How can I make Kuzco lose the race? Oh I know. First I'll turn him into a hippopotamus. Then I'll put the hippo on a diet. Then I'll invite him to dinner. And then I'll feed him and feed him and feed him until he gets so big, he can't even move. It's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant!"
Yzma
Well.
I rearranged my pen and pencil collection to the left side of my desk. I stared at it for two point four seconds before deciding to move it back to the right.
Well.
Helena Kyle thought she could keep a secret from the Oracle of New Gotham.
I placed the pencils on the left side and kept the pens on the right.
Helena Kyle was awfully full of herself.
Challenging me to spar or to a game of Scrabble or Monopoly was one thing. Questioning my authority was something I had learned to tolerate in our mission to safeguard New Gotham. Questioning my capabilities as a cyberhacker – the very ability I prided myself in and protected a city based upon – was a naked insult.
'Anything goes.'
Well.
I would live to see Helena regret the day she rued my mastery of the digital world.
The bell rang and two dozen teenagers scrambled to their feet. I collected their test sheets one by one as they filed out the classroom, mindlessly throwing each paper on top of the other, not bothering to see if they were upside down or backwards in the pile.
The drive home in the Hummer was a blur, my mind abuzz with possibilities.
I had spent the evening before exploring everything I could on the open net – as Helena had stated, I found nothing immediate to connect her eight grand to a source. The money had been cash dropped. The only trace the depositor had left was an indiscernible scribbled loop-de-loop of a signature on the deposit slip.
Of course the signature would be nigh useless - c'est la vie, after all. I had already pushed the initial apprehension of the obstacle aside and was looking forward to the satisfaction of cracking it. My fingertips inputted the tower code automatically, my mind whirring in anticipation of an afternoon of espionage.
The Delphi welcomed me home with a wink of its screensaver as I rolled from the elevator. I paused to listen to the creaky clock tower – unless someone was being particularly cat footed, I was alone. Excellent.
My fingers flitted over the keyboard. I quickly fired a probe into Sun Mutual's bank records searching for a match on the mysterious signature – riffing through the digital scans would take all night, even for a probe. After a moment's hesitation, I tabbed my secondary screen: Helena's phone company.
I had been debating with myself throughout the school day on the ethical ramifications, privacy concerns... and whether Helena had considered this when she agreed to the rule "anything goes."
"Would that be the same pantry you hide your Beanie Baby collection in? Right next to the whoopass?"
The vivid memory of Helena's taunting voice rang in my ears and I harrumphed to myself. Helena had dug her own grave, now it was time for her to lie in it.
I tapped the enter key, instantly embedding a digital recorder programmed to catch any calls connected to her cell or home phone.
With a click of my mouse I extracted her call records and expanded them to include the past three months. For some reason it pleased me to see that the greater half of her minutes were used to contact either my cell phone or the clock tower land line. Eleven percent were to or from the Dark Horse, understandably. Several other calls were traced back to... I typed in the unusual number... none other than the eidetically-minded, Helena-infatuated and very well connected metahuman Gibson Kafka.
Including one twenty second call mere moments after my conversation with Helena the previous day.
My left hand had flipped open my cell and dialed the number for No Man's Land before I realized it was moving.
"No Man's Land Gift Shop, Gibson here."
"Gibson," I purred, delighted to have reached him on the first try. "It's Barbara. You remember, Helena's friend? We met that one time at the bar?"
"B-Barbara Gordon? Eep!"
I frowned at the response. Surely I wasn't that intimidating? "Are you alright?"
"Y-yes, fine. Always happy to hear from you, lovely, enchanting Barbara. Um, Helena's not here right now..."
"I wanted to talk to you, actually. About some money that Helena's recently come into. Would you know –?"
"I don't know anything about that!"
Ah. So Helena had got to him first – the call I had noted must have been her warning him to keep mum. No matter.
"You can tell me anything, Gibson." I decided to go for maternally reassuring right off the bat; it always worked when Dinah was hiding something, after all. "I promise you Helena will never hear of it."
"I know nothing! Eep! Stop that!"
"What's going on?" I demanded before an irksome realization struck me. "Is Helena there?"
"No!"
"Gibson! Put her on the phone. Now."
A scuffle of static briefly ensued. I tapped my fingers impatiently.
A familiar breathless voice filled my ear.
"Barbara. What a surprise. I just walked in..."
"Save the crap for someone who'll buy it, Hel."
"Barbara, attitude. Goodness. Apparently I'm not the only one here in need of anger management."
"You had to bring Gibson into this."
"Me? You were the one interrogating him! He's practically having a break down right now. Jeez, what did you do to him?"
I fumed silently, unable to vent my frustration into words. Helena was cutting off my main lead, most likely abusing the young man's crush to get her own way. The five-year-old inside me was vehemently stomping her foot. No fair.
"It's already been what, twenty four hours? You know, if you just want to give up now I won't hold it against you."
"In your little kitty dreams," I hissed.
Beepbeepbeep.
"Dammit, I have another call. We'll continue this later." I viciously stabbed the end call button, the speaker automatically switching to the second line. "What!"
"Um... hi. Barbara? It's Wade. We were supposed to do dinner tonight?"
A glance to my watch confirmed my horror.
I closed my eyes, heart sinking.
"Wade. I am so sorry. I got caught up with work, our website crashed, we lost all our orders..." I hacked my best friend's phone account, I silently added. "But that's no excuse."
It wasn't an excuse for lying either... but a straight up 'I forgot' seemed so much more sadistic than the imaginary hectic afternoon I had concocted for him.
I may have been a liar, but at least I wasn't a cruel one.
"No... it's okay... I understand how things pile up. Just call me next time, okay?"
"Wade..." I paused, struggling for words. "I'm not sure it's a good idea to have a next time. Look at how busy I am. To be honest, I'm starting to wonder if we can work."
If silence could talk, I could have guessed what it was saying.
"...Barbara... of course we can work. What are you talking about?"
"If you like, we can talk about it face to face tomorrow after class," I offered. It was the best I could do – the man deserved more than an over the phone break up, after all.
And I was breaking up with him, I told myself emphatically. Too much was too much. While Wade was absurdly okay with constantly being let down, I couldn't continue bearing the guilt of carrying on such a hollow relationship. It had been an ideal of mine once – having a husband, maybe a child, peacefully living in the suburbs. It was the idea of a normal life that a large part of me still longed for.
However I had recently concluded an even larger part of me, apparently, was more obsessed with things like programming and hacking, thwarting crime, taking care of Dinah, and most of all my enjoyably competitive interactions with Helena. There was no room left for a husband in that equation – even if it meant that that equation was a slightly lonely one.
I was never lonely with Helena, I discerned thoughtfully.
I rolled my eyes. God help me with that one.
"I'll stop by your room during lunch."
I tried to mask the dread in my voice. "Until then."
The evening passed uneventfully, Helena's cell phone remaining disappointingly inactive. Dinah retired early after an exhaustive day of testing, leaving me alone to contemplate my thoughts.
My sleep was restless that night. Upon waking, I could not remember exactly what I had dreamed, only that it had been bleak, muddy and wet.
Freshly showered yet still half asleep, I rolled blearily to the kitchen table where Dinah was munching on toast and jam. She graciously pushed a second plate toward me.
"I made extra for you."
I nodded in appreciation.
"Thank you."
A faintly recognizable brown-haired, blue-eyed blur flopped wearily into the chair beside Dinah.
"Hey none for me? Jeez. Tell me how you really feel, kid."
"Hel!"
My mouth tugged into a beaming smile after the sound of her sleepy mumble of acknowledgment. "What are you doing here? Not to mention what are you doing up so early?"
"I've been up all night, got called back to work... some shit at the bar... fucking Casey. She busted a knob off one of the taps, it sprayed off and knocked glass and shit everywhere. Fucking health department came over, had to inspect everything... unh. The whole building is shut down until they're done inspecting."
"Including your apartment above the bar?" I guessed, pouring myself a cup of coffee.
Helena lolled her head pitifully in folded arms.
"And she's been up here bugging me ever since," Dinah complained.
"Why don't you use my bed," I offered – her old room had long been commandeered by Dinah's presence in the clock tower.
"Your bed?" Helena seemed unusually fascinated at the prospect, until her face fell. "Nah, I gotta leave for an appointment in a bit, no point."
"Appointment?" I asked curiously.
"You know..." She arched a narrow eyebrow. "The court ordered anger management I have to go to because a certain redheaded school teacher -"
"That was not my fault," I denied, draining my cup. "There were a million excuses you could have used to explain why you threw that perverted punk into the dumpster – like the truth, for one. 'He looked at me funny,' I'm afraid, was not even close to what I told you to say."
"Details, details. You and I both know the only reason I was down that alley in the first place was to collect that bogus evidence, which by the way never existed, for your ridiculous moth man theory."
Dinah's ears perked up. "What moth man theory?"
"It was not a 'moth man' theory, it was a legitimate hypothesis that simply did not pan out. Dinah, let's go. We're going to be late for school."
"Barbara," Helena called out after me. I swiveled my chair and raised an eyebrow as Dinah hurried to catch up with me. Helena was returning my raised eyebrow.
"Tick tock," she said, tapping her watch.
I tsked, shaking my head and ignoring Dinah's confused expression.
Helena would get hers, I told myself, as her earrings gleamed in the morning sun that was burning through the clock face.
I smiled darkly. Darkly and cheerfully.
Over the past twelve hours of fitful bouts of sleep and mongering, I had developed my plans beyond mere telephonic monitoring. An evil thought had wriggled sneakily into my brain sometime during the night, as such thoughts were wont to do.
What had I been doing monitoring the woman's phone calls? The very idea was so limited – so restricting - child's play to a hacker like me. Why catch snatches of her daily conversation when I could monitor her entire day?
Of course, if anything sounded personal I would immediately tune it out. I wasn't a pervert or nosy peeping tom. I had embarked on a quest for information... and nothing was more sacred than the pursuance of knowledge.
A/N: Forgot to add suicide to the list of content warnings. Sorry! :) Also, a Canadian. Gasp!
