I want to deny it, but he’s right. Maybe I’m finally growing up. Just like my father always wanted. Except… I’m not doing it for him. I’m doing it for her.
“Don’t you have an account to crack?” I grumble at Ryan.
He nods as he rises from the table.
“There’s a folder on my nightstand,” I tell him. “You’ll have everything you need in there.”
“I doubt it will be everything I need,” he responds. He’s not being sarcastic. He’s stating a fact. “But, I’ll figure it out.” Again, fact.
“Thanks, Ry.”
He nods again as he heads to the stairs. “Don’t thank me yet, Liam. Give me about thirty minutes and I’ll let you know what can be done.”
“I’m gonna go shower,” Danny informs me, “but I can help you move your shit into your new place after that.”
I nod. “Not going to class?”
He shrugs. “Fuck chemistry.”
I smile and head up to start packing.
I’ve changed clothes and am only twenty minutes into shoving my crap into black garbage bags—because who needs boxes—when Ryan taps on my door.
“I’m in.”
“Already?” Ryan is good, but this is too good.
He shrugs. “They leaked the fund data intentionally for Bobby to find it. They made ittooeasy to find, so of course, he did. To do that, they weakened one of their own firewalls to allow him entry. I watched how they did it and mapped their entry sequence. Now I have their pattern.” He sighs as I watch him with my mouth hanging open. “I’m inside their network. I left a small executable that keeps a persistent connection. They won’t see it unless they’re actively looking for anomalies, which I suppose they could do. I have an alert set to tell me if they find it.”
“I don’t know what half of that meant,” I confess.
He sighs. “It means I have root access now.” At my look of confusion, he shakes his head. “It means that we have a way in, Liam. I can control the account if you want me to. But, like I said, I have a paper to write. I didn’t know what information you wanted from their accounts, so I bypassed their authentication and mirrored their transaction logs. Right now, I’m mappingallaccounts connected to that fund. There appear to be a lot of them.”
“I—wow, Ryan. It’s only been twenty minutes. This is unbelievable.” I am in shock as much as anything else.
He begins his finger tapping. “Like I said, they weakened their own firewall when they leaked the information. That showed me their sequence. It was only—”
“Okay, Ry, okay. I wasn’tquestioningyou. I wascomplimentingyou.”
“Oh.” He frowns. His hand stills. “Oh. I see. Well, thank you.”
“No, thankyou. This isamazing. Really.”
My brother blushes. “So, uh, yeah. When you tell me what information you want about the transactions, I can get that for you. I need a couple hours to write this history paper first, though, okay?”
I grin. “Can’t ChatGPT write it?”
My brother looks scandalized. “ChatGPT? Please tell me you don’t use AI to write your papers, Liam. That would be cheating. You could get expelled.”
I can’t help my roar of laughter. God. I adore my little brother. He blushes harder, so I try to contain my chuckles. “Sorry, I wasn’t laughing at you.” I am perfectly aware he thinks I am, so I explain. “I’m laughing at the irony of you breaking into the Greeks’ accounts and then lecturing me about cheating.”
His brow furrows. “One criminal breaking the law to hurt another criminal is not synonymous with cheating the educational system that is meant to prepare us for the future.”
This time I manage to hold back my laughter. My brother. So logical. “No. I suppose you’re right.”
He frowns.
“Seriously, Ry. You are the best. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
