Page 23 of One Breath After Another

Penny’s brow dipped. “But why?”

“That’s the hard part.”

“Why?”

Naz straightened and folded his hands over his knees as he stared at her. “You told Roz there was a network of people involved in the ... thing your father was doing. Right?”

Penny swallowed hard. “So what?”

“When the police asked you for more information about that, you went quiet.”

“Because look what they did with my father.”

“Right,” Naz said, “but there are still people out there, Penny ... hurting kids.”

“And?”

“This program is going to catch them—or at the very least, identify them, and then gather evidence of their business on the dark web, which will then be compiled into zipped, protected files before being delivered to whichever law enforcement is closest to their areas.”

She blinked.

That sounded ... “That’s impossible.”

“No, it isn’t. I had a base program to work off—one that was made decades ago called Thorn. It crawled the dark web looking for child porn, which it would then try to match using facial recognition and other landmarks, should the photos include those, to real children. The problem was, that was a white hat system. It only worked legally. It didn’t go over the line into the gray, or outright black, sides of hacking on the dark web. So, it had limitations. Mine does not, and since it will run constantly without me needing to touch it, and as I have it going through so many servers that it’ll never be traced back to me. Or rather, it would take them a very long time to figure out it was me.

“This program will hack into government databases, into school databases. It will pull pictures of children from online yearbooks, and teachers from school websites. It will pull criminal records, and it will look into workers whose photos are on the internet. I have a friend who is also working with a guy that runs a program which hacks into every single security camera that runs on Wi-Fi, which means at some point, it will also be able to just—”

“Run through faces from the general public,” Penny said faintly.

Naz nodded and pointed at the laptop. “That was the last bit of code needed. All I have to do now is hit that black button where it says RUN in the left-hand corner, and the system will be live in the dark web.”

“Can’t other people detect it, or—”

“Highly unlikely, given the way it was designed.”

“Don’t the people using the dark web have things to protect—”

“It’s going to hack into those systems, too. It’ll create small wormholes that will be virtually undetectable, which will suck in their coded information, before running through it to decode as much of it as it possibly can. That will leave the program with information of the people behind the forums.”

Holy shit.

“I know it doesn’t change what’s already happened,” Naz murmured, “and it’s not going to make your life better or easier to get through what’s been done to you, Penny, but it’s going to help someone else. It’s going to save someone else. Nobody gets to change the past—we can only change the future.”

“Yeah ...”

“The code is finished. You can press the black button, if you’d like.”

She stared at the screen for a while.

Naz waited her out.

Then, without warning, Penny leaned forward, and hit the RUN button. The screen blinked, the white background turning black as the words turned white and began to scroll. It was almost beautiful, really.

“I still wish he was dead,” Penny muttered.

“I can make that happen, too.”

Naz said it so flippantly.