The outer layers are easy, disposable, but the deeper you go, the more encrypted it becomes.
Tyler works from the outside in, searching out the smaller players, the ones new to the network. He creates identities that hold up under pressure and slithers into conversations as if he belongs there, tactfully feeding into their egos, which gets them talking.
It’s too easy because they want to be seen and, more importantly, admired.
It makes what comes next easier.
Once they open up, Tyler gets into their systems, their files, and their lives.
He extracts everything he can, names, locations, financial trails, and patterns.
Anything that leads deeper into the web.
Then we raid their operations.
After we finish the job, Tyler drains their cryptocurrency wallets that are meant to make them untraceable.
We don’t keep it; it goes to our foundation. We established it the same week Marie and Sofie disappeared. It’s a safe house, a place for the ones we are able to save. It provides therapy, security, and provides them with a chance to rebuild something that was taken from them, their lives.
The people running the foundation are not just staff. They are our extraction team, or as we refer to them, our rescue crew.
Whenever we do a raid, we notify them first in case there are victims on site, and we move fast to get them out.
Some of the women and girls we find have the same story.They were coerced into thinking a better life awaited them here. Most of them are from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, or Colombia. They are given visas or work permits and brought here under the pretext of legitimate employment, with hotels being the easiest.
When they arrive, they are already in debt. A debt they never agreed to. Their documents are confiscated, and their freedom is stripped away.
Then they are sold and forced into brothels, into rooms, into lives they never chose.
Passed along from one man to the next like they’re nothing.
We still haven’t found Marie and Sofie. Not a single trace. But I haven’t stopped looking. I never will. Hope is a fragile thing, but it is all I have left of them, and I hold onto it because letting go would mean losing them all over again.
For the last two years, I’ve visited the local morgue every week without fail.
At first, it was because I needed to know. Every time an unidentified young woman was brought in, a part of me dreaded it would be Marie or Sofie. Another part dreaded it wouldn’t be. Grief does strange things to a person. It leaves you suspended between hope and despair, unable to fully embrace either.
Somewhere along the way, I befriended Mr. Higgs, the mortician who worked there. What started as awkward conversations in sterile hallways turned into hours spent listening to him explain things most people would rather never think about. Human anatomy. Muscle groups. Organ systems. How trauma affects the body. The ways bones fracture. The things death changes and the things it doesn’t.
Most people found Mr. Higgs to be strange.
I found him kind.
And over the last two years, while searching for my friends among the faces of the unidentified, I’d learned far more about the human body than I ever expected to.
I work on driving out emotions. It stays out of this room,sealed off. The weaponized version of me enters. I brace myself for what is waiting on the other side, then wrap my fingers around the handle.
The cold metal touches my skin, I gather my resolve and I turn the handle and enter.
The room is dimly lit, almost entirely by the gleam of Tyler’s setup. Computer monitors cover one wall, and code spills across them in rapid streams, windows opening, duplicating, and collapsing into others. Black screens blink in and out as he weaves through them.
Tyler sits in the middle of the room, unmoving except for his hands.
I enter the room and draw the door shut behind me.
“jackinthebox149?” I ask urgently, keeping my composure.
“Yeah.” He answers flatly. His eyes never leave the screen while his fingers move faster, intentionally.
