Chương 190: B2 Chapter 189: Surface Signals

Meno considered asking Thorn to leave before opening the shady cleaning app on his phone, but having him there had advantages. Thorn had just proven he was terrible at pillow fights, yet one look at the bodybuilder taking up half the couch should discourage anyone from interfering.

"I need to make a call. If you stay, you might hear stuff you can't unhear. Do you want to leave? It might be extremely unsafe."

"I gladly collect dirt on you so I can use it later to backstab you," Thorn said.

"And you did not win, by the way. It was a tactical pause." Meno let him keep that delusion. The fight had ended the moment Thorn ran out of stamina. There was no reason to force a dramatic finisher after the other build had already collapsed. He opened the shady cleaning app and tapped customer support. A voice came through almost immediately with the same tired condescension Meno remembered, perfect for a chief shadow scientist who technically did not exist. The old guy needed a vacation.

"Is this an emergency?" Grandpa asked.

"Yes, but not regarding me. My girlfriend is missing."

"Get a new one and stop calling me. Do you think these XUltra capsules set themselves up? I am overworked and underpaid."

"It's not like that. It doesn't make any sense. Her phone rings, but she never answers. She didn't post on her page when she should have."

"It never does," Grandpa said.

"My wife left me for my brother. We haven't talked since. At first she was also all sorry, but when I forgave her and asked her to come back, she said no. It's better to be alone."

"Really? I saw how Teacher glanced at you. I thought she was your wife." Meno had completely made that up, but Grandpa had gone quiet. This might work.

"She did?" Grandpa asked.

"Are you certain?"

"Exactly. When you explain the science stuff, she always seems very attentive." Grandpa only needed a few seconds this time.

"What do you want?" Good. Meno had found the exploit.

"Can you check the hotel cameras and see if she left with anyone? Pink hair, checked out yesterday evening. Her name is Rina. You can find her online."

"I am well aware who your girlfriend is."

"You are?"

"Let me work." Thorn had given up pretending this was none of his business and was openly listening now. Grandpa disappeared into silence for several seconds.

"I am in. Scraping the footage." When he spoke again, his tone had changed.

"That's strange."

"You found her?"

"Clear traces of video tampering. High-level technique, but the footage wasn't protected, so it doesn't mean anything by itself. Checking Vernova street cameras." The next wait took longer.

"Same. Whoever did it knew what they were doing. Not many people would even detect it." That deleted the breakup theory. Rina leaving without a word had been strange. Her phone ringing unanswered had not fit either. But somebody scrubbing her from hotel and city cameras meant there was finally something Meno could work with. A mechanic.

"Can you check her phone? Find out where she is?"

"Already did. Her phone is in The Pearl. Remember when I told you to press the button during the last incident? We kept your phone on spread mode. It plants seeds in every nearby device without military-grade firewalls." Meno remembered the button. He did not remember agreeing to turn his phone into a roaming debuff.

"But there is nothing suspicious on the device itself," Grandpa continued.

"Mostly nudes, but that's expected."

"Are you saying she left her phone in her room? It's definitely not in mine. I called it a million times."

"There is no proof of anything, but the timing is suspicious. You caused a major meltdown yesterday. If she was working for someone, that gave them perfect cover to exfiltrate her without immediately burning her high-value cover persona."

"What are you saying? If that was the case, why erase the footage? She is very famous. It makes no sense to hide her leaving and then have her show up somewhere else later."

"I don't know. I am a scientist, not a spy. Did you tell her anything sensitive away from phones? I ran your conversations through the AI, but it only flagged mild risk. If it had detected anything serious, we would have intervened in real time." Meno had already assumed they were spying on him, so that part barely registered. Someone scrubbing Rina from the footage did. That was a giant glowing raid marker if he had ever seen one.

"Nothing specific, but she knew something was up. Didn't you have security stationed at the hotel? Maybe they saw something." This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Their job is to keep you and the others safe, not track your girlfriend. Go get the phone. She might also have left a physical note, which is annoying because I cannot access paper remotely."

"Why aren't you more concerned?"

"There is no evidence connecting the scrubbing to you. Did she steal anything? No. Did she know any specifics? No. If she tried to mess with your phone, I would have seen it." Grandpa kept going before Meno could object.

"The most obvious explanation is that she was a honeytrap. Either you lost relevance when Veyrath imploded, or whoever she worked for realized they were getting too close to real fire. By that I mean us. They reconsidered, used the implosion as breakup cover, and pulled her out. Although that still does not explain why they scrubbed her from the footage." Meno did not buy it.

"What if she wasn't alone when she left? Someone was with her, and that was the person they actually wanted hidden. Removing only one person would have made the footage look broken, so they removed Rina too."

"Mental gymnastics taken to eleven. They most likely scrubbed her so you couldn't follow and make things complicated. I am sure she will pop up in some city on the other side of the North Atlantic soon enough. By then you will be over it, since your attention span drops to zero whenever VR is not involved." Grandpa was wrong. The whole setup smelled like bait. Veyrath collapsing had created the maximum-doubt moment.

Rina disappeared immediately afterward, and anyone looking at the timing would reach the obvious conclusion: she had been with Meno while he was famous, the game died, and she left. Clean, plausible, and painful enough to keep him questioning whether anything else had happened. That was exactly what bothered him. If someone could not grab him directly because Feltforge had people watching, Rina was an easier target.

Grandpa had already admitted the security around The Pearl existed for him and the others, not for her, and whoever had done this understood world boss mechanics enough to scrub footage in a way even Grandpa considered high-level. They could have known Feltforge would detect the edits. They could have wanted that. Leave enough behind for Meno to realize something was wrong, then let him chase the trail somewhere The Pearl's security did not cover.

No need to attempt kidnapping if they could convince him to walk out on his own. Meno remembered some famous quote he had read once: Let your opponent come to your house and eat your wife's poisoned cabbage. It was an absurd amount of tinfoil, but that did not matter. If Rina had been kidnapped, recognizing the trap did not remove the need to walk into it. It only meant Meno had to outplay whoever was waiting on the other side. They clearly expected him not to give up. On that part, they were right.

Who outplayed who was still open. Meno was not telling Grandpa any of this. He would get locked inside The Pearl before the call ended, and Meno already expected someone to follow him whenever he left.

"Is there really no way to track people outside the cameras?"

"There is, but it isn't trivial. I cannot brute-force into the government's heartbeat sensor network remotely without leaving a trace. It would trigger twelve red flags, which is not worth it for your girlfriend, I am afraid."

"What about non-remotely? Please." Grandpa went quiet long enough for Meno to stop pacing.

"Okay. Listen very carefully. If Morlando or any of his dogs ask, this conversation never happened. Got it?" Meno listened.

"If you can take your phone to Vernova City Hall, the servers should be in the basement. I can use it to carefully massage the surface signals without having to go through the wall and access the government's main network. We don't need global access anyway." Every sentence made Grandpa sound more annoyed that he had agreed to this.

"How you accomplish it is up to you, but don't bother me again until then. I have enough to do. I just hope you get caught so I get a deadline extension on this LinkSync project while they rescue you. Bye." The call ended with Meno holding an actual objective. First, find Rina's phone. There was no universe where she had secretly scrubbed herself from hotel and city surveillance. Someone else had done that, and Grandpa said her phone was still somewhere inside The Pearl.

Why she had left it behind had too many possible answers to solve before he found it. Whoever took her could have known phones were trackable. Rina could have hidden it herself because she knew something was coming. Either route made the phone the next step. Thorn had barely moved through the entire call. Now he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, the government conspiracy apparently hitting harder than pre-workout.

"You can just call people to hack into stuff for you? Just who are you? Are you a secret government spy?"

"Pretty much the opposite of that."

"What does that mean? Not-secret, not-government, not-spy? Or secret, not-government, not-spy? Maybe not-secret government spy? That's off. Perhaps not-secret, not-government spy, but spies work for the government, so maybe…"

"Stop. It doesn't matter. We are here to find Rina, remember? What do you think happens to your subscription if she just poof vanishes forever?" That fixed Thorn immediately.

"I just reached Platinum tier recently. You think that's possible? We can't let that happen. I want to reach top ten first, then she can retire."

"Let's go. We need to get into her old room." Meno got up, and Thorn followed him downstairs. Reception hard-denied them. Meno claimed he had left something in Rina's room, but the woman was clearly not buying it. The cleaning staff had already gone through the room, she explained, and anything left behind would have been recovered. They had found nothing. Grandpa said the phone was still inside The Pearl, so nothing was not an acceptable answer. Thorn moved up beside Meno.

"This is a national emergency, official business. That's why I flew to Vernova from Skyline last night. I have to retrieve a package from her room." The receptionist did not even blink.

"Mr. Theodoro Smuff, I was unaware you worked for the government." Meno looked at him.

"Wait, that's your real name? Theodoro? Smuff?" A vein stood out along Thorn's neck as he aimed all of his anger at the receptionist, then redirected it toward Meno.

"Do not say it again. Only parents can call me that."

"I mean, you can call me Meno if you want. It's fine. Whatever." Meno turned back to the receptionist.

"Okay, then I will take that exact room for the day. You can do that, right?"

"Certainly, sir." That was much easier. Meno tapped his phone to complete the booking, received the digital key, and headed back upstairs with Thorn. The gaming hub felt deserted compared with the previous night. Most of the streamers had either checked out or gone outside to shoot IRL content. Brine and Kestrel might be out somewhere, but they would come back. Those two were not moving on until they had a recovery plan. Rina's old room had already been cleaned when Meno opened it.

The bed had been remade, the bathroom counter was empty, and every trace of her had been removed. No phone. Meno called her again, and a faint vibration answered from somewhere in the room. He ended the call, dialed again, and followed the buzz with Thorn until they both ended up beside the built-in heater.

"This is getting spooky," Thorn said.

"Just what happened?"

"You can leave if you want to. You don't have to take this kind of risk."

"Shut up. Do you take me for a pussy? If the crew pumps, I pump harder." They worked around the heater until Meno caught a thin black edge behind the casing. He reached into the gap and pulled out a phone that had been wedged deep between the unit and the wall. Rina's phone. Nobody had dropped it there, and the cleaning staff had not simply missed it. Someone had hidden it. Meno's internal raid warning went red. The obvious problem was that he had no idea who had done the hiding.

Someone could have left the phone there as bait, or Rina could have shoved it out of sight because she knew she was about to lose it. Either route made everything on the device worth checking. After that, they needed City Hall. Grandpa's access point was somewhere beneath the building, and Meno doubted the front desk would solve this one by letting him rent the basement for a day. Meno finally had a dungeon again.