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series.
    “If you’re going to lie,” Sully said, “keep it simple, logical, and something you can remember.”
    Like Ross Winthrop, an alias used by Gabriel Ross Sullivan, whose father’s name was Winthrop.
    “So do you think Meevel’s skilled enough to have safeguarded his files with a triptych?” I asked, leaning back so Sully could view the entire screen again.
    “If he’s brash enough to think he can play with the Farosians behind my back then, yeah, he’d start investing in some serious fail-safes. Let me take a look.”
    I slid out of the seat. I’d been working on Gregor’s files for almost two hours and it felt good to stand. I grabbed the plate with the remnants of the bright-apple meal and stepped toward the galley alcove, thinking of Thad. I reminded myself that Drogue would shortly be alerted to the situation. That was a good start. Though I longed to send Thad a message myself, it would only make things worse. Even if Thad and I never experienced that psychic bond siblings are supposed to have, I prayed he knew that I was not abandoning him. Sully and I would do everything we could to help.
    I shoved the dish into the recyc and latched it, then leaned my palms against the counter and stretched out the backs of my calves. I should probably head down to the Karn ’s small gym, work off some stress on the treadmill—
    “Well, this is interesting.”
    I rounded the counter separating the galley and the main room, then sprinted the few short steps to the desk and Sully’s side. He’d opened the account labeled One. And as no icons flashed wildly and no random codes streamed across any of the databoxes, either there were no fail-safes or Sully had disabled them.
    Disabled, his voice confirmed in my mind. Easy. I’ll show you later what you missed. Then out loud to make sure I didn’t miss his distinctly affronted tone: “And you complain about my gambling.”
    Gregor was in deep trouble, as evidenced by a series of notes sent to him demanding money, and others he’d sent to friends and crew, asking for loans. Nothing about the Farosians, but Blaine’s Justice Wardens could well have provided an answer to some of Gregor’s financial problems.
    “And I pay Gregor well. Better than I should, considering…” Sully let his word trail off and leaned away from the screen, as if disgusted by what he saw there.
    “So you think he sold out our location for money?”
    “Likely.”
    “You want to confront him.” I could feel the tension emanating off him. “Unless you’re willing to lock him in the brig until we get to Narfial, and then risk letting him off there with all he knows—”
    “After I confront him, he’ll know very little.” Dark eyes glanced up at me, narrowed.
    Yes, Sully could do that, wipe a mind clean of its past. While I hadn’t forgotten that, it wasn’t something I liked to dwell on.
    “That’s why I have to wait for him to make a few more moves,” he continued, his focus back on the screen again. “I need his contacts, and I need to know what he’s promised them. Now let’s see what’s in box number two.”
    Boxes Two and Three held more interesting information. Gregor had been researching Ragkirils and ways to counter a mind-probe. Those files dated back several months, though, to when Sully and Ren questioned the crew. Neither Sully nor I could tell if Gregor had been thinking back then of contacting the Farosians and feared Ren might find out, or if this was simply in response to Sully’s interviews with him.
    Sully perused the mind-probe-blocking recommendations Gregor found. “Wasted time and money on those,” he scoffed and left it at that.
    More recent transmits showed that the Farosians were providing money. Though there wasn’t any one transmit that said that in blatant detail, the missives for “special packages” and “important contributions” from an aunt and uncle Gregor didn’t have told it all.
    I used the data Sully found to locate records