“No, she doesn’t. Jewel cares about herself. She always has. Why else did she so easily give up her role as soon as she wanted something else? Today she wants to try marriage.”
“Tomorrow she’ll want to try divorce.”
“I’ll get her father involved if she tries that. Maybe he’ll be able to make a dent.”
“Where is he?”
“Off finishing a mural on some backwoods city council building. Jewel probably won’t listen to him, anyway. She surpassed his talent when she turned fifteen, and that’s all she’s ever really respected. I pity Senator Dubois. I didn’t know he’d fallen in love with her. I don’t know what will become of him if she throws him away.”
Lila shuffled back to the table and sat down, finally pouring herself a cup of hot chocolate. “I’ll make sure he’s not tossed out of the compound if Bullstow does not accept him back. I’ve always been fond of Louis.”
“That eases my mind,” he said, taking a cookie.
Lila pulled the plate away. “Your doctor, Father. You know what—”
“It’s only one. And it goes without saying that you’ve done your last job for Bullstow and Chief Shaw. You can’t be prime and do that sort of work too, not when you have the entire family depending on you. Things could get sticky if you were caught.”
Lila fidgeted with the handle of her mug. “Things are sticky now,” she said. “I’ve had some complications.” She looked Lemaire in the eye as she told him about the blackmailer, about the messages, about the broken promise after she’d paid.
Her father crossed his arms over his chest, worry peeking from every line on his face. “Bea didn’t tell me. This is a mess, Lila. You have to clean it up. You can’t have this problem still in your lap. If your blackmailer comes forward, it will have repercussions for us all. Deadly repercussions.”
“I know,” Lila said, eyeing her father carefully. “That’s why I need your permission to hack BullNet once more.”
“Elizabeth—”
“Don’t. I’m tired of being called that today. You asked me to find the hacker in BullNet. I haven’t finished the job, and until I do, this blackmailer is a threat to us all. If you don’t let me hack Bullstow again, you’ll lose your council seat before the first session.”
Her father scratched at his beard. “What do you need?”
“A day. I need to make sure I deleted everything from the logs that night. I also want to check the rest of BullNet for more traps. I peeked into the BIRD because we that’s where the highborn had been caught, but every state database might be booby-trapped. I don’t know what sort of partner this person was to Reaper. They might still have access to everything Reaper hacked. I need more data. We need more data.”
“Lila, I don’t know about this.”
“I can do it from here.”
“That would put me at risk,” he warned, and sipped his hot chocolate. “You know exactly what will happen if the press thinks I gave you free rein in BullNet. I couldn’t even blame them.”
Lila nodded. She’d been against Tristan’s plan to steal into Bullstow and hack the network without permission. Asking her father directly seemed the better course of action, playing on their sense of honor, on the desire to finish what they’d started, on the need to protect the state from the likes of Reaper and his partner.
On the need to protect her.
She hadn’t counted on her father having second thoughts.
“You’re already at risk, but if you have any better ideas, I’d love to hear them. For oracle’s sake, you can always just say that you had no idea what I was doing anything on my laptop the entire time I visited you.”
Lemaire put down his hot chocolate. “I’d have to bring Chief Shaw in on it.”
“Of course, but he wouldn’t want a gaping hole in his network either. Let me finish the job we started.”
After a moment of silent contemplation, Lemaire snatched up his palm and trudged from the room, greeting Shaw over the quiet in his booming voice. While he spoke, Lila grabbed her satchel and slid out two brand-new laptops. As they booted up with a series of little beeps, she took off the star drive from around her neck and uploaded her snoop programs to each one.
Her father sighed from the doorway. “You’ve already started, haven’t you? What if he’d said no? What if I’d changed my mind?”
“I would have figured out a way to do it anyway. We can’t leave this asshole in the network. Too many people could be harmed, and I’m not just talking about the hackers or the ones who pay them. This asshole has access to everyone’s data. Everyone’s at risk.”
Lemaire pulled up his coat sleeve and checked his watch. “I need to go. I couldn’t dump all my meetings when I left Unity. I have a holo-conference at eleven, but I’ll be back for lunch.”
Lila waved him off. “Go. We’ll eat when you get back.”