Colleen rolled a pair of jeans into a bundle. “I will text you everything we do. Morning, noon, and night. Where he says we’re going, and where we actually end up. Just a constant stream of texts and location pins.”
She scowled. “Good, but I still say you’re being stupid. My parents would lock me in the attic if I did something like this, either to prevent me from going or afterward if I ever went home again. Did you even google this guy?”
“Yeah, I did a search. I didn’t find anything incriminating. He doesn’t seem to be on social media much.”
Actually, that wasn’t entirely true.
When Colleen had googled Tristan King, she hadn’t found anything at all, and that was weird. No Facebook. No TikTok. No websites. No blog, no Insta, no driver’s license records, no real estate records, no tax returns, and no pay-to-search results.
No internet tracks at all.
Either Tristan King was very serious about his privacy and knew how to cover his tracks exquisitely well, or Tristan King didn’t exist.
Colleen had even launched her Tor browser and gone onto the dark web, looking for any signs of Tristan King.
Nothing.
Maybe he’d given her a false name, and maybe his business card was fake. It wouldn’t surprise Colleen. People did all sorts of weird things.
However, what was really weird was that there was absolutely no mention of any Tristan King anywhere.
The Google search for Tristan plus King had returned zero results.
Colleen had never seen a Google search return a zero, even for flagrant misspellings.
According to the internet, nobody had ever been named Tristan King.
Nobody in the whole world had Tristan as a first name and King as a surname. Those names were gone. There was a gaping black hole in the internet where the words Tristan King should have been.
Tristan had said he was a coder. Some computer science majors and hackers were paranoid about any sort of presence on the internet. Her parents’ generation had opted into the facial recognition software on all the social media platforms, allowed tracking and spiders to engage because it made buying a toilet seat online so much easier, but computer science majors didn’t allow any tracking or electronic home assistants.
There were, of course, jokes about technology “enthusiasts” who had programmable thermostats, electronic home assistants shaped like disks or tubes listening to them at all times of the day and night, smartphone-controlled vacuum cleaners and sous vide devices, and their smartwatchs hooked up to their smartphones tracking every step they took and auto-posting the graph online.
On the other hand, cybersecurity professionals hardwired an analog kill switch for the internet on their laptop and used a printer with a USB cord with no Bluetooth connection, and that was all.
And they kept a loaded gun sitting next to the printer in case it started acting funny.
Maybe Tristan King was a privacy nut, but the absolute absence, zero-kelvin heat signature of Tristan plus King in every search result was bizarre.
But there was no way Colleen was telling Anjali that. The woman had just threatened to lock her in a basement to keep her from going.
“I know, but what do I have to lose?” Colleen asked the air as she wadded up her clothes and shoved them in her luggage. “I don’t have a job. I sure as hell don’t have a career. I don’t have a boyfriend or even a cat. And it’s only a week. You know, I think Tristan King did me a favor by getting me fired.”
“I do not see how being fired could ever be a favor,” Anjali said and propped herself up to sip from her glass of water.
“GameShack was a terrible place to work. They switch the schedule around every week and always manage to ‘accidentally’ schedule me for exactly thirty-eight hours a week so they don’t have to give me benefits. I haven’t had health insurance since I dropped out of college.”
“Well, I might have heard once or twice about how awful your manager was,” Anjali snarked.
“Right? I didn’t realize all those grotty tattoos were white-supremacist bullshit.”
Anjali flinched. “Ew.”
“Tristan King took one look at Miller and peeled him like a grape. It was freaky. Miller was practically squirming on the floor by the time Tristan stopped talking at him.”
“Hmm, so this Tristan King guy is perceptive and uses what he sees to be cruel.”
“Cruel to a white supremacist Nazi who was being a dickhead.”
