“Thinking.” She didn’t look at him, her lips pursed for a moment. “I run a shipping firm. Or I did, before you dragged me into your mess. You know what most shipping is? It’s tracking where things go when they leave a place.”
He watched her work… the set of her jaw and the way her eyes moved across data like he would read a defensive formation.
“Medical records for humans have a chain of custody,” she continued. “When a doctor retires or dies, his files don’t just evaporate. They get transferred. Either to official medical archives or…” She trailed off, fingers flying faster. “There. The Healers’ Hall on Ithaan’Dor . It’s the central repository for all practitioner records in this sector. When V’Teth died, his patient files would have been automatically uploaded to their system.”
He just stared at her.
He’d spent weeks on Parac’Norr planning this. Running scenarios in his head during training sessions and lying awake at night working through contingencies. His whole strategy had been built around confrontation. Find V’Teth and make the draanthic admit the diagnosis was faked.
Muscle and intimidation. The tools he knew.
Not once had he thought about the paper trail.
Well, aren’t you an absolute draanthing idiot? Are you sure you weren’t dropped on your head one too many times as a baby?
“The Healers’ Hall,” he repeated slowly. “On Ithaan’Dor .”
“Mm-hmm.” She was still scanning data. “Heavily secured, obviously. Medical privacy laws. But the records exist. They have to.”
“So how do we get to them?”
She frowned at the screen, chewing her lower lip. “No idea. I’m thinking about it.”
We.
The word had come out of his own mouth without him noticing. And she hadn’t flinched or reminded him this was a transaction with an exit clause either. Somewhere between the ransacked room and the emergency departure, she’d stopped being his reluctant chauffeur and started being… something else.
And he didn’t know what to do with that.
10
Chapter 9
The ration bar tasted like dried, compressed packing material, but the caff-stim was working, so Raaze kept chewing.
Cait had taken over the entire forward console. Screens bloomed across every available surface, overlapping and cross-referencing each other in a way that made his eyes tired just looking at them. Building schematics. Shipping manifests. Traffic logs that shouldn’t have been publicly available but somehow were.
“How did you get all that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Most of it’s in the public record, if you know where to look. Then it’s just a matter of cross-referencing.”
Raaze bit back his grunt of surprise.
Fred’s voice came through the speakers, smugly satisfied. “I should mention that while the manifests and schematics themselves are public, the cross-referenced utility access data required a certain amount of… creative retrieval.”
“He means hacking,” Cait said without looking up.
“I prefer ‘aggressive data acquisition.’ The Ithaan’Dor infrastructure board really should invest in better encryption. Their current system was almost insulting.”
Raaze took another sip of the terrible caff-stim, shaking his head. “You hacked an Imperial medical facility’s staffing records?”
“I hacked an Imperial medical facility’s supply chain, which is connected to their staffing records through a delivery scheduling system that was clearly designed by someone who thought firewalls were a type of building code violation. The staffing records were a bonus.”
“Fred, stop bragging,” Cait murmured, not looking up.
“I will never stop bragging. It is my defining trait.”
Cait was already pulling up new data, her fingers moving across the interface with the ease of long practise. His gaze snagged on her fingers as they danced over the interface, all that delicate precision making his throat tighten.
