Chapter 25

I wanted to confront Barry when he returned to the office, but I decided against it. If he was a traitor, why would he work to help me find Thanatos?

"Good morning, Kifo. I brought my laptop, so things should go a bit quicker today," he said in a chipper voice, holding up his laptop bag to show me that he had, indeed, brought said device.

"Cool. I'm still working on narrowing down the list. I'm gonna scratch out abandoned houses. The walls looked made of stone, and there was light coming in. Plus, people tend to get suspicious of activity in an abandoned house."

"I thought you ruled them out when you were scratching off buildings in densely populated areas." Barry took his laptop out of the bag and set up shop at Thanatos' desk. Looking over the information he'd gotten yesterday, he input it into his computer and got to work.

"Not all of them. Some of the houses were in areas that weren't exactly rural but weren't exactly urban either."

Barry looked up from his laptop, looking as if he were contemplating this new information, then nodded his head. "Makes sense. Once I've gotten into their system, I'll try finding out where the live feed was being streamed from. Assuming the feed is still live and still streaming to the computer." Getting up from the desk, he walked over to me and sat down in the chair across from me. "The program on my laptop pretty much does all the work for me. Would you like me to help with narrowing down the buildings?"

"Sure." I nodded my head and handed him half the stack of papers before getting back to work.

* * *

We spent almost the entire day going through the list of abandoned buildings, me working at my laptop and Barry at Thanatos' computer. We were still going through them when there was a knock at the office door.

"Come in," I called out, sitting up straight and looking over at the door.

Frank, the security guard, walked into the office with a slight frown on his face. "Sorry to bother you, Kifo, but we have some news on Thanatos."

I stood quickly and nearly dropped the papers that were still on my lap. Just barely catching them. "Did you find him? Is he okay?"

"We didn't find him. We don't know if he's okay, but someone just came by claiming to know where he is."

"Who is it? I want to speak to them."

"Yes, ma'am. I had her wait down in the lobby, but I'll bring her up here to you." With that, Frank retreated to go and get the woman.

I was hoping it wasn't some damn Memitim scum pulling our legs. I hoped that she really knew where to find our boss.

"Should I keep doing the scan, Kifo?"

I looked over at Barry and nodded my head. "If she's lying, we'll still need the information to find him if we can get it."

Barry nodded his head and turned his attention back to the task at hand, checking his laptop periodically.

I really hoped she wasn't lying.