Page 74 of Static/Cling

“And if anything happened to Rufus, Kassian will be devastated, and he doesn’t even know how much danger his brother is in. How badly this could come down on him. He’ll think it’s his fault.”

“Babe.” Leif reached for Bjorn, thought better of it, given his current mood, and let his hand drop.

Bjorn frowned at him, but instead of accepting the distance, he squared his shoulders and laid a hand on the back of Leif’s neck.

The sizzle of electricity was sharp over his skin, but fast, there and gone, then Bjorn kneaded his nape, sending a much more pleasant shiver through Leif at the powerless contact of skin-on-skin.

“File first,” Bjorn said, taking control of the conversation. “Am I right in thinking that there is no physical copy?”

“From what little I overheard before I had to turn off his device, they haven’t been able to decipher it yet, which means so far, it’s all digital, yes.”

“So what are our options?”

“Kassian,” Sal said. “He either takes it out with him, or destroys it. Though I doubt at this point, that he can do either without George noticing and getting very, very angry about it.”

Bjorn grinned such an evil grin Leif shuddered. “What?” he asked.

Bjorn lifted a hand. A shower of sparks danced from his fingertips and bounced off the poorly stacked furniture. The sheer quantity of pinpoint lights, and the crackle of his earpiece, meant Bjorn had somehow built up a good deal of power, yet he’d touched Leif without discharging much at all. That was a level of control Bjorn usually only had in the throes of sex.

Which he had to not think about right now, because hello. Mission Impossible commencing.

“Bjorn,” Sal said sharply.

“I’m just sayin’.”

“At the very least, you would have to destroy every computer in that building.”

“Point me to a server, a few wall plugs, and anything with a wire attached to it is toast.”

“That’d take a lot of power,” Leif pointed out, feeling a little queasy at the thought. The amount Bjorn had needed to fry one computer had been difficult for him to dissipate after. What would this amount of electric build-up do to him?

“And there is no guarantee the computer with the actual file on it isn’t air gapped,” Sal added.

“Even still.” Bjorn smoothed a hand down his shirt. “It doesn’t hurt to be thorough. And we hope that either Kassian or Rufus has the presence of mind and ability to trash whatever machine he’s working on, if it is air gapped, or whatever.”

“Okay.” Sal took a breath. “You’re right. We have to leave that to them. Nothing we can do about it right now, other than keep it in mind, should the opportunity present itself. So. There are two servers in the building. The main one is in the sub-basement, where Kassian is. The backup is on the floor where you are now, on the west wall, in the center of the front block.”

“Perfect. We take out the backup first, then go get Kassian and the main server,” Bjorn said.

“You won’t be able to fry even the backup server without that being noticed,” Sal said.

“And if we do that, the building goes on lock-down, and we can’t get to Kassian,” Leif guessed. “But if we go down for him and the main server first, we won’t be able to get back up here to this one.”

“This is what I’m saying.”

“There’s no point in not taking out both servers,” Bjorn said. “We leave one, we stand a good chance of also leaving this file behind, and all this is for nothing.”

“If we could do both at the same time,” Sal mused.

“But we can’t alert Kassian. If you turn his earpiece back on, it’ll set off an alarm, right?”

“Probably. If it works at all. He may be in a shielded area.”

“An alarm will be a dead giveaway he didn’t come in here on a whim, by himself, like he said.”

“And they’ll come looking for you.”

“We can’t be in two places at once,” Leif said, frustration making his limbs shake. He clenched his fingers, trying to stop, trying to not show Bjorn how much the stairwell encounter had taken out of him.

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