"Is this what you're looking for?" asked the lieutenant.

Josephine squinted at the screen. Fourteen suspects detained at French border trying to violate border lockdown. Subjects released.

"No. I didn't say border. I said Lyons. An operation in Lyons."

The lieutenant craned to look at her. "But we don't have any soldiers in Lyons. We evacuated the region."

He glanced over the computer screen to where Tan lounged at a coffee desk. Tan chewed food bars he had found in a break room. Since Josephine started carrying a glyph card, it'd grown harder to get angry at him for acting so damn flippant during these excursions. He was tense. He just hid it well. The food, the cigarettes, and fidgeting were all to distract himself. They were in the heart of a Lakiran military base after all.

"What I'm looking for," she said, "won't be in the usual lists. This was special forces. They were using orbital pods. Would that be in here?"

"It would, but you need permission to see that? Where did you say you came from again?"

She wiped his memory. It took a few tries until all the suspicion drained from his aura. Now he was just confused. This was useless.

She wiped his mind of everything about herself. "Why are you sitting in my chair, Lieutenant?"

Startled, the lieutenant glanced up, saw the rank of Colonel on her sleeve, and hopped from the seat. "I'm sorry, sir."

"Leave."

"Yes, sir."

As he hurried away, she pulsed him again. He'd wander the halls with a lingering sense of having done something wrong.

Josephine tabbed through the database. The Lieutenant had been right. All she saw was a slew of arrests made during the evacuation. The only action in France now was along the border. Everyone detained for crossing illegally was released. No more arrests. They'd run out of places to hold people lately.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Tan. You think you could help me?"

Tan tossed aside his food wrapper and meandered over. He grabbed the touch screen and laid it face up on the desk. Taking out a single cent euro, he flipped it in the air. It clinked onto the screen. He carefully plucked the coin, then tapped the screen where it had landed.

This took them to the main database menu.

He flipped again: Department list.

Again: Civil Protection Records.

That made no sense. Civil Protection wasn't military. It protected political gatherings and oversaw places like embassies. Josephine said nothing though. That penny was landing with purpose. It's next two flips landed on the same button: page down.

Next flip, Imperial domain. Now it made sense. Imperial domain was protection of the queen, but it might also involve assignments passed down by the queen directly—those led by exemplars.

After that, it entered a list of project code names. Most were obscure, but the last was blatantly clear.

Lyons.

Tan flipped the coin again; it landed on that project. Josephine took over, but a password screen came up as soon as she tapped it. With a sigh, she handed it back to Tan.

This time, he pulled out his bag of dice. He picked a twelve, an eight, and two six-sided ones. The system he had was complicated. Josephine had helped him form it through countless trial and error. Back when they started this, it only ever failed when the password contained characters his system couldn't account for. Capital letters were the first stumbling block, then numbers, then special characters... It once failed them completely at a security console in India. Studying a keyboard later, Tan figured out it must have had a tilda, the corner keyboard button he'd overlooked until then. Nowadays, Tan's system even incorporated potential unicode characters. Josephine lost track of the rules a while ago.

The password here was strong. The dice had him press a few function keys, but when he finally pressed the enter key, the filed opened.

----------------------------------------

Sakhr was in a conference about the state of the empire's transportation infrastructure when his tablet vibrated. While the minister kept talking, Sakhr opened the alert.

Someone had just accessed the Naema file. It came from a terminal in West Spain apparently. Sakhr checked a map. It was farther away from Lyons than he had expected.

Josephine must have played it safe and not gone to the nearest military installation. Wise, perhaps, but not wise enough. Sakhr had no idea how Victoria had so much trouble catching this woman. This trap would have been obvious to him: a single file in a database that's easy to find, but not too easy. The password protection was hard, but not harder than anything that Asian had proven capable of hacking.

He closed his tablet and turned his attention back to the ministers. If he got the alert, so did the response team.