Over Exposed

by Allyson Lindt

  The memory of finding his grandmother’s body wormed its way into Max’s thoughts, and she couldn’t shake it. So much blood.... Her gut churned at the unwelcome images.

  The door swung open and crashed into the wall behind it, and her racing heart pounded against her ribs. She grinned when she saw Taylor.

  “Sorry for startling you.” He gave her a sheepish smile. “The hinges are looser than I’m used to.”

  Adrenaline rushed through her but was receding. In their code she asked, “How was traffic?”

  He dropped onto the edge of his bed, and the mattress whooshed around him. He didn’t meet her gaze. “Heavy in spots, but overall, exactly what you’d expect for this time of day.”

  That was the right answer; it meant things went well. So why was she still on edge? She knelt in front of him. Sometimes the double talk made her question too much. “You’re sure?”

  He smiled and wrapped his fingers around her wrist. With his free hand, he produced a plastic shell from his shirt pocket. A thumbnail-size memory card rested inside. He handed it over but didn’t release her. “Cross my heart.”

  They could talk openly. He didn’t think he’d been followed, and in a place like this, surrounded by so many walls and people, he’d be almost impossible to nail individually.

  “Did they meet our terms?” she asked.

  He tugged her to sit next to him. “Deposit is in the dummy account, including expenses for a week. They’ll want an estimate in three days, if you think it’s going to take longer.”

  “Is it going to take longer?” she asked.

  It was too much of a risk for him to know the details of the job, but he’d have an idea of how intensive the work was. He rubbed the back of his neck, as if the question made him uneasy. That was odd.

  “Probably. We’re going to be on this one for a while,” he said.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” She intertwined her fingers with his.

  “You know that doctor we ran into?”

  It would be a long time before she forgot. His eyes hidden behind empty lenses still haunted her, and that whole possibly-a-Null thing kept her up at night. “Yes.”

  Taylor started to speak, but no sound came out. He frowned, then shook his head. “I can’t get him out of my head, you know? Another Null, possibly Synth—it’s still bugging me.”

  “Me too.” Max tried to let his answer soothe her. “I promise to keep an ear out while I’m working.”

  He tightened his grip on her hand. “Don’t worry about it. Whatever we find, we find.”

  Chapter Five

  Taylor rested his hand on Max’s shoulder. The familiar contact didn’t comfort her the way she needed.

  He squeezed. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  The rest of yesterday afternoon had passed without incident. So why couldn’t she get rid of the uncertainty that clawed under skin?

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He traced her shoulder blade with his thumb, drawing tiny circles.

  Her alerts were in place. He’d be on his guard. There was nothing to worry about. She needed to shed the uncertainty that had followed her since the run-in with the doctor. “I’m good. See you soon?”

  He gave her one more squeeze, and then left her to work. Taylor’s job was to see the city and get a feel for it, while Max investigated the details of what they were being paid to do.

  The moment the door latched shut behind him, she slipped the memory card from their new employer into her handheld.

  Running away hadn’t helped. Sitting around moping hadn’t helped. Throwing herself into work needed to be the fast track to getting rid of this feeling of helplessness.

  She ignored the desk in favor of working on the bed. It gave her more space to shift around. Where to start? She opened the directory on the card.

  There was only one file. If she took the lack of data at face value, she’d be calling Taylor, to tell him the deal was off. Instead, giddiness made her bounce her foot against the obscenely colored comforter. She loved a challenge.

  With a tap, her screen telescoped into a holographic projection of the text document.

  A series of jumbled letters, numbers, and meaningless symbols mocked her. Corrupt data or a pattern?

  It wasn’t corrupt; it was encrypted.

  The grin that spread across her face probably made her look like a lunatic—it was a good thing no one was around to witness it. She’d received encrypted files before, but never without a key. The circuits in her brain blipped and sparked to the beat of an unheard tune.

  A puzzle. A distraction. A challenge. And all within a time limit, since she needed to figure this out before Taylor returned.

  Their livelihood was based on snagging documents their owners didn’t want anyone reading, and making them available to the public. Max had an entire drive of encryption routines she’d written in the past—some for work, some because she could. She loaded the file into the decryption app she’d built. It would check the contents against each algorithm, and alert her each time the process found matching words in the English dictionary.

  A twisted, masochistic part of her hoped she’d never encountered this before. It meant more fun. The only downside to that was, if every check ran to completion without finding something, she’d be waiting another couple of hours.

  She tapped an icon on her holoscreen, and the current window shifted left several inches, to make room for a new one on the right. Might as well catch up on the news. She alternated her gaze between the decryptor and headlines.

  Everyone was talking about P-72. It bothered her that their world revolved around things invisible to the human eye. There was a new quarantine in Omaha—a city they drove through three days earlier. How close had they been to getting caught in that? Idaho had closed its borders to all travelers, including The Church.

  Riots had broken out in Portland. Too bad—she always wanted to visit.

  Most of the time, she wondered why the comments section on any news site existed. She read each and every one, anyway. She paid the closest attention to the things people dismissed as crazy theories, fanatical rambling, fake news. Because sometimes—not often, but enough to make it worth the agony of reading—there was truth hidden in the ranting. It wasn’t always what people expected, but it was there.

  Similar to the encrypted document, a pattern emerged when a fact was buried in the fiction. She hoped to find that for P-72. The disease had come from nowhere, brought the US to its knees within weeks, and controlled much of what Taylor and Max did.

  Failed decryption after failed decryption scrolled by, as she read.

  Who wanted to go to Idaho anyway?

  I’m in Portland. Nothing burning near me.

  Why isn’t anyone visiting Omaha anymore?

  What was sticking in her head? A hint. An idea. Just out of reach.

  A chime filled the room, and her heart flipped to jackhammer mode.

  It was her messenger. She laughed in the empty room at her own jumpiness. An incoming note from OSF blipped in the lower right corner of her handheld.

  Max pulled up the conversation. OSF’s screen name stood for Overseas Freedom. Max didn’t actually know if OSF was a she any more than OSF knew Max’s gender, but it was easier to think of OSF as a she than a they.

  OSF’s message read, Things aren’t looking good in your part of the world.

  No kidding. Other countries closed their borders and placed sanctions on the US when the registration laws were enacted. Some had allowed refugees in during the early days, but since the outbreak of P-72, every country had tightened its borders. OSF was going to help Max and Taylor get out of this place. She had contacts in Hong Kong, who could help them start a new life.

  It sounded like a dream come true—getting out of here, never running again... It wasn’t so simple as saying let’s go, though. Since they wanted to vanish off the grid without a trace, they’d have to surrender this line of work. Which meant saving enough cash to live of
f, as well as to pay OSF’s contacts the fee for converting their funds into legal, untraceable currency. It also meant having to pay OSF’s immigration fee.

  Max and Taylor were close, money-wise. It was why funds for living were stretched so tight. After this job, they’d only need one or two more jobs.

  Max replied with, And that’s new, how?

  I’d laugh, but this is serious. There are new laws passing around the world.

  Fuck. Max clenched her fist, digging her nails into her palm until the sting turned to numbness. Finally, she typed, What kind of laws?

  The kind that make closed borders even more difficult to cross.

  OSF didn’t need to say more. Max could ask for details all day, but it wouldn’t change the bottom line. How long?

  Four weeks. I wish I could give you more.

  Shit. And then we’re stranded here?

  There are always loopholes, but the cost doubles.

  Considering it took years to save this much... We’ll have it.

  Glad to hear it. It’ll be nice to meet you. You’ll have the deposit details in forty-eight hours.

  That was it. Conversation over. What had Max done? There was no way they could make that kind of cash in four weeks, but they had no other choice. They couldn’t stay here long enough to double their savings, and if they didn’t make the deadline Max just committed to, they forfeited their fifty percent deposit and lost the chance to work with OSF again.

  She swallowed the acrid bile that burned up her throat, and returned to her work. Please let committing to that deadline be a good idea.

  Her encryption app completed a short while later, without finding a match. She struggled to rediscover that giddiness at the promise of a bigger challenge than she’d had in ages, but they’d run out of time.

  She blew a strand of hair out of her eyes and turned her thoughts inward, past the stress and the looming deadline and the outside world. She dove beyond, into the part of her mind that seemed to have those digital answers when she needed them the most.

  Under the bright blue ball of let’s hack something that lived in the back of her thoughts, an answer poked up its head. The solution to the encryption floated to her fingertips, and she navigated her directories using muscle memory, before she put a name to what she was looking for. She opened a random file in an old R-Sharp project and compared it to the data from the client. The file wasn’t encrypted; it was compiled like a .dll.

  She decompiled the document and stared at a brief note addressed to her. Whoever created it was clever. It wasn’t simply notes. It was a series of loops and if-thens that built the message detailing her instructions. Their employer, PharmNu, suspected their competition, IasoChem of bribing key FDA officials to get their drugs approved faster.

  One of the drugs involved in the supposed inducement was a cure for P-72. A cure? Really? Okay, so the message also said there were serious side effects, possibly worse than what they were getting rid of, but it meant a solution was close.

  The first half of her job was to find damning information on IasoChem. It wasn’t enough that PharmNu had suspicions. She was being paid to find irrefutable proof.

  The second half of the contract would be to distribute the evidence so far and wide that it couldn’t be ignored. The guy signing their checks claimed this was for the greater good. Experience told her the people filling her and Taylor’s bank account were no closer to sainthood than the company she was being paid to expose.

  Maybe this time her cynicism would be wrong. Perhaps PharmNu wanted to save the world. Before she and Taylor pursued this job, she’d compared PharmNu’s private financials to the records they made available to the stockholders, and discovered significant discrepancies. She doubted they were motivated by altruism.

  Still, doing the job meant getting paid, and the allegations against IasoChem were serious. If it was true, their cure for P-72 had a high risk of stroke, embolism, and neurological damage. The idea of something like that being given to Taylor...

  Ice slid down her spine. If he were infected, would the risk be worth the chance of a cure?

  She’d uncover the truth, she’d share it with the world, and they’d move to their next destination. She didn’t know what PharmNu said to Taylor, to give him the impression this would be a difficult job. If she wasn’t done by the time he returned, her spiders would run in the background and give her an answer by tomorrow morning.

  Taylor might not need to do surveillance. Thank God. She didn’t like the danger of him approaching employees of whatever company they were investigating, to coax them into spilling their secrets.

  Hell, if she wrapped this up today, and took another risk like snagging a job without completely vetting it, she and Taylor would make OSF’s four-week deadline without a problem.

  She scanned IasoChem’s network, their emails, their inner-office memos—it was all clean. Each new document dragged her mood further under. The clock taunted her, as it ticked away seconds, and then minutes and hours.

  Taylor would be back soon. She rarely finished a job in a day, but this wasn’t right. IasoChem was completely clean and one hundred percent above the surface. They didn’t even have something as minor as a mailroom employee guilty of privacy violations.

  She was being paid a lot to prove this company did horrific things. Instead of finding rivers of corruption, she was looking at the digital equivalent of a bleached slate. This was the most pristine corporation in the history of anything. That by itself set off every warning bell in her head, but it was the opposite of proof.

  She blinked, to get some of the moisture into her eyes. There wasn’t any evidence of tampering. She could sniff out when data had been hidden—it was as much instinct to her as breathing—but this was as if nothing was ever there.

  Time to try a different angle—satellite companies or any business partners who might be more than what they seemed. Anywhere IasoChem could hide assets or transactions. They owned other groups that didn’t share their name.

  Except it still dead-ended.

  She had one final tactic to resort to. Don’t do it.

  Too late. The idea was already there. Snooping private corporations was unethical, but as long as the target wasn’t The Church, it wasn’t considered treason under the revised Patriot Act of fifty-eight. On the other hand, digging into Food and Drug Administration computers... If anyone found her, it was a one-way trip to dead-in-a-shallow-grave town.

  Not that she’d be discovered. She forced the false arrogance through her veins. If she were the kind of person who got caught, they wouldn’t be in this business. She just needed a hint of information. A name. If she could grab any evidence at all from the FDA servers, she could trace it to IasoChem. In and out.

  She made it past the first firewall, and the muscles in her neck tightened to the point where it throbbed in her skull. Too easy. The second obstacle took longer, but not much. She was in.

  Now, where to? Every network had a methodology. A pattern that made it possible to figure out quickly where to look for what.

  Her handheld chimed with an alert sensor, and she jumped. Someone was accessing her hard drive. What the hell? She closed every connection she had to the government network.

  Her heart dropped into her shoes. No one could get into her machine. Not that she was willing to take the chance, regardless of what her ego said. She disconnected her wireless.

  Seconds later, it reactivated. Shit. She powered off her handheld. Easiest solution ever. If it wasn’t on, there was nothing to trace.

  It kicked on, as if started remotely. Fuck. She’d destroyed the remote the day she got the damn thing. Her pulse hammered in her ears, the rushing blood making it hard to think.

  She yanked the battery and tossed the device aside. Please, please don’t let it be a government tracker. She’d heard they had tight computer security, but never expected to be auto-traced. Please don’t let them know where we are.

  Worry throbbed behind her eye, insisti
ng she get back online and make sure her location was secure. She didn’t dare turn her handheld on, though. God damn it. Where was Taylor?

  She paced, but within moments, her legs refused to move. This was bad. No one had ever noticed her coming or going on a network. She didn’t leave a footprint.

  She tried to focus on relaxing. There was no reason to panic until she had more information.

  Being proactive kept her and Taylor alive, though. Crossing her fingers and hoping for the best would get them caught. She dropped to the edge of the bed and pulled her knees to her chest. The sum of her doubts and worries from the past week rushed forward in a single wave, clenching around her chest and making it hard to breathe. She needed to be rational about this. What if we’re busted? played on a loop in her head.

  The door latch clicked open, and her pulse threatened to yank her veins from her skin.

  “Max?” Taylor’s face appeared in front of her, concern etched around his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  His hands on hers drew some of the tension away. He was here. He wasn’t freaking out about something his empathy picked up on. It was okay. She just needed to convince herself of that.

  She licked her lips. “I’m fine.”

  He frowned and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Are you sure?”

  If he was asking straightforward questions, he didn’t sense anything.

  There’s another Null out there. Fuck her brain.

  “Max?”

  She couldn’t give him details, but she needed to tell him what happened. She grasped for her voice. “Someone tried to access my handheld.”

  “Fuck.” He sank onto the bed next to her. “On a scale of one to spending the rest of our lives in a Church research facility, how screwed are we?”