Heena tilted her head, considering. "Wouldn't 'X' be a better name?"
Ashton blinked, momentarily thrown off his rhythm. Then he grinned, that wild, unrestrained expression that made him look half-mad. "Oh. Yeah. That. X. Call it whatever you want—I'm sure the bastard has a dozen aliases anyway." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Point is, X is the one propping him up. Without that backing, the Bureau would've dragged him in by the scruff ages ago. Probably would've dismantled his entire operation and scattered the code to the void."
Heena tapped the table, her nails clicking a steady rhythm against the lacquered wood. An unregistered heroine system, backed by an even dirtier back-end system that didn't officially exist. The kind of shadow infrastructure that required serious resources, serious protection, and serious dirt on the right people to keep running.
This was bigger than she'd initially thought.
