“Is there a problem, Lil?” asks Hanningan.
“Yes, he photographed something, I believe me. I requested access to his phone, which was denied.”
Hannigan walks over to the man and threatens him with cops and arrest if he doesn’t comply, and simply takes the phone from the guy.
They unlock it with his face.
“It’s a private phone,” says Hannigan. “Without a guard on it,” he continues. “And yes, he photographed you, and?—“
Hannigan stops talking and holds the phone for Lilian to see. I can’t tell from a distance what it is. What I can see is how the employees' faces switch, and I know what comes next.
And sure enough, the guy jumps at Hannigan, pushes him back off his feet with a caught leg, grabs the phone, and runs.
He doesn’t come very far. The security guards tackle him into the glass door leading to the office, which vibrates dangerously close to breaking, and Hannigan handles him roughly.
Lilian watches from a distance, and I walk up to her from behind.
“What was that about?” I ask.
“He photographed us,” she says without looking at me. “There was an entire folder about me on his phone.”
“You think he has something to do with the—um—You know, the shooting?” I ask in a hesitant, insecure tone, as Ella would.
Lilian looks at me. Her eyes narrow, and for a moment, I fear she suspects me, but then she turns and gets the phone that lies on the floor next to the guy, with Hannigan and his knee in the back.
Lilian takes the phone and returns to her office. There, she gets out a second laptop from her desk and plugs the phone in. I shadow her, watching. How she operates, acts, thinks.
“What are you doing?” I ask, trying to get close. I want to see what’s on it. I also want to know who the guy is.
“What do you know about my company?” she asks, typing in a password.
“You develop government software. I read something about super surveillance via AI in an article,” I say, reinforcing my cover.
“That covers it on a surface level, yes. I can match the data from this device with all our other information. Imagine this phone here, there is all sorts of data on it, location logs, messages, contacts, browsing history, images with faces, and location tags in metadata. I can feed it into Zeus, and it cross-references it with our existing and available governmental data,” she says and types in several queries.
“This enables us to build whatever we need,” she continues. “Contact spreadsheets, movement maps, and even predict the likelihood of certain decisions. Currently, I am building a comprehensive profile of him within a secure system for testing purposes.”
My heart beats faster as I watch her do what she does for exactly two reasons.
One, I need to get my hands on that laptop.
And two, a nice body is great, but that mind of hers, her intelligence—I blow everything I came here to do in the wind as I grasp her chin and pull her up.
12
LILIAN
PLAYLIST: SCARS TO YOUR BEAUTIFUL – ALESSIA CARA
My eyes wander from the screen into Ella’s eyes as she grasps my chin and pulls me up.
She is biting her bottom lip, and I can’t resist her. I can’t.
“You asked me what I do to you,” she whispers in a voice that hums warmth into my cold chest. Her beautiful green eyes shimmer like a forest in the sun after it rained and the water drops twinkle like diamonds on every leaf.
“But don’t you see what you do to me?” she says. “Don’t you see how you shatter every single one of morals?”
I cannot grasp her words because her touch distracts me from whatever I was doing. I cannot remember who I am right now.
