Chapter 106 Cute.

Chapter 106: 106 Cute.

I had just finally, finally managed to drift off into a half-decent sleep when my bedroom door hit the wall with a sound like a gunshot.

"Boss! Miles! Get up!"

Before my brain could even register the intrusion, a pair of grease-stained hands grabbed my ankle and yanked. I barely managed to catch myself before I was dragged off the Egyptian cotton sheets entirely.

"Rhea, what the hell?" I groaned, squinting against the harsh hallway light spilling into my room.

"No time! You gotta see this, come on!" the mad scientist insisted, practically vibrating with manic energy.

She was still wearing her heavy canvas workshop coat, her face smudged with engine grease, and her woolly hair sticking up in wild, static-charged tufts. She grabbed my arm and began hauling me out the door before I could even grab a shirt.

I stumbled after her, too exhausted to put up a fight, letting her drag me all the way downstairs and into the bowels of the chalet.

The former basement was utterly unrecognizable. Gone were the coal bins, the various boxes of rotting Christmas decorations, and the crumbling brickwork.

I kind of missed the giant, rumbling monstrosity of the early-century furnace that used to sit in the corner—it had a fantastic ’1890s possibly wrought by demons’ look to it that would have made a great plot device for blowing up the building.

But Rhea had needed a workshop, and she had claimed the basement.

Now, the place looked less like a room and more like the inside of a massive, hostile combustion engine. The sci-fi aesthetic was nowhere to be found.

Thick, industrial cables the size of anacondas snaked across the grease-stained concrete floor, hooking into massive, jury-rigged server racks encased in raw, welded steel tubing. Heavy-duty workbenches groaned under the weight of dismantled drone engines, hydraulic presses, and scatterings of rusted gears.

It looked like a chop shop built by a lunatic, lit by the harsh, flickering glare of caged halogen bulbs and the occasional shower of rogue sparks from a half-finished welding project.

It was a pretty decent setup, honestly. Especially considering there wasn’t a convenient massive cave system under the chalet, filled with OSHA-violating pitfalls and space to store a giant novelty penny.

Though, given enough time and Rhea’s obsessive need to build, I wasn’t ruling it out. If I gave the dog-girl a pickaxe and a case of energy drinks, I bet she’d have an underground lair hollowed out within the week.

Rhea let go of my arm, scurried over to a rolling mechanic’s stool, and collapsed onto it.

She sat cross-legged, surrounded by empty chip bags and a battery of oil-smudged coffee mugs drained to the dregs. She sighed, rubbing her eyes with the back of a dirty wrist.

I stood there in my sweatpants, blinking away the sleep. "So... any leads?" I asked.

I said it more for the sound of it than anything. Just looking at Rhea’s defeated slump told me all I needed to know.

"No," she groaned, her ears drooping. "Nothing yet."

I nodded, frowning, and walked over. "Then why did you drag me out of bed at this hour? What’s the problem?"

Rhea glared at the holoprojector. It sat on a massive, scarred iron table, thick copper wires spliced directly into its casing and snaking back into the humming server stacks. "The damn thing won’t connect without a similar signal."

"So we have to wait for Delirium to make a call?" I said, curious.

Rhea sighed, her head lolling back to stare at the exposed pipes on the ceiling. "No. He needs to make more than one," she said, tapping her temple intently. "He’s got a bunch of heavy-duty security systems bouncing the signals around, and every one of these communicators runs on a different frequency. But they all have architectural similarities in the code, and I’m getting close."

I raised a brow. "Is that right?"

"Sure is! And the next time that bastard puts out a broadcast, my rigs will be ready for him," she giggled madly, a feral grin cutting through the grease on her face. "He’s not going to get away from me next time!"

I stepped up beside her stool and patted her head. "Good work. We’ll get him yet," I assured her.

Rhea looked up at me, suddenly uncertain, the manic energy bleeding away. "You really think so?"

"Of course. We’ve got the greatest mechanical mind of her generation tracking him down. And we’ll make sure he never bothers you again."

Rhea snorted, but the feral grin returned, this time with a hint of the old, genuinely happy Rhea I knew. "Yeah. Yeah, we will, huh?" She groaned, stretching her arms over her head until her joints popped, then tilted her head back to look at me upside down. "Ya know, Miles?"

"Yeah."

"I really do appreciate this. Really. Not a lot of guys would take on someone like Delirium for me."

Poor girl.

I reached down and stroked her woolly hair in that specific, firm way I knew she liked. Rhea let out a soft, contented moan, her eyes drifting shut as she leaned into my hand.

"I’m sure there are plenty who would," I said.

"Mmmm," Rhea hummed happily, squirming on her stool to get closer. "Nah. There really aren’t. I did try to find some before. I mean, a mad scientist like me? You’d think guys would be lining up around the block to get a share of my unparalleled genius!"

"True," I agreed.

"But Delirium always made them a better deal," Rhea sighed, snuggling deeper into her oversized, oil-stained coat as my fingers massaged her scalp.

"Really?"

"Oh, sure! He promised them all sorts of hardware. And I mean, villains at that tier don’t exactly have a whole lot of ’loyalty’ standards. Delirium promised the syndicates that if they handed me over, they’d not only get crates of top-shelf munitions from his armories, but whatever I was going to build for them, free of charge. Not a lot of bad guys would pass that up, no matter how cute I am."

"Well, no one ever said villains weren’t pricks," I said, which was the absolute truth.