Hide and Seek (Silvercrest U #2)
Prologue
Myles
“Come on,” my friend Cipher says through my headphones, a teasing lilt to his voice. “You know you want to.”
Chuckling, I spin back and forth in my chair and pop the tab of my energy drink. “Nice try, but those kinds of taunts don’t work on me. I have younger siblings, remember?”
“Did you just open another energy drink?” Echo asks, her voice filled with disapproval. “How many times do I have to lecture you about the adverse effects of excess caffeine on the body, especially the heart and kidneys, before you listen to me?”
“At least a dozen more.” I guzzle down some of the drink, slurping as loudly as possible in my headset.
The overwhelming taste of chemicals and artificial sweeteners triggers a sort of Pavlovian reaction where my heart speeds up even before the caffeine has a chance to work its magic. Maybe Echo has a point.
She heaves a dramatic sigh and makes several tsk sounds. “What am I supposed to do with you?”
“Keep lecturing us while we keep being morons and ignore all your well-intentioned suggestions?” Cipher asks.
“Yeah, that sounds about right.” Echo snickers. “Why am I friends with you guys again?”
“Because we know way too much about you, and it’s safer to keep us around than it is to let us out into the world unsupervised?” I tease.
“True story,” she agrees, and I can hear the smile in her voice.
“How’re things now that you’re back at school?” Cipher asks.
“Fine.” I tap a few keys on my keyboard and run a quick check on the code I need to hand in to one of my professors in an hour.
The assignment was given to us in the first week of school, and we’ve had over four months to do it. Originally, we were supposed to hand it in before the Thanksgiving break, but enough of the class begged and pleaded with our professor for more time that he gave us an extension.
I started working on it when I got back to my dorm a few hours ago, and I’m not even the slightest bit concerned about leaving it to the eleventh hour. I’ll get an A+ on this, the same as I do on all my assignments and tests.
“Fine?” Echo prompts. “That’s it?”
“Yeah, my dude. Let us live vicariously through you. Not everyone gets to go to a secret school for the world’s elite. Throw us some crumbs of gossip or nuggets of insights into your world,” Cipher urges.
“Crumbs and nuggets?” Echo asks. “Have you eaten any real food today? You only talk like that when your brain is screaming for nutrients.”
“Do two bags of hot Cheetos and a half dozen pizza pockets count?” he asks.
She heaves a big, theatrical sigh. “No, none of that counts as real food. Have you not heard of fiber?”
“Nope, don’t know her,” he says innocently.
“Did you at least drink water?” she presses. “And just water. Not coffee or soda or juice or energy drinks. Actual water in water form.”
“No comment.”
“Hopeless.” She clucks her tongue again. “Phoenix, what about you? Is the dining hall open, or are you also surviving off sugar, forever chemicals, and microplastics?”
“It’s open,” I assure her.
“Good, at least one of you is actually eating food.”
“But I missed dinner hours and wasn’t here for lunch, so…” I let that hang in the air.
“I swear both of you need handlers,” she says with a chuckle.
“That’s why we’ve got you.” Cipher makes kissy noises over his headset.
“And you’re damn lucky you do,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am,” I agree. “The luckiest.”
“Damn straight you are.”
Echo’s obsession with clean eating started a few years ago, and we’ve been playing this game with her ever since.
Unlike Cipher, I usually try to eat well and drink enough water, but today was an off day with traveling and getting distracted by my assignment.
I like snacks as much as the next guy, but I’m also a long-distance runner, so I understand nutrition and moderation.
It’s just more fun to tease Echo than it is to dogpile on Cipher and his horrible food habits.
Cipher laughs. “There’s nothing straight about any of us.”
“True story,” Echo says on a snicker.
Both Cipher and Echo are gay, while I’m bi. Being queer, or questioning in my case, was one of the things we bonded over when we met playing an MMRPG five years ago. They’re the only people in the world who know about me while both of them are out and have been for years.
Being queer and gaming are only two of the reasons we’ve stayed close all these years, and even though I’ve never met them in person, they’re my best friends.
“So, any news or gossip to share?” Cipher asks.
“I’ve been back for less than four hours, and the only person I’ve talked to was the guard at the main gate,” I tell them.
“You need to get a social life so we can get more stories,” Echo says. “Our lives are so boring compared to yours.”
“Mine’s pretty boring too,” I tell them. “I go to class and talk to you guys. That’s literally my entire life this year.”
My chest tightens a bit at my words. They might be my best friends, but I haven’t been completely honest with them the past few months. I’ve had some stuff going on, but it’s not the kind of thing I can tell them—or anyone.
Cipher asks about a new game patch that just came out, but I’m distracted as the check I ran on my code finishes, and I quickly scan the summary as they chat about the patch.
Everything looks good, and the code is ready to be sent off. Easy peasy, as usual.
I’m just about to upload it to the private server for my class when my screens go black and my headphones go quiet.
“What the fuck?” I say to the empty room as my main screen flickers and a paused black and white video appears on it.
Is someone in my system? What the hell?
I’m so stunned by the fact that someone seems to have breached my security that I don’t immediately try to boot them the fuck out and instead stare at the video.
I recognize the background. It’s one of the campus security cams, and from what I can tell, it’s one of the ones near the woods on the western side of the school. The really weird part is how there seems to be something on the ground, like a sheet or a curtain of some sort.
Before I can decide what to do, the video starts playing.
I watch as two men in dark clothes and hoods drag a third into the frame, then toss him onto the sheet or whatever it is. He’s obviously been beaten, and my stomach roils as one of the men pulls a gun out of his waistband and levels it at the man’s head.
He puts up his hands and struggles to his knees. There’s no audio, but I don’t need sound to know he’s begging for his life.
The man with the gun doesn’t even flinch as he fires two bullets into the man’s torso. His victim falls forward and face-plants on the ground as a dark pool spreads out under him.
The gunman calmly puts his weapon back in his waistband, and he and his partner quickly roll up the man they shot in what I now see is a tarp and drag the body and the evidence of their crime out of frame.
What the ever-loving fuck did I just watch? And why the hell did someone want me to see it?
A little circle appears over the time stamp on the paused video. It was taken just after midnight four days ago.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I just saw when the video disappears and what looks like a police report pops up in its stead. Still confused as all hell, I scan the page.
Wait. Am I reading what I think I am?
According to the report, the body of Jacob Fisher was found on the side of a highway about fifty miles from the school with two gunshot wounds to the abdomen.
“No way,” I mutter and double-check the date on the report. It’s from two days ago.
The report fades from my screen and is replaced by a photo of another man who’s lying on a hardwood floor with a bullet hole through his neck and another time stamp overlaid on it from five days ago.
An autopsy report loads next to the photo, and it’s for Erik Carmichael, who was apparently shot in a home invasion on the same date.
My brain starts ping-ponging as the photo and autopsy reports disappear, and I unconsciously start connecting the dots from the information I was just shown.
I’m still processing everything when my system flashes back to life and my screens are restored like nothing happened.
“Phoenix?” Echo asks as my headphones also flash back to life.
“Myles?” Cipher asks. “What the fuck, dude?”
The fact that he’s using my actual name and not my handle tells me how freaked out he is.
“I’m here,” I say quickly.
“What the hell happened?” Echo asks. “Why did you go dark?”
“Power failure,” I blurt out. “A short one. Knocked me offline, and I had to wait until it was restored.”
“Really?” Cipher doesn’t sound convinced. “Your fancy pants school full of billionaires had a power failure?”
“Not even the rich can be completely insulated from mechanical issues,” I say, trying to keep my tone light and unbothered. “I gotta log off anyway so I can finish that assignment before it’s due.”
“Yeah, okay,” Echo says, and I can tell that she’s also unconvinced by my lie. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Are you sure that’s all it is?” Cipher asks.
“Positive.” I try to sound confident and not at all like I’m about to lose my shit. “Just gotta get ahead of this assignment. Later.”
“Later,” he says.
I cut the feed and exit out of all of my programs except the private server for my class so I can upload my code.
When that’s done, I shut everything down and start a full sweep and diagnostic of my system to figure out what the fuck just happened and how the hell whoever just invaded my system managed to get into it.
I know what they wanted me to see, but not why.
The two men who’ve been blackmailing me are both dead, and they died only a day apart on different sides of the country.
Instead of being ecstatic that they’re gone and can’t bother me anymore, I’m filled with a cold sense of dread. Someone killed them, and they know I was involved in the shit they were doing.
Were those messages a threat, and whoever killed them is trying to tell me I’m next? Or was that their way of telling me I’m finally free?
Or was it a bit of both?
Pushing those thoughts to the back of my mind, I focus on my system and start the painstaking process of going over every layer of my security so I can reverse engineer how I was hacked and find the fucker who did it.