by Debora Geary
He scanned the screen. “You didn’t fix your brother’s.”
She opened her mouth to protest—and then her brain caught up with her mouth. She’d fixed them for several two-bit players with piss-poor security on their personal computers. It had never occurred to her to check her brother’s account. “Wait. Jamie has image-security issues?”
“Yup.” The hint of smugness on Daniel’s face was a faint shadow of the bucketful in his mind. “Even the best get sloppy occasionally.”
Not Jamie. He was a teenage slob in real life, but no way— Nell felt her fury spiking again and embraced it as an old friend. “Wait. You hacked into Realm through my brother’s account?”
Smug fled, replaced by something that looked suspiciously like anger. “Yeah. I don’t hack kids and people who use their dog’s name as their password.”
What kind of bank robber looked for the hardest way into the vault? Nell shook her head. And tried to fight the niggling voice at the back of her head that said it was entirely possible. If Jamie had a weakness, it was his gypsy avatar’s freaking wardrobe. She had enough outfits to dress half of Berkeley—assuming half of Berkeley liked gaudy silk and sparkly jewels. He claimed it distracted the competition.
Nell leaned forward, trying to put her mad on ice for long enough to figure out who to kill. “Show me.”
“It was a really small hole.” Daniel picked up his keyboard, hit a few keys, and pulled up a profile on screen. “Here, in the last round of costume images that got added.”
She looked. And froze.
It wasn’t Esmerelda onscreen. It was The Wizard.
Not Jamie’s account. Hers.
She sucked in air and read the damning lines onscreen. Realm’s creator and number-one player—and she’d left the barn door unlocked.
-o0o-
Daniel could hear the landmines clicking again. He’d stepped in something—and he had no idea what. “It’s an easy fix.”
“I know that.” Her words were clipped and diamond hard. “But I never should have screwed up in the first place.”
“You can’t be watching every Realm player all the time.”
Nell stared at the screen another moment, forehead wrinkled—and then started to laugh, the hard edges suddenly melting away. “I know.” She turned her chair toward his and handed him a cookie, eyes suddenly dancing with mischief. “But in this case, the watching should have been easy.”
He was so lost.
She grinned, with the kind of voltage that sent his hormones leaping for the light. “Jamie isn’t the top player in Realm. I am.”
He hoped the melting in his brain wasn’t terminal. “You’re the Wizard?”
“Yup.” She bit into her own cookie, face still alight with amusement—and something far more dangerous. “And you’re the sneaky, sniveling bastard who stole my spells.”
Oh, God. “Your brother’s the gypsy.” The very sexy gypsy. Daniel’s respect for Jamie flew up several dozen notches.
“Yes. Don’t change the subject.”
It was all pretty much the same mind-blowing subject in his world. He’d gotten them backwards. Mixed up the sexiest woman in the world and her kid brother. “You’re a hell of a fighter.”
“If that surprises you, you’re a hell of an idiot.”
Daniel winced. He’d totally deserved that one. “It was supposed to be a compliment.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Her voice quieted some. “I screwed up and it’s making me touchy.” She sighed, breaking off another chunk of cookie. “Too much to do and not enough brainpower for all the details.”
He settled back, finding himself intrigued, yet again, by the layers of Nell Sullivan. He’d have expected anger, or some kind of hot-headed recrimination. Then again, he’d also thought she wore flamboyant gypsy skirts and use her wiles on the unsuspecting men of Realm.
Ha. She blasted them with lightning bolts. While her teenage brother wore the skirts.
He should have figured it out. She didn’t have the gypsy’s easy flair—and The Wizard’s fast, powerful, in-your-face gameplay suited her personality down to the ground.
Derailed by stupid assumptions. “Sorry. I didn’t figure your brother for the skirt-wearing type.” And oh, shit, that had come out forty kinds of wrong.
Hot fire spit in her eyes, the kind that said mama lion was about to have somebody for breakfast. “You have a problem with that?”
No. Hell, no. Some of his best friends wore skirts. “No. Dammit, I’m sorry. I made a really stupid assumption, okay? Your brother is nineteen? And that avatar’s been playing for what, five years or so?” It took hundreds, maybe thousands of hours to rack up that kind of game points and Esmerelda’s poised, easy play.
“Yeah.” Nell was holding her fire, at least temporarily. “Something like that.”
Daniel shrugged. “So how many fourteen-year-old boys do you know with the smarts to play a female persona that well?”
A grin slid onto Nell’s face. “Esmerelda used to look a little different.”
He could only imagine. “Most of us don’t grow out of our comic-book-girl phase for a while. It’s a failing.”
“Hmm.” She seemed amused. “And when did you grow out of yours, exactly?”
He heaped mental blessings on the head of Tiffany Perkins—high school gamer, total hottie, and the one who had convinced him that avatars with boobs bigger than their heads were rude, disrespectful, and totally impractical. “My first librarian avatar was female.”
Nell raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Was she an old, ugly spinster?”
He knew better than to face-plant into two stereotypes in one afternoon. “Nope. She was smart, sneaky, and gorgeous.” Modeled after Tiffany Perkins, but he was smart enough to keep that part to himself. Hadn’t gotten him anywhere good with Tiffany, either—but it had taught him the value of gaming with avatars that other players tended to underestimate.
“Uh, huh.” Nell’s skeptical meter climbed higher—and then the oddest look crossed her face. “Wait. Blonde bombshell librarian. Totally sneaky, and way smarter than she looked. Oh, my God. You were Sigrún.”
Oh, hell. Daniel wondered what incredibly stupid lasting impression he’d managed to leave at sixteen. “I can’t be blamed for anything I did before the Internet was born.” At sixteen, he’d been playing Maze Wars on a green-screen terminal.
And then the second shoe dropped. Maze Wars. “Your mom. She was at Ames.” The NASA center that had been the birthplace of modern gaming.
Pride blazed on Nell’s face. “She was.”
Daniel tried to synch that kind of genius with a woman who couldn’t bake chocolate chip cookies. And then yanked his brain back to the more urgent issue. “You played Maze Wars?”
She still had a really odd look on her face. “I begged Mom to let me play one summer. We still had a hookup into Ames, and my older brothers got to play. I was thirteen, and she looked over my shoulder the whole time.”
He tried to think back nearly fifteen years. “That’s when the PARC guys were cheating.” Hacking the code and figuring out how to see all the other players in the maze.
“Yeah.” Nell’s opinion of the PARC guys was obvious. “Took Mom a while to figure out why they always seemed to be one step ahead of everyone else.”
He’d learned two things that summer. Digging in the swamp of the PARC efforts, he’d gotten his first serious lessons in hacking. And watching them easily obliterate scores of players, he’d also found his first ethical line in the sand.
“I was good, for a kid.” She was talking softly now, remembering. “But I was cornered, along with several other players. We’d formed a kind of alliance.”
It had been another outcome of the cheating—players had learned to work together to fight greater evils. Gaming had never been the same again. “Did you hold them off?”
“For a while.” She grinned. “Mom was running traces on the PARC guys, trying to figure out what they were doing.”
; Daniel made a mental note never to mess with Retha Sullivan.
“But there were too many of them, we were too disorganized, and the ethernet was too slow.” Nell looked up, the strange look back in her eyes. “And then Sigrún came storming in, guns blazing, and punched a hole in their defenses.”
The Great Maze War of 1983. He’d hacked the hackers, closed down their all-seeing eyes, and led the mass attack that had left the PARC guys reeling.
Sigrún’s fifteen minutes of fame. After that, Daniel Walker had learned to play in the shadows. “I was a sixteen-year-old kid with a big ego.”
“Mom thought you were a hero.” Nell pushed over the last cookie and spoke so softly he barely heard. “So did I.”
He felt something odd inside his chest trying to find the sunlight. The guy she thought he’d been. “I wasn’t.”
“I know.” She stood up abruptly, picked up two still-full cups of coffee, and headed for the stairs.
And he sat in the half-dark, wishing for things that had never been true.
-o0o-
Retha heard Nell coming long before her footsteps hit the top of the stairs. She set down her laptop and reached for the kettle. A wise old witch had once told her that most of parenting was listening and loving. The chaos in Nell’s mind said that both would be needed in short order.
She turned as her daughter rounded the corner into the kitchen—and blinked. What on earth?
Nell’s eyes reflected the tangle in her mind. “Remember Sigrún, Mom?”
Retha nodded slowly. She remembered. One very awed, very smitten thirteen-year-old had printed out a grainy image of Sigrún’s blonde bombshell avatar and taped it to her wall. “I do.”
“He’s sitting in our basement.”
Sometimes the threads of life tangled in crazy knots—and sometimes they wove into tapestries of eye-catching beauty. Retha smiled and held out a hand to her driven, confused daughter. Nell’s first hero, alive and well in the here and now. “Destiny can be a really funny thing, sweetheart.”
“It’s weird.” Her fiery child chomped on a stray cookie, wearing the same pouty face she’d perfected at two. “I always thought Sigrún was a girl.”
And that vague bond of sisterhood had helped her geeky tomboy of a daughter find her feet in the gaming world of 1983. Retha said nothing—she’d long ago learned that silence was one of the finest tools of parenthood.
Nell reached up into the cupboard, still fuming. “How does someone like that grow up into The Hacker?”
Retha was pretty sure the chasm wasn’t nearly as big as her daughter thought it was. “Same way you grew up to be The Wizard, and your brother has turned that silly gypsy of his into a decent character. People evolve. So do their games.”
“He skulks in the shadows now.” Two glasses hit the counter with enough force to ring both their eardrums. “Breaks the rules, screws up the game. A cheater, just like the PARC guys Sigrún helped us beat.”
Sometimes it was a mother’s job to comfort, console, and agree. This wasn’t one of those times. Retha reached for the glasses and headed to the table. Consoling could be done anywhere. Other forms of parenting required hard surfaces. “You’re smart enough to know why you’re wrong, love.”
Nell raised an eyebrow and brought over more cookies. “Didn’t know we were having one of those talks.”
“Neither did I.” But parenting seven children taught you that skeletons and busty blondes tumbled out of old closets at the strangest moments.
Her daughter slid into a seat at the table and waved a quick warming spell over the cookies. “So, am I wrong about Daniel now, or was I wrong about him back then?”
Maybe a little of both. “You were only thirteen. You saw the world in black and white.” And even now, her daughter struggled with shades of gray. “Sigrún wasn’t entirely pure, even in 1983.”
Nell traced a finger through the chocolatey chunks in her cookie. “You figure he hacked the PARC guys?”
“Yup.” Retha stepped into the soggy footing. “And I figure they deserved it.”
“So hacking’s justified if the cause is good?”
Ah, traces of the thirteen-year-old still lurked in her daughter’s soul. “I think that ‘legal’ and ‘right’ and ‘just’ are three really important words. And they don’t always mean the same thing.”
“Sure.” Nell shrugged. There had been a lot of ethics conversations at the Sullivan family table. “And maybe saving us all from the evil Maze Wars cheaters was just and holy, but hacking’s…”
“Just wrong?” Sometimes even grown daughters needed a gentle push.
“Isn’t it?” Cookie crumbled in her daughter’s fingers. “Why break in and sneak around unless you plan to do bad things?”
“I think that’s a very good question.” Retha had a short, fierce debate with the tangle of knowledge and maternal instincts riding in her own heart. “And perhaps one well worth asking your Daniel.”
It was telling that her daughter’s mind didn’t scowl nearly as fiercely as her face. And even more telling that she didn’t object to the idea of Daniel as “hers.”
Retha got up to nurse the teapot—and to give her hands a moment to stop shaking. Destiny was knocking on the door, and it was as complicated and messy and fraught as she’d always feared it would be. Life usually was.
She reached for more teabags, using the ease of ritual to soothe herself. The business part of the kitchen had never been her domain—but even she couldn’t burn tea very often. And the kitchen table had always been hers.
The helm of the starship Sullivan. They’d flown through a lot of crazy galaxies, and this was just one more. She smiled, feeling the same anchors of table and cookies and long routines slide tranquility into her daughter’s mind.
Retha peeked over at dinner, bubbling in a pot on the stove. Jamie’s work—he always left a couple of jars behind when he came to raid the pantry. Just another one of the starship’s quiet rituals.
Lining two cups up on the counter, an odd fact tickled her brain. Sigrún. From the old Scandinavian tongue. Secret victory. Nell had looked it up at the library—painstaking in the pre-Internet days—and developed a six-month fascination with old Norse legends.
Secret victory.
Retha stirred the sauce pot, bemused—and wondered just how long this particular thread of destiny had been tugging on her daughter’s life.
And she worried. Nell was wrong about Daniel—but she was also right. He lived in the shadows, by his own set of rules. And that was an interesting choice for a grown man.
Especially a grown man who had the blood rushing in her daughter’s veins.
-o0o-
“Why’d you hack us?”
Daniel looked up from the best spaghetti he’d ever eaten—and realized, far too late, that it was more than a friendly plate of dinner. Nell had walked back downstairs with two of them in her hands, and he’d been dazzled enough by the smell to miss that she’d come with an agenda. Damn.
He shoveled in another twirled fork-load of noodles and tried to assemble enough brain cells to answer her. It was damnably hard to explain something you didn’t fully understand yourself. “Same reason people climb Everest, I guess. Because you were there.”
“Climbing Everest isn’t illegal.”
The words were curt, but the tone wasn’t. She was curious now, not looking to eviscerate him. He hoped. “Ever trespassed? Jaywalked? Snuck into a beach park after hours and lit a fire?”
That one had her laughing. “You mean, am I a perfectly law-abiding citizen? No.” She sobered, eyes watching him. “But you broke our windows and picked the locks. That’s hardly the same as an after-hours bonfire.”
This was probably the reason burglars didn’t stick around to have conversations with the homeowners they’d just robbed. “Look, I probably don’t have an answer that will make sense to you.” But her curiosity still lingered in the air—and suddenly he wanted her to understand. “I guess, for me, intent mat
ters. The kids who sneak onto the beach, drink way too much with their bonfire, and go steal old lady’s purses—they cross a different line than you did looking for a little summer fun.”
“Sure about that, are you?” She forked in spaghetti and looked amused.
Yeah, he was sure. Nell Sullivan had one of those unerring moral compasses. “Sometimes the little rules are stupid. I try to respect the big ones.”
“Which are?”
Man, she had a really excellent poker face. “Don’t prey on the weak. Help out the good guys. Fix what you break.” His stomach was not happy about this line of questioning.
She raised an eyebrow. “Tweak the nose of the guys with the biggest egos?”
Maria Walker hadn’t raised a total idiot. Daniel kept his mouth shut. And watched as his words kicked around in her head and found places to land. When she rolled her eyes and grinned, he felt like a crack in the foundation had stabilized.
And like an idiot, he needed to kick it just to make sure. “That’s it? Water under the bridge?”
“For now.” She eyed him, traces of steel behind the easy exterior. “Sullivans have long memories.”
Duly noted.
Chapter 10
It had been a week. Five days trapped in tight quarters with a man who made her cells yearn for spontaneous combustion.
Nell pulled open the back entrance to The Dungeon, knowing full well that it was impossible to sneak into her mother’s house. And trying anyhow.
She’d spent the weekend throwing lightning bolts at innocent rocks in the desert and pretending it was just her hormones he disturbed.
He’s not here, sweetheart.
Her mother’s mental voice made Nell jump. Dammit, Mom—quit scaring me.
If you’d come in the front door and said good morning, I could have delivered Daniel’s message in the usual way. Retha sounded like happy spring flowers—clearly she’d already had coffee.
What message? Nell tried to be as ungrumpy as possible, given her current lack of caffeine infusion.
He’s working from home. Something about testing security from an external location.