The facility was quiet at night. Ale had the sense not to host parties here outside daylight hours, the witches had finally agreed to stop turning up whenever they felt like it, and since they'd found a solid lead on the artifact everyone had been sleeping soundly. There was only the gentle hum of the refrigerator in the communal kitchen to break the silence.
And, tonight, there was rapid clicking and tapping from Zerax's room. She'd started out trying not to make any noise, in case she woke someone, but she was far enough from the other bedrooms and after a while frustration had overridden self-control.
She couldn't sleep. Technically Zerax didn't need to sleep, or at least not as frequently as an organic being, but when she'd worked for her creator she hadn't been allowed to sleep unnecessarily, to maximize work done; she relished being able to do it now. But she'd had a stressful encounter with the self-proclaimed "tech witch" Lucius earlier today, and while it had been resolved to the degree that it could be, it still tugged at her mind in unoccupied moments, keeping her awake. To ward it off she was playing a game.
Trying to play a game, anyway, but the software was working against her. She was bored and confined by the linear story path and was currently trying to glitch her way into areas she wasn't supposed to be able to reach, but this particular game seemed better designed than the last few she'd tried, and she was tired, anyway. Her last few attempts had just killed her character and, since she hadn't bothered to save, sent her back to the beginning of the boring linear path again.
After one more failed attempt, she closed the game in irritation and went to check her email, just for something else to do. She was rapidly approaching the point of insomnia at which the next day is already ruined and so staying up an hour or two more doesn't seem so bad.
There was an email from the professor. Her creator.
She'd shoved her laptop to the foot of the bed and scrambled back in the opposite direction before she even fully processed what she'd read. What did he want? How had he even found her? He couldn't make any demands of her, the
nerve, she had a life and a job and
friends and she didn't need—
Stop. Reality check. How could the professor have gotten her email address? Her email address which wasn't posted on the conference's website and was only known by people she trusted or people who didn't even know where she was from. She didn't trust without hard evidence, and as for the latter group, it was hard to imagine any argument that would convince a normal person to put him in contact with her. "Your contact with the Naturalist Colloquium is actually my property, and I need you to give me her contact information so I can retrieve her." Absurd.
Conclusion: it wasn't really from the professor. But then who was it from? The address was correct, the preview of the message was convincing. Who would go to this much trouble for a scam? Not to mention the amount of digging they'd have to do to even learn this about her in the first place. It was also absurd, yet it was the only explanation she could think of.
Only one way to find out what was going on. She opened the email and downloaded the attachment.