CHAPTER 25
THE ONLY THING I’VE LEARNED in the last three days is that I’m not cut out to be a hacker. I’ve spent every free minute of my time with my nose buried in this stupid program, and I still have no idea how to even read the code. I’m going to have to break down and ask Sim. We haven’t seen a whole lot of each other outside of training. Lately, she’s been coming to bed late, and I rise and start the hunt for breakfast early. Will she even help me?
Only one way to find out. It’s Thursday afternoon, and I’ve got to get a handle on this before tomorrow morning. I scour the house looking for her, but she’s not in any of the downstairs spaces. I move to checking upstairs, but when I make it to the last room on the girls’ side, the only person in there is Hack.
“Hey, have you seen Sim?” I ask from the doorway.
Hack looks up from her tablet blankly, and it takes a moment for her expression to clear as she registers what I said. She must have been concentrating intensely. “Nuh-uh. Why?”
I consider not telling her. Sharing your weakness with the competition doesn’t seem like the wisest way to win, but neither does going into an assessment knowing you’re going to fail. “I need help.”
“With the assignment?”
I nod.
Hack sits up straight on her bed and crosses her legs in front of her. “What do you need help with?” She motions for me to sit.
I step carefully into the room, like I’m worried I might fall through the floor or something. Then, I shake my head at my own ridiculousness and continue all the way to Hack with more self-assurance. I sit a few feet from her and hand her my tablet. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
She spends all of five seconds reviewing the code on my screen, then hands the tablet back. “See everything in brackets, here?” She points to part of the code. “That’s the bones, that’s how you want the code to perform.” Then she moves her finger to hover over a different section of code. “This part here is the function, what you want to accomplish. Whoever designed this code knew what they were doing. It’s beautiful work.” She gazes admiringly at my screen. I follow her gaze and let her words digest.
And suddenly, it all makes sense. Her explanation, as simple as it was, is just what I needed to be able to put the pieces together. “Why are you helping me?” I ask, my curiosity getting the better of me.
“It’s like, what… eighteen hours until our assessment, and you don’t even understand the code? There’s no chance of you beating me, and you seem pretty cool.” She shrugs and falls silent. Then we exist in that awkward place where we aren’t friends, but maybe could be, someday. But for now, we have nothing else to say to each other.
“Well, thanks.” I stand and aim for the door.
“No problem,” Hack calls after me.
I head back to my room with a new understanding of what’s expected of me, and eighteen hours to practice enough to maybe actually make it through the assessment. I settle in on my bed, curling around my pillow for comfort, and dig in to work.
Everything snaps into place with the first line of code. Now that I know what it does, I’m able to anticipate the outcome just from reading the gibberish. In less than ten minutes, I have a workable solution to hacking a simulated drone. I erase my work and try again. This time, I crack it in seven minutes. The third time, six minutes. I try it over and over and over, until I reach a personal best time of three minutes, twenty-seven seconds. That’s less time than it took Hack during her duel against Sim. When I finally call it a night, it’s with the confidence that I’ll be here, sleeping in this bed, this time tomorrow night. I’m going to rock this elimination assessment.
#
I can’t breathe. My lungs ache for air, and panic seeps into every corner of my chest I can’t fill with air. Something heavy covers my nose and mouth, blocking my access to air. I drag air in as deeply as I can, but all I get is a mouthful of leather. A glove? Someone has their hand over my face, and it’s cutting off my air supply. My stomach clenches and roils, threatening to vomit into that gloved hand. I swallow against the urge, sucking hard to get air past the firm fingers.
The room is so dark, I can’t clearly see who’s leaning over my bed trying to suffocate me, or maybe they’re wearing a black mask to get lost in the shadows, and I don’t know which unnerves me more, but I kick out anyway. My feet don’t connect with anything except the mattress underneath me, so I adjust my aim and try again while reaching up with my hands to try to level the hand away from my mouth.
There’s an unusual chill in the room, but adrenaline-fueled heat blazes in my veins, tightening my muscles. I pull the hand away and gulp at the air, desperate for oxygen. I’m still dragging in breath after heavy breath, trying to expand my lungs enough to scream when strong arms wrap around me and yank me off the bed. They aren’t fully prepared for my weight, and I hit the ground hard. My left hip throbs from the impact, but I push the pain aside and scramble in the direction of the door.
I finally find my voice and screech the beginnings of a cry for help, but hand wraps around my ankle and tugs me back, knocking me face down on the ground. The impact forces my hard-earned breath from my lungs. Then I’m being lifted by the waist, off the floor, over the desk, and toward the window. The open window. How? The question is a fleeting thought in my brain as I’m shoved through the opening to hang halfway out, precariously balanced between safety and a twenty-foot headfirst drop.
“Help me!” I scream, holding the windowsill in a death grip and fold myself against it, ignoring the painful way it digs into my stomach. “Sim!” I call out for my roommate, but there’s no answer. Has whoever is attacking me already taken her out? The ground below is free of mangled bodies, so the intruder didn’t toss her out ahead of me. “God, help me!” I sob, partly out of instinct, and partly because no one else is coming to my aid. God is all I’ve got left. All I ever really had in this place.
My attacker lifts my feet off the ground in an attempt to flip me out of the opening, but I kick hard. This time I connect, with a solid thunk, which is followed by a whispered, “Oomph.”
The impact gives me enough of an advantage that I’m able to pull myself back into the room. I fall gracelessly off the desk and start a crabwalk toward the door. My attacker seems ten feet tall, a giant looming over me, a dark silhouette blocking out all but the tiniest slivers of moonlight coming in through the open window. I feel tiny in comparison, like a bug about to be squashed, and I tremble in fear.
“What’s going—hey!” Sim rushes in from the hall. Before she can come to my rescue, though, the masked assailant launches up onto the desk and through the window. I wait for the thud of a body hitting ground, but hear only silence. I press a hand to my chest in a vain attempt to still my racing heart. Five seconds pass, then ten, and still nothing. Eventually, I get the nerve up to peek out the opening. There’s nothing under the window except bare ground, freshly mown grass.
“I’m pretty sure I was just attacked by a magician,” I mutter as I come back from the window and close it behind me. The telltale click indicates the lock has engaged, and for good measure, I test the window. It doesn’t budge.
“Are you okay?” Maverick’s voice right behind me makes me jump a hundred feet in the air. When I turn, he’s impossibly close. Sim hovers in the space behind him, and a small crowd has gathered in my doorway: Hack, Legacy, Cipher, Redux, and Ghost lingers near the back.
I take stock of my aches. My thigh is going to bear a beauty of a bruise tomorrow, and my stomach aches like someone tried to saw me in half. But I’m not a lawn pancake. Everything else seems minor in comparison. “I’m okay.”
The company clustered around my doorway begins to thin, Hack and Redux losing interest now that the action is over..
“We should let the instructors know what just happened.” Ghost looks like he wants to come in, but his gaze slips to Maverick, and he stays where he is.
“How?” Cypher challenges. “They obviously aren’t manning the cameras, or they’d already be here.”
Legacy’s gaze searches out the camera on my ceiling, and she nods in reluctant agreement. “We’ll have to tell them in the morning then.”
Ghost sways forward, like he’s about to take a step in my direction, but stops himself. Then he spins on his heel and heads back for the guys’ side of the house.
Maverick hasn’t moved. He watches me intently, like he’s worried I’m suddenly going to shatter into a thousand pieces and he’s waiting to catch them all.
He must recognize that because he takes a step forward and reaches out slowly, like he’s worried he’s going to spook me. When I don’t shy away, he sets his hands on my shoulders. “Why don’t you try to get some more sleep. I’ll hang out here just in case.” He lets go of my shoulders and pulls out the desk chair.
“You don’t have to stay,” I say, but the offer sounds amazing. Deep down inside, I’m silently begging him not to leave.
“I want to. If I go back to my room, I’m just going to be up all night worrying that whoever that was will come back.”
His answer makes sense, because I would likely do the same thing if he left me alone in here, stare at every large shadow willing it not to move, listening for any noise out of place, and generally freaking out at every imagined danger. Two of us were already murdered, and I was almost the third. “I’ll be fine. Really,” I reassure him, but my voice wavers on the last word. It’s hard to bury the last fifteen minutes under a brave face.
“Besides, we’re both here.” Legacy announces, motioning from herself to Sim and back again. I had all but forgotten her presence. At some point, Cipher slipped away, but Legacy has stepped fully into the room and is leaning against the wall casually, arms crossed over her chest.
“You’re staying here?” I ask in surprise. Legacy seems like the least likely person to want to help watch out for a fellow recruit.
“Safety in numbers. If I’m here with you two”—she motions first to me, then to Sim—“The three of us are safer than if I go back to my empty room.”
Her words click. It’s not concern for me keeping her here; it’s self-preservation. And ego. Legacy doesn’t have a roommate, and she’s worried my attacker may come for her. “Okay,” I agree, mostly because I think deep down, she’s scared, and I sit gingerly on the edge of my bed. “But no cuddling,” I tease as I slide under the covers.
Maverick gives me one last, concerned look, then nods and leaves the room. Legacy settles into the desk chair, facing the door, and Sim, quiet this whole time, goes to the bathroom for a shower.
Even with the comfort of knowing Legacy is three feet away and Sim just on the other side of the bathroom door, sleep is elusive. The world is quiet tonight, like the moment just between lightning and thunder. Vacuous. The silence sucks me in like a black hole, and with every passing second, the crushing force threatens to shatter me. I suck a lungful of crisp midnight air into my chest to keep my soul from collapsing, and I focus on the ceiling. I level my breaths to long, slow inhales and even exhales, and eventually, I’m able to force my eyes to close.
#
Morning comes too soon. Or not soon enough. When my alarm goes off, Legacy is still there, though she’s moved to the floor between mine and Sim’s beds, and appears to have dozed off at some point. Now, she’s gazing up at me groggily.
Sim’s is empty, fully made, looking exactly as it had last night.
I get out of bed and step over her carefully. I grab clothes from the dresser and retreat into the bathroom. When I come out she’s gone.
I want to thank Maverick for coming to my rescue last night, but I’m short on time this morning and he is scarce until we’re all gathered on the road preparing to start our run, except today, Sever stops us.
“This morning, we’re going to skip the run and jump right into the elimination assessment,” Sever announces without fanfare. “It’s come to our attention that there was an incident last night. Until we get to the bottom of it, consider yourselves on lockdown. After today, all remaining recruits will be restricted to the interior of your house only, and you will be assigned buddies. You will be expected to know where your buddy is at all times.”
Someone has already told the instructors what happened to me, and I’m relieved that I don’t have to be the one to do it, that I don’t need to relive the moment in my mind to relay it to them. I briefly wonder who it was, but it doesn’t really matter. Besides, now we’re all being punished because I was attacked, and judging from some of the looks I’m getting, at least a few recruits blame me for that.
Maverick, however, is looking at me with concern. When I meet his gaze, he mouths, “Are you okay?”
I nod.
We don’t get a chance to actually talk as we head upstairs for our assessments, but when we claim our chairs along the wall, I purposely position myself to end up in the one right next to his.
“How are you feeling?” he whispers.
“I’m alive.” I mean it to be a joke, but the slight way he flinches proves I missed the mark.
“Let’s begin,” Wraith says from in front of the workstation. “We’ve been reviewing your practice attempts this week,” she indicates the tablets she collected from us this morning, “and we’ve paired you for this assessment based on technique and proficiency shown in your practice. We’re going to start with Anomaly and Havoc.”
Does that mean they’re the best or the worst?
Sever hands them each a VR headset, and they sit facing us with their keyboards in their laps. The screens behind them light up, ready to display their work. I hold my breath as they start, and I watch them intently, my gaze flickering from Anomaly’s work to Havoc’s and back again. But when they pass minute five, I relax my tense muscles and settle in to enjoy the show. By the twenty-minute mark, I’m cool and confident. I’ve got this in the bag.