Chapter 15 #2
It was another ghost MeNetID, with a textual post history stretching years into the past, even interactions and ratings enough to give it a very solid seventy-eight social score, almost as good as the account MorDread had given him.
This must be an account Sprite had been holding and working on for years, making it realistic enough to pass scrutiny, saving it for when she needed it.
And she had just gifted it to him. That was breathtaking generosity.
Not only that, but the associated wallet had a thousand cryps in it.
A thousand cryps! That might be a hundred times less than MorDread had offered, but it was a month of easy living, longer if he kept his head down.
A line-of-sight invite pinged into his lenses. Sarah-Paige Wright Has Invited You to Join Her Party. Accept?
Oh, he accepted, all right. Party invites made it possible for “randoms”—people who met by chance—to stay connected throughout the night.
That would work nicely. A window opened to float in the air on the right side of his smartspace, filled with Sprite’s fairy-winged avatar.
She was wearing a hoodie and a wry look.
He saw the same look mirrored on the face of the real Sprite as she pulled her head back out of sight.
“Please tell me that when you cried for me on the Nets, you had a plan for when the Feds showed up,” she said.
“Um, yeah. Totally do.”
“And your grand plan is?”
“To ask you to help me escape.”
“Uh-huh.” Her wry look deepened. “You’ll owe me for this.”
“Sure, but I can only pay you back if I make it out of here.”
“Meet me there.” A location marker appeared in his smartspace, overlaid on a dim, distant first-floor alcove.
He weaved through the dancing crowd in that direction. “Is it safe?”
“The Feds’ll be watching the exits, but without your girlfriend’s tracker chip, they’ll have a hard time finding you in this place.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Jason said, a little too quickly.
“No?” Sprite said. “She was reserving spots in the Canyon Lounge when the Feds intercepted her. Maybe she wasn’t really gonna sell you out. Maybe she was giving you a clean chip to help you escape. It could have been the start of an epic romance.”
“It would never have worked out,” Jason said, slipping into the dim, neon-purple glow of the booth. “I’d have had to kill Aric.”
“See, that’s what I like about you, Ghost.” Her voice echoed for a moment, coming simultaneously from her chat box and from the slim, hoodied figure slipping into the booth across from him, before the party system reacted to their proximity and closed the chat box.
“Your good, old-fashioned sense of grievance.”
Jason, too, reacted to their proximity. Phreak, she really did look like her avatar, sans butterfly wings—even better, actually, since her image had none of the tiny visual or motion inaccuracies of VR.
The booth’s neon glow edged one side of her face in soft purple and glimmered in her dark eyes.
His breath hitched, and his palms grew clammy.
This was a complicating factor. He’d have to be careful.
It would be hard to think or act objectively if he let himself get personally attached.
“Hey, you don’t like panyons either,” he managed.
He said it as a statement but found himself holding his breath in case she disagreed.
“What are you talking about? Here I am in Digelight, sharing a booth with a bad boy with a tragic backstory who’s obsessed with vengeance, and who is completely dependent on me. We fit right in.”
“Yeah, sorry for the neediness,” he said. “And thanks. Again.”
“Thanks for your thanks, but no, thanks,” she said. “Tonight I blew my cover with the Collective for you. Years of work down the toilet. Contingency exit plan tossed out too. MorDread wants my head. You owe me more than a thank-you.”
“Okay. How do I make us even? Assuming I don’t end the evening in jail.”
“Join me.”
Jason’s stomach did a little flip, but he kept his face carefully blank. “Doing what?”
“What I recruited you to do: Make sure Andrew Norman can’t use the Final System to rule the world.”
“Let me get this straight,” Jason said after a pause.
“You recruited me to the Collective for that? Five years ago?” It was Jason who’d figured out what Norman was building, piecing together the clues, presenting them to Sprite.
Though now that he thought about it, she had sent him in the direction of many of those clues in the first place.
And when Bruno had come knocking, it was Jason who’d floated the idea of using the job to attack the System and triangulate its location via its defensive reaction—though that idea, too, had been suggested by Sprite mentioning how the System’s network access probably worked.
“I knew you’d be motivated,” she said.
“And you’re the one who messaged me that MorDread intended to steal it.”
“I don’t want the Russians ruling the world either.”
“Do you have a team? Someone you were double-agenting for?”
She said carefully, “I’m one of a small number of people working toward the same general goal.”
So not only had she had recruited him for her own purposes, but she wasn’t working alone. Both revelations raised positively garish red flags. “What’s your motivation?” he said.
“Does it matter?”
“It’ll help me trust you.”
“More than saving your life?”
He bit his lip. “Good point.”
“I’m sure you have other options if you turn me down.”
“Another good point.” But he was also realizing just how little he knew about Sprite.
She was playing some game of her own, a game that included infiltrating the most dangerous hacker organization on the planet, which spoke volumes about her skill.
But she’d just thrown that game to save him.
“What kind of a phreaker are you, anyway?” he asked suddenly.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t strike me as phreaker material.”
Her expression went flat. “Why, because I’m a girl?”
“Because you’re young and gor—and talented. You had other options.”
“What about you? You’re not much older than me, even if you’re not as gorgeous.”
He felt his face flush, and hoped the purple lighting hid it. “You know my ‘tragic backstory.’ I’m already half criminal, if you listen to the PsychNet shrinks. But you gotta admit you didn’t exactly fit in with a group that includes a psychotic hunting spider.”
“You saying I’m not ruthless enough?”
He shrugged. “I’m not judging, but fairies aren’t exactly known for ruthlessness.”
Her expression turned a little wicked. “Have you read the original fairy tales?”
Mia had. Jason swallowed and tacked the conversation back to the point. “Seriously, what’s your motivation?”
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “What kind of a hacker would I be if I gave up personal information?”
“A likable one?”
“Ah.” Her smile went wry. “I don’t think you’d like me much if you got to know me.”
“Why not?”
“Just a hunch.”
He had a hunch she was wrong. But what he said was “I’ve got it: You’re actually an assassin like Huntsman. You use this fairy schtick to make people think you’re harmless, and then you strike when they least expect it. Admit it.”
She laughed, a genuine laugh that crinkled her eyes into half-moons and made a dimple appear in her cheek, almost hidden by her hoodie. “I’ll never tell.”
“Come on. If you want me to join you, you gotta give me something to work with.”
“Just because we’re alone in a booth in Digelight doesn’t make this a date, phreaker. You don’t need my life’s story.” But she was still smiling.
“Why don’t we start with something simple, like what you’re doing in DC?”
“I was born here, California boy.”
That helped make sense of how someone so young had gotten so deep inside MorDread’s organization.
People didn’t realize how often hacking was done locally.
MorDread would have jumped at the chance to recruit someone in DC.
“See?” he said. “That already makes me trust you more. So how does a DC girl get mixed up with an international hacker ring?”
Her smile vanished. “I have my reasons for wanting to diminish Norman’s power.” Her flat expression was somehow familiar, and then he realized it was because he’d often seen the same look on Mia’s face when she hid her feelings.
“Ah,” he said, “it’s personal for you too.”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, it is.”
They regarded each other silently for a moment.
Jason tried to think objectively, but it was difficult with those dark eyes looking steadily into his.
He wanted very badly to trust her, because .
. . well, phreak, her face could have been tailor-made to his specifications.
But physical attraction was a very poor reason to trust someone not to screw you over.
But this was Sprite. This was his handler, the girl—yes, really a girl—who’d been by his virtual side every step of the last five years, who’d helped him navigate the world of black-hat hacking and also the sometimes no-less-difficult real world, and who had, today, literally saved his life.
Just because he was more and more sure with each passing moment that she was the most beautiful girl alive didn’t mean she wasn’t trustworthy.
That made sense, didn’t it?
“I guess that’s good enough for me,” he said. “Help me get out of here and you’ve got yourself an ally.”
“Who owes me a favor,” she reminded him.
“Who owes you more than that,” he said seriously.
“We’re agreed. Now, what do you want me to do?”
This brought him up short. Somehow he’d expected her to have a plan already. “I dunno! Something like you did before. Something distracting, something to draw the Feds away from the exits.”
“I’d need access to their lenses for that. Or . . . or maybe admin access to Digelight’s local Net.”