Page 108 of Coldwire
“Ate already,” Kieren replies.
I take a big bite of the fried dough. The warm crunch presses to the roof of my mouth, dances across my tongue. I almost moan. Why do we have to be in a cold war with Medaluo when their food is so good?
“Whatisthis?”
“Fried dough.” Kieren leans back. His lip quirks. “Seemed pretty obvious, Ward.”
“I know, but—” I take another bite. “There’s no other ingredient? It’s just deep-fried dough?”
“Deep-fried dough, indeed. I watched them make it. Had a great conversation about the Threto men’s soccer team and everything.”
“What do you know about soccer in Threto?”
“Absolutely nothing. I guess I’m so likable that people will talk to me regardless.”
I finish the rest of my food in a few bites before scrunching up the plastic bag. Kieren is watching me through the entire thing, and when I raise my brows to signal,What?he only shakes his head.
A click sounds in my ears. The minimized call tab trembles to signal activity, and the waveform in my display springs to life again.
“I’m back,” Kam declares. “Is it a good time to continue?”
“Of course,” Kieren says. “We’re all ears.”
“I ran the email through the checkers available to us. It seems someone’s scrubbed the metadata very intentionally.” Kam pauses. “They did leave behind the geoposition, though. It was written upcountry, so the pinpoint is marked clearly.”
There’s something to Kam’s tone that leads me to brace before she’ssent along the scan results. Before she says, “See for yourself,” and I open them.
MEDALUO, Land of Outer Frontier, 7 Phoenix Mountain Road
“Offron?”I exclaim. “There must be a mistake.”
It’s not a fake email, given its contents. My dad wrote it. So how could it have come from Medaluo, much less Offron, at the very corner of the country? Offron is the hotspot for Medan government officials.
“I’m assuming the Henry of this sign-off is Henry Sullivan?” Kam asks.
Henry Sullivan, my father. Henry Sullivan, who, upon any cursory search at present, is getting slammed for being a Medan sympathizer.
“Maybe Chung altered the geoposition,” Kieren offers in lieu of an answer. “Maybe he’s leading us on some sort of trail.”
Kam is typing rapidly on her end. “Any reason you think so?”
“This whole posting has been a treasure hunt,” he says. I’m glad Kieren is taking the reins, because I can’t summon a word. “A key. A disk. A reader. Now an address andnothing else. Why scrub a file that you’re storing in your personal disk? Better yet, why scrub a file but leave a location? At that point you may as well delete everything. He obviously wants someone to follow it.”
“You make good points. None of that can be discounted.” A pause. “Regardless, I’d advise you take a look at this location in Offron and finish out the treasure hunt. I’m only your ground contact—I won’t be making any reports to the company while you’re in the midst of your survey. But you will need to answer the questions NileCorp will inevitably have. Or else the company will come and ask me.”
That last part is targeted. She means to say that I shouldn’t try to hide my dad’s involvement in this. Because Kam knows, and NileCorp will find out one way or another.
Kieren clears his throat. “Sure. We understand. We already have a tour bus we’re in control of, so we can proceed.”
“Great. Good luck.”
Kam hangs up.
Immediately, as soon as she’s off our call line, I get another trying to enter.
I’m too stupefied to react. While I can see the buzzing request in my display, I ignore it, still trying to parse what we were just given. I try to imagine the sequence of events before Dad wrote that email. Staying somewhere in upcountry Medaluo, checking on a young child: “whole, smart, healthy”—those were his words. How could it possibly be anyone other than his supposedly dead birth daughter?
The buzzing in my display stops. Seconds later, Kieren says “Rayna?” out loud, picking up when she clearly tried him next. “Wait, you’rewhat?”
