Chapter 64: Chapter 10: Black hat

> “She let him continue, but he seemed skittish and soon retreated. The next day, she returned to the girl and asked to see her brother, but the girl feigned ignorance.”

I didn’t see Emma again for three days. Which was fine, because we wouldn’t be ready for our first run at the library until next week, as I needed to finish uploading the posts from our photoshoot to Zazy’s Instagram account, in addition to the fake photos I had created showing her in various cities around the world. And also because all the stress of the past few weeks had finally caught up to me, as each night’s sleep was worse than the last. By Saturday morning, it felt as if I was back in college on the tail end of an all-nighter.

“I’d like to read your dad’s notes,” I said, somewhat surprised to see her at the restaurant when I arrived, after I had spent an hour in front of the mirror trying yet again to deactivate the glamour, even for a few minutes. Her usual breakfast of a black tea and American biscuit was already finished, and she looked up at me as if she was in a haze.

“What?”

“Your dad’s notes. About the Dragon’s blood,” I said. “Maybe there’s something else there.”

“What?” she repeated. “Oh. His notes. He didn’t have any.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Dalia said-”

“Dalia is a twat. And didn’t know my dad from Adam. He didn’t keep his research or his notes or anything on paper. Didn’t trust it. He kept it all up here,” Emma said, tapping her temple three times.

“So then-”

“Right, it’s all gone. All of it. The motherfucker spent most of my life trying to track down the components of the Stone and then up and died in the middle of the night. Didn’t leave a will or a diary or anything behind. Luckily the Guild’s bylaws are pretty ironclad regarding inheritance, so I got his Seat instead of my arse of an uncle. But it seems like he left me his mess to clean up just the same.”

“I see. For whatever it’s worth, my mom didn’t leave me anything either, when she died.”

A bald-faced lie that I thought was true at the time. My mother gave me her locket as my real inheritance years before her death, that much was obvious now. But it was little solace to the scared girl who was suddenly and absolutely alone in the world.

“Huh. Sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, that still leaves us back where we were a few days ago. With me sending J.P. to the cache to pull the box out.”

“You don’t trust him? It seems like you two are close.”

“Very. Our families go back several generations. Ever since we first joined the Guild. J.P. was the best man at my parents’ wedding. Still, I don’t think I can just…”

Emma trailed off and fixed her gaze on the wall behind me, and I pretended to look down at my phone, which I had set to lock after two seconds of inactivity, lest Emma grab it and wonder why there were hundreds of pictures of a brown-haired girl who did not look like Jade stored on it. Of course, I had to shut off the face unlock given that my own face was also locked away.

Wait a minute.

“What if there was another way?” I asked.

“There isn’t,” said Emma. “At least not one that we will be able to flesh out anytime soon.”

“Let me ask you something. This box, it’s just sitting there, in some nook in the collection?”

“Supposedly.”

“And so what if whoever put it there wants it back?”

“They don’t want it back. It’s what’s inside that matters and what matters, to them, is that no one unlock it.”

“You’ve been operating under the assumption that we have no way of getting the key. But what if you’re wrong?”

The still half-full tea kettle next to Emma’s cup nearly fell on its side as she slammed the table with both hands.

“I’m not. We can’t. I didn’t pay much attention to what my dad was doing, but this I am certain of: he never found it. Didn’t even come close. Are you really that fucking full of yourself that you think you can find in a few days what he spent a decade looking for?”

“Let’s just say I know a thing or two about locked boxes.”

----------------------------------------

“This is stupid. Can’t believe I agreed to this.”

“Shhh. Stay in character.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Fine, but stop speaking with that horrific accent and just pretend that you’re American!”

“I am American!”

“Even better!”

Zazy Scott and her assistant Jane Hutchinson emerged from the taxi in front of the Emerson Library at precisely 9:15 on Wednesday morning and walked toward its gleaming double doors. Jane carried a large storage bag on one shoulder and a flannel tote bag around the other, while Zazy looked weary carrying the tiny purse she clutched in her ring-adorned right hand.

“Jane, the door please,” said Zazy/Emma.

“Are you fucking serious?” I said under my breath. Yes, I felt bad about using Jane’s name again after manipulating her all those months ago to break into Frankie’s spin class, but it was the first thing that popped into my head when I created the fake employees of Zazy’s soon-to-be makeup empire.

“You said stay in character!” hissed Emma in response. “Zazy doesn’t open doors for herself. It’s beneath her.”

I shook my head in disbelief, the strands of the blonde wig I was wearing rubbing against my temples.

“OK, OK, one sec. And you’re enjoying this too much.”

“I am what you made me.”

I fumbled with the door handle, the postercard-filled bag nearly sliding down my arm. In contrast, Emma’s alchemy-enhanced tote felt like it weighed nearly nothing. “Zazy” walked through the open door, and I quickly let go of the handle and ran in after her before the door slammed shut on me.

We had entered a pristine lobby drenched in sunlight, beyond which was the Atwell Courtyard. I motioned Emma toward one of the stone archways that led out into the indoor courtyard, and she followed behind me. The museum that housed the Library wasn’t open yet, but several of the small tables were occupied by students either furiously staring into their laptops or outright asleep.

We walked to the courtyard center and looked up. The Italian-inspired archways stopped after the second floor, and from where we stood, I could just see the glass walls enclosing the fourth floor, where the beige cabinets holding thousands of pigment samples awaited.

“It’s up there?” I whispered.

“Yep,” said Emma. “But don’t forget, you still need to work your magic and figure out which one.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Seems like I’m doing all the work here. Next time I get to be the obnoxious socialite, and you can be my overworked lackey.”

“If we ever have to work together again, I think this current arrangement is more to my liking. Let’s go.”

Emma strode off to the elevators at the north end of the courtyard and I scurried after her, like the good lemming I was pretending to be.

We reached the fourth floor without incident or interception, only to be greeted by an empty reception area and a set of locked glass doors down one hallway.

“Well, they certainly rolled out the welcome mat, Jane,” said Emma, who had upped her British accent to another level. “Where is this Mona Hardin person who you said was going to show us around the collection?”

I resisted the urge to tell Emma where she could shove the over-sized sunglasses and fumbled for my phone.

“Umm, let me check the email again, Ms. Scott. They were supposed to-”

“You do that,” said Emma, almost shouting. “I’m going to sit down on that uncomfortable looking piece of furniture over there and hope it doesn’t give me a herniated disc.”

Emma retreated to a backless wooden bench off to the side of the foyer, and I pretended to look for the email with the details of our meeting with the assistant curator.

But in reality, this was all going exactly according to our plan. I dashed down the hallway opposite the locked glass doors as quickly as I could without running, and then hurried back to the reception area.

“Come on,” I said, waving Emma up from the bench. “It’s empty.”

We retreated into the spacious conference room I had discovered and closed the door, although the glass walls afforded us little privacy.

“Great job, Jane,” said Emma. “I can literally see where the bloody vial is hidden, but we can’t go any further. I told you that you should have worn the fake baby belly. People are extra nice to pregnant women.”

“Will you fucking relax?” I said with a snarl. My patience was wearing thin at Emma’s condescension, which I suspected was only partially an act. “I’m just getting started. Can you get my equipment out of here?”

I handed her the magic tote bag, and she reached her hand into its depths. When she brought it out again, she was holding a laptop bag that stretched the edges of the tote farther than I thought possible.

“That’s a neat trick,” I said, as I unpacked the contents of the new bag.

“The edges are lined with chrysomallos. It stretches and contracts as needed,” said Emma.

I set my assemblage of hacking tools on the table, which consisted of a laptop loaded with white hat and black hat software and a small black box the size of a deck of playing cards.

“What the hell is that little thing going to do?” Emma asked.

“This ‘little thing’,” I said, “is an ODROID C2. It’s a tiny but very capable computer. It’s our gateway into the Museum.”

I ran an ethernet cord from the ODROID into a free port embedded in the conference room table and then opened the laptop. Within a minute, the devices were connected, and I began snooping around. Emma towered behind me in her six-inch heels like the overbearing bitch she was pretending to be, usefully blocking anyone outside the room from seeing what we were up to.

“What exactly are you doing?”

“Seeing how far I can go from this port. If it’s connected to the rest of the Museum’s internal network … yes!”

I shut the laptop quickly and stored it away, before retrieving a small plastic bag.

“That’s it? You’re done?”

“No, the real work will begin tonight, which, thanks to our little friend here, I can do from the safety of the hotel,” I said. “But before we go, I need to do one more thing…”

I removed two stickers from the bag and stuck them on either side of the ODROID.

“Property of Carter Museum IT. Do not remove from room,” said Emma, reading the stickers. “I have to admit, that’s pretty clever.”

“That’s why you pay me the big bucks,” I said, as I tucked the ODROID into the mass of messy cables that covered the outlets and ports in the middle of the table. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“I thought we were waiting-”

“Oh, no!” I said at the top of my voice, as we walked out of the conference room. “It’s all my fault. I … I misread the email. Our meeting is tomorrow. Not today. Mona is at an offsite-”

Emma finally snapped back into character.

“Are you that daft? Honestly, I can’t believe I hired you over that girl from Cambridge. She might have been ugly, but at least she could read a two-line email without fucking everything up! Now, carry this please. My arm is tired.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Scott.” I said, taking the small purse from Emma and wishing I still had the Medoblad. “It won’t happen again, I swear!”

“For your sake, I hope that’s true.”