Authors: Michelle Gagnon
Which worked to his advantage. Peter was still blown away by how easy it had been to simply stroll inside. Over the past four months, he’d devoted hundreds of hours to scaling the extensive firewalls that protected Pike & Dolan’s data.
Turns out all he had to do was knock at the front door. Peter shook his head in wonder. Humans were so much less reliable than computers.
Choosing a server on the next-to-last bank, he opened the front panel and knelt down. He carefully installed the device into a port about six inches off the ground. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d notice unless you were looking for it. And if he was lucky, no one would find it until he’d gotten what he needed.
The sound of a door opening and closing set his heart hammering. Peter quickly straightened and closed the cabinet, trying to still his trembling hands. He scurried along the row, almost crashing into Terri as he emerged in the main aisle. She raised a sparkling hand to her chest in alarm and said, “Christ, you nearly gave me a coronary,” her Boston accent twice as thick as it had been minutes earlier.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“Whatcha doing back there?” she asked, eyeing him suspiciously.
Keeping his eyes down, he muttered a string of incoherent sentences peppered liberally with every techie term he could come up with on the fly. Terri impatiently waved for him to shut up. “Whatever,” she said. “You fixed it?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he muttered.
“Really? What was wrong?” She scanned the room behind him curiously, clearly trying to figure out where he’d just been. “My boss gave me hell, by the way. Said I wasn’t supposed to let you out of my sight.” She glared at him, as if it was his fault that she hadn’t been able to sneak out for a latte.
“Sorry,” he said again.
“You apologize too much, you know that?”
“Sorry.”
Terri laughed sharply. “Okay, well. If you’re sure it’s fixed.” She smoothed her dress and said, “I’ll walk you out.”
Peter was careful to keep his head down as she led him briskly back to the lobby.
Minutes later, Peter was trotting to the nearest T station. From there, he’d switch trains a few times before returning to his car. Paranoid, maybe, but he wanted to make sure no one had followed him.
The thought of what his little device might already be intercepting added a bounce to his step. If the plan succeeded, he and Noa might finally get enough information to deal a fatal blow to Pike & Dolan, burying them. Peter practically felt like bursting into song.
T
he garage door opened and Zeke drove the van inside. Noa sat in the passenger seat, quiet and pensive.
“You all right?”
She turned to find Zeke looking at her with concern. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She paused. “That was a good one today, right?”
“Definitely.” He turned off the ignition. “If Peter hadn’t found out that P&D was sending a squad here, Teo would be lying on a table right now getting his chest sliced open.”
“Yeah, I know. Lucky he intercepted that email.” Noa rubbed her wrist. For nearly her entire life she’d worn a jade bracelet, one of the last gifts her parents had given her. She’d awoken on an operating table four months ago to find it gone, the final vestige of her past life stolen. She missed the bracelet more than everything else combined. Whenever she felt stressed, she’d still catch herself reflexively touching the skin it had once rested against.
“Something’s still bothering you,” Zeke noted.
“I just feel like we’re not doing enough,” she admitted. “We saved one kid today, but they might have gotten a dozen more, and we’ll never even know for sure.”
“That’s why we took one of their guys, right? Maybe he’ll tell us.”
“Maybe,” Noa said, although she privately doubted he’d say anything. Much as she hated Pike & Dolan, she had to admit they knew their stuff when it came to hiring shadowy mercenary types.
“So what do we do with him after?” Zeke asked.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Noa admitted, lowering her voice so that the group in the back of the van couldn’t hear. She’d discovered that a big part of leadership involved acting like you always knew what you were doing. Zeke was the only person she shared her doubts with. “I guess we just drop him somewhere when we’re pulling out.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he said comfortingly. “We always do.”
Noa didn’t answer. The van door slid open behind them, kids chattering as they piled out. She sometimes felt like she was trapped in a play, in a role she was ill suited for. These teens expected her to have answers for everything, down to what they’d be eating for dinner. It was a lot more exhausting than she’d ever have imagined, especially since six months ago she basically had been a hermit living alone in a studio apartment.
But it wasn’t like she had a choice in the matter. No one else was doing anything to save these kids.
“C’mon,” Zeke said, nudging her arm. “Let’s get inside. I’m starving.”
“Hey, Noa. What do you want us to do with this guy?”
Noa turned to find Janiqua standing at her window. She swiveled in her seat and looked into the rear of the van. The guy was still rolled up in the tarp, bound and gagged, with a black pillowcase over his head.
“Leave him for now,” she said, forcing some authority into her voice. “We’ll deal with him after dinner.”
Janiqua nodded briskly and went inside the house. Noa took a second to gather herself—the kids were probably already going over every minute detail about the raid. After that there would be questions: What would they do with the prisoner, where were they going next . . . She felt a wave of fatigue coming on, and tried to fight it back. Ever since Pike & Dolan had experimented on her, Noa suffered from weird physical side effects: She slept less, but exhaustion would overcome her unexpectedly. She only needed to eat every few days, but when she did, she’d consume mass amounts of food in a single sitting. And she healed much faster than normal; sometimes a deep cut vanished after just a day.
She’d learned to manage; deep-breathing exercises usually helped with the fatigue, and she was careful not to gorge when the others were around. They seemed to sense that there was something different about her, though. That was probably part of the reason they followed her.
Unconsciously, Noa’s hand drifted to her chest. A little over four months ago, P&D had transplanted an extra thymus in her chest, which partly explained why she’d undergone all these strange changes. But she was no closer to finding out exactly what that meant. All she knew for certain was that their experiments were continuing. And that the same people who had used her as a guinea pig were still determined to find her.
There was a muffled noise from the backseat. Noa watched in the rearview mirror as the guy struggled, trying to shift up to sitting. Her eyes narrowed; better make sure he was still tightly secured—the last thing she needed was for him to escape. She slipped into the back and checked the zip ties on his wrists and ankles. Out of curiosity, she lifted a corner of the pillowcase to get a look at him.
She immediately shied back in horror. Noa knew this guy; he’d chased her through Brookline high school last fall. Nearly caught her, too.
His eyes also widened in recognition, then narrowed to slits. He tried to say something, but the duct tape on his mouth muffled it.
She collected herself, trying to repress the sudden flash of panic.
He’s tied up
, she reminded herself. He couldn’t hurt her now. “Nice to see you again, too,” Noa said. “You’re not getting out of here, so you might as well chill.”
The guy glared at her. Noa dropped the pillowcase and said, “Behave yourself, and we might even feed you. Chili tonight. Should be pretty good.”
She climbed out of the van. In front of her, a plain wooden door led into the kitchen. They were hunkered down in a foreclosed house in Oakland. It was in a seriously sketchy neighborhood, on a street where half the residents had been forced out when they couldn’t pay their mortgages. So far, no one appeared to have noticed the group of scraggly kids squatting there. But it had been a few days, and staying in the same place for too long increased the chances that they’d be discovered by the cops, or worse. They’d need to move on soon.
But first things first. Noa squared her shoulders, girding herself. Time to face the troops.
Can’t talk 4 long
.
Yeah I know
, Peter typed.
U ok?
Having a blast, got a new gold ring u’d like. Plus a silver one.
Peter Gregory frowned at his laptop screen. “Crap,” he muttered.
“What is it?” Amanda asked, coming to peer over his shoulder.
Peter resisted the urge to close the laptop so she couldn’t see. He’d been surprised to find Amanda hanging out in his room when he got home; surprised, and a little frustrated, since it meant he’d have wait to see if his device was working. She’d been acting weird and edgy, though, so he hadn’t had the heart to turn her away.
But then Noa had logged onto The Quad to chat about her latest operation. The Quad was a virtual message board that only the best hackers in the world were privy to. Theoretically, only he and Noa had access to the private chat rooms they established there with password-authenticated key codes. Still, they were careful to converse in cipher.
And now his ex-girlfriend was squinting over his shoulder while he tried to find out how everything had gone. Peter shifted slightly to block her view.
“Is anything wrong?” Amanda asked.
“Not really.” Peter debated how much to tell her. Amanda knew a bit about what Noa was doing on the West Coast, but he stopped short of sharing details. Not that he didn’t trust her, but it would have felt like a betrayal of Noa’s confidence. “They stopped another abduction. But they took a prisoner.”
“That was stupid,” Amanda said disapprovingly. “One of the commandos?”
“I think so. Noa said she might, but I thought I’d talked her out of it.”
More words flooded on-screen:
Deciding where 2 go next, you still vote 4 the canyon?
Peter got a flash of Noa hunched over a keyboard, choppy black hair swinging forward to curtain her face. It had been four months since he’d seen her, but he still thought about her almost constantly. Although it was getting harder and harder to remember the exact shade of green her eyes were, or how her voice sounded. . . .
“What’s the canyon?” Amanda asked, shaking him out of his reverie.
“What? Nothing,” he muttered. “Listen, can you give me a minute?”
“Oh, sure,” Amanda said, clearly miffed. “Wouldn’t want to get in your way.”
“You’re not,” Peter said defensively. “I just hate people reading over my shoulder.”
“You never used to,” Amanda grumbled as she flopped back down on his bed.
Peter rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. Even though they’d broken up months ago, Amanda still had a knack for making him feel like a bad boyfriend. He bit back a retort and focused on his keyboard.
Still there?
Noa typed.
Yeah,
Peter wrote back hurriedly.
Sorry. Canyon is a go.
Gr8, thx.
2 days?
2 days.
He hesitated, then added,
b safe.
But she’d already logged off.
Repressing an inexplicable sense of loss, Peter closed the laptop. It felt like more than a virtual link had been severed. Even though they never stayed online for more than a few minutes, it helped him feel connected to her and what they were doing. Which was important, because sometimes Peter felt like he was watching a kid who looked and sounded like him living his life on the other side of a pane of glass.
He’d first met Noa in person four months ago. Before that, she’d been an occasional participant in the hacktivist group /ALLIANCE/ that he’d established to punish internet bullies, child and animal abusers, and anyone else who took advantage of the weak and powerless.
Through a fluke of fate, the two of them had stumbled across P&D’s secret research project, Project Persephone. The goal was to find a cure for PEMA, a disease that afflicted tens of thousands of teenagers. Peter’s own brother had died from it; it was always fatal. And sure, a cure would be great—but kidnapping former foster kids and treating them like lab rats wasn’t the way to go about finding one. Noa had been one of P&D’s test subjects, until she escaped. Luckily, they hadn’t infected her with PEMA. But she hadn’t emerged unscathed, either.
And even though the two of them had managed to lure the FBI to a lab filled with victims of those experiments—in pieces—none of it had come to light. Which meant that someone powerful enough to call off the FBI was involved.
And that scared the hell out of him.
“So she has a hostage now,” Amanda commented. Peter turned to find her flipping through a back issue of
World Soccer Magazine
.
“I wouldn’t call it that,” Peter said with a frown.
“No? What would you call it, then?” she challenged, eyeing him.
Peter shrugged. “She just wants to get some information. The last few labs they raided, the kids inside were already dead. She wants to know why.”
“And she thinks this guy will actually tell her?” Amanda snorted. “What’s Noa going to do, torture him?”
“Of course not,” Peter said, although privately he wondered. While he’d been going through the motions of being a normal high school senior, Noa had been living on the streets again, facing off against armed thugs in raids on top- secret labs. Maybe nonviolent retaliation just wasn’t viable for her anymore.
Peter couldn’t repress the sense that his life was unbearably dull in comparison.
Which was why he’d risked infiltrating that server room. Hopefully it was already funneling mass amounts of information to him via a remote server in Hungary.
Somewhere in there he was hoping to find concrete proof of what Pike & Dolan was up to, including locations of all their secret labs, names of kids they were targeting, and what their experiments actually entailed. Maybe he’d even discover why Noa had developed such weird symptoms after they gave her an extra thymus.
He should have told her about the packet sniffer. If she’d known he was close to accessing all that information, she might not have taken a prisoner.
The fact that she’d put her group in more danger, especially when it could have been avoided, just added to his discomfort.
“Well, I think she’s wasting her time,” Amanda declared.
Peter shifted uncomfortably. If Amanda hadn’t been the one to initiate their breakup, he would have suspected that she was jealous. Even though Amanda had made it pretty clear that she only wanted to be friends, her mouth always got tight whenever he talked about Noa.
“So what’s the canyon?” she asked again.
Peter cracked his knuckles, trying to figure out a way to say that it was none of her business without setting her off. “Nothing, really.”
“Phoenix.” Amanda tossed a wave of honey-blond hair over her shoulder as she continued, “That’s where she’s headed next, right? You found another lab there?”
Peter tried not to react—sometimes Amanda was too damn smart for her own good. “I’m not supposed to say.”
Amanda rolled her eyes and flipped onto her back, scooping up the magazine again as she said, “Right. The canyon. Brilliant code you two came up with. You should tell her to just let the guy go.”
Peter chose not to respond. Noa was going to do whatever she wanted, no matter what he said.
It was frustrating, just sitting here waiting for news all the time. And he never got to hear much about the raids, thanks to their security protocols. All Noa usually sent were coded numbers of saved kids (gold rings) along with veiled questions about future targets. Amanda was right: Phoenix was next; the last time he’d hopped P&D’s firewall, he’d found indicators of a major lab there. With any luck, his sniffer would provide specifics, and he wouldn’t have to waste any more valuable time circumnavigating the increasingly sophisticated firewalls.
And this time, maybe there would still be kids left to save.
Peter sighed. All this cloak and dagger stuff was exhausting.
“You want to go to a movie tonight?” Amanda asked abruptly.
“What?” he said, startled.
Amanda frowned at him. The gesture created a little crinkle between her brows that he’d always secretly loved. “A movie. You know, where you get popcorn and watch things on a giant screen.”
“I’ve kind of got a lot to do here,” he said, gesturing to the computer.