37. Thirty-seven
Thirty-seven
Payton
A insley’s eyes are brimming with tears when they meet mine again. “You need proof that Archer was the hacker that attacked Olympus. I may be able to help…” She looks down and shakes her head sadly, pulling her hand away from mine.
“How can you help?” I ask, hating her warring emotions and pain and knowing she’s struggling because she wants to help me. I love this woman and I don’t want to see her hurting in any way, despite everything I’ve learned tonight.
She sets her duffle bag down on the coffee table and pulls out a sleek black laptop that clearly isn't her work-issued equipment, and must be her personal computer. She sits on the couch and I follow, staying close to her as she opens the computer and powers it on. The home screen is simple, and the operating system is Linux, which is unusual for anyone not in the tech world. She looks over at me, but won’t meet my eyes.
“I need my phone, please,” she says quietly, shoulders slumped and her whole countenance defeated.
I pull her phone out of my pocket and hand it over to her. She activates a hot spot, connects her computer, then clicks on an icon on her laptop screen and pulls up a VPN, clearly comfortable with this process and knowing her way around her own tech and how to hide her movements online. She pulls up a web browser and types in an IP address.
She's surprising me left and right. This is a vastly different woman from the one I met at the Unicorn Café who lost her shit over a temperamental laptop with a screen of code on it. Between this and learning about her secret identity behind the Atlanta Haute List, I don’t even know her, it seems. The address loads a white password-protected screen and she quickly types in her credentials, which are both hidden. It opens a storage site that she navigates through with ease, pulling up a folder and opening a backup copy of a website with a resource library on the left, a navigation screen across the top, and a blog feature in the middle where the meat of the website obviously lives. It’s a copy of The Atlanta Haute List.
My knee-jerk reaction is to delete it and remove the code so it’ll never be created again, but I refrain and let her show me what she wants to. In the end, it’s something that could change everything.