Chapter 8 Bitsy
The deep, gravelly vibration of his voice seemed to rattle right through the concrete floor, buzzing straight into the soles of Bitsy’s scuffed sneakers. “Who the hell are you?”
Bitsy couldn’t breathe. Her lungs felt completely stuck, trapped beneath the heavy weight of the freezing air and the sheer, terrifying shadow of the giant looming over her.
She pulled her knees tighter against her chest, burying herself deeper into the oversized pastel pink hoodie.
The thick cotton offered absolutely no protection against the massive monument of a man standing in front of her.
He was huge. So much bigger than anyone she had ever seen in the real world. His dark overcoat made him look like a piece of the night sky had broken off and walked up the forty-two flights of stairs just to find her.
Her heart hammered a frantic, erratic rhythm against her ribs, a wild thump-thump-thump that felt so loud she was certain he could hear it over the howling wind.
Everything in her brain scrambled, a chaotic mess of bright colors and static.
She wanted to disappear into the stars on her gray sweatpants.
She wanted to slip through the cracks in the floorboards.
Most of all, she wanted her stuffed bear, Honey.
A wave of sudden, hollow misery hit her as she remembered she had left him in her car to keep him out of the dust. Her fingers twitched where they were locked around the edges of her bulky old laptop, wishing desperately that she could pull his worn, fuzzy brown ears up to her chin,
For weeks, this dark, unfinished floor had been her safe place.
It was cold, yes, and the wind blew through the open concrete framework with a lonely, hollow whistle, but it was empty.
And empty meant quiet. In the big world down below, everything was always too bright, too fast, and entirely too loud.
The noises of the city—the screeching tires, the shouting people, the endless, grinding pressure of having to be a grown-up when her inside self felt so incredibly small—shook her up until she felt like she was going to break into tiny pieces.
But up here, connected to the massive, heavy stream of data she had found pulsing beneath the streets, she could fade away.
She had named the server The Ghost because it was so beautifully silent, so perfectly hidden.
Whenever she plugged her homemade rig into the line, the connection was like an iron shield.
It was a massive, unbreakable current of pure processing power that swallowed up her little laptop and created a space where the rest of the world couldn't touch her.
Until tonight.
Tonight, The Ghost had broken. Bitsy had noticed the shift almost twenty minutes ago.
The screen had begun to stutter, the frame rates on her video dropping into a jagged, painful lag.
The loading circle had spun and spun, a little white wheel against the dark background that made a tight, anxious knot form in her stomach.
The Ghost never lagged. It was supposed to be foolproof.
She had tried to rewrite the routing buffers on the fly, her fingers flying across the mismatched keys she’d scavenged from three different junk piles, but the interface had simply locked up.
The glowing blue rows of code had frozen solid, trapping her out.
And then, she had heard the footsteps.
He hadn't been sneaking. He had been heavy, loud, and deliberate, his boots crunching against the construction dust and gravel with a terrifying, rhythmic certainty.
Her inside self had gone completely small then, sliding instantly into that deep, foggy headspace where she wasn't a smart coder or a capable person.
She was just a little girl hiding in the dark, hoping the imposing man would just walk on by.
She had taken out her blunt purple crayon, her hands shaking so hard she could barely hold it, and focused entirely on the black-and-white lines of the garden scene on her paper, pretending that if she just kept coloring her flowers, she could blend right into the shadows.
But the giant was talking to her. And he was waiting for an answer.
“I—I’m...” Bitsy choked on the first syllable, her voice coming out as a tiny, pathetic squeak.
The terrifying intensity in his dark eyes didn't waver, and the absolute authority radiating off him made her lower lip begin to tremble violently.
A warm, stinging tear welled up in the corner of her eye, spilling over her pale cheek and disappearing into the collar of her hoodie.
“I’m s-sorry,” she sobbed out. The dam completely breaking as more tears followed, blurring the sight of his massive leather boots.
She squeezed her eyes shut, pulling the bulky, scuffed laptop so hard against her ribs that the plastic edges dug into her skin.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I didn't mean to be bad. I promise I won't do it again. I’ll never do it again!”
Her chest heaved with a quiet, terrified gasp, her words tumbling out in a frantic, stuttering rush of apologies.
“Please don't be mad at me. I just—I needed the quiet.
The big world is so loud, and everything hurts my ears, and the server was so big and heavy.
It made the noise stop. I just wanted to watch my movies and color my flowers.
I didn't steal anything bad, I swear! I didn't look at the secret numbers. I just used the extra pieces to make a safe spot.”
She buried her face against the top of her laptop, her shoulders shaking as she wept. She was waiting for the yelling. People in the big world always yelled when they were angry. They used mean, sharp words that felt like slaps, and they made her feel like she was entirely invisible.
But the giant didn't yell. The silence that followed her confession was thick, but it wasn't sharp.
Wyatt stood over the tiny, shivering creature, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his dark overcoat.
He didn't shift his weight. He didn't raise his voice.
When he finally spoke, his register was still low and gravelly, but the lethal edge had slowed into something entirely different—something heavy, commanding, and deeply disapproving.
“You broke into a closed-circuit, high-level corporate network to watch cartoons, little one?”
The specific words made Bitsy’s breath hitch.
Little one. The name settled over her like a warm, heavy blanket, hitting a spot deep inside her chest that made her want to look up, even though she was terrified.
She peeked out from behind her wild halo of soft brown hair, her eyes wide and wet with tears.
She nodded once, a tiny, miserable movement of her chin, her tongue instantly darting out to catch a stray tear near the corner of her mouth.
“M-My movies,” she whispered, her fingers loosening just enough from the laptop to gesture vaguely toward her canvas bag. “The princess ones. They sing the pretty songs, and then the noise goes away.”
Wyatt’s eyes dropped to the delicate ruffles on her white socks, tracking the scuffed sneakers, the star-covered sweatpants, and finally settling on the purple crayon lying in the dust by her milk crate.
The sheer absurdity of the situation should have made him cynical, but the absolute precision of the hack—the flawless, elegant code he had spent three weeks tracking—was currently running as a baseline shield for a fairy tale.
“There are plenty of free wireless networks down there,” Wyatt said, his voice dropping into a slow, corrective cadence that carried the absolute weight of a lecture.
He gestured toward the open perimeter of the floor where the city lights flickered in the gray mist. “The libraries, the coffee shops, the public transit stations.
Why aren't you using those instead of tapping a private nitrogen-pressured fiber line?”
Bitsy sniffled, wiping her nose with the back of her oversized sleeve.
The fabric left a faint smudge against her pale skin.
“None of them are strong enough,” she whispered, her voice holding that stubborn, defensive little edge that she couldn't quite help.
“The library is sticky, and the coffee places have the big grinding machines that make my head buzz.
Their internet is small. It breaks when too many people look at it.
This server didn't break. It was heavy. It was like... like a big room with the doors shut. It drowned out the rest of the world.”
She looked down at her paper, where the purple flower was only half-shaded. The realization that she had ruined her safe spot came crashing down on her, and another wave of quiet tears spilled over her lashes. “But I ruined it. I made a mess.”
With a shaky, heartbreaking sigh, she started to shift her weight on the plastic milk crate, her thin legs trembling as she tried to move.
“I’ll go,” she choked out, her little headspace turning entirely miserable as she reached out to unplug her patchwork rig from the concrete pillar.
Her small hands fumbled with the electrical tape, her vision swimming.
“I’ll gather my things and I’ll go away.
I won't ever come back to your building, mister. I’ll find another place. I’m sorry I was a bad girl.”
“Stop.”
The command wasn't shouted, but it was entirely absolute. It cut through her panic like a sudden frost, freezing her fingers right on the hand-soldered copper wiring. Bitsy’s heart skipped a beat.
Her inside self didn't know how to disobey that tone.
It was the voice of someone who knew exactly how things were supposed to be, someone who held all the rules in the palm of his big hand.
She let go of the wires instantly, her hands dropping into her lap as she looked up at him through her wet lashes, her chest heaving with a tiny, submissive hiccup.