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I would not leave this desk—I would not rest until I found my friend Lia.
CHAPTER TWO
Sara
Hours passed, a blur of black windows with white text, blinking cursors, and dead ends, until I closed my eyes and saw meaningless words imprinted on the back of my lids. Occasionally, I’d stopped to drink coffee, snack, and jot down notes. But as the afternoon began to wane, I couldn’t eat or drink or make myself to get up.
Not when I was descending into a familiar, deadly kind of panic—a kind of fear that I’d only felt a few times before and had vowed to never feel again.
Ice-cold terror snarled up my arms as I hit another dead end and a scream of frustration built in my head. What the fuck was this? Why couldn’t I find one single answer? One lead?
Did the Michaelson family employ some kind of tech god? A hacker savant? An MIT student?
My jaw set to the side. I had gotten into Harvard and not MIT, and while I loved my Ivy League school—it had been my first choice—the MIT rejection still burned. But maybe I could use that, pretend the Michaelsons did employ some MIT incel bastard who hated women and was a decent coder but would be crushed under my stiletto.
I snorted. Like Zakary Frole at work. God, that fucking twat. At least calling out of work meant I didn’t have to see him and deal with his inability to take no for an answer.
And as though waiting for my petty grievance to pave the way, my computer chirped at me. Finally, I’d found something. Not what I was looking for, but a start—the Michaelson family’s virtual private storage, buried and locked under layers of protection. At least I had something, maybe a place to look for answers, instead of hunting for a place to even look.
You can do this, Sara Tailor. You are a badass tech whiz. Better than any gangster in Boston.
Getting into this storage, however, was presenting a real challenge. Chewing on my lip, my eyes flicked to my second monitor, where the project was that I was working on for my part-time tech job, a security-focused company calledMoxi.They let me hack and chew all around their systems and client systems to find security flaws, and last month they had given us all access to a new, cutting-edge tool calledIris-X, or Iris-Beta,as it wasstill very much in beta.
We were not, under any circumstances, supposed to use it for anything outside of work until the product was done being developed.
But of course, I looked atIris-Xinside and out, copied it, made improvements, and had not yet deployed it. I called it myIris-XS,my super sneaker, and excellent additions or not, it was a huge risk. I had no idea ifIris-XScould be detected—or if it even worked.
The alternative, though—brute-forcing my way in or even finding the physical server farm to try and get in that way—could take days. Weeks.
Heart pounding into my fingertips, I opened theIris-XSapplication before I could stop myself and wielded it against the layers of security and firewalls around the Michaelson systems, cutting through them like a hot knife through butter. It was almost intoxicatingly easy, and a name flashed by during my furious search.
Hyperion.
That gave me pause in the tangled world of the Michaelson’s internal web that opened up to me. My lips parted as it hit me. No wonder it been so hard to hack into this—this wasn’t a typical virtual machine or series of servers. It was not like anything I’d ever seen. This was a whole world, with twists and turns, crafted by a genius who’d named itHyperion.
“Holy shit,” I said and sat back, flicking my eyes through what I could see, trying to understand what I was looking at. It would take time to learn this, to fully appreciate this—
No. I need to find Lia.
But my hesitation cost me. Suddenly, I was kicked out of where I’d been withinHyperion, and almost locked out entirely. If my super sneakyIris-XStool hadn’t given me the ability to create backdoors and fake accounts, I would have been. But like a little parasite, I couldn’t be so easily removed, and I fled off to a different corner, trying to find a list of likely places they could have taken her.
What if they had hurt Lia?I swallowed as the computer screen seemed to fuzz in front of my eyes.What if they’re hurting her right now?
Hastily, I began to compile a list, addresses that I scribbled down, even as I sensed that whatever—or whoever had kicked me out before was closing in.
Sure enough, right before I was about write down the address for a place out in West Carlisle, I was locked out. A snarl tore out of me, and I slammed my hand down in frustration, then sucked in a sharp breath.
Final warning,ran the message on my screen.Your code might be lovely and your talent prodigious, Iris—but next time I won’t be so nice.
I gaped at the message, wondering how they’d done it—and even more mind-blowing, it acted like an old-school chatroom. I could type back.
Fingers shaking, I wrote out,Go to hell, Mr. Hype. Or should I say, Mr. Michaelson?
Oh, ballsy,came the response.Even though it’s pretty damn cold out today in Boston—you’re playing with fire.
“What?” I whispered.
Suddenly, another window opened, this time with a map. For a split second, it was stagnant, then it zoomed in to the Northeast, tilted over to New York, to the Midwest, and then jumped back Massachusetts.
