Free Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) by SL Huang Page A

locks with.
    A window air conditioner sticking out of the side of the house caught my eye. Perfect. I took a running start and vaulted on top of it. My feet balanced on the fulcrum as I slid the window up, and I slipped inside, equalizing my mass so the unit barely wobbled before I let the pane slam back down.
    Rayal’s home was simple but comfortable. I wandered from room to room, wondering what I was looking for.
    She had a number of photographs around, on end tables and hanging on walls and a few on the mantle. I figured out who she was from the pictures: a woman who looked her age but did it gracefully, her features a shade too wide to be beautiful but a broad smile that might get her categorized as handsome. Her skin tone was lighter than her husband’s—I wasn’t sure if she was light-skinned African-American or mixed—and in all the photographs her eyes were her best feature: large, bright, and lively. I saw pictures with a group of people who were obviously her family; with someone who looked like a sister, both of them bundled up in front of a ski slope; of her shaking hands with someone on a dais, everyone in business suits.
    And there were quite a few pictures of a younger Denise with a small boy, a boy with a darker skin tone than she had and unruly black hair. In all of them, Rayal was laughing or smiling as she played with him or embraced him. There were also pictures of the boy alone, portraits they’d probably had taken, and one of him on Santa’s knee at a mall, and one of him playing with a large orange plastic truck.
    I picked up a picture of Rayal tackling him while he appeared to be trying to run out of frame, squealing in glee. This was clearly her son, the one she and Warren had lost years before.
    There were no pictures of a daughter.
    What the hell was going on here?
    The house wasn’t big. I found a neat but lived-in bedroom that showed me nothing but another picture of her son on a nightstand. The bathroom was unremarkable save for the prescription bottles of what I could only assume were psychiatric medication. I’d burned my phone, but Rayal had a fancy camera sitting on a tripod in her bedroom, and I swiped it to take pictures of the pill labels. Screw Checker, I could do a search on the drugs and find out what had happened to her myself.
    The other bedroom had been turned into a study. Books overflowed the shelves and were stacked haphazardly on the chairs and desk, the towers threatening to tumble into her desktop computer. I scanned the titles; they all appeared to be related to her work—software engineering, machine learning, control theory, natural language processing. Books on programming languages I’d never heard of. She had lots of academic papers heaped around as well, loose or in large binders.
    Whatever Rayal’s reason for leaving Arkacite, she hadn’t given up her work.
    I tried turning on the computer—I knew how to get by rudimentary OS passwords—but Rayal had a touch more security and the machine stymied my elementary cracking. So instead I used a paperclip to pick the locks on the file cabinet. Aside from a plethora of paperwork connected to medical insurance claims—I gathered they related to her hospital stay and continued psychotherapy—I found a library’s worth of contracts and nondisclosure agreements from Arkacite, folders and folders of them, each inches thick.
    I skimmed the pages. It looked like all the work she had done for the company had stayed with them, and that she was not permitted to work in the same line of research upon the termination of her employment or even discuss that research outside of the company. The convoluted legal language was downright frightening, if I was reading it correctly.
    Jesus. What had she been working on?
    Or was Arkacite just so worried about corporate leaks that they were desperate to cover themselves?
    Scraps of paper and spiral notebooks around the office showed some electrical engineering sketches, but they