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Damon sank into the seat next to me. “What’re you doing with that thing now?” he asked, keeping his voice low. Jin was sleeping in the back. The car rumbled as Seth hit the gas.
“I’m still working on finding a back door into the Assembly’s server,” I said. My thumb skimmed over the touch screen. “I’ve tried a few things that didn’t work out, but I’ve got another strategy that I’ve made some progress with.”
He snorted. “I thought you could hack your way into anything in two seconds flat.”
“Not quite,” I said with a laugh. “Getting into thephonewasn’t hard. And it’s been used to access at least one level of the Assembly’s database before. But they cancelled her user account as soon as they realized the phone was stolen, it looks like. So I’ve got to carve my own way in.”
“Hmm. Yeah. I wouldn’t know where to start. Haven’t really had time to play around with computers a whole lot.”
Because he’d been busy getting in trouble in class and then working sketchy jobs to keep afloat after he’d dropped out of high school. Yeah, I guessed my honor roll, college graduate self must look pretty privileged to him.
We’d all suffered some when Rose’s dad had fired our parents from the Hallowell estate staff as punishment for the friendship we’d formed with her all those years ago, but my and Seth’s parents had found their feet pretty quickly. Whenever I’d seen Damon’s mom around town, she’d always looked run down and sad. And his dad had run off years before that.
He hadn’t sounded pissed about it just now, but a prickle of guilt ran through my gut anyway. “I’m sorry,” I said.
Damon raised his eyebrows at me. “For what? My lack of computer skills?”
Oh, hell, I was probably going to put my foot in it. But I’d already committed.
“I just mean—back then. All the stuff you were going through. I wish I’d reached out more. I mean, we used to be best friends, all five of us… We didn’t have to drift apart. I should have tried harder.”
Damon blinked at me. He ducked his head, his spiky coffee-brown hair drifting to shadow his eyes. “I guess I can’t say I was doing a whole lot of reaching out myself.”
“You were having a hard time,” I said. “I knew that. I wish I’d done more. That’s all.” I paused. “Although maybe it was for the best in the end, because if youhadn’tgone off and made those new friends of yours, you wouldn’t have picked up all the nifty breaking-and-entering skills we’ve found so useful.”
I wanted to take the words back the second they’d spilled from my mouth. Yeah, that didn’t sound at all insensitive or anything. Damon’s head jerked up so he could stare at me, and I gulped. His mouth twisted.
Then he started to laugh.
The sound was catching. In a second, I was laughing too. The comment hadn’t even been that funny, but it was a relief just to feel like we could laugh about something in the middle of all this.
“You do have an interesting way of looking at things, Mr. Brainiac,” Damon said when he’d caught his breath. “I guess that’s for the best too. Get on with your fancy-pants hacking.”
He leaned back in his seat, letting his eyes drift shut. As I tapped into the interface I’d been using, Rose stirred at my other side. “What’s so funny?” she murmured.
“Nothing really,” I said, still smiling. “Nothing worth waking up for, anyway.”
She made a dismissive noise. After a swivel of her hand, her body went unnaturally still for a moment. When I glanced over at her, wondering what spell she’d cast, she nodded.
“I can’t sense any magic at all anywhere nearby. I don’t know how much range I have, but I think the way I’m checking now, I’d know if they were close enough to really hurt us.” She sighed. “I guess tonight’s attack was their big effort.”
“They’re regrouping,” I suggested.
“We’ve got to assume so. I don’t think they’re going to back down yet.”
It’d be easier to know if I could get into this damn server. My fingers flicked over the screen. A little code here. Massage a password there. Chip away at the walls around the network until I had a hole just big enough to weasel my way in.
I’d broken into a whole lot of secure databases in my time: banks, government, you name it. Just for kicks, though. None of them had really mattered.
Breaking throughtheselayers of security, on the other hand, could be a matter of life and death.
I squinted at the screen, tapping out another sequence on the touchscreen keyboard. This wasn’t exactly the greatest phone I’d ever worked with either. But—hey! Was that an opening?
My spirits shot up. My fingers dashed over the screen as if the crack I’d discovered might close at any second. I shoved it wider with another line of code, and—bingo! The lowest level of the Assembly’s private database spilled down the screen. My mouth stretched into a grin.
Ha. They might have magic, but they didn’t rule the internet, that was for sure.
My excitement must have radiated off me a little more strongly than I’d intended, because Rose shifted again, tipping her head against my shoulder and looking down at the screen. “Is that good?” she asked, looking hazily at the interface.
