Chapter 16: The Spa Day

"Touch them," Raylan said.

He said it before I could ask, with every dot on his phone gone black and his grandmother's gravy cooling in front of him.

"You told me not to touch your servers," I said.

"I'm telling you something else now."

I pulled my laptop across the tablecloth, between the cobbler and the rolls.

The cage where his machines lived belonged to a hosting company, and the hosting company's landlord was the Merriman Family Office.

Someone had cut their power at six o'clock sharp, right when the board hung up.

It took me forty seconds, because I had spent a Wednesday night building a spare room for his monitors on a rented box in Dallas.

I hadn't told him.

I had only known what kind of people owned his lights.

"Look at your phone," I said.

The dots came back one at a time, green, green, green.

His grandmother leaned over my shoulder and peered at the screen.

"Is that all?" she said.

"That's all, ma'am."

"Hm." She patted my arm. "Take some cobbler home."

On her porch Raylan held my hand flat against his chest, and I felt his pulse through the wool.

"Forty seconds," he said. "Forty people couldn't do that in four hours."

"They don't have a spare room in Dallas."

"You built me a spare room."

"I built myself a spare room," I said. "You happen to live in it."

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