CHAPTER FORTY
Balor
“ W hat the fuck do you mean, she’s not there?” I bark at Denton over the phone.
Of all days for a breach to go down. This mess required my attention in the command center and forced me to spend hours focusing on and dealing with a deeply threatening situation, so bad that Shane is still scrambling to recode and swap out motherboards on my servers.
I’ve hacked into nearly every camera in this city and stored the feeds, filling up a football field sized room of humming machines holding petabytes of data.
We get breaches all the time from the feeds, amateur geeks hacking into them and creating fast-spreading viruses that, like the strong Hudson River current, drift into our network, banging on our firewall.
I sent Denton to pick up Ella and bring her here to see all this action. Most days, my techs keep their heads down and except for the occasional burp or fart, they don’t utter a sound, making this place dreadfully boring.
Today, the command center buzzes like the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange. I figured Ella would get a kick out of seeing all the activity.
Only, Denton got to Fredricks Elementary and found it closed. The students, teachers, and their aides all gone.
Ella finished up work early, left, and didn’t tell me.
I stare from my glass office above the datacenter floor, watching the chaos below me, trying to stay fucking calm.
Calls to her phone go to voicemail and her location is no longer pinging. With my data feeds down because of the breach, I can’t look up the cameras near her school to see what direction she went after dismissal.
Two more hours pass, and I’ve gotten no message back from her while Denton circles the neighborhood checking coffee bars, restaurants, and shops.
Ella has vanished.
With my baby.