was legal immigrants. And this tended to filter down to their kids at an alarming rate.

  Now on some level, this prejudice made sense! After all, these were the people who had gone through the whole bureaucratic rigmarole and become citizens or permanent residents the hard way. And if they could do it, why should someone else get any leeway for taking an unlawful shortcut? Just… ignore the dozens of ways that immigration had become more difficult over the last decades, how the process of immigrating to the US in the 70s or 80s was nothing like trying to immigrate in the era of CCTV, the internet, and most importantly, Microsoft Excel. And the distinction between illegal immigrant and refugee didn’t matter to these people, either. All they cared about was whether someone came into the country “the right way”, which, of course, had to be the way they or their parents first arrived. Any other method of entry? Invalid. Improper. Cheating.

  So, with this in mind, was it really that much of a surprise when Rachael Cruz deleted all fifteen thousand refugees’ information? That this action would come from the child of legal immigrants, the one Moonshot who could electronically delete the asylum of fifteen thousand “illegals” without leaving any trace, and whose conscription into the NMR resulted from the one time she decided to do something nice for an illegal immigrant?

  The destruction of Cruz’s bullies’ grades was an event. The deletion of her uncle’s (admittedly fake) arrest warrant and deportation order made it into a pattern. But trying to undo the heavily publicized acceptance of fifteen thousand refugees, backed by Lady Liberty herself? At that point, it became enemy action.

  The NMR booted Wiretap out, slapped her with a dishonorable discharge, and publicly decried her actions. But, since the Wiretap alias wasn’t connected with her legal identity, Rachael Cruz was still able to make a living for herself. She went to Silicon Valley, found work with some or other tech mogul there, and sometime in the last five or six years, she relocated to DC to act as the company’s lobbyist, thanks to a few people in the government who held the same biases and prejudices she did. It was while doing this that she met her husband, got married, started up her podcast, etcetera.

  But apparently, things weren’t quite so rosy in her personal life, as she and her husband had filed for divorce some time last year. And then in the first week of April, amid mandatory mediation, fighting, bickering, awfulness, and disagreement… $727,532.86 disappeared from the joint account Cruz and her husband had set up after marriage. Over half a million dollars, gone.

  Her husband, Erik Henry Anderson, had an airtight alibi: he was camping in the woods with his buddies, one of whom ran a YouTube channel that reviewed a variety of outdoors equipment, and who had four days of continuous footage showing Erik with him one day before, the day of, and two days after the wire transfer.

  Rachael Cruz also had an airtight alibi: she’d been on an airline flight from Hong Kong back to the US. Except… the plane had in-flight wi-fi. Meaning that while Rachael Cruz, relatively average American citizen who hadn’t paid for that in-flight wi-fi, had an alibi, the disgraced ex-NMR superhero Wiretap didn’t.

  And since both parties had already submitted sworn affidavits stating that they were the only two people who could access their joint marital account…

  Yeah, no. Maybe it was bad of me, given that I was her lawyer, but no. I didn’t believe her for a goddamn second.

  “And when did you first learn that the funds were missing from the account?” I asked, after an hour or so of being a mostly passive listener.

  “Three days after he got back from that stupid fucking camping trip,” Rachael Cruz spat. “My divorce lawyer said not to so much as think about that account until the asset split was finalized. Don’t log in, don’t go to the website, don’t open the app, don’t even go within three blocks of the bank itself.”

  “Which is…”

  “Navy Federal Credit Union.”

  My ears and tail broadcasted my surprise by perking up atop my head and going ramrod straight behind me.

  “Seriously?” I asked, unable to hide my disbelief. “They let you keep that perk?”

  “What, did they not let you?” Cruz taunted, an ugly sneer pulling at one side of her mouth.

  “Of course they did,” I said with a flick of my ears. “I got an honorable discharge.”

  “What!?” Cruz yelled, her chair squealing loudly against the floor as she stood up in anger. “How!? You murdered five people!”

  Casey hissed beside me, the sharp intake of breath and the creak of his pen telling me that he’d started getting angry. I flicked my tail over onto his lap, hoping it would calm him down a little bit, and furrowed my brow as I leveled a glare at Rachael Cruz.

  “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand,” I said, even my most level tone failing to hide the heat behind my words. “And do try to remember that your continued freedom is largely contingent on my cooperation. We both know you don’t have the money to pay for another lawyer.”

  Rachael Cruz didn’t respond. She just sat back down in her chair, laid one leg over the other, and crossed her arms with a harrumph.

  “Now. May I continue?” I asked. Cruz didn’t offer any verbal response, and instead just raised one eyebrow. “Very well. Now, this initial review and discussion didn’t give me enough information to offer you an idea of how things may proceed. There are simply too many irons in the fire, and we need some answers to outstanding questions before we can get any concrete solutions.”

  “Questions such as?” Cruz prompted.

  “Where’s the money?” Casey interjected, as much offering it as one of those outstanding questions as asking it himself.

  “That’s the biggest one, yes,” I agreed. “When police look into a crime, they look at means, motive, and opportunity, but not necessarily in that order. The means can apply to both yourself and your husband, given you’re the only two with access to that account. Motive is obvious: by your own admission, the two of you are in a messy divorce, and people do some really stupid shit in messy divorces.”

  Messy shit like… well, arguing over a very literal pile of shit. No, I wasn’t kidding, that was a very real case being taught in law schools!

  “As for opportunity…” I sighed. “Your husband—”

  “Ex-husband,” Cruz interrupted. I fixed her with a glare, lowering my ears in displeasure.

  “You’re not divorced yet,” I told her. “Now as I was saying, your husband has an alibi that puts him hundreds of miles south of here, and well out of range of cell phone service. So while he had means and motive, I’m not seeing any opportunity. You, on the other hand, can control any electronic device that connects to any system which is itself connected to… just about anything, I think? Power grids, cellular networks, satellite signals, undersea internet cables? Correct me if I’m wrong?”

  “... all of that,” Cruz admitted. “Unless the device and its power source are off the grid.”

  “Like an airgapped device on a backup generator?” I asked. “Or a laptop using battery power in a Faraday cage?”

  “Like that,” she confirmed.

  That was… more than a little terrifying, actually.

  “Are there any traces left behind when you connect to or disconnect from a system?” I asked.

  Cruz didn’t give me an immediate answer, instead frowning and staring at the back of my tablet. Next thing I knew, though, the word processor on the device opened up on its own, and words typed themselves out on the new document.

  None that I ever found, but I haven’t tried looking since Y2K.

  I waited to see if anything else would type itself out on my screen, but nothing else showed up. I glanced up at Cruz, but when she subtly shook her head, I just saved the document and swapped back over to my notes.

  “Don’t do that again without permission,” I told her. “You’re not the only client whose files are on my devices.”

  “Hmph, fine.”

  I gave Cruz the stare for another few seconds, but once it became clear she wasn’t going to be the slightest bit apologetic about this, I didn’t have much other choice but to move on to the next point.

  “As it stands, we can’t do much without more info,” I reiterated. “But the big questions are as follows: where the money went; the origin of the wire transfer request; what levels of verification were needed to transfer that much money; and lastly, was there any method we’ve overlooked by which your husband could have been the one to initiate the transfer, despite having been in the middle of nowhere.”

  “And what do I do?” Cruz asked.

  “As little as you can,” Casey suggested, earning him a glare from the client.

  “Pretty much that,” I agreed, drawing Cruz’s ire back onto me. “You need to be a perfect model citizen. And more importantly, you need to be boring. Given your powers? No social media, no online shopping, nothing more involved than a quick check of texts and emails a few times a day. Disconnect as much as you can.”

  “But what about my podcast?” she asked. “I have to record another episode of Cruise’in for a Bruisin’ this Sunday!”

  “Not on your own devices, you don’t. Podcast as big as yours, you’ve definitely got access to recording equipment and at least semi-professional workspaces. So use them, and stay as hands-off as you can.”

  “... fine,” Cruz spat, standing back up from the table and taking her glass over to the sink. “Anything else?” she called over her shoulder.

  “Not at this time, no.” I pulled a business card out of my briefcase and left it on the table, then started packing my things away, Casey having already begun wrapping up the moment he saw me pull out the business card. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “You better be.”

  I met Cruz’s gaze one last time as I stood. Then, once Casey got up from his chair, I led the two of us out of the apartment.

  No words were spoken until we were both back in the car and out of the garage. Casey hung a quick left out, then a right after we passed under the Red Line metro’s bridge, and we headed back towards Union Station to go from Northeast to Northwest DC.

  “You believe her?” Casey asked. “When she said she didn’t do it?”

  “Nope,” I admitted. “I was in the NMR when she got OTH’d. Nobody was really surprised to have proof that she was a right unholy bitch, and this whole kerfuffle wouldn’t have been any surprise to them either.”

  “OTH?”

  “Other Than Honorable,” I explained. “Not as bad as a dishonorable discharge, but for Moonshot, close enough. Wiretap was as well-known as Lady Liberty in law enforcement and the NMR. Couldn’t crack encryption? You could get a warrant to search someone’s computers, and she could do it from the other side of the country. But unfortunately for Wiretap, she got on Lady Liberty’s bad side, and the rest is history.”

  “Oh.” Casey paused before saying more to honk at the driver in front of him, who’d sat motionless at a green light for a good four seconds. “What about you?”

  “Hm?”

  “Well, didn’t you get on Lady Liberty’s bad side too?”

  “Hm… let me guess, Fatima said something?” From the suddenly sheepish expression on Casey’s face, I figured that was the case. “Guessed as much. That… well. Lady Liberty and I had an, ah, emphatic difference of opinion that got a little physical, yes. But there’s a world of difference between that, and attempting to sabotage a major diplomatic and human rights success story.”

  I shifted in my seat a little, feeling that twinge of pain in my back again. God, that was starting to really bother me — what even was it?

  “Oh. I, um. Sorry if I…” Casey trailed off, clearly trying to think of the best way to phrase things.

  “It’s okay,” I said, cutting off that train of thought. “Honestly, I’d rather you ask than try to make an assumption based on limited information and context.” After all, that was what led to my issue with Lady Liberty in the first place — her acting on an assumption without taking even five seconds to interrogate that further.

  On the topic of Lady Liberty, though… if I wanted to follow through on the favor I’d promised, I’d need to actually sit down and talk with her. That annoying new ache in my back spiked at the mere thought of such a meeting.

  I just hoped that this time wouldn’t be another pain in my tail. I’d just gotten it all nice and sleek after brushing out the last remnants of my winter coat, too…