"Can the lad still contact two other people?" Max asked Madeleine.
"Yes, but…" Madeleine paused, glancing warily at the downstairs passage on the right.
"It's risky?" Max surmised.
Madeleine nodded. "The alteration I made was meant to facilitate the sending of two waves of messages, with the second one being a contingency in case Drai's parents couldn't be reached—a prediction which turned out to be true. But I wouldn't have expected for all four recipients to be disconnected from the comm network. Truthfully, even as we're talking, we're risking detection, as it only requires someone to manually inspect my terminal activity to notice an abnormality in my encryption key, signal pattern, access history, or transmission log."
"What?" Max blurted in surprise.
Almost immediately, Drai asked, "Why didn't you tell me this operation was that risky?"
