The fears she’s been trying to push down blossom again. She swallows, then she re-reads, trying to stay calm… and something else hits her.
You’re worried about me, she writes, of all the things she could write.
Of course I’m bloody worried about you! Her skin seems to tingle, almost like when someone’s close, though she’s still alone in her room. Say you disappear next, who’s going to have to come looking for you? Me. Bloody I would have to.
Mallory stares at the words, feeling all kinds of strange.
You wouldn’t just leave it? she asks.
He doesn’t answer for several seconds, then, You won’t leave The Asker. Mallory swallows again, and she knows – she knows – she wouldn’t be able to leave Warden either. She wouldn’t, not if she didn’t know the why of it, and she’d hate it even if she did. She’d do whatever it took to find him, to make sure he was okay… but she doesn’t say that. Just realizing it makes her feel oddly vulnerable in a way she never normally does with him. Her fingers seem tied.
You wouldn’t be able to hack me, she writes instead.
Maybe not, but I could bloody well try. Then, after another pause, Echo, this is going too fast. We need to cool it down; it’s all just going too fast. Look, you said yourself you don’t even know if why he’s gone is related to the others. I’m not saying we leave him, I just think you shouldn’t rush into anything you might not be able to back out of.
A wave of exhaustion seems to hit her then. She’s been running on adrenaline and too much caffeine too long. The fight falls away and she says something she would never usually say.
What do you want me to do? she says. I don’t know what to do, so tell me.
Would you wait one more day? he asks. See if he comes back. Give yourself one more chance to avoid getting mixed up in whatever this is?
One more day, she says, and then?
Then you try and hack him, and I’ll do whatever I can to help, even join in shoveling duty when whatever shit it throws up hits the fan.
She tries to make herself think what The Asker would do. He cared about the Forum, but he also cared about its members, about ensuring they were safe – it wasn’t just what he’d said to Mallory and Scarlet about that, you could see it in his posts, in the way he interacted with newbies, always trying to build them up and bring them on. Each member mattered. Even if there is a reasonable, non-sinister explanation for why he is away, the protection of those people has fallen to Mallory now.
What would The Asker do?
The Asker is careful. The Asker doesn’t take risks. So, Mallory can’t take any, not now.
Okay, she tells Warden. I’ll wait one more day. But there is something else she needs to do in the meantime.
What would The Asker do?
No, she thinks, what did The Asker do?
She looks down at the bottom right corner of the screen, where the name Queen Scarlet is still written in grey above The Asker’s. He’d made Mallory an administrator, said there was no one he would trust more to protect the Forum. That means he trusts her instincts.
Just fricking do it, she tells herself – and then she does to his account what he did to Scarlet’s. She downgrades him from an administrator and shuts off his access to the message boards. She resets the login trail again – maybe people will ask questions about that, but it’s necessary. This is what he would do. Any account you have a doubt about, you have to shut it off. If anyone ever found the Forum who shouldn’t, the repercussions… Now, if he comes back, he can message her, and her alone – and she can reinstate everything. She also adds both The Asker’s and Scarlet’s accounts to her notification settings, so she will be emailed immediately if she gets a message from either of them.
It’s all fixable, she tells herself. She still feels hollow. She clicks out of the administration panel and back into the message boards. It’s fixable, she repeats.
***
Another day passes, going both slower and faster than Mallory wants it to. She had stayed up late again, then repeated her early Forum check before school. The Asker’s still gone and her apprehension has been building steadily throughout the day. She logs in straight after she and Jed get home, her brother starting on his math without her, though she doesn’t feel good about that. With the second login reset, one or two members on the boards are getting a little more agitated about The Asker’s absence, but Warden has been keeping up his crusade against anyone who argues with her.
Of course I’m bloody worried about you.
That’s what he had said, and the words have been bouncing round in her head a great deal since. She kept finding herself thinking about them through school, wondering if he was wondering about her too, wherever he was, wondering if he was right to be worried…
She logs out, and then goes through the motions of the afternoon, churning out an English essay on Emily Brontë and filling in a bio question sheet, before checking Jed hasn’t gone too far out on his math. He hasn’t and she feels a glow of pride for him. Afterwards, they cook pesto chicken pasta together – page eighty-two – Jed carefully chopping the onions so she doesn’t have to touch them.
And all the while the clock ticks on and she wonders… She wonders… And her nerves grow and grow till she can hardly swallow her food, though it doesn’t taste half bad…
And then she’s there, online again, and it’s been another twenty-four hours and The Asker’s name is still written in that foreboding grey.
I’m doing it then, Mallory tells Warden, her heart beating all fidgety.
I know, he replies.
It’s been two days.
I know.
I can’t leave him. She should have helped when he’d asked, but she didn’t, and now this is all she can do.
I know, Echo, Warden says. I’ll help, if you need it. Mallory feels the tingle again, running across her arms. Not saying that you’ll need it, he adds quickly. It’s just, it is The Asker.
Thank you, she writes. I’ll let you know. She minimizes the chat box.
Just calm yourself down, okay, she thinks. But it’s hard, because whatever happens, wherever The Asker is, what she’s about to do will change everything. She taps the pattern once, slowly, carefully.
Four, three, four, two.
Then she begins.
She heads into the admin panel and starts searching through the system logs, pinpointing the exact time of The Asker’s last login. When she tries to look further, though, to locate details of the device used or the IP address, she hits a wall; an error message. She tries a few different things, all of which fail. The Asker had really meant it when he’d said about safeguarding their real identities – even from administrators of the system. He’s probably got his own additional security set up on top of it as well, just like she has. Even with her account’s new access privileges, this is going to be a challenge. She presses her fingertips against each other, feeling a little rush that isn’t down to nerves or worry. Despite everything, something like this is what she’s been yearning for.
She starts trying to crack her way in. It’s complicated and clever. Scarlet had been dead right when she’d said The Asker was paranoid. Regular status-requesting interruptions from Warden don’t exactly help – he really doesn’t know the meaning of the words I’ll be quiet now, even when he’s said them – but Mallory finds herself relaxing as she does it; her shoulders, her neck, her whole body loosening from where it’s been screwing itself up into since everything started to go so wrong… This, this is good, it feels good. She is finally doing something, facing something she understands and can solve, instead of sitting and waiting. Her room fades away around her as she disappears into the characters on the screen. And it feels right and ordered and comprehensible… And, strangely, calm.
It takes a long time but, eventually, she breaks through, manages to find her way past the twists and turns to what she is looking for; an IP address. Her hands pause on the keypad. A rush of triumph trickles down from her n
eck to her gloved fingers. The address might not tell her exactly where The Asker was when he disconnected, but it should give her the general geographical area. She actually smiles, then runs the numbers through an online IP search. A location appears on the screen.
The smile falters.
It is in New York City, just like she’d expected; an area of Port Morris on the southern edge of the Bronx. There’s a fresh sting of guilt. Did someone discover him doing the very hack he’d asked her for help with? She types the location into Google Maps, setting it to the satellite image. It looks mainly industrial, like warehouses or factories, all nestled along the bank of the East River.
Crap.
There’s nowhere obvious that The Asker might have been; why would there be a hi-tech secure network – somehow connected with Scarlet and Daedalus – just for a bunch of derelict-looking buildings? She zooms in as far as she can, scanning any labels that appear, but there’s nothing, just street names and…
Her breath catches.
One of the buildings is labelled Labyrinth. In Greek mythology, the Labyrinth was a maze built by the original Daedalus. Sure, the name has since also been used in a whole load of movies and books and media, and she could be massively extrapolating a connection… but still. Mallory clicks on the link. It’s a nightclub, built inside a converted warehouse complex. Not exactly a smoking gun, but better. At least it’s a place where people generally go.
And the name…
She starts running background on the place. Nothing pops out, other than some seriously bad taste in décor and a penchant for alarmingly heavy techno music. The club was given its name by its current owner of three years, Evan Seable, who made his money on Wall Street and now seems to be having some sort of midlife crisis. From recent photographs, he actually wouldn’t look too out of place in the eighties Labyrinth movie. Somehow connected to the disappearance of five of cyber space’s most elite hackers, though? Mallory finds nothing linking either him or the club back to the more recent Daedalus.
If there was a closed network The Asker wanted to hack, the club’s security feed would be the most likely target in that area, but it still doesn’t feel right. When he’d said a location hack, she’d expected some big corporation or something… But then, if this was the lead The Asker had been following to find Scarlet, and she’d been following Daedalus the hacker… well, a seedy-looking nightclub in New York would sound about right. Jeffrey Mullins was from the Bronx, after all, though no way near Port Morris…
If, if, if.
More questions again.
She clicks back to the map. She’s zoomed in so far she can see streets, cars, tiny people even. It’s strange thinking that’s where he was – the actual person who is The Asker – that’s where he was last logged in. She could drive it in under two hours, go look around. She shivers. It’s so very real, seeing it like that, thinking that. She takes a slow breath and notes down the coordinates. Then she checks through the Forum data again for any other connection details, but there is nothing there for The Asker, nothing apart from his last log off. She can’t even find the type of device he was using. The history is clean. The Asker probably wiped it as he went. In which case, Mallory realizes with a chill, the only reason there’s one traceable position at all is that he was interrupted mid-session.
She backs out of the system logs and runs her usual checks. There are no traces running, no alarms she can find, though. The fact he hasn’t tried to stop her… She closes her eyes.
You don’t know anything for sure.
All she has is one single clue. She looks down at the address scrawled on her notepad. The last place that The Asker was The Asker.
Best Laid Plans
You want to go there, don’t you, says Warden. It’s not a question. Mallory has told him what she found from The Asker’s account. She didn’t give the details, just that it had led to an area of NYC, probably a club. Her stomach flutters.
Warden’s wrong.
She doesn’t want to go there. She wants to stay in her room with the door locked and the curtains shut, but the location is the only lead they have on The Asker. Mallory had hacked Scarlet’s account too, after she’d hacked his – she’d done one, she might as well do both – but it had been completely wiped clean. Whether Scarlet had done that herself before she left, or The Asker had done it later to protect her, she doesn’t know, but it means she has no other options left to find them electronically. If Labyrinth was where The Asker was when he logged off then maybe, just maybe, the security footage could tell them why. The place will likely be crawling with CCTV cameras and, with access to its archived footage, Mallory could search for someone actively using a phone or tablet or laptop at the same time he was – someone perhaps interrupted at that exact moment. Something happened in that club that caused him to log off for the first time in four years. She just needs to find out what.
But there’s no way to reach the footage remotely. The club runs a closed network. She’d have to be there to do it; a location hack.
She starts tapping on the desk.
I have to go, she replies. I need to tap into the security feed and it’ll have to be on site.
I can’t convince you this is a bad idea, can I? says Warden. I mean I could tell you that it could be dangerous, that you have no idea what you’re walking into, or even if it will be of any use at all, but I don’t think you’ll listen.
Mallory taps faster. Does he think she doesn’t know all these things? It doesn’t help him saying that, it doesn’t damn well help, because they have nothing else and she can’t contemplate that being it…
I’ll leave my ‘I’m a hacker’ T-shirt at home, she replies. It’ll be fine as long as I don’t go round shouting, ‘Hey, everybody, I’m Echo bloody Six.’ I’ll just be some girl no one will see.
Okay then, he answers, surprising her. She had expected more argument than that. But I’m coming too, he adds. Mallory’s heart seems to skip a few beats.
No, she replies, almost automatically.
YES, Warden answers. Two things. One; believe it or not, I care about The Asker just as much as you do. This Forum kind of changed my life and if he’s in trouble I want in with helping him out of it. Two; you don’t seem to grasp how serious this is and I really don’t trust you not to do something stupid.
Mallory stares at the words.
I get that it’s serious, she replies. That’s why I’m going.
And that’s why I’m going too, he answers. Mallory starts typing another response, this one ruder, but Warden’s addition appears before she can post hers. If you go and then you disappear, I told you, I’ll have to come looking for you anyway, so we might as well just get it over with together.
That tingling feeling floods through her again. She tries to shrug it off, but part of her wants to say yes, wants to go into this with him and not alone – it really fricking does – and that, in itself, is unnerving. She doesn’t want to go to the club at all, but if she can go with Warden, who’s smart and who understands and who she… who she trusts? But the idea terrifies her, too. Not just the logical, sensible caution against taking that huge risk to meet someone from the internet, but also just a very human fear of having the actual person who is Warden standing right in front of her, having him see her as she actually is, with no screen between them and…
Damn it.
She had turned down The Asker because he wanted to meet in person. It’s something she told herself she would never do. She doesn’t know who Warden is, not really, no matter how much she feels like she does. That’s the thing with the Forum; no faces, no accountability, and she likes that about it – but it also means you can’t verify anything. That doesn’t make a difference when the only place you interact is online and who you are there is what’s important. But it matters in person. Mallory doesn’t like to entertain the idea that Warden has ever really lied to her seriously, but he could have. He could have, and she shouldn’t forget that, no matter how much she
recoils from it. All the things she thinks she knows about him could be false and…
Crap, crap, crap…
She doesn’t know what to do again. She’s had enough of feeling that way.
I can help, Warden adds. Point number three. Maybe that should have been number one. I should have started with that. Hacking security on site, downloading a shedload of files on site, all that has risk to it. But it’s actually something I know a bit about. I may not see code the way you do, but with this, I think I can help. I’ve got an idea.
An idea? Mallory pauses. Just write something, she tells herself. At least ask him what it is. Write something!
But she doesn’t. She feels frozen.
Are you freaking out? Warden asks. He really doesn’t know when to stop talking. Maybe he just can’t. Maybe that’s how he copes with things. Maybe in the same way she can’t get a word out now, he can’t make himself stop. Is that why you’re not saying anything? Hey, I’ve got no confirmation you’re not a serial killer either, and you are definitely the more volatile of the two of us online. I’m still offering to do this, though. He's getting worked up, she can tell. The words are coming faster and faster. I told you before that you can trust me. I don’t know what else to say other than I meant it, Echo. I bloody well meant it. Please don’t do this by yourself.
And that’s what it comes down to.
Does she go to the city alone, a place she’s only been twice in her whole life, or does she believe him, let herself trust him? Her skin tingles again. She wishes it would stop. There is worry in his words. She can see it as she rereads them. She didn’t trust The Asker – that was the choice she made before, and now he’s… now he’s… she doesn’t damn well know, does she? What she does know is that if she could change it, she would.
Your idea, she says finally. What is it?
***
It’s Friday afternoon, and two days have passed since Mallory found out about the nightclub and told Warden. She’s been twitchy all through school, more so than usual. Mr Cartwright even sent her out of English for ten minutes because she couldn’t keep still. She didn’t mind – they were still doing Emily Brontë, and pretty much all the characters in Wuthering Heights were dicks who deserved what they got. Plus she’s had it with Mr Cartwright claiming he knows what Emily thought, when there’s not a way he could. Her head is too full to concentrate anyway. In every class, she’s been thinking about what’s happening later, what they’re going to do…
Echoes (US Edition) Page 10
