Encryption of the Heart (Love, Tech, & Magic #1)

Chapter Twenty-Six

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Olline wasn’t sure how many hours or days passed as she worked.

Just kidding, she knew it was about twelve hours, but it felt like years were crawling by.

She had severely underestimated how large her digital trail had been. On the bright side, working non-stop meant she had no extra capacity to think about Casimir. She was determined to be too exhausted to even dream of him or to remember the feel of his hands on her.

That was the hope, anyway.

His phantom touch still haunted her. Her magic tickled over her skin as if retracing the path his fingers took. Olline did her best to ignore the tingling sensations in order to secure her freedom. At that twelve-hour mark, Olline took her first break to indulge in a home brewed cup of coffee. The mug barely brushed her lips when a memory nearly had the mug tumble from her hands.

The newer control chips, similar to the ones Bode had, could not be reactivated once the killware was triggered as planned. But Casimir’s device was old, little better than a working prototype, he had told her. His could be manually restarted if someone were to get their hands on him. It was why she had needed access to his files to begin with, to find the schematics, and she had stormed off before ever taking care of the problem.

Even though he had left Antal and was probably halfway across Audamar by now, if Etzel sent a bounty hunter after Casimir and dragged him back, he could be enslaved all over again.

Maybe Casimir will go into hiding and Etzel won’t be able to find him once Delora has him arrested.

She tried to calm her annoyance with that thought, but Olline’s hands still shook.

What if he hadn’t fled Antal yet? What if he was still securing a safe way out of the city? What if Casimir stayed?

What if, what if, what if?

There was no way for Olline to contact Casimir now, not after she deleted him from her wrist-communicator. Even if she could unblock him, there was nothing left to unblock. Her breathing started coming in fast little bursts and she put her coffee down on the table so she could shake out the anxious energy collecting in her fingertips.

It didn’t help.

Casimir may have crushed her heart, but that didn’t mean he deserved to be enslaved again. Throwing her disheveled hair in an even more disheveled bun on her head, Olline grabbed her favorite turquoise jacket, slipped on her black boots, and ran out of her apartment. She didn’t bother changing out of the little crop top she had been in the past two days. Her leggings were stiff on her skin, but she had no time to change. Olline may not know how to contact Casimir, but she knew where to start: right back where she had last left him.

His apartment was abandoned.

Well, not entirely, but Olline thought it was pretty obvious her first instinct had been correct. Casimir got out of Antal at the first opportunity, taking only the essentials with him.

Casimir left the door unlocked, as if he didn’t care who came looking for him. His closet wasn’t empty, but he probably left with just the clothes on his back. Why would you take your dishes or the framed prints of musicians if you needed to get out of the city as fast as you could? Why would you take the plant that the girl you manipulated made on the run with you?

She hesitated in the middle of the room, tugging on her fingers. It seemed like a defilement to be in the apartment without Casimir, without being invited. Olline didn’t know why she still cared; he hadn’t taken even that miniscule level of consideration toward her. But that was the difference, wasn’t it? Olline wasn’t like Casimir; she couldn’t even pretend to be.

She sighed and pushed her feelings away; she wasn’t here to snoop for fun.

As she began picking through his place, it amazed her all the tiny, personal touches she had missed the first time. Or maybe she knew Casimir better now and she could see him more readily in everything. That, however, would require her admitting that not everything was, or could have been, faked or a lie between them.

There was such care put into the few things Casimir had. Aged frames that had been patched, the fake wood repainted and smoothed out a dozen times at least. His clothes weren’t new, but they had been treated with reverence. Tiny stitches could be seen along the seams, repairing them and altering the fashion to remain chic even decades later. The furniture, at first glance, had looked like a matching set, but now that Olline was looking for any sort of communication device Casimir may have left behind, she could tell that they weren’t. Casimir had taken discarded stools and painted them and changed the upholstery, anything he needed to get the stools to look like they matched. That they belonged together.

Her chest tightened, her throat constricting as hot tears prickled in the corners of her eyes. Casimir had made this tiny studio a home, a haven for himself when he wasn’t allowed sanctuary anywhere else. He showed the world a facsimile of who he was, but here? Here was the real Casimir. And he had invited her in willingly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Olline said with resignation. “He’s gone.” She took a deep breath, looking around one last time for anything she could have missed. The tears she had banished returned with a fury.

The room still smelled so strongly of Casimir. Like she had just missed him. The musky eucalyptus and lavender scent coiled around her, stronger now that she noticed it, and Olline mourned. She grieved for what might have been, what could have been, if a few things had been different. Running a delicate finger over the night orchid, she lost herself in the fantasy of what being with Casimir would look like:

Her dragging him to every little coffee kiosk that made real coffee, him grumbling about it through the ghost of a smile, garnet eyes twinkling at seeing her delight. He would surprise her by taking her to secret garage band practices on a random work day afternoon. Even the mundane things like grocery shopping would be a fun little adventure, with the two of them teasing each other up and down the bread aisle.

She clenched her fists and screwed her eyes shut again. “Stop it, Olline. Focus. Casimir still needs help.”

There was nothing in his apartment that would help her find him. So where could she go?

Definitely not Refractory, that was too close to Etzel for Casimir. Same went for the Government Plaza. Maybe that private garden he had snuck her into? It was late enough he could sneak in . . . “But why would he go there?” Olline murmured. “There’s nothing there for him.” Perhaps he had gone back to The Pit? But no, that didn’t make sense either, because he had only gone there when he was stalking after her.

Her eyes trailed over the pictures on his wall, and her breath caught in her chest. “That’s it!” The little artists haven Casimir had made and kept after Kullen abandoned the club, and Casimir. She doubted he was there, but someone there might know how to get in contact with him.

If nothing else, it was the best—only—lead she had, and Olline was going to follow it.

In theory, it was a great idea, the perfect plan to start with. In execution? Olline did not know where she was going.

Unlike Casimir’s apartment, the tiny little club he had converted from a residence was well hidden. Antal had morphed and grown around the location over the years to where it wasn’t obvious or easy to retrace her steps to. Casimir had taken her on such a convoluted, winding path she was already disoriented.

Olline thought she was in the right area, but she wasn’t positive. A lot of lower Antal looked the same: shrouded in an oily dusk, the neon lights around the businesses creating hazy shadows to light the pedestrian pathways. There were hundreds of tiny alleys and alcoves that led nowhere, dozens of street vendors all hawking the same knock-off magitech devices or street food block after block after block.

Ducking down a side street that looked familiar, Olline tried to stay in the light as much as possible. It looked like the same alley Casimir’s club was tucked into with its cluster of tiny homes. She decided to check the closet sized residences to see if she could find the right door again, when the alley abruptly ended in a greasy wall.

“Dammit,” she growled. Olline turned to leave, only to find her path blocked by a burly figure that hadn’t been there a second ago.

Olline moved to the side to get around the person standing in the middle of the narrow path. There were homes in this cramped alleyway, after all. It was possible she had surprised someone by being somewhere she shouldn’t have been.

But the person stepped in her path as she tried to move around, and Olline realized she was only half right. This was definitely not somewhere she should be.

Olline pulled on her power, reaching out to the natural elements, and even her own piercings in her ears and eyebrow to aid her should it come to that. She couldn’t see the person’s face, so she didn’t want to rely on her tech skills if this person didn’t have biomagitech in them like Bode had.

She tried to step around them again, murmuring, “Excuse me,” in case they were merely rude, only to be blocked again. By then, she had identified the pieces of real stone in the walls around her and was ready to pull them toward her, to bundle them around the sharp steel she would free from her own skin, when the figure spoke.

“Olline Tavos.” They’re voice a raspy, wispy whisper that brought her up short. They said her name without question, and the magic fizzled in her fingertips in her surprise. “You’ve been a busy woman. Too difficult by half to track down.” There was a grating rumble that Olline too late realized was a laugh as they captured her wrists in their enormous hand. “Lucky me, I’ve found you. The boss will be pleased.”