Chapter 1
Lone Star Republic
IT WASHOTTER than Satan’s tit outside, but Jo wore a fleece-lined hoodie zipped all the way up to her chin, a necessity so she wouldn’t catch frostbite in the computer room. She swigged another gulp of RAGE ENERGY and continued to blind herself with the fluorescent light of the monitor set up eight inches from herface.
“How hard is it to get five monitors?” She slammed down her energy drink, rattling a pile of M&Ms and sending them scattering across thetable.
“How hard is it to work on four?” her friend—the only other person she’d seen for a month—asked from across theroom.
“No one asked you, Yuusuke.” Jo rolled her eyes and took another hefty sip of neon-green juice. She wouldn’t be surprised if, over the past twenty-four-hour hack-a-thon, she had slowly begun substituting the liquid for blood in herveins.
“Then who else were youasking?”
“Johnsonhere.”
“Who the hell is Johnson?” Yuusuke pushed his chair back from his desk, leaning back so far he almost toppledover.
“Empty energy drink can numberfifteen.”
“Fifteen? Damn, Jo, you’re going to straight-up give yourself a heartattack.”
“Don’t insult little Johnson.” Jo picked up the can as she swiveled her own chair to look at Yuusuke. She brought the aluminum to her cheek, nuzzling it tenderly. “He didn’t mean it,sweetie.”
“What hour are we on?” Yuusuke groaned, running his hands through his hair. Most of it had fallen from his pony tail and now hung limply around his face. Dark stubble lined his chin, the patchy shadow almost the same shade as the purple bags under his eyes. Bags that no doubt mirrored those beneath herown.
“Twenty-five.”
“We’re screwed if we don’t get a break,” Yuusuke mumbled from behind his hands, rubbing his face as if to wake himself up. The motion prompted Jo to copy, realizing how heavy her own eyelidsfelt.
“We’re screwed if we don’t get abreakthrough.”
He muttered some kind of agreement, or expletive, or both, and returned to hiscomputer.
Code and sequences ran across one of her screens. It was a little bit of software that could be used for a probing attack on crypto-currency databases, just like the one they were currently trying to crack into. Unsurprisingly, the Black Bank had one of the best security systems in the world. Unsurprising, really, since the bank was owned by the infamous hacker group, Incognito. It’s why the payout for this particular job had been so impressive: only fools would takeit.
She and Yuusuke were just suchfools.
In the corner of her left screen, a little red bubble appeared with a ‘1’ at itscenter.
“Message from the boss,” Jo announced. She looked over her shoulder when there were no signs of life. Yuusuke’s head bobbed, his giant headphones covering both ears. Jo took one of her fifteen energy cans and tossed it at his head. It missed, but struck his shoulder, still having the desiredeffect.
“What?” He nearly jumped out of hisskin.
“Message from the boss,” sherepeated.
“Oh fu— what does it say?” Yuusuke stood and walked over to read their employer’s most recentdemand.
“Maybe they decided not to hack the most un-hackable thing on the planet?” Jo offered hopefully. The only way they were getting into the Black Bank’s servers was if they actually broke into the room they were housed in and got to tamperbehindthefirewalls.
“Then we don’t get paid and someone else gets the glory. Fat chance. And, anyway, we both know it’s not what youwant.”
Jo clicked on the bubble and a tiny, encrypted window popped open. It was a small frame, a little portal to the world outside that neither of them had seen for two days now. It showed a barn in the middle of nowhere, adjacent to an unassuming farmhouse. High-efficiency solar panels lined the rooftops, feeding what Jo knew to be industrial batteries disguised as grainsilos.
It was the barn in which they now sat. Underneath the picture were listed the current date and time. Then, a few lines of text, colder than the room in which theysat:
The Rangers have yousurrounded.
Do the honorable thing and purge alldata
