Café guy’s face was bright red and he was panting. “Got you,” he gasped.
His friend stood behind him, grinning. Café guy slowly got up, keeping his hand wrapped around her upper arm. He jerked Noa painfully to her feet, wrenching her arm hard and twisting it behind her back. “Make a noise,” he said, “and I swear to God I’ll kill you.”
“Hey,” the other guy said, “remember—”
“Yeah, well, they didn’t have to chase this little bitch down,” café guy said. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
They started down the hall. Noa felt tears welling up. She fought them back down. It was bad enough they’d caught her again; she wouldn’t give them the benefit of seeing her cry, too.
And then, the alarm started to blare. Two shorts and a long, two shorts and a long. Not a standard fire drill. Noa broke into a grin.
The two guys froze, looking at each other. “C’mon,” the guy holding her arm said, hurrying her toward the stairwell.
“It’s a campus breach,” she said calmly. “No one in or out until the cops come.”
“What?” Café guy tightened his grip and Noa winced, almost crying out.
“They’ve gone into lockdown mode. They know you’re here,” she explained. “Next comes SWAT. After all the school shootings, they don’t take any chances.”
The other guy cursed under his breath. Noa felt eyes watching them, and turned her head. A teacher was peering through the small window in her classroom door. She held a cell phone to her ear and her lips were moving rapidly.
“We have to get out of here,” café guy muttered, looking around wildly.
“Hey!” A male teacher emerged from a classroom down the hall, and Noa’s heart sank. She tried to mentally will him away. “Let her go!”
The guys holding her didn’t seem to know how to react. “It’s okay, sir,” café guy called out.
“It doesn’t look okay.” The teacher jabbed a finger at them, like they were misbehaving and he was about to assign detention. Noa recognized him as her former chemistry teacher, Mr. Gannon. She couldn’t tell if he remembered her—it didn’t seem like it; all his attention was focused on the men holding her. “Just let her go. You do that, they’ll go easier on you.”
Noa could sense them wavering, trying to decide what to do next. Café guy’s eyes were darting around, like he suddenly realized that even though the hall was empty, there were eyes at every door, a whole slew of witnesses. They both seemed to be waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
Noa felt the grip on her arm ease slightly. “She’s not a student here, sir,” café guy said. “She’s our responsibility.”
Mr. Gannon’s eyes narrowed. “Bullshit. Now let her go.”
Another door opened. Apparently emboldened by Gannon’s stance, a chubby man with a thick mustache who Noa recognized as the Spanish teacher stepped into the hall. Then another door opened. This time a middle-aged woman in a tweed skirt stepped out. Determinedly she held up a cell phone and said, “I’m recording this! Let her go now!”
“Just relax …” Café guy looked lost. He edged backward a step.
Noa wrenched away from him. Her arm twisted painfully in its socket, but slipped free. Without pausing she dashed down the hall past Mr. Gannon. Kept going until she’d almost reached the next stairwell.
“In here!” someone shouted.
Noa turned. The last door on her left was open, and a young, pretty teacher was frantically waving her in. Noa pivoted quickly and darted inside. The door slammed behind her, bolt turned. As she stood there panting, the sound of something scraping, orders being given. A hand on her shoulder.
Noa turned and found the pretty teacher looking up at her. She was blond, probably not much older than her. She looked absolutely terrified. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?” Her voice was high-pitched, strained. Like she was trying really hard not to scream.
“I’m fine,” Noa said. They’d blockaded the door with two desks set on top of each other.
The teacher followed her eyes to the ad-hoc barricade. She wrung her hands and said, “I think that will hold them. The doors are strong; they had them replaced a few years ago. And the police will be here soon, don’t you think?”
There was a group of about twenty students clustered at the far end of the room away from the door. It was the health ed classroom; the walls were papered with enormous diagrams of human reproductive systems.
“Sure,” Noa said. “It’ll be fine.”
She could feel the weight of the other kids’ eyes on her, and heard them whispering.
The teacher cleared her throat, sounding slightly calmer as she said, “Why don’t you go stand with the other students. I’ll just call in and see if … well, I’ll call.”
Noa obediently went to the back of the room as the teacher fumbled with the phone mounted on the wall by the pencil sharpener. It took three tries for her to dial the number with trembling fingers; then she spoke in a low, urgent voice.
“I remember you.”
Noa turned.
The words had been spoken by a small brunette wearing glasses with thick black rims, multicolored stockings, and a rainbow skirt. She looked vaguely familiar, but Noa couldn’t place her.
“Art class sophomore year,” the girl explained.
“Right,” Noa said, still not remembering.
The other students remained silent.
“You kind of sucked at art,” the girl said. “But you were good at computers.”
“Yeah,” Noa said. “I hated art.”
“I thought you dropped out.” The girl’s eyes shifted away.
“You just, like, never came back.”
“Well.” Noa looked toward the door. “I’m back now.”
A knock at the door. No one spoke. The teacher looked ready to dissolve in tears.
“Brookline PD!” a voice on the other side shouted. “You okay in there?”
“We’re fine,” the teacher called back, relief flooding her voice. “But … how do I know it’s the police?”
“Come see for yourself, miss.”
Tentatively, the teacher went to the door. She bent over, peering between the legs of the desk to see out the little window. “Oh, thank God!” She whipped around and said, “Help me move these desks so they can get in!”
Five minutes later, Noa was filing out of the building in a sea of high-school students. Everyone was extraordinarily subdued, although a wave of chatter murmured through. Rumors flew about why the alarm had sounded, and whether or not classes would be canceled for the rest of the day.
The police had established a perimeter around the school. On the other side of it, a crowd composed predominantly of terrified-looking parents had gathered. The students were herded onto the baseball field. Most immediately broke off into clusters, or started to search the crowd for their parents.
Noa stayed with them until she reached a copse of trees at the edge of the field. She scanned the scene, but no one seemed to be paying any attention to her. The girl in the glasses and tights was weeping on the shoulder of a woman wearing a voluminous dress.
Noa hurried to the sidewalk and turned left, headed toward the T green line. Every half block or so she turned, but couldn’t spot anyone following her.
As she walked, Noa tried to figure out where to go next. They’d managed to cut off access to her cash, which was a serious problem. But there was someone who might be able to help.
If he wasn’t too angry with her.
To guard against another surprise visit from Mason, Peter stayed on the move. He was making a circuit of the campus computer labs scattered around town. It took some time to get from MIT to Harvard to BC, but at this hour all the buildings were open and no one blinked when he sauntered in and sat down at a terminal.
Not that Peter was actively involved in what was happening now; he’d need some serious processing strength for that, and most of these computers fell short. But he definitely didn’t want t
o miss seeing the raid unfold.
He checked on AMRF’s website a few times and was pleased to note that it was becoming progressively sluggish. By his third stop, the Boston College computer lab, the site failed entirely—there was simply nothing left.
Peter glanced at his watch—the entire dismantling of what appeared to be an airtight system had taken under three hours. He was duly impressed by the skill set of his /ALLIANCE/ minions.
Peter had taken the precaution of setting up a separate data account on an overseas network. Logging in, he saw that Loki was already uploading files. He’d volunteered to lead the assault once Peter explained that he wouldn’t have the tools required at his disposal. Peter sent him an IM invite.
Everything cool? he asked.
Loki responded immediately: Harder than I thought, but yeah. Revised HBGary model worked like a charm. Sent a list of all companies affiliated with the AMRF domain—brace yourself, there’s a lot of them. It’ll take some time to upload data, there’s a ton of gigs here. You got enough space?
Yeah. Thanks for this.
No worries. Let’s not make a habit of it.
Gotcha. Later.
Peter watched the database fill. Sixty gigs and counting—holy crap, he thought. Loki wasn’t kidding; this was a massive amount of data. What the hell could it be? Was this all related to Project Persephone, or something else? What was AMRF actually doing?
Peter quickly realized he might need to set up a separate account on another server to hold all the data. He fervently hoped that AMRF hadn’t sufficiently backed up, and would lose everything. He wished he could be there to see Mason’s face when he found out what happened. He’d kicked the hornet’s nest, that’s for sure.
And the way they’d gone about it was fairly ingenious. Of course, they were just replicating a raid that had been done last year. Part of him couldn’t believe it had actually still worked. In the wake of the HBGary fiasco, you’d think that every company on the planet would have taken stricter security measures.
When Peter discovered during his probes of the firewall that the AMRF site used a third-party CMS, it gave him an idea.
There was an international online community that went by the name “Anonymous,” a wink to comments posted anonymously on blogs and in chat rooms. Although it wasn’t an official “group,” per se; more of a loose coalition that operated almost like sleeper cells.
Anonymous members had claimed responsibility for all sorts of hacktivist raids, from defacing the Australian prime minister’s website after he advocated internet censorship, to assaults on credit card websites after they blocked donations to WikiLeaks.
But their HBGary raid had really impressed Peter. A year earlier, the head of HBGary, a major computer security firm, threatened to reveal the identities of Anonymous members. Before he could, Anonymous members hacked into the company’s servers and publicly posted in-house emails, destroyed stored data, and defaced the website.
They made it clear that they’d only assaulted HBGary because they felt backed into a corner. Peter was fascinated by what they’d done, and read up on all their other hacktivism. A lot of it was amateur stuff, simple software programs that knocked a company’s website offline.
But the HBGary security breach was something else. Hack masters used sophisticated techniques to infiltrate a company that claimed to be the leader in airtight computer security systems. Reading about it had inspired Peter to start /ALLIANCE/.
Peter had always suspected that Loki might have been a major player in Anonymous. Aside from Rain, he was clearly one of the most talented /ALLIANCE/ hackers. The fact that he’d stepped up to the plate to defend the group meant a lot. In some ways, it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him.
Peter was feeling pretty good. With the help of his minions, he’d struck back at a group of bullies who’d hassled him, taken his personal property, and systematically dismantled his brainchild.
But the good feeling evaporated as Peter pondered what to do next. He briefly felt a pang of sadness, thinking about his parents. But he wasn’t the one who had invited armed goons into their lives. He had to figure out what AMRF was all about, and how his family was involved. And for that, he needed a safe place to comb through all this data.
The great thing about bricking AMRF’s system was that with any luck, Peter had also thrown a wrench into how they’d been tracking him in the first place. Even if they managed to get everything back online, it would take at least a few hours, maybe even days. It largely depended on how proficient their IT team was.
He couldn’t start digging through the files until they finished uploading, unfortunately—and that was going slowly. Peter’s legs jiggled, and his stomach growled so loudly the girl sitting at the next terminal threw him a grin. He hadn’t eaten yet today, he realized.
Of course, after what happened with Amanda, he wasn’t very hungry. A twinge at that—he couldn’t stop picturing the way she’d looked up at that guy last night, the coldness in her voice when she spoke to him. He couldn’t believe that her feelings had shifted so quickly. In retrospect, though, maybe they hadn’t. He couldn’t honestly remember the last time she’d sounded excited when he called, or lit up when he met her for a date. Maybe he just hadn’t been paying close enough attention.
Peter shoved it out of his mind. The /ALLIANCE/ assault had succeeded, and he’d struck back at the people who had been messing with his life the past two days. Right now, that was what counted. The rest he’d figure out later.
Idly, he went back to his email in-box. At the sight of Amanda’s name, his heart leaped and he raced to open it. She might have forgotten that his phone got taken, and woke up feeling awful about the night before. Maybe she’d been trying to get in touch with him all day. Maybe it wasn’t really over.
When he saw what she’d written, it was a gut punch. Just two sentences that read: Your parents called and left a weird message on my voice mail. They want you to call them back right away.
Peter sat back and read it again. He hadn’t even realized that his parents had Amanda’s cell number. He went from feeling hurt to pissed off. That’s all she had to say? A year and a half together, and she hadn’t even signed it.
Screw her, he thought, angrily closing it out. Another email suddenly appeared: He frowned when he saw the address. It was from Rain.
Similarly terse, this one read: Need to meet and talk.
He hesitated. Rain hadn’t logged into the CYTASG chat room, which had given him another twinge of concern. No word from her for over a day now. Yet right after the raid, she rematerialized. Could he trust her? Maybe she’d been in league with Mason all along.
Peter decided that as long as he was careful, he didn’t have anything to lose by meeting her in person. Hopefully Loki had managed to get everything off AMRF’s servers before inducing the crash, but maybe she’d found something. If Rain had hopped the firewall, that meant she’d already had some time with the data.
Either way, he had to admit he was curious.
Sure. Where? he wrote back.
She responded almost immediately. Peter smiled at the meet spot—it was perfect.
See you there.
Amanda pushed through the doors into the waiting area of the Runaway Coalition. She nearly groaned out loud when she saw it was full. Crap, she thought. Doctor day. She’d completely forgotten about it. A local MD came once a month to provide free care to the teens who visited the center. It was the one time they were always swamped. The patients suffered a wide range of illnesses, from the common cold to drug withdrawal to PEMA. And most were filthy from living on the streets—the Coalition had a locker room with showers, but most didn’t take advantage of it. Amanda always figured they didn’t see any point in getting clean when they’d wind up dirty again in a few days.
Still, they came. And the Coalition provided a safe haven, even if only for a few hours each day. Perfect, Amanda thought. The one time she could have used a light day.
; Of course, it was a volunteer position. After a sleepless night, the other community service people would have called in sick. But Amanda took these hours as seriously as a job. The thought of how much her brother could have used a resource like this steeled her. She’d grit her teeth and get through it, despite her exhaustion.
As Amanda made her way through the throng, she kept her eyes on the ground—she’d learned long ago to ignore the occasional comments and catcalls. She’d been coming here since she was just fifteen years old. The place had terrified her then, a fact that she’d admitted to no one, especially her folks. Most of the kids looked years older than their age. They were universally dark and grimy, covered with piercings and tattoos. Some were already missing teeth, their cheeks carved out by hunger and addiction. It had taken a long time for her to feel comfortable here.
Mrs. Latimar was in her usual spot behind the plateglass window that separated the waiting room from the office. She was in her midsixties—a strong, brusque woman who served as the heart and soul of the Coalition. Rumor had it that she’d lost her daughter to the streets ages ago, and formed the Coalition to serve as a productive outlet for her grief. Amanda completely related to that—when she found out what had happened to her brother, she couldn’t stop blaming all the faceless people who could have helped him, and didn’t. The knowledge that they shared the same sort of loss had always made her feel close to Mrs. Latimar. Plus Amanda was the stalwart, well into her third year, while most volunteers only lasted a few months. Mrs. Latimar had even hinted that at some point, she might be able to find money in the budget to pay her. Which was nice, but not necessary. She’d come even if they charged her for the privilege.
“Morning, dear,” Mrs. Latimar said, breaking into a smile at the sight of her. She smoothed her hand over her no-nonsense ponytail. The Coalition’s office was tiny, two desks squeezed in between the filing cabinets. She watched Amanda unwrap the scarf from around her throat. “You look tired today. Everything all right?”
“Fine. I stayed up late studying for midterms,” Amanda said, avoiding her eyes. Despite the amount of time they’d spent together, she and Mrs. Latimar hadn’t ever discussed their personal lives, and she wasn’t about to start now.
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