Jett grinned back. "I'll make sure to remind her when she isn't so grouchy," he called out the doorway.
"I am not fucking grouchy," hissed Blaze.
"Of course not. That's exactly why you're in a swearing fit without an end in sight."
"Fuck off! I'm only pissed because you're fucking annoying, you dick."
"You're grouchy because this is the third late-night case in a row. We're all tired."
"Excuse me, just because you've got all the stamina of a fucking diabetic chair, doesn't mean I can't deal with a couple of early mornings."
"Blaze, you've been running on caffeine and fury alone for the last ten sectres."
"And you've been running on me, so stop acting like a little old lady bitch who's swallowed your own dentures, with a fucking egg in your kidney, and do something I've told you to do!"
"I don't even want to know what you're talking about."
A girl scowled as she stared at her the image on her laptop, bedclothes sandwiched between the two. The heating was off at this time in the morning, she was desperately huddled under the duvet for warmth, her neck aching where she'd spent what felt like days craning it to see her screen in the icy darkness before the sunrise.
On the screen, there was a monochrome picture, the kind that came from an infrared camera, showing a bunch of Witch Hunters standing around in a room, shouting at each other. A pang of disappointment ricocheted off the walls of the girl's chest. She should have been able to see all of this coming. To think her efforts had been a waste. She'd even taken a couple of hours out of her day to come up with a plan. The passwords to get into the systems had been easy enough, people would spill anything under certain pressures. But if the information she so needed was offline, and she couldn't get to it now more so than ever, then she'd need to pay a visit to the Computer Tower.
It wasn't as if that were easy. The defences around the core system were built for Level 9s, for the mages stronger than herself. She'd seen exactly how many orders of magnitude more powerful than her even one of the weakest had been, despite the name for them implying that she was just below them. If there had been a fight, it wouldn't have been pretty.
The girl sighed and turned off the computer. She needed time to think.
But if she wanted, she would get.
