"Right." The word accusation sat in his gut like a cement brick.
"Shit. I didn’t mean it that way."
"Yeah, you did." Gideon raised his hand. "I’m in no mood to rehash any of this. You’ll hear the spin, and it won’t be reality. The truth is buried in server called Bralorne Backcountry Protocol. If you ever come across that, you’ll learn why I was fired for no valid reason."
The elevator opened, and Gideon stepped in. "No hard feelings, man." The doors closed, and so did everything he’d spent the last seven years working on.
Chapter One
There were three things Zadie Noor did not do.
She didn't eat breakfast before noon. She didn't apologize for the number of screens she needed to function like a normal human being. And she absolutely did not use her gaming name—or any other name she could be associated with—on the dark web.
She was Felicity. And right now, Felicity had a problem.
Felicity: You knew people at Blackridge Security?
God, she missed being Hopper. Not because Felicity wasn't still a piece of her, but Felicity had to be more careful. Quieter. More hidden in the dark corners of the web. Hopper had the ability to be a little more like the real Zadie. Fun. Flirty. A little outrageous. Felicity barely tapped that part of Zadie's personality, and sometimes it grated on her nerves.
She watched the cursor blink while she sat in silence in the comms room. It was after seven in the morning, which wasn’t early, but today it seemed that everyone thought it was acceptable to be lazy and either sleep in or pretend to. Zadie had never been a reasonable person when it came to rest. Not that she didn’t know how to sit still. Obviously, she knew how to do that. But her brain that struggled to shut off when the moon came out.
Flatline: There you go, putting words on my fingers again. I said, I’ve heard of the company.
She smirked. Two weeks ago, she came across "Flatline" on a thread she shouldn't have accessed, observed him doing things he definitely shouldn't have been doing, and she had been quietly impressed—and entertained—ever since. Whoever he was, he moved through encrypted systems as if he'd built them himself. Which, given some of the architecture she'd seen him navigate, wasn't entirely out of the question.
Felicity: Your impressions?
Flatline: That they’re much like my name these days.
Felicity: That might be accurate, but I hope you have a pulse.
Flatline: I do, but that’s not what you really want to know. Let me save you the time. The official word is that they closed up shop. But I heard they had some trouble. Not the money kind. The enemy kind, and it crashed their CPU. Figuratively speaking, of course.
Zadie leaned back in her chair and chuckled. Her teammates, Neve, Scout, and Wynn, constantly made fun of the fact that sometimes she preferred speaking to her screens rather than to humans. Wasn’t true. But there were some personalities that came across digitally that tickled her the way most didn’t.
Felicity: Interesting. Anyone take credit?
Flatline: Not that I’ve seen. And from what I can tell, whatever they built got taken apart faster than it went up. Which says more about the foundation than the demolition.
She tilted her head at the screen. There was something in the phrasing—the serene confidence of someone who'd built enough things to know exactly how they failed. It reminded her of someone. MacGyver. God, she missed him.
Felicity: You're annoyingly useful, you know that?
Flatline: I've been told.
Felicity: Don't let it go to your head.
Flatline: Too late.
Knock. Knock.
Zadie shifted her chair. "Hey Darwin."
"Do you ever stop?" Darwin asked as he leaned against the doorjamb, wearing a light blue button-down shirt and a pair of faded jeans. If he wasn’t wearing that, it was a white shirt and dark jeans. Or a purple one with stone-washed jeans. The man didn’t have very many outfits.
But it worked for him.
"Do you?" Zadie folded her arms and smiled as if it were a challenge.
