Back at the villa, Holden dumped the money on Maeve's desk.
He pulled it straight out of his Inventory and let it pile up in front of her. The bounty chest's contents first, five million credits in enchanted gold spilling across the table in a blue-glowing avalanche, then brick after brick of Syndicate cash until the pile covered her keyboard, her tablet, and half of her spare monitor.
Maeve's eyes lit up.
Not with greed, but with curiosity. Her fingers were already moving before the last brick hit the table. She snatched a coin from the pile and fed it into her tablet's scanner.
"These have origin tags." Her voice had shifted to her analyst voice. "Every enchanted credit gets stamped with a transaction trail at the moment of creation. I can trace these back to the source accounts."
"How far back?"
"All the way."
The screen filled with a cascading chain of transaction records: account numbers, transfer dates, and authorization signatures.
