As I arrived at Hud’s building she was busy working on something that looked like a green face on a screen made by lines of ones and zeros. She was chewing on a piece of twig, a habit I kind of disliked; it made her entire place reek of sweet sandalwood.

“Hey there, Hud; what are you doing?” I asked her as she turned to look at me.

“Tara Duluc. It’s been a long time since I had your addicted ass in here,” she said. Before I could reply she had continued talking. “What’s this ugly green face here? It’s quite simple; I am using a compositor to enhance the

corithious lines to create a simulation of the sub-cortinal reflux field, so it can act as a host unit for all sorts of derivative variations.”
I lifted my eye brow. “Right.”

Hud noticed I had no idea what she was talking about and sighed. “A digital librarian. I’m still mapping Mikhail Fox’s data. He had a lot, it nearly fried my neurotransmitter, and we can’t have that.” She jumped down from the panel she was working on. “Not that he’s functioning yet, but when he is, just think of the possibilities it will wield.”

I could only laugh. I had somewhat missed her quirky hyperactive behavior. She looked me over and sat down at her desk, which was more or less a wall of monitors.

“So what brings the great Tara Duluc to my dark corner of the city?” she asked.

I reached into my pocket and took out the riddle. “This is what brought me here,” I said, handing her the note. She looked it over and placed it in front of her.

“You want me to solve a silly riddle?” she asked, as she gave me a weird look.
I nodded. “Exactly. I need to know the answer to it. It’s important; a girl’s life depends on it,” I replied.
She handed the note back to me. “This will take some time,” she said.
“Why can’t you just input it into whatever you use and see if something comes up?” I asked.

She shook her head. “This mainframe is not that tuned-in to human folklore, and that riddle is definitely human in origin. If it weren’t I would have recognized it.”

I shook my head in frustration as I put it back in my pocket, “I was hoping it would have been easy.”

She snorted. “Yeah, like that ever happens in thisplace.” She was right, though I hated to admit it to her. I had hoped that she would have known the riddle and could have helped me; I was still on square one. “Would that be all or is there more you’d like to know?” she asked, making it clear that she was busy and not really in the mood to be helping me.

I shook my head. “No that’s all, for now at least,” I replied as turned to leave.

“Tara,” Hud shouted after me, making me turn back to her. “Be careful. The person who left you that riddle is close to being brilliant, and the line between a genius and a madman is thin, realthin.”

Her words rang through my head, and even frightened me a little. But why should they frighten me? He was dead; electrocuted and buried by now. And he was human; no way he could come back to haunt me. He had left a riddle to show me I was incapable of saving that girl, and I was going to prove him wrong. I was going to proof him so very wrong.

“Thank you, Hud, I will be careful.” As I left her, still feeling her eyes on my back, I decided that before I doing anything else I would go to The Third Head of Cerberus, one of the local nightclubs.

Next Chapter: The third head of Cerberus