Echoes (US Edition)

by Laura Tisdall

  Don’t be sorry, he replies simply. It was a lot to ask – too much, really – and maybe I shouldn’t have asked at all. Your answer is probably the right one. It is certainly the most prudent.

  A kind of relief trickles through her, but it’s incomplete, marred.

  I’ll watch the Forum, she says. Whatever else you need. Anything.

  Thank you, he answers. Then, I’ve already made you an administrator. I did it earlier. You now have the same control over the Forum as I do. You could even shut it down if you wanted to. Mallory blinks, reading that again, not quite believing it. The Forum is secure, he continues. Whatever has happened to Scarlet, nothing has been compromised, but, as I said before, keeping the members here safe is my responsibility.

  So why trust me like this? She can’t help but ask it.

  Because I believe that this place means as much to you as it does to me, he answers. I wouldn’t have made you a moderator at all if I didn’t already trust you completely. Others have been here longer. He pauses, then, Also, because you are the most talented hacker I’ve ever met. The buzz shoots up her spine again, stronger this time. You don’t think quite like other people. You twist a problem around until you find the right angle to look at it to find a solution. I’ve seen it in your hacks more and more this past year. If the Forum ever does come under attack, there’s no one else I’d want running counter-security more. Myself included. I’ll still be logged in if you need me, but my focus will be elsewhere for the next few days.

  Mallory’s heart is still beating too fast. As she re-reads the words, she almost changes her mind, almost tells him that she will go with him…

  Almost…

  But…

  No… No.

  I won’t let you down, she writes instead, meaning it and feeling it. I’ll keep everyone safe. I promise.

  I know you will, he answers. Thank you, Echo.

  She bites her lip.

  And Asker, she says, whatever lead you’re following, please, be careful.

  Always am, he replies.

  Administration

  Mallory spends the next few days in a state of hyperawareness, her senses even more wired than usual. She registers every sound, every creak of a floorboard, every scuff of a shoe against the sidewalk behind her. Things that didn’t startle her before, now do. It doesn’t help that she’s pretty much been running off Red Bull and coffee since she refused The Asker’s request for help, and he made her an administrator. She’s been checking the Forum every free waking hour – and a number in which she should have been sleeping – hoping Scarlet will be back, scanning every new post for any mention of her, Daedalus or the missing hackers, and searching through all the login data she now has access to, looking for any attempt at intrusion, for anything out of place. With a member unresponsive for an unknown reason, they can’t be one hundred percent certain of the group’s secrecy any more and, though it’s unlikely anything’s been compromised, Mallory isn’t taking any risks. She’s even set up an alert system to email her cell phone at the slightest discrepancy within the system. She doesn’t ever check the Forum on her phone – it would have to utilize different service provider hotspots and that makes her uncomfortable – but, now, if a member so much as accidentally enters the wrong login details once, she will know. She still can’t shake a quiet gnawing guilt that it’s not enough, though, that regardless of what she does now, she has let The Asker down and can’t quite make up for that. It doesn’t matter that he told her it was all right, doesn’t matter that she still knows it was the sensible thing to do, she feels it all the same.

  Whatever is going on with Scarlet in real life, she doesn’t come back online. Three days pass, then four days, then five… As a precaution, The Asker resets the login protocol for ordinary members. It’s what he does if ever any requested hack goes south, or someone’s been banned. Every current member, barring Scarlet, will now be sent a new trail start point for logging in, rendering any knowledge of the old one useless. He’s also taken away Scarlet’s account’s moderator status and blocked its access to the message boards. If she – or anyone – logs back in on her profile via the back door, all they would be able to do is send a chat message to The Asker, or to Mallory. It’s all fixable when she comes back.

  If she comes back.

  Just a precaution, Mallory keeps reminding herself, repeating it like deep down she doesn’t quite believe it, but doesn’t know what to do otherwise. She just wants Scarlet to log in, to tell them she really was sick, or she went on holiday and didn’t tell them because… because of something that will make sense and wash the whole thing away. She wants it to just go back to normal. Things rarely work like that though – and thinking otherwise doesn’t change it.

  The Asker has been posting a few new smaller hacks to help tide things over with the other members, but, though always online, he’s been marked Do not disturb for more time than he hasn’t since he told Mallory his theory about what connected the four disappearances. She keeps wondering what the lead he mentioned could be, but he’s asked her specifically not to look into it herself – not to look into Daedalus at all – like he sure knows she wants to now. He said it wasn’t safe. It’s taking every ounce of her willpower to obey, but she’s determined not to let him down on two counts. They haven’t spoken much, even when he’s not been marked as busy. She’s wanted to… but then also been glad, relieved even, every time he hasn’t opened a chat with her. There’s something wrong about that.

  Yes, she just wants things to go back to normal.

  By Monday morning, she’s exhausted. On top of the late nights and how edgy everything has made her, she went running with Jed twice at the weekend, worked a long shift on Saturday and spent Sunday afternoon having a family practice with the punch bag in the yard. Roger seems to have started retreating again – just like she knew he would, she knew – but at least he’s kept helping with that. She rubs her eyes, vision blurring as she stares down at the questions Mrs Fraser-Hampton has them working on – the hawk-eyed math teacher and her damn addiction to spot testing. Mallory tries to focus. She’s had to be more careful with her answers since their discussion in the second week, but her mind is strung out. Maybe, for once, she’ll genuinely get a B. Everything’s just wound her tighter and tighter, one thing after another, with less and less to release it. When she’s on the Forum now, she doesn’t feel the freedom she always has before. She feels a weight; feels a constant, nagging worry at that stupid grey name in the corner… at The Asker being like The Asker less and less. She feels like it’s falling away from her; like the one place that is her escape, the one place she actually fits, is slipping out of her grasp and there’s not a single fricking thing she can do about it. She hasn’t even claimed a new hack since The Asker first told Scarlet and her why he was posting less of them, leaving them for the others who don’t know and might start grumbling otherwise.

  The one thing left the same is Warden. The last few nights he’s been waffling on and on, like he does, about his current favorite subject; a new safe he’s been saving up for – a fireproof Lampertz that weighs hundreds of pounds and can apparently withstand a cruise missile attack. There’s a particular model he’s found on eBay that’s ex-military use and, as he’s told Mallory repeatedly, is very unusual, not to mention ingenious and, even, just a little bit beautiful. She hasn’t told him anything about what’s going on, though she wants to, she so wants to. The Asker’s ordered her not to tell anyone else on the Forum, saying that far from serving as a warning, telling a group of elite hackers that there’s something they shouldn’t go after would be like lighting a homing beacon – and he’s right. She did, however, surreptitiously double check Warden’s views on Daedalus and anyone looking for The Reckoning – ‘utter rubbish’ and ‘a bunch of whack jobs’ – unable to forget how she’d felt when she’d imagined what it would be like if he ever left too. He knows something’s going on, though. He rarely misses things and he doesn’t bullshit; that’s part of w
hy she liked talking to him in the first place. He keeps wondering to her why The Asker’s on Do not disturb so much, why he hasn’t even replied to the documents he sent him from a hack two days ago. Mallory tries to avoid the subject, but Warden is persistent and, when it comes down to it, she just acts annoyed and says she doesn’t know either. She doesn’t like it, lying to him like that – which is dumb in itself. They hide things from each other all the time about their real lives – they have to – but this? It makes her squirm inside, makes her face flush up red, though all that’s there is a laptop screen.

  She stares down at her black-gloved hands, clamped into little fists on top of the white paper and Mrs Fraser-Hampton’s tricksy questions. Sometimes she wishes she could just turn it all off, ball herself away like the pale skin of her palms and not know what was happening outside…

  Shut up, she tells herself. It’s a dumb thing to think.

  ***

  At lunch, Mallory sits with Darlene and Heidi, leaving her usual chair’s gap. They’re already deep in conversation and she makes no attempt to join in beyond nodding hello. She tries to zone everything out, looking intently down at her bowl of ravioli and letting her eyes fuzz out of focus so it all turns into a mushy, beige blur… She can feel herself stiffening up, even so. The cafeteria is too noisy and it’s not just Darlene going on about whatever she’s going on about. There is so much shouting, so much movement. Mallory scrunches her hands into her lap, pulling her shoulders in. She’s aware, too, of Bobby Dahn sat over the other side of the room. She finds she’s somehow always aware of where he is now, always checking, just to be sure, though he still hasn’t gone near her since… since the parking lot. But she can hear his stupid, sniggering laugh, carrying all the way from where he’s sitting to where she is, that same damn laugh she heard when –

  Shut up, she thinks. Just shut up. You’re in control. You’re the one who’s fricking in control.

  ‘What about you, Mallory?’

  She looks up, startled.

  ‘What?’

  Batty Fat Heidi is gawking at her expectantly.

  ‘Where are you applying to for college?’ she asks.

  Mallory looks from her to Darlene.

  ‘Erm,’ she mumbles, ‘not sure yet.’

  ‘How can you not be sure?’ says Darlene, eyes squinting and blinking, blinking, blinking like they do when she’s reporting some scandalous bit of Top Model news. ‘You know the deadlines are coming up. Haven’t you been to look at anywhere yet?’

  Mallory shakes her head, resisting the sudden urge to throw the bowl at her.

  ‘Where are you applying?’ she asks instead – which distracts Darlene suitably. It seems she’s made extensive visits, so could give Mallory some pointers… Mallory tries to close out the sound again, to close out Darlene completely, in fact – but then she notices that Heidi is watching her, apparently not listening to the endless virtues of Ohio State either. She feels a tug of guilt. She shouldn’t have thought of her as Batty Fat Heidi just then. She’d decided she wasn’t going to any more.

  The day after the… after what happened with Bobby, the whole school had been talking about how he’d been pepper sprayed. His eyes were so red raw he couldn’t exactly deny it, but he claimed his little sister had done it as a joke. Darlene had been going on and on about it, saying how she thought it was a lie and wondering what Bobby had really done to deserve it – and, then, for the first time in the history of them eating together, Heidi had told her friend to ‘just shut the hell up’. Darlene had been so surprised that she had, and Heidi had seized the opportunity to then mention how her dad had banned Bobby from her family’s store after she’d told him he’d started the Batty Fat Heidi nickname. Mallory had felt a gratitude she didn’t quite know how to express, and she’d decided she’d never think that name again.

  She looks back at Heidi now and remembers her standing by that doorway, watching till she’d left. She nods because she doesn’t know what else to do, and Heidi smiles at her. It’s a reassuring smile. And, just in that moment, it somehow makes Mallory feel a whole world better.

  ***

  ‘You think we can win tonight, Mal?’

  ‘What?’ It’s evening that same day, and Mallory glances across at Jed, hand pausing mid-wipe on the plate she’d been drying.

  ‘The Falcons,’ he says, placing another on the drying rack. His brow crinkles. ‘They’re playing the Jets at Georgia Dome, remember.’

  Crap.

  He looks up at her expectantly. ‘I know we’ve got a lot of injuries,’ he continues, ‘but I think the home crowd might help end the losing streak. We’ve just had a tough start, that’s all.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, kiddo,’ Mallory says, nodding.

  Crap, crap, crap.

  With everything else that’s been going on, she’d forgotten it was the Falcons’ day on Monday Night Football. Her eyes flick to the clock. They’ve still got half the washing up to do. There’ll be no time to log on to the Forum again before it starts. She’d been hoping to not be too late tonight as well; her getting so tired she can’t concentrate properly isn’t helpful. That’s when you get mistakes. She puts the plate away and glances back at Jed. He’s already wearing his Falcons jersey. She should have noticed earlier, but he wears it so much anyway. She briefly considers making up that she’s got school work to do, but something in her rebels against the idea. They always watch Falcons football together. They always have, and Roger still comes alive when they do. It’s one of the few times the three of them really feel united, all rooting for the same thing, like a family should, like they used to… so Mallory doesn’t say anything. Jed’s had a rough couple of weeks, too, and she shouldn’t just go changing something like that. Connor’s been leaving him alone – she’s been checking every day – but she can see that more than his eye got hurt in that fight. She can see it in the way he takes these deep breaths before they get on the bus or when they reach the parking lot if she’s driven. She can see it in the way he focuses so hard on working that punch bag. She’ll just have to be late again, maybe not stay on so long.

  When they’re done with the dishes, she darts upstairs to grab her own jersey. She looks, once, at her laptop, but makes herself ignore it. She’d checked the Forum when she got in from school, before spending the afternoon running Spanish lines with Jed and reeling off her own history essay on Lincoln’s inauguration. Nothing had been wrong then, and with her auto-alerts, she’d have had a notification on her phone if anything had gone wrong since. The inbox is empty, so it’s still fine.

  Her jersey is a little tight for her now, clinging to the sweater she loops it over. Her grandparents had bought matching ones for her and Jed when they’d last visited them in Atlanta and gone to a Falcons home game. That was seven years ago now, not long before Roger left for his last tour. They’d bought them multiple sizes too big so they’d last – so Mallory’s still sort of fits, and Jed’s still dwarfs him. It was the only NFL game she’s ever actually been to. She’d lasted eleven and half minutes before Roger had had to take her out the stadium, balled up so tight she couldn’t stop shaking. There were just too many people, and so much noise, the air thrumming with sound. He’d carried her all the way back to his parents’ house and she’d been so out of it by that point that she’d let him. When they’d got in, he’d sat with her in his old bedroom with the door shut and the curtains closed, both of them wearing ear muffs until she’d calmed down. She remembers it. She still remembers it. She clenches her jaw, blinking too many times in a row as she heads back downstairs.

  It’s a good game. Mallory likes watching, likes running all the stats in her head and guessing the plays. She likes how much Roger cheers at the TV with Jed, how his eyes light up whenever they’re on offense, and for those three hours she almost forgets about being late for the Forum. The Falcons lose again, though – by just two points – a pair of touchdowns in the fourth not enough to save them after the Jets make a forty-three yard field goal in the f
inal play. Three defeats in a row, now. Roger’s excitement falls away like it’s something you can feel happening. He doesn’t say anything afterwards, just nods goodnight to both of them and heads up to his room. A few moments later, the opening riff of ‘Master of Puppets’ starts pumping down the stairs.

  ‘It was closer than the Patriots, at least,’ says Jed.

  ‘Yeah, kiddo,’ Mallory agrees.

  It’s almost eleven by the time she finally logs in to the Forum. Roger’s still blasting Metallica, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ filtering out through his thoroughly-not-soundproof door, so she wears unplugged headphones to cancel it out. Every other loud noise scares the crap out of him, but sustained heavy metal he can endure. Go figure. She’s exhausted, but she has to check in at least once before she goes to bed. She has to speak to Warden at least once, too. If what’s happened has taught her anything, it’s about the importance of maintaining a regular contact when people expect you to.

  She files automatically through the stages of logging in and the welcome message loads up as usual. She closes the box and checks the Forum administration panel she now has access to. The Asker really meant it when he said he’d given her the same powers as he has. She could do anything she liked there; she could access the Forum’s code, alter it if she wanted to, even lock him out. He really does trust her. The thought gives her a new trickle of energy and she searches thoroughly through the data. There have been no attempted intrusions, nothing untoward, not even a mistyped password today.

  And you would have known if there had been, she thinks, because your phone would have beeped at you, so you shouldn’t get so worked up –

  Have you seen the boards yet? The chat box from Warden pops up just as she’s finishing. She rubs her eyes, sighing. What crap has someone posted now?

  No, she replies. Just about to. What is it this time? Troubadour and Nexus threatening to hack and out each other again?