Nessa laughed. “Nessa is fine. What are you, the name guru?”
Fred looked down at a pile of technical items she’d purchased from the shops downtown. The shop owners had tried to stop her from paying, and she’d literally thrown cash at their faces before running out the door.
“I don’t like owing people,” she’d said.
She grabbed an item from the pile and ripped into it. “I changed my own name, but I can’t go around changing everyone else’s names to suit me, you know? Not to their faces, anyway. Except you guys all agree with the practice of changing names to fit the person, mostly, and now it’s a fun little brain teaser. Which name goes best? It’s something I never considered until now.”
She set the item she’d unwrapped on the table and ripped into another one.
“What have you got there?” Nessa asked, barely stopping to look.
Austin and Tristan stood against the wall and Sebastian took the third of four chairs around the small table, leaning back to let Fred have all the surface area.
“Huh?” Fred looked up, her brows raised, then at the items around her. “Oh, this is to build a satellite link. As far as I can tell, these people are trying to cut visitors off from the grid.” She shook her head adamantly before going back to unpacking. “I might unplug one day but today is not that day. The thought gives me hives.”
Austin crossed his arms. “Just visitors?”
“Well, definitely visitors, at any rate,” she replied. “There’s no Wi-fi or service up here, just TV dishes and satellite.” She looked around at them. “They don’t always look like actualdishes.” Back to her task. “That’s how the people here are getting internet so they can research and keep up with the magical world.” She chuckled. “Who would’ve thought I would be working for and talking about a magical world. Amagicalworld!” She paused to give them a toothy grin. “Look ma, I’m in the magical world!”
“Focus, please,” Nessa said jovially.
Fred nodded and returned to her task. “They’ve cleared away all the trees and have a view of the sky. These guest houses have TV dishes, but TV dishes only receive broadcasts. I can’t rig them to work for internet. But look it-here, they have all I need—morethan I need—in their shops. They asked if I’d need help installing it and reached to make an appointment. Which is odd, right? If they wanted guests to have internet, wouldn’t they make these houses internet ready?”
“The townspeople are operating on a different wavelength than the governing body, I think,” Austin said. “Than maybe the mages.”
Fred bobbed her upper body, her version of an enthusiastic nod. “That makes sense. They’re very nice, most of the townspeople. Friendly and smiley and everything. But then you guys got attacked, so there’s something wrong there, obviously.”
“How long will it take you?” Nessa asked her.
“Oh, not long. I’ve done this plenty. The hardest part is setting up the satellite.” Without looking up, she touched a square package about the size of a standard piece of paper, flat, and only about five inches or so thick. “Then I’ll use the picture you took of the mage, saunter my way into the ones and zeroes of the world, and find out who our mysterious friend is.”
“It’s a race against Niamh’s version of fact-finding,” Tristan said, crossing his arms over his chest like Austin.
Fred held up a finger.“Au contraire, mon frère. She is getting the word-of-mouth contingent. The little anecdotesabout this mage’s past. The items of note that might not be strictly factual, but photos taken with an ever-changing lens and stored as rumors. I will get the hard data. Places of employment, fitness reports, moving dates or maybe disappearing dates, things like that. Then I’ll do my own little social reconnaissance. What her co-workers thought of her, her hobbies, friends, enemies, whatever. Together we’ll construct an overall picture of this lady. We’ll know her better than her friends probably do. Assuming she has any.”
“She didn’t point you out as the Captain.” Sebastian turned in his chair to look at Nessa. “That’s telling. She recognized me, even like this, but not you.”
“I thought of that, yeah.” Nessa folded a bag neatly and put it on a pile of others. She started emptying the next, putting everything onto the counters in groups. Once done, she did the next until there was no room, and then she started moving items into the fridge or various cupboards. “We don’t have enough room for all of this.”
“We can distribute what doesn’t fit into the other houses,” Austin replied.
She gave him a blank look, and then comically frowned. “Withholding information like that from your loyal subjects is not how you work smarter instead of harder, Mr. Alpha King.” She sighed and looked around the kitchen. “I have to start over.”
Austin smirked and Tristan started chuckling.
“Yeah, ha-ha.” Nessa pulled items out of the cupboards and put them back into groupings. “Let’s make Nessa do one job twice.”
“Well, really, it’s only one job done one-and-a-half times,” Tristan replied.
“Don’t bring semantics into this,” she groused.
“I bet she’s seen me before.” Sebastian’s eyes held a faraway expression. “In person.” He drummed his fingers against thetabletop. “I bet she has worked for the Guild in some capacity. They would have pictures up of me in all forms. They brought me in to torture. They’d have an image of me at my absolute worst.”
Fred looked up at him with wide eyes. “Does Niamh know that?”
Sebastian’s eyebrows furrowed. “Yes?”
“He didn’t mean that as a question,” Nessa said, emptying the fridge. “The question is only why are you asking?”
