Specter: Circuit Series Book One
Page 3
I rolled my eyes as he plopped in the chair next to me. “What’s up, bro?”
“Hey, dude.” He thrust his bag at me. “Want to touch my meat stick?”
I pulled one free of the bag and took a bite, chewing with a smirk on my face. “Is it this small? Shame.”
He flipped me off and smacked the power button on his machine, firing it up as he chewed his processed meat. I watched him type in his three passwords, a plain background appearing on the screen. He relaxed in his seat, dropping his bag of meat on his desk and popping his knuckles.
“Mischief is gonna create some mischief tonight.”
Ace and I chose the names Specter and Mischief in high school. We decided we needed code names when hacking started to become more of a lifestyle rather than a hobby. Some of my team members didn’t create a code name until they stepped in the door and were required by Cruz to do so. It basically went hand in hand with rule one.
Zelda’s code name was Jo. She decided her real name was too cool to try and one up with a pseudonym. She claimed she didn’t want to disrespect the actual Zelda like that. Because to her, video game Zelda was a real person.
August and his twin sister, Hayden, went by the names Apollo and Artemis. On this side of the circuit board, we also had a Titan, a Jester, and a Helios. All different names and all for different reasons.
Ace calling himself Mischief was a no-brainer. That’s all he did. Created Mischief. And he had one hell of a time doing it. In all honesty, it really and truly should’ve been his middle name. Ace Desmond just didn’t do him justice. Who cared if Desmond was his grandfather’s name? He was born to be and create mischief. The dude got lunch detention constantly in middle school. I doubted he even remembered what the cafeteria looked like. He was suspended so many times in high school, it was a true miracle he graduated. What they say is true, you can have it all. Ace was living the dream. Creating the highest level of mischief possible and nobody yelled at him for it. In fact, it was encouraged.
I chose Specter after one of my favorite DC comic characters. He was arguably the coolest anti-hero ever created and nobody had any idea who he was. It enraged the nerdiest parts of me. He first appeared in number forty-six of the More Fun Comic series when his alter ego was murdered by thugs and his spirit was denied entrance into the afterworld and sent back to Earth. The purpose was for him to eliminate evil.
And that’s all I wanted to do as a hacker. I longed to eliminate evil. To wipe out the bad guys by beating them at their own game. And alas, my own version of Specter was born. I kept my old comic inside my desk in case I ever needed a reminder of why I ran on four hours of sleep and a gallon Diet Coke. So far, I didn’t need the reminder.
My phone buzzed against my desk. I lifted it, finding my sister’s name flashing across the screen.
“Hey, dude?”
I turned to look at Ace, swiping my finger across the screen to open my sister’s text. “Yeah?”
“Where’s Cruz?”
“Zelda said he’d be back soon.”
“He’s probably getting another tat. That’s like the only reason he ever leaves this place. I’m still convinced he lives in the rafters.”
“He does not live in the rafters, you dumb asshole.”
He chuckled and slid closer to his desk, nodding at the phone in my hand. “Do something productive.”
“Fuck you. How do you know I’m not?”
The thirteen of us could hack into just about anything. Cell phones, ATMs, vehicles, elevators, airplanes, trains, any online store. Hell, we’ve hacked into a damn Furby before. Just to see if we could. It was all illegal, but damn if you’d ever get me to admit it was wrong. We spent our nights with eyes burning from the light of a computer screen to stop bad shit from happening in a world where bad shit was inevitable. I didn’t need my computer to eliminate evil, though it made things a shit ton easier.
“Is that a booty call?” August hollered.
“Does Wren know what a booty call is?” Zelda shouted back.
I set my phone on my desk and held up both of my middle fingers, scanning Lilah’s text quickly.
Lilah: I’m on my way to meet with a client. I’m not confident I locked the door. Can you go look?
Me: You want me to walk home to make sure you locked the door?
Lilah: Yes, please. :) you’re closer than me!
Me: omfg
Lilah: You’re my favorite brother.
I was her only brother, but that wasn’t the point. My sister did this at least once a week. If it wasn’t her forgetting to lock the door, it was her leaving a curling iron on, the coffee pot still brewing, the refrigerator open. Anything. She was scatter brained, and I meant that in the nicest way possible. She was constantly on the move, never stopped to take a breath. I worried she’d wear herself out, but I’d never seen her with bags under her eyes and never heard her complain.
“Be right back.” I stood from my chair and put my computer to sleep. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust everybody inside this room. It was just that a dude’s computer was like his underwear drawer. There were some places that were sacred to a man. A place he didn’t like others to go.
“Where you headed?” Ace asked, eyes on his screen.
“Lilah thinks she forgot to lock the front door.”
“Of course she does.” Ace shook his head. “That girl needs to stop and smell the roses every once in a while.”
I grunted in agreement and headed back towards the elevator, riding silently to the main floor and pushed out onto the street. I nodded politely at a few people who walked passed me and stopped to pet a small dog, adding another reason why I should move out soon.
Lilah wouldn’t let me have a dog.
I waved to the doorman of our building and contemplated taking the stairs, but thought better of jogging up nine flights of stairs and slid between the elevator doors just as they closed. I rode in awkward silence to the ninth floor while a couple made out against the wall beside me.
I practically barreled out of the elevator and down the hall to my apartment. As soon as I rounded the corner, spotting the entrance into my home, my feet stuttered against the carpeting. My heart rate increased to the pace of a jackhammer when I spotted the brown box sitting outside my door.
It appeared as though Lilah and I had a package. But I knew right away that wasn’t what was happening. Any packages Lilah and I received went to the desk in the lobby. We picked up anything we ordered downstairs. The package perched outside my door was special. And as I approached it, sweat pooling at my temples and dripping down my neck, I saw who it was addressed to.
SPECTER
Shallow breaths escaped in me in quick rotations. I squatted down and got a good look at my name written in permanent marker over the top of a box no bigger than the one my shoes came in and taped shut with packaging tape.
My identity as Specter was kept under wraps for a reason. Fourteen people knew who I was and what I did at Circuit when the sun went down. And I was more than positive this package didn’t come from anybody in that fourteen.
I wasn’t thinking clearly at all. I forgot about checking the front door and swiped that box off the floor. I took off down the hall and towards the elevator. It could’ve had a damn bomb in it for all I knew. Yet I took off anyway, my feet flying across the sidewalk at a pace that had me panting for breath.
I held the box tight to my chest, praying to whatever God would listen it didn’t mean what I thought it did.
Circuit was compromised.
And somehow, it was all my fault.
3
Wren
“Brother, you need to breathe.” Ace placed the heel of his hand on my back, rubbing deep circles in my lower back muscles as if I were giving birth. “You don’t even know what’s in there. Could be panties from your last hookup.”
There was a snort I was positive came from Zelda. “What last hookup?”
“Everybody shut up for a second!” Cruz’s bark w
as just as intimidating as my sister’s. It echoed off the concrete walls and silenced all thirteen of us in a nanosecond. He'd just returned from wherever the hell he was when I flew out of the elevators, hyperventilating and talking a mile a minute.
“I’m sorry.” I rushed out, my gaze focused on the way my knuckles tightened against the back of my computer chair.
“Knock it off, Wren.” Cruz clipped, studying the little box. “You did nothing wrong.” He took a long breath, dropping down into his large leather chair spaced evenly between two desks, each lined with three monitors and a flatscreen built into the table.
Cruz exuded every type of quality a leader was supposed to have. He was as hardcore as they came. Had a gaze that could make even the strongest of man’s knees weak. Ace thought it was his Puerto Rican descent, and all the tattoos that made people think twice before spewing any disrespect at him. Art covered almost every inch of his body. He had large patches of color inked across his chest and back and down his arms. Small words and scriptures covered his fingers and the tops of his hands. He had some type of mantra written in Spanish that wrapped around his neck. Due to an extremely unfortunate situation, I’d witnessed Cruz taking a shower. That’s how I knew he had tats covering his thighs and down to his toes. The crazy mother fucker had a tat on his shlong. The only part that wasn’t covered was his face.
And though it seemed like he’d spent his life savings putting ink into his body, I thought the badass persona had a lot to do with the way he held himself. During the two years I'd been part of Circuit, I hadn’t once witnessed Cruz slouching. He stood tall, shoulders pulled back and chin held high as he stared at his computer screen. When he was sitting in his big chair, his fingers flying across a keyboard faster than the rest of us combined, he didn’t get up to stretch or shake out his legs like the rest of us.
Most of Circuit joked he was a Puerto Rican robot, remembering when to blink at certain times so we all didn’t become suspicious he wasn’t made of flesh. But I knew that wasn’t true. Despite the way Cruz seemed to snap at people instead of talk, and had no family to go home to, he was soft.
I mean, yeah, he was tough as nails and wore brass knuckles over his tattooed fingers.
But he was soft when it mattered. And right now, it mattered.
I wasn’t sure how the hell I did it, but I broke the first rule.
Remain Anonymous.
“I doubt it has anything threatening in it.” Ace offered.
Cruz lifted his gaze from the box and gave Ace a stare that said he was a moron. “That’s not the situation here, mano. If this were holding a bomb, we’d probably already be dead. I’m more concerned with how this person knows Wren is Specter and why the hell they know his address.”
I swallowed thickly, wiping the sweat off the back of my neck. It wasn’t just that something in that box could be threatening to me or my team. It was that I was the one who had compromised us. I put us on the radar of some nameless, faceless person who could have easily followed me here.
The damn FBI could be above us right now, rubbing their hands together, giddy about arresting thirteen hacktivists who’ve spent years stepping on their turf and breaking the law in order to do some good.
The sound of a knife slicing open the thick cardboard sent a rough shudder down my spine. I didn’t normally act so squirrely, but my brain couldn’t comprehend the notion that I would be the reason Circuit got caught after more than ten years in production.
I wasn’t sure when exactly Cruz took over Circuit from the man who funded it and created it. I did know he was running it long before I came along. As much as Cruz was intimidating, he was even more of a mystery. Nobody knew much about him or how the hell a man whose first language was Spanish, and hacked into NASA for fun, ended up living fourteen miles from Washington DC. All I had the privilege of knowing was Cruz took over Circuit from a man who ran a multi-million dollar company. Who that man was and the name of that company was unknown to every person who was standing inside this room. Mystery man bought this building under a pseudonym, started it up, and did what he could by himself until Cruz came along and found himself a team. Anything beyond that remained a mystery.
There was only one person in the world I could think of that might know more. She lived in my apartment and had the same bright red hair as me. I never asked Lilah anything about the years she spent in love with Cruz. It wasn’t my business. If they wanted to make it my business, they would.
But they didn’t. Because Cruz couldn’t be explained. And he liked it that way.
I forced my feet to move, climbing up the three stairs to get to the platform that held Cruz’s workstation. His rightful place was in the center of the rest of us. The central processing unit we were all connected to was him. He held all of us together. If he went down, we all did. So we did our best to make sure he never did.
“Wren.” Cruz sighed, sliding the blade of his small knife back into its protective casing. “I think you’re freaking out for no reason.”
I choked on nothing. “No reason? Cruz, my identity has been compromised. I may have just fucked this whole thing up.”
Cruz held up his hand to get me to shut the hell up. A small snicker came from him. “Listen, mano, I’ve been doing this a long time. You know as well as I do we’re prepared to handle a breach. There’s no way this is the Feds.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, giving myself a death wish. “How do you know?”
He sized me up, looking up and down my lean body with a small shake of his head. “Because Marshall would’ve warned us.” He pointed at the box. “This is somebody fucking with us. So calm down before you piss in your damn pants.”
Ace’s laughter barreled out of him. He slapped my back, coming to stand beside me so we could peer into the mystery box. Cruz peeled it open slowly. I was pretty sure he did it just to drive me mad. Nobody wanted to know what the hell was in that damn box more than I did. I had almost had a heart attack over it. Almost pissed in the pants I’d just bought.
Cruz’s face twisted in confusion when he peeled back both flaps of the box. He pushed it across his desk, my neck craning so I could see what was inside. My whole face contorted when I got a good look at the contents. There was a card, tucked nicely into a crisp white envelope lying next to a pile of gift cards on a bed of blue tissue paper. All to different restaurants and department stores around town. Tentatively, I reached inside the box and lifted the card.
My hands shook with a strange surge of adrenaline as I shoved my pinky finger under the flap and tore it open. My confusion deepened when I pulled out a simple white card, folded in half. Ace let out a sound of impatience and yanked it from my hand, flipping it open. His gaze dropped when he read it and handed it back to me. My eyes scanned the sentence, brows furrowing. I pushed it across the table and watched Cruz’s brown eyes read the strange wording.
Tell everyone at Circuit I said thank you.
Cruz stood out of his chair, turning to face the rest of our team and read the card out loud. Nobody said a damn thing. The question was no longer what was inside the box, but rather who the hell was thanking us.
And why.
4
Sage
I woke with ice in my veins and sweat inside my mattress as if it were a sponge here to soak up the aftermath of my nightmare. My hair was stuck to the back of my neck with a glob of sweat, my breaths coming out in quick pants. I pressed my hand to my chest, breathing in for three seconds and letting it out for three more. It took five times of the breathing exercise I was taught in counseling before my heart rate slowed to a healthy pace.
I peeled myself off my bed, yanking off my sheets and stripping from my pajamas. I checked the clock. It was only six in the morning. Which meant I got about four hours of asleep.
It wasn’t the amount I should’ve been getting, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. I asked the universe to give me a way out of hell for almost two years straight.
They gave it to me. I coul
dn’t get greedy and keep asking for more.
I slipped into the bathroom connected to my bedroom and flipped on the sink, pressing cold water to my face. My skin was flaming, blood pumping through me at a relentless pace. Still, I was shivering. There were goosebumps along my arms, my body hair sticking straight up as if I stuck my finger in an electrical socket. When I lifted my head and gazed at the reflection I found, I saw it clear as day.
Fear.
It was etched into me like a second skin. I couldn’t remember the last time I didn’t look like I’d just seen a ghost. Eyes that were supposed to be a bright blue looked like old dishwater. My cheekbones had too much definition and my lips were cracked. I was already a naturally pale person but now it looked as though I was a phantom. A ghost of a girl I once was. And as I splashed more water on my face and slipped into the shower to rinse away the perspiration matted onto my body, I decided I was okay with that.
I asked for an angel and received a handful of them. They did their part, ripping me from a life I’d thought I’d die from. Now it was my turn to put myself back into my old one. Bulk up and show some gratitude.
I was lucky I wasn't dead.
But even as I thought it, I wondered if it were true. I hadn’t slept a full night’s sleep since I’d been home. I was incapable of stepping outside of the house without someone by my side. I hadn’t attempted to get a job or go to school. I had no interest in any hobbies.
I was stagnant.
I went to counseling with Dr. Julie three times a week and said what I felt comfortable saying. Then I came home and didn’t do anything worthy of the second chance I was given. But I had no idea how to stop the fear from crawling under my skin.
As if the universe were trying to prove a point, a bottle of shampoo crashed against the shower floor. I screamed like somebody shoved a knife in my chest and threw my hands over my mouth to attempt to muffle it. I whimpered into my palms, falling to a heap on the shower floor and crying softly.