Page 32 of Victorious

But he didn’t, because the truth was, Mitch didn’t know what he wanted the answer to be.

Victor Vale was like a live wire. Tremendously powerful, but if you stayed around him long enough, chances were you would get hurt. Or killed.

Mitch had spent the last ten years testing his luck. He’d been dragged into Victor’s path, and then, onto his quest for revenge. And he had gone along, in part because it was better to be at Victor’s side than in his way, and in part because Mitch owed him something—his freedom, his help.

But now Eli was dead, and Victor was AWOL, and Mitch had gotten away with his life. He should have run, gotten as far away as he could. But for some reason, Mitch hadn’t. He didn’t know why. No, that was a lie. He did. The shower cut off in the bathroom and Dol dragged his head off the bed, in anticipation of Sydney’s eventual return.

Mitch’s gaze hung on the door as he said, “How can I help?”

“I’m glad you asked,” said Victor. “I want you to write a program. One that can find me in surveillance footage.”

Mitch nodded. “You want me to erase you from it?”

“On the contrary,” he said, and Mitch could hear it then, in Victor’s voice. That almost-smile that he knew so well. “I want you to put me everywhere.”

Mitch frowned, but started scratching out notes as Victor explained.

He wanted a program that would replicate his image, and plant it in surveillance footage all across the country. Mitch smiled as Vic spoke, the cogs in his head already turning. Clever. Offering EON hundreds of false leads would negate any real ones, while wasting copious time and resources, spreading EON thinner with every squandered pursuit.

By the time Sydney stepped out of the bathroom, surrounded by steam and swallowed in a hotel robe, Mitch had hung up, and started coding a program he’d already named Rainfall.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked, eyes sharp. At first, he took the look for fear, then realized it was worse: hope. He could tell her. But the truth would only make things worse.

“The front desk,” he said. “They called to complain that you used all the hot water.”

Syd stuck out her tongue and collapsed onto the bed.

Mitch smiled grimly. Maybe he wasn’t bad at lying after all.

XIIINOW. THEN.

1 WEEK BEFORE THE END

HERALD DINER

MITCH finished his slice of pie, and clicked away from the gardening forum, switching to an incognito browser, and running a program to block his IP.

His watch chimed, the way it was programmed to do every six hours. He dug a bottle of pills from his pocket, tipped one out into his palm—small, unmarked, and charcoal-black—and used the last of his chocolate milk to wash it down.

Then he typed in the address.

EON used to have a forward-facing portal, albeit an encrypted one, for employee access. But nearly a year ago, it had ostensibly gone dark. Now there was no public site, and he was greeted with a blank page and an error message. But Mitch was undeterred.

As far as he could tell, this was the only remote access with the EON server. And even if it looked defunct, it wasn’t. The door had been sealed, painted over, but underneath, some point of contact was still there.

He hit a sequence of keys, and a coding window popped up.

The black screen, blank save for a single blinking cursor.

Inviting him to try.

And he had.

Over the last nine months, he’d tried stealth and force, malware and mirroring and overloading the system, but so far, nothing had worked. Every attempt was met by the same two words.

TRY HARDER.

Mitch swore under his breath.