Promise: Caulborn #2 by Nicholas Olivo Page B

fun-size Hershey bar out of his front coveralls pocket and tore into it. “Remember back when Treggen had those cameras installed in our office?” I nodded. Treggen had influenced another gremlin, a late friend of Gears named Axlesnapper, to put cameras in the office to spy on us. “Well,” Gears continued, “I ran a bunch of simulations trying to figure out how security had been breached.”
    “And you found out how Axlesnapper bugged us?”
    “No,” Gears said. “Every scenario I ran said it was absolutely impossible for her to get in without being detected.”
    I rubbed my chin. “You seem excited by this.”
    “Are you kidding?” His voice squeaked as he said this. “Of course I’m excited! This means that Axle might not have been working for Treggen.” He pulled up a new window on his computer. It showed a blueprint of the building. “This is every entrance and exit to this office, traditional or otherwise.”
    “What do you mean, ‘or otherwise’?”
    “Heating vents, sewer and water pipes, that sort of thing. When I first joined the Caulborn, I crawled through the entire heating system and mapped it out. I also put sensors throughout the ducts to let me know if we had surprise guests. None of them went off.”
    “No offense Gears, but wasn’t Axle as smart as you? Wouldn’t she have known to disable them?”
    “If she’d seen them, sure. But it’s not like they’re flashing little baubles that screamed out ‘Hey, I’m a sensor!’ I have vibrational and pressure-sensitive stuff running through here. If anything was out of place, those would’ve gone off. The only way she could’ve gotten by them is if the power had been cut to the building.”
    “We had a power failure around that time, didn’t we?” I asked, thinking back to that night.
    Gears’s ears drooped a bit. “Yes, but you and Megan found Axle’s body before that blackout.” He looked down for a moment, probably thinking about how painful Axle’s death had been; she’d been dissected as part of an experiment to create a new breed of gremlins. Gears gave himself a shake. “But don’t you see, Vinnie?” he looked me in the eyes, his grin returning. “This means that Axle didn’t do it. I went through everything, all of her notes and journals, and I didn’t find anything that implied she’d broken into our office.”
    “Maybe she just destroyed the data?”
    Gears shook his head. “No. If she was going to break into the office, it meant she’d have to outsmart me. And while we were equals, she knew I didn’t mess around when it came to security. She would’ve spent months gathering intel, tools, and gadgets to get her into the building. It couldn’t have been her.”
    “Well, that’s good, but it still leaves us with the question of who planted the cameras. Do your simulations take things like teleportation and dimensional jumping into consideration?”
    Gears frowned. “No, but that’s not stuff she would’ve had access to. I thought about those phasilion things that Treggen uses, but you told me it takes weeks for them to move, so it’s unlikely one got in and out without us knowing.” He gestured to the cardboard box with the wires coming out of it that he’d been working on when I came in. “I’ve got some new equipment here. It’s going to help me run some additional tests and try a few new theories out.”
    “What’s under here?” I asked, lifting the corner of the box.
    “Gah!” Gears shot forward and slapped my wrist. I dropped the box and yelped, both in surprise and pain. His glowing yellow eyes were huger than normal, and his chest puffed in and out faster than I’d ever seen before. “Sorry, Vinnie, but that’s some very sensitive equipment under there. It is literally one of a kind, and I can’t let anyone know what it is, let alone tinker with it.”
    “Okay, Gears, no problem.” I looked at the tiny red welts on my wrist where Gears had hit me. That could’ve been a lot