‘You take away something she cares about,’ finishes Scarlet, moving forward and draping an arm across his shoulder. It was a trap. Mallory feels hollowed. She feels cut open and, of all things, strangely embarrassed, like a child being publicly shown the naivety of having believed in something so fully.
‘Everything was set up to make you think something had happened to me,’ explains The Asker. ‘I chose Labyrinth because of its name and because it had a closed network, so you’d have to come in person. It was public and busy – somewhere you wouldn’t feel exposed – and the owner, a Wall Street hack called Seable, just happened to be in Children of Daedalus. You were right, Warden,’ he tells him, ‘the real CoD weren’t involved.’
‘Just helpfully-named, harmless little yuppies running around giving themselves tattoos,’ says Scarlet, wiping her left hand and letting the ink smudge just like it had on Weevil’s.
‘But Seable gave us use of the club,’ says The Asker, ‘and a blind eye when I told him who I really was.’
‘Fangirled worse than Jericho used to over you,’ Scarlet tells Mallory.
‘That name and that CoD connection,’ continues The Asker, ‘plus the trail I left from my account… I didn’t know for sure if you’d come, but I hoped. Sneak, Weevil and Tower all went offline as planned so I could set it up that hackers were disappearing. There were clues there and I didn’t think you’d be able to leave them unfollowed. I knew the Forum meant a lot to you and I could tell you felt guilty about turning me down.’ Mallory’s face flushes, her fists clenching tighter and tighter, so tight it’s painful. ‘I set up a silent alarm,’ he says, ‘to catch anyone logging on to the club’s system – so if you came, we’d know. We’d staged the kidnapping footage for you to find, so while you were downloading and checking it, we could work out who you were. We were waiting, watching the security feeds from laptops in the room where you found me. The plan was for Scarlet to catch you then, and blackmail your help in exchange for both of our freedoms.
‘It got to five days, though, and we were running out of time. Maybe I was wrong, maybe you weren’t coming. We started double checking everything this morning, just in case we might have missed something. Tower was the one who spotted it.’ He glances at Warden. ‘We never found your bug, but he noticed the increased data usage – someone was downloading from the system. You’d already been the night before,’ he tells Mallory, ‘and you’d done what Echo Six does and got in and out without a trace, found a loophole. We didn’t know what you’d seen yet, but we couldn’t risk you going to the police.’
‘So we sent you a little encouragement not to,’ says Scarlet. ‘It was all or nothing then.’
The ransom note, Mallory realizes, no one needed to hack The Asker’s account because he’d sent it himself. And her face burns again because, Stupid, so stupid…
‘After that,’ says The Asker, ‘we started searching through the footage for you. Still took hours, and an incident report about a locked bathroom, before we thought we’d found you. You’d brought a friend, boyfriend maybe, but it was only Echo Six we needed.’
‘No offense.’ Scarlet smiles at Warden.
‘Fuck you,’ Mallory hears him grunt, and she feels a jolt of both relief and pride.
‘By then, you still hadn’t replied to the ransom message,’ The Asker goes on, ‘but I knew you would have seen it. I started thinking… you had bettered us before. Maybe trying to trap you was the wrong way to go about it. Maybe the way to get you was to give you what you wanted. We knew you were watching now, but we didn’t look for the bug or try to stop you. Instead, we left me with only one guard and we waited.’
‘I could still have called the police,’ Mallory says, struggling to process it all.
‘But you didn’t, did you?’ Scarlet answers. ‘Because you’re arrogant, Echo, and with that ransom message… well, you care about our dear Asker here, don’t you? A lot.’ The words seem to cut Mallory, slicing through her.
‘You damn – ’ she begins, rising.
‘Stop,’ The Asker orders – and Mallory does, because he’s still got the gun, hasn’t he? Scarlet smiles. ‘You hadn’t so far,’ he says softly, ‘and I know you, Echo; you always try to fix things yourself. You don’t trust other people to do it. That’s why you’d never do co-op hacks. You need control.’ Mallory sits back down. She feels so fricking small. ‘Sneak was monitoring various police tip lines just in case, but, as Scarlet said, it was all or nothing. The picture we had of you wasn’t good enough for any facial recognition software we had access to. Weevil flashed it at the camera to give you a little extra incentive, though, I wasn’t so happy about that. I thought it might scare you off.’ Mallory remembers the shouting in the footage.
‘Worked, didn’t it?’ says Weevil.
‘You were never going to my house,’ she realizes.
‘Sugar,’ says Scarlet, ‘we don’t even know your real name. You could have disappeared and we’d never have found you. But, again, you didn’t,’ she grins. ‘That’s the beauty of it. You came and rescued The Asker like two budding little heroes and then – well, you kids know the rest.’
The Asker was never in any danger – and neither were she or Warden, until she had put them there. Every single part of it was a trap to get her to access The Reckoning for them. And she fell for it. And Warden…
Oh, damn it, Warden…
Warden, who was cautious and sensible, and shouldn’t even be there, but came because of her, and who’s now been shot because she didn’t see it, because she was too stupid to see it, because she trusted…
‘I need you to try again,’ says The Asker. She looks back at him, filling her gaze with every piece of anger and rage and hurt that she’s feeling. Everything she ever did for him, every conversation they ever had, every time she justified what she did because he said it was the right thing, all of it has become this tainted and twisted mess – maybe it always was, she just never knew it.
‘I came for you,’ she hisses, and he flinches because he knows. And it makes it all the worse because he knows what he’s done in betraying them, and he still did it, like they didn’t matter. ‘We came for you!’ she shouts, and her voice breaks, and then she’s crying because it hurts, even though she’s so fricking angry. She’s still crying, even though she doesn’t want to, not in front of them, not for him, not now. And, in that moment, his face is pained and awful, and she can see that some part of him is sorry – but it’s not enough, it’s not near enough.
‘I never wanted to hurt anyone,’ he says thickly, ‘but I need you to do this, Echo. Please,’ he tells her, walking over, crouching beside her chair like you’d do with a little kid. The smile is gone from Scarlet’s face now. There is no snide remark. ‘I need you to do this,’ The Asker repeats, ‘and I know you can, and if you do, we’ll let you go, both of you.’
‘Like hell – ’ she begins.
‘I will,’ he insists, definite. ‘Like I said, I don’t want to hurt you. That’s not what this is about.’ And, even after all that’s happened, deep down something inside of her still believes him on that. He hesitates. ‘This is more important than what I want, though, so whether you trust me on that, or not, is irrelevant. What you need to know is that if you don’t try, Echo, if you fail…’ He glances at Warden.
The meaning is clear.
Jeffrey Mullins Jr
Mallory stares at the blank screen of the laptop. The kitchen is strangely quiet now. Warden has been taken down to the basement, his leg strapped in bandages and an old T-shirt. Sneak said she’d staunched the bleeding and cleaned the wound, but he’ll need proper medical attention eventually. The bullet went right through, but she thinks it cracked his femur. He’ll be fine for the next few hours or so at least – again, she thinks – enough time for Mallory to break the unbreakable encryption and release the most destructive and insidious computer virus the world has ever seen. The whole thing makes her feel sick and it’s not just because she’s fairly sure she
can do it. Warden would hate what she’s doing to save him. Guilt wells up within her. Whatever she does, it is going to hurt people. He had looked so pasty pale when Tower and Weevil had carried him away. They wouldn’t even let her get up to go to him, had taken him out all too quickly, his face scrunched up in pain. All they’d given him was Tylenol. Two stupid pills when they’d probably shattered his femur…
Assholes. How could The Asker do it? How could he? Because he isn’t who you thought he was.
The Asker shuts the kitchen door. He’s sent Tower to guard the front, Weevil out back into the yard. It doesn’t seem like anyone reported a gunshot – the makeshift silencer seeming to have done enough. The cops would have been there by now, but they’re still being careful. Sneak is with Warden.
‘There’s a bed in the basement,’ The Asker tells Mallory. ‘Warden should be more comfortable there.’ He says it like he still cares what she thinks, and it makes her insides twist. It’s like he wants her to know that he’s thought about that, like he still thinks he can convince her that he’s not a bad person and that what he’s doing is right and all for some greater good.
He can go to hell.
She doesn’t even look at him, just stares at the laptop. It’s just him and Scarlet in the room with her now; The Asker armed with the gun, Scarlet with the BB she’d found in Warden’s backpack and said was ‘cute’.
‘What I don’t get,’ says Mallory, eyes still glued to the screen, ‘is why Daedalus made it so hard. Why all the rules, the encryption, the time limit? I thought he wanted The Reckoning to get out, but he knew you, so he knew you weren’t smart enough to crack this on your own. Why set it up that way?’
‘Because he was a dick,’ says Scarlet, and, for once, there isn’t any trace of sarcasm. ‘He couldn’t see anything beyond his own ends, beyond what he wanted, couldn’t see anything greater.’
‘He did it,’ says The Asker, ‘because of me. I’d known him since we were kids. He was a couple of years younger, lived on my block till his parents split and his mom moved up to the Bronx. We got into coding together, but everything was always a game to him. Everything was about winning, being better and proving it – not that there was ever any competition. I was well aware of how beyond me he was. When we started the Finders Reapers, all I hoped was that I could help him use it for something worthwhile, give him a direction.’ He pauses. ‘He didn’t want direction, he wanted victory. I didn’t lie when I told you things didn’t end well between us. I told him he was wasting his gifts and he didn’t react well. He left us – took on increasingly reckless hacks to feed his ego, started releasing viruses that stole and damaged and destroyed, started releasing those ridiculous videos. After I got out of jail, he’d email me every single one before he posted it, like he wanted me to be impressed, and at the same time was trying to say he didn’t care what I thought because look what he could do.
‘The Reckoning was his final salvo in the game he thought we were playing. He made it everything he knew I’d always wanted him to do – breaking the common internet encryptions had always been my holy grail, not his. And then he hid it, just out of my reach, before blowing his brains out with a 12-gauge.
‘The video he’d released online, the one claiming the existence of The Reckoning, containing the quest instructions that ultimately led nowhere – that was for him, to make sure people wouldn’t forget him, to make him into some kind of myth because people would never stop looking. But the virus itself? That was for me. He knew no one would try harder to break it and he knew I would probably fail. He won either way. If I cracked it, I’d release it and everyone would know he’d done it. If I didn’t, he’d still be infamous and he’d still have won because he’d beaten me. I think he knew the FBI were closing in on him long before they actually traced him. He could have run, but he didn’t, because that would have been defeat.’ He shakes his head. ‘He could have done so much, but he just – ’ He cuts off.
‘Now all that’s left of that is this laptop,’ he says, ‘a ticking time bomb of the idea that could save the world.’
Or break it, Mallory thinks, but she stays silent. The Asker pushes the power button.
‘You’ll have to start from scratch, I’m afraid.’
Mallory feels numb. All this because of a friendship turned sour?
A home screen finishes loading on the laptop; a delta drawn in black on a silver background. In the top right corner is a timer, counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until Tuesday morning’s deadline. In the very center of the delta is a large, cartoony red button reading, Try Again?
‘Click it,’ says The Asker.
Mallory does and the screen goes blank. A fanfare begins to play, blaring out tinny and electronic, like the soundtracks to the video games she and Jed used to play on the fossilized Atari at Ruthie’s house. The volume is set so high it’s distorting the laptop’s speakers, but nothing happens when she tries to turn it down. The backdrop disappears, replaced by a webcam view of a guy sitting at a desk in a bedroom, a topless Lara Croft poster tacked on the wall behind him. He looks in his mid-twenties, with broad shoulders and short, fuzzy brown hair. Mallory recognizes him as Jeffrey Mullins Jr from the pictures in the news stories about Daedalus’s suicide. He smooths out the Pac Man is My Homeboy T-shirt he’s wearing, like he’s about to give some kind of address, then he looks dead at the camera and smiles. It’s an unnerving smile, dangerous.
‘Hello,’ he says, clapping his hands together once, loudly. ‘Hello, Apollonian. Oh, sorry,’ he hesitates, brow creasing, ‘would you prefer The Asker now? Either way,’ he smiles again, ‘welcome to my… video – call it what you like – suicide note, although that is a bit grim.’ He pulls a face. ‘But whatever, it is my last recorded message to Planet Earth and I have left it for you, old friend. I hope you realize how important you are to me.’ He tries to look serious, but a trace of the grin is still there. ‘No Minotaur for you; we know each other too well for that. I want you to see my face for this.
‘Now,’ he goes on, ‘thinking about my imminent death has made me reassess a few things, consider my legacy, you know, all that crap you don’t care anything for. And you know what I kept thinking about the most? I kept thinking about you, and what you said to me before we oh-so-unceremoniously parted ways and you abandoned me. You said, now what was it…? Ah, yes.’ He sticks his face right up close to the camera. ‘You are a waste. If I had an ounce of what you have – and then you paused, I remember you paused, and you said – you could change the world if you weren’t such a selfish, egotistical bastard.’ Daedalus leans back, letting out a long sigh. ‘Gotta say buddy, that hit me, right here.’ He smacks his fist sharply against his chest and, for the briefest moment, his eyes darken. ‘I named myself after a genius,’ he says quickly, ‘but you took the title of a god and you want to change the world. I think we could debate which of us really has the ego problem.’ He stops. Then he smiles again, holding his hands out in surrender. ‘I may be about to depart this earth, but – because of our friendship – I am going to give you what you wanted all along. I’m going to give you that ounce of what I have in here.’ He taps his forehead.
‘Okay,’ he continues, ‘now comes the technical part. Pay attention. On this laptop, I have left you a virus. I like to call it The Reckoning.’ He sweeps his arms out like a banner. ‘Too dramatic? Ah well, I’ve already made another little video about it for everyone else – I think you’ll like that one – and I can’t change it now. So, anyway, what does this virus do, you ask? Well, I don’t like to boast, you know I don’t, but I kind of figured out how to crack the common internet encryptions in less than a million years. I know, I know, people have been trying to for, like, ever and no one’s ever done it and now I have… but there we go, let’s get over it, because that’s not all, my friend. No. I have encoded this algorithm into a virus for you, the result of which has the potential to hack any system and, once you release it, it will. It will open any door that has bee
n shut. It will find the things people have tried to hide and it will leave them open to the wonderful world of cyber space.’ He pauses. ‘And it won’t stop,’ he says quietly. ‘It will just keep going and going and going. Daedalus forever… ever… ever…’ He laughs.
‘Look, I’ve seen what you’ve been up to with your little Forum. Didn’t invite me to join – even though we both know you based it on my design for a roving Finders Reapers site – but we’ll let that go. It’s cute, really, what you’re doing. This virus, however, will really change things up for you, man, and you can find all the truth you ever dreamed of.’ His face darkens again. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I was right with the name; calling it The Reckoning isn’t too dramatic. It will be dramatic. It will be everything laid bare; no exclusions, no exceptions and no nepotistic protections. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it’ – and his voice rises – ‘for everyone to just tell the fucking truth!’ he shouts. He looks almost manic, and the words rattle Mallory because she also believes every one of them. ‘Maybe,’ he spits, ‘you’ll get more truth than you ever wanted, but beggars can’t be choosers.’
The video cuts then, like Daedalus edited the footage. He is calmer again.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I got angry. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that. I knew how things were going to end. I shouldn’t fight the inevitable, just embrace it. Now,’ he continues, businesslike, ‘you know me, I’m a great believer in the importance of earning what you get. Work ethic matters. So, I’m not going to just give it to you. Harsh, you say? Well, maybe I’m feeling a bit prickly and emotional given that I’m going to kill myself in about’ – he glances at his watch – ‘fourteen hours, fifty-four minutes. Whatever the reason, this is how it’s going to work. I have built a labyrinth for you, just like my namesake. The Reckoning is encrypted within the laptop you’ll be watching this on. You hack it, you can have it. Forever,’ he whispers dramatically, wiggling his fingers at the screen. ‘Use it to change the world all you want.
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