Echoes (US Edition)

by Laura Tisdall

  ‘When I saw you dive in front of me…’ he says, voice thick. ‘Mal, you saved my life, and then that gun went off and I just thought, it’s the wrong way round. I’ve seen people shot before, but that… my wonderful, brave little girl – ’

  He cuts off, and, ‘Dad,’ Mallory says, her own eyes prickling, and she blinks and blinks, and she’s overwhelmed, and she can’t really think straight, and…

  I almost died.

  And she remembers, again, what that felt like, not just the pain, but the fear that came with it, fear like nothing she’d felt before…

  And she’s thinking that her dad could have died too, and Warden…

  And it’s all just too much…

  And…

  ‘You’re going to be okay now,’ Roger says, and it’s fierce and determined and strong. ‘I’m gonna try harder. I’m going to do better and from now on, Mal, it’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay,’ he repeats and his voice is cracking all over but he keeps talking. ‘You don’t have to be frightened any more. I won’t let anyone hurt you, Mal. I won’t ever again.’

  And through her eyes that are blurring up, suddenly she sees it, sees the man before her as the man who held her hand every time he said goodbye before a tour, sees the man who was smiling at her on that swing in the park at Quantico, the same person who used to give her the cherry from his sundaes at Franco’s and who’d read her bedtime stories and then stay up till she went to sleep when she worried there was something hiding in her closet, even though they’d both checked it.

  And she remembers how he could make her feel like the safest kid in the world…

  And she looks at her dad, and she finds she feels very, very young…

  And…

  ‘Dad,’ she says again, her own voice cracking. ‘Would you hold my hand?’ she asks – hold it just like he used to before a tour, when he’d promise her he’d try, and that he’d be a good man. And maybe what he’s saying is just words, and maybe it won’t all work out, but it is different this time because they aren’t just words, because he’s there, because he got out that car, and went in that house and…

  He pulls his chair over, legs screeching against the floor as he moves it too fast. Mallory lifts her hand from under the covers, the drip in her arm pulling, but she keeps reaching. And Roger’s reaches… then he hesitates.

  ‘Your gloves,’ he says, looking round. ‘I brought a spare – ’

  ‘No,’ she tells him, making a choice in that moment, and his face breaks just a second, and then very slowly, so very gently, he takes her hand, enclosing it in both of his. The skin chafes and Mallory’s chest tightens, but she doesn’t ask for the gloves, and she doesn’t let go.

  Because he came for her.

  And she misses him.

  She misses him so very much.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mal,’ he tells her, tears rolling down his cheeks unchecked now. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  And her own eyes are wet and she’s full on crying too, but it’s not the horrible kind of crying, the kind that hurts… It feels like…

  It feels like relief.

  And, for once, she doesn’t tell herself to stop.

  And she doesn’t want to stop.

  And she doesn’t need to.

  Not just then.

  Not when she’s suddenly feeling so safe.

  A Real Goodbye

  Mallory’s been in hospital almost a week when Warden comes to say goodbye. He’s been staying in a ward on the floor above her. Like Sneak had suspected, the bullet had fractured his femur and he’d needed surgery, a titanium rod and four screws to fix it. The doctors had told him last night that he was well enough to fly back to California, though, so they’re discharging him. She tells herself that’s a good thing. It means he’s getting better and that’s a good thing, but…

  I don’t want him to go.

  They haven’t really had a proper talk since they’ve been there. He’s come down to see her every day that they’d let him, but Mallory was pretty out of it for the first few, and then between her family and his – and all the doctors and nurses and police and FBI agents – they’ve hardly had any time alone. They haven’t spoken about what happened between them in the basement and they haven’t talked about what happens now. Mallory’s thought about it, though. She’s thought about it a lot. Every time she sees him, she remembers what it felt like to be that close to him and it sets her pulse racing, and it’s both scary and not scary at the same time and, in a way, she’s glad he hasn’t said anything about it – though she wonders what he’d say – because she’s not sure what she’d say in return. She’s never really thought about… about being with anyone like that before. It always felt impossible. Whenever guys looked at her that way, it unnerved her and she was way too anxious to ever let anyone get to know her well enough to even contemplate it.

  But she does know Warden.

  Over the past two and half years she has got to know him without having to worry about anything like that and she never realized until she met him just how much he had worked his way in, how much he really meant to her. As she looks up at him now, dressed neatly like himself again – complete with sweater vest and side parting, and making a clunking racket at the door because he still hasn’t mastered opening them while on crutches – she wonders if some feelings could maybe be stronger than her fear, if some emotions could drown out even the compulsions that tie her up inside and have just made everything so hard for so long.

  Maybe, she thinks, for the first time, maybe one day they could. She’s tired of things being hard. She’s so damn tired of it.

  Warden finally makes it through the door, a nurse rushing to his aid before he can further hurt either himself or the glass.

  ‘Stupid things,’ he mutters, levering himself inside. ‘How are you supposed to do anything if you have to use both hands on these bloody sticks? It’s a stupid system and…’ His eyes meet Mallory’s then, and he bobs his head – the crutch-user equivalent of a shrug. The frown softens. ‘Hi,’ he says, smiling sheepishly.

  ‘Hi,’ she replies. She feels it again, her pulse spiking even as he looks at her – and she tells herself to stop being ridiculous and at the same time is acutely grateful they’ve finally disconnected that fricking heart rate monitor. The room is empty apart from them. ‘My dad’s gone for lunch,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, I know – one o’clock every day.’

  He timed it, she realizes, and Warden’s cheeks flush red and he suddenly becomes very interested in his feet.

  ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘I just knew he wouldn’t be here right now and because I wanted to say goodbye. I…’ His hands grip tighter on the crutch handles – she can see it where the knuckles go white. His shoulders sag in a kind of surrender. ‘I miss talking to you,’ he says simply.

  She nods, but no words of her own quite make it out.

  For crying out loud…

  He hobbles over and sits down so awkwardly in the chair by her bed that one crutch is sent clattering loudly to the floor.

  ‘Oh bloody hell,’ he snaps – and Mallory finds herself smiling. He notices. ‘Glad to know my trials amuse you,’ he says, but he grins back at her. He leaves the crutch on the floor, leans forward a little and, ‘Mallory – ’ he begins.

  His phone buzzes and he jumps.

  ‘Crap.’ He looks at the screen. ‘My mom,’ he says. ‘They’ve been packing my stuff up from the ward and she says they’re ready to go.’ He puts the phone away. ‘Thought I’d have longer.’

  ‘What time’s your flight?’ Mallory asks.

  ‘Boarding four twenty, but I’ve got to go to the Javits Building before. There’re a few last things, you know…’ He trails off and Mallory nods.

  The Reckoning had deleted itself after seventy-four minutes, just like she had set it to, but it still did a lot of damage and the Feds have been everywhere the past few days, asking questions, checking things over and over. Even Roger had been interrogated while she wa
s still in surgery. Mallory understood that it made sense; the agents had entered Angeline Garcia’s house to find two shot teenagers and the computer that was the source of the virus, and at first it hadn’t been clear who was responsible for what… but it was disconcerting, being in the middle of it all – especially on a hospital bed, having been shot, unable to really move in the middle of it all. Mallory knew Warden had been questioned too. Like with everything else, though, this is the first time they’ve really been able to talk openly about it with each other.

  ‘Did anyone tell you,’ he says softly, ‘they’ve all been charged now?’

  Mallory looks down at the covers. The remaining Finders Reapers were arrested in the raid. Her dad had updated her on the investigation yesterday evening.

  ‘Sneak, Weevil and Tower with kidnapping and cyberterrorism,’ she replies, trying to keep her voice even. ‘On top of that, Scarlet’s been charged with attempted murder…’

  My attempted murder…

  ‘The Asker with accessory to that,’ she goes on, hands gripping the fabric, ‘and his own count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.’ Except, he’s not called The Asker by anyone else. He’s Nathan, or Mr Garcia. Her thoughts start to run with the mess of it. And Scarlet’s not Scarlet, she’s Marsha-Jane –

  ‘Echo,’ Warden says.

  You’re okay. You’re –

  ‘Echo.’ She looks back up at him. ‘They’ll be gone away for a long time. A long time.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, trying to loosen her fingers and only partially succeeding.

  ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  ‘I know.’ There’s a silence then and, for once, Mallory isn’t comfortable with it. She wants to talk. She doesn’t want to think about the charges and what they mean, and the real names and how very real they make everything else feel.

  ‘The FBI lady said I can pick up my laptop before I leave,’ Warden says.

  ‘That’s good,’ Mallory replies, seizing on it, though the new tack unnerves her for a whole different reason.

  ‘Your dad can probably go get yours for you, too.’

  She nods again. The ‘FBI lady’ is Special Agent Caldera. Shrewd and imposing, with a stare that’s near impossible to hold, she’s been heading up the investigation into the release of The Reckoning. Neither Mallory nor Warden have been charged with anything – it was clear their part in it was under duress – but their computers were taken with the others in the raid. Both had wiped themselves clean upon FBI techs trying to break into them, so the Feds have no actual evidence of any previous misdemeanors on their part either. Caldera’s interviewed Mallory twice personally now, though. It was her cybercrime division that she had ‘oh-so-helpfully’ targeted the ping at and they’d received hundreds of thousands.

  ‘I spoke to her again this morning,’ Mallory says, still unsure how to feel about the encounter. She hadn’t been very lucid during their first interview, but the doctors had taken her off the morphine yesterday and she was definitely more with it as a result. Apparently Caldera had found out. She seems to be very good at finding things out.

  ‘Oh,’ says Warden. ‘What did she want?’

  ‘Checking I said the same as you,’ Mallory replies. ‘At first.’ She frowns. The agent had already known most of what had happened in the house. As far as Mallory could tell, Warden had pretty much told her the truth, and what Mallory had said had agreed with him. They’d both skirted around things like the bug in the nightclub – though Mallory suspected Caldera had put the pieces together on that – but the real issue had been explaining how they had met, how they had all met, initially. In Warden’s account, the ‘Forum of illegal hacks’ had been relabeled as an ‘online coding chat room’ – that he unfortunately couldn’t remember the address of. Caldera really didn’t seem like a person you could bullshit and Mallory had stumbled over that too. She didn’t think that The Asker or Scarlet would have given any details of the Forum away – they’d only make their own sentences worse – but she had expected the pressure to come then, had expected the agent to needle and push like she had with everything else, had had to tell herself firmly that there was no real evidence left of the group’s existence or any illegal activity, trying to stop the panic that had started building in her chest…

  Caldera hadn’t pushed, though. She had done something completely unexpected.

  ‘You don’t remember either,’ she had said carefully, red-painted lips pursing together. She had said it almost more like an instruction, than a question. Mallory had managed a negative, but the move had thrown her and she was still a little off from the meds. ‘I’m going to be honest with you,’ the woman had said then. ‘You completed The Reckoning so I know just how smart you must be. And I can make a very good guess as to the kind of thing you might have been involved in that would have brought someone as smart as you to the attention of someone like Nathan Garcia in the first place.’ Mallory’s heart had almost stopped at that, but Caldera had continued, ‘I also know the risks you and Mr Ward took in order to stop him. In this job, I’m all too aware of what the repercussions would have been if you hadn’t.’ She had paused, then, holding Mallory’s gaze. ‘You know, I deal with black-hats every day; people trying to steal, to tear things down, to cause chaos that my team and I have to fight tooth-and-nail to patch up. That kind of activity is everywhere and it’s insidious and daily I have to make calls about what to go after and what to leave; calls about whether a person – or, let’s be up front about this, a hacker – will do more harm than good if I leave them in play.’ Mallory had been hardly breathing by this point. ‘As it stands, I have no direct evidence of what you and Mr Ward were involved in before. Maybe I could find some if I really looked, but then you’re so smart, maybe I couldn’t. What I do have evidence of is that you understand consequences. You saw the consequences of something like The Reckoning and you nearly died to prevent them. To me, that understanding is the real difference between the kids who end up as white or black-hats. You’re sixteen, right?’ Mallory had nodded. ‘Consider this is your wake up call.’ Her mouth had twitched upwards. ‘Be smart,’ she had said.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ mutters Warden, when Mallory finishes telling him. It’s kind of breathy and she can’t quite tell if it’s a good ‘bloody hell’ or a bad one. ‘Then she just left?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Mallory says. ‘First, she asked me if there was any chance I could remember Daedalus’s algorithm well enough to recreate it.’ Warden’s eyes widen a little at that.

  ‘Can you?’ he asks. She hesitates.

  ‘I told her no.’ The truth is, though, that the more she’s thought about it, the more she’s not sure whether that’s strictly true. She doesn’t really forget things, and she had understood how it worked and, if she was given enough time, maybe… ‘It doesn’t matter either way,’ she tells Warden. ‘Even if I could… no.’ It’s not something she would ever go near again. It’s possible other hackers might have picked up something about how it functioned before it deleted, but it was so complex she doesn’t think they’d figure out the whole thing for at least a while. People know now that it’s possible to do, though, and the FBI – and Agent Caldera – will have to deal with what happened however they choose to deal with it. She doesn’t want to be a part of it. Warden nods, understanding.

  ‘She gave me her card,’ Mallory adds, ‘before she went.’ She points to the table by her bed where it still lies; white and plain, just a name and a number and an email address. ‘She said it was for if I remembered anything, and also’ – she bites her lip – ‘she said, ‘so you don’t have to send a virus the next time you notice something we might want to know about.’’

  Warden smiles at that, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘I think you made a friend.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Mallory says. ‘I mean it. Why do you think she did that?’

  Warden shrugs, properly this time.

  ‘Maybe she meant what she said,’ he replies, ‘
she didn’t think what happened was our fault and she was grateful for what you did.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Or maybe she wants to recruit you,’ Warden laughs. Then he stops. ‘Actually, check that, maybe she does.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass.’

  ‘No, I’m serious. I mean, you’d be a flipping nightmare for all the black-hats out there.’

  Mallory feels an unexpected buzz at the suggestion. What would it be like from the other side?

  ‘I’m still in high school,’ she says, not sure what to make of it.

  ‘Yeah, so imagine what you’ll be like when you’ve fully grown into your powers,’ Warden replies. The smile comes back. Mallory rolls her eyes. She sags back against the sheets. She can wonder about it another time.

  All of it, another time.

  A week, and everything still exhausts her. The doctors have said it’s normal, keep telling her she’s lucky to be alive – though how getting shot in the abdomen can really count as lucky she doesn’t quite get yet – but it’s still frustrating.

  ‘Who knows,’ she murmurs, ‘maybe she even wants to recruit you.’

  ‘Ooh, burn.’ Warden grins. She finally smiles back at him, the edges of her mouth teasing upwards. And she thinks how often he smiles in real life, and how she didn’t realize that before, and she thinks…

  She thinks…

  I’m going to miss you.

  And she feels it, too, and her smile falters, though she doesn’t say it out loud. Warden’s face softens, like maybe he thought it at the same time… Maybe…

  You don’t know what he thinks at all, she tells herself.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he says – maybe he’ll tell her – ‘I could set up a new chat box for us. When I get my laptop back, I could have it ready for when you get yours and make it secure, so… well, I know we won’t have the Forum, but, so we could still talk like we did. You know, if you want to.’ And he looks nervous as he says it, as if he thinks there’s a chance she wouldn’t want to, and, right then, she realizes she does know exactly what he thinks, what he wants. She does. And relief sparks through her, and…