CHAPTER 3
Sirin and I stand out of sight around the corner, but we hear Agan as Tiffy and another facilities officer take him away for questioning.
“Do you know who my uncle is?” Agan says, angry and loud. “When he finds out about this, you're going to lose your jobs. Let me go and I won’t tell him about this.”
I don’t hear Tiffy’s response, but I know it’s not going to work.
“I wonder how many times he’s tried to use you as a get out of jail free card?” However many it’s been, I’d guess it’s worked up until this point.
Tiffy will be back eventually. Once they’ve got him in one of the holding rooms. For now, Sirin and I are the only ones who go into his apartment.
As soon as the doors open I choke out a laugh. “Holy crap. It’s huge.”
Agan’s apartment is more than twice the size of Sirin’s. This room has an amazing view of the planet MiNo orbits and the furniture is definitely custom, not the standard stuff that comes with your compartment lease.
“It shouldn’t be this big.” Sirin pulls his comm out of his uniform pocket and after a few swipes and pokes at the screen, helmets out a discontented sound. “This permit never should have been issued, it—”
I look up at the clear rings where compartment walls were removed to make the space bigger, waiting for whatever else he’s about to say.
“It says I approved it.”
“And you didn’t.” It’s not a question.
“No, I did not.” He puts his comm away. “I’m having one of the people in my office pull the full information. I want to see exactly what I approved.”
I let him lead the way further into Agan’s apartment. I shouldn’t be here in the first place, I definitely shouldn’t be snooping.
One of the expanded spaces is full of equipment, and so many screens. It makes Kita’s workstation look like a toy computer.
They’re dark, but Sirin presses one of the keys and both the keyboard and the screens flare to life.
I’m on all of them.
The recording device he retrieved from my room is linked into the cpu, but it’s the crate of them beyond it that makes me actually feel sick.
There are names written on them.
I look back up at the screen. I’m curled in my bed, covers over anything that might be titillating, and I’m on my comm.
“I’m talking to you.” As awful as this all is, I can’t ignore the fluttery feeling this particular image sends through me. “No one else makes me smile like that.”
He wraps that tentacle around me, pulling me close and kissing the top of my head. “We’ll make sure you smile like that again later, okay?”
“Okay.” But I can’t look away from the screen. There’s a bar on the bottom… we’re somewhere in the middle of what he recorded.
“I want to know how long he was watching.”
Sirin nods and silently taps through keys, until the footage cuts and shows him putting the recording device in place. There’s a date stamp and I have to think back to when that would have been.
Before I can finish doing the math, Sirin says, “It was shortly after we started seeing each other at Phantoms.”
Shortly after I stopped fawning over the person I thought he was.
“He didn’t like that I stopped wanting to be around him.” I look up at Sirin. “That was about the time that Kita and started actively avoiding him and his friends.”
Scowling at the screen, Sirin looks at the other devices. “I’m going to have to go through things to see who else he’s done this to.”
There’s a knock on the door and Tiffy joins us.
“He’s pissed off. And despite telling us all that you’re going to fire us and even ship us off station, he hasn’t actually asked us to bring you in to deal with the problem.”
“Leave him to think about what could happen to him for a while.” Sirin doesn’t look like he cares if Agan spends the next week stewing.
I count the recording devices while Sirin and Tiffy cross check files. Both of them getting more and more disturbed as the numbers climb.
“There’s another link.” Tiffy points at something on the screen, and when Sirin opens it, they both go preternaturally still.
The video is dark and glittery, and I know exactly what we’re looking at when Sirin says, “This just got so much worse for him.”