by E. C. Myers
The file ended with another news article. It showed Ariel’s Panjea profile picture under the headline hit and run.
Max leaned closer to the screen, gripping the sides as he read: “Local authorities are on the lookout for a black SUV that struck and killed Ariel Miller, 23, of San Jose, at 7:23 p.m. while she was crossing Walnut Street on 4th Avenue in downtown San Bruno.”
Death was a permanent way of silencing someone.
With growing dread, Max opened the next file in the list: X-2_Powers.odt. Another Panjea profile, showing a heavyset black guy named Geordie Powers, originally from North Carolina. Under Employer he had written, “I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you.” His location was listed as Arlington County, Virginia.
Geordie’s file concluded with an article describing how the nineteen-year-old had been beaten and stabbed to death in an alleyway late at night. It was described as a mugging, but only his laptop had been taken from his backpack—he still had his wallet with all his money and cards inside. There were no witnesses and police had no suspects; although there was a security camera in the alley, the computer storing the footage had crashed and the files couldn’t be recovered.
What a coincidence.
The next file: [email protected]. This was one of the Dramatis Personai members who had “disappeared”!
Max skimmed a chat log of hackers discussing a target: a software company that was charging outrageous amounts for downloadable content for a big new game that had just come out. The company claimed they were providing new levels, but @sskicker had hacked into their e-mail server and found messages from the development team about levels they had decided to withhold at the last minute to make extra money. They were essentially forcing customers to pay for content that they should have had right from the beginning.
Words were highlighted throughout: references to stores and the time of day. Next to one of these, Evan had annotated “Arizona?”
Logging chats was not allowed specifically for this reason. It looked like Evan had been storing months worth of them and using them to piece together the identities of Dramatis Personai hackers.
The next page showed the Panjea profile of a thirteen-year-old boy named Sayid Fawaz, who was just old enough to have a Panjea account. It was followed by an article about him being killed in a drive-by shooting while walking to a movie with his friend, Steven Oberkircher, in Phoenix, Arizona. Miraculously, Steven hadn’t been injured.
Max closed his eyes. Sayid had been so young.
X-4_Infiltraitor, another of the missing hackers, was Ty Andrews, sixteen, from Fairbanks, Alaska. Max didn’t read the article, just the headline: teen drowns in lake near fairbanks.
By now, Max was feeling sick, but he had two more files to go. Max knew who X-5_Marks.odt referred to even before he opened it.
Everyone had heard about the bizarre death of Kyle Marks, a thirty-one-year-old who had died in a fire in his Brooklyn apartment two months earlier. Kyle had been a prominent tech reporter with a popular vlog called TangledWeb.
The fire had happened in the middle of the day while he was editing his show and chatting with a friend online. With no explanation, he had stopped responding, and moments later, fire trucks were responding to his address. The fire had supposedly been caused by faulty electrical wiring in the old building, but no one knew why Kyle hadn’t been able to escape in time or ask his friend to call for help.
Max scrolled through the file. Evan had collected every report he could find about the story and every article Marks had ever written covering Panjea.
Max couldn’t believe that Kyle Marks had been a victim of this conspiracy, whatever it was.
The final file, X-6_L0NELYB0Y.odt, was for the third Dramatis Personai member who had gone offline. Max opened it and scanned through it quickly: Jeremy “Jem” Seers, age sixteen . . . no Panjea profile, no picture. He was also from Fairbanks, Alaska. Max wondered if Ty and Jem had been hacking buddies, like he and Evan had. The odds that two members of Dramatis Personai had lived in the same town and never met were slim. There was much less info on Jem, a lot of Evan’s question marks around chat logs, and no cause of death—just a police report filed by his parents, an article about an Amber alert, and a missing persons poster. What horrible fate had he met if there wasn’t even anything left of him for the police to find?
Max slowly closed his laptop. He couldn’t look at any more. His hands shook.
What is the silence of six, and what are you going to do about it?
Evan wanted him to do something with all this, but what? Could he send these files to the police? There wasn’t any hard evidence that the deaths were actually murders, or any clues to who was responsible. And Evan could have done that much himself. As for turning to reporters. . . . Well, maybe he had, and that’s why Kyle Marks ended up dead. Having that on his conscience might have driven Evan to suicide.
Then why enlist Max if there was a good chance he would be in danger, too?
If Evan wanted him to warn the other members of Dramatis Personai that someone had hunted three of them down, Evan could have just given DoubleThink the passphrase instead. Did that mean he didn’t trust her with it? Or he was worried that this information would be used against everyone in Dramatis Personai?
Or maybe he thought someone in the group was involved with their deaths—perhaps the same person who had ID’d Evan as one of their own.
Quietly arranging the deaths of six people had to require serious resources: deep pockets and major connections. Since Evan had posed his question at a debate in front of presidential candidates, perhaps he had suspected their involvement. That was a frightening thought—one of them would be the next president of the United States.
Max jumped up. He walked off the pins and needles in his legs, pacing back and forth on the thin library carpet. The room was now empty and as quiet as a cemetery. He looked at the clock—he’d been here for three hours without realizing it.
He could approach the FBI with the little he knew. Hopefully his cooperation would get them off his back. But if the Feds were in on it—as it appeared they might be—Max might end up like Ariel, Geordie, Ty, Sayid, Kyle, and Jem.
So he had to keep investigating. Figure out what Evan had uncovered and find proof that people had died for it. Find out more about the people who had been murdered; if he could find any evidence that one of their deaths had been more than an accident, then he could reconsider approaching the authorities.
Why not start at the beginning? Ariel Miller had been the first to die, and of the six, she had lived closest to Max’s current location. He looked up her former address in San Jose. He could be there by tonight.
The bell rang. He saw that students were allowed to go off school grounds for lunch, which made this the easiest time to sneak out and get back on the road. Max collected his laptop and bag and left the library, joining the crowd of students heading toward the cafeteria.
Max cut through the cafeteria, toward the doors at the back that led directly to the parking lot behind the school. He hadn’t parked there, of course, but his stolen vehicle was just on the other side of it.
The smell of food set his mouth watering and he felt a pang of hunger. But he abruptly lost all interest in lunch when he saw two girls sitting across from each other at a table in the corner, hunched over back-to-back laptops like they were playing a high-tech game of Battleship.
The girl facing him was short with brown pigtails and oversized black eyeglasses. She tilted her head to the right and left as she tugged on each of her pigtails in turn—right, left, right—with focused concentration.
The girl with her back to him had her long blond hair in a ponytail. A crumpled Denny’s bag sat on the table alongside two empty takeaway containers.
It couldn’t be . . . .
The pigtail girl glanced up and her eyes widened in recognition when she saw Max. How
did she know him? She said something to her companion.
The girl facing her turned around and pulled off her yellow-tinted computer glasses. DoubleThink! She locked eyes with him.
Max made a beeline for their table.
“Are you following me?” DoubleThink and Max said at the same time.
He sat down next to her and glanced at her screen. He couldn’t read it from this angle. She had a protective filter on it that rendered it a shimmery gold. Nice.
“What are you doing? You can’t be here,” Deety hissed.
She looked subtly different. It was only the absence of any makeup now that made him realize she’d been wearing it this morning. And now that Max saw her long hair, he realized she’d been the other waitress at Denny’s that morning, the one who had been arguing with Jess. Maybe she had been coming up with an excuse for why she couldn’t serve him.
DoubleThink had supposedly driven six hours from Seattle to meet him, but apparently she lived in Roseburg and went to school here.
“And you said I wouldn’t be able to find you again.” Max grinned.
Deety’s eyes flicked to pigtail girl. Max turned to her. Up close, she looked like a younger version of Deety. She wore a baggy, blue plaid shirt buttoned over a purple T-shirt. Was this her sister?
“Hi, I’m Max,” he said.
“I know,” the girl said.
“Shh. Not so loud.” Deety glanced at the tables around them, but it was so noisy in the cafeteria he doubted anyone could overhear them.
“I wasn’t following you, Deety,” Max said. “I just needed to get out of the open. This seemed like the perfect place to blend in. I didn’t know it was your school. You said you lived in Seattle.”
“You can’t be surprised that a hacker lied to you,” Deety said.
“I was just starting to trust you too,” Max said.
“You can trust me,” Deety said. “With the important stuff.”
“Me too,” the younger girl said.
“Stay out of this,” Deety said. “You have to leave, Max.”
“I was just about to,” he said. “I looked at those files. There’s something really big going on.”
“I’m not interested. I don’t want to know anything else,” Deety said. “People are looking for you.”
“I noticed. But how did you know?” Max asked.
Deety turned her computer around and Max saw his high school yearbook photo on the screen—on CNN.com.
He leaned closer. The caption read, “The FBI is on the lookout for Maxwell Stein, a known associate of Evan Baxter who hasn’t been seen since Wednesday morning. He is considered a person of interest in their ongoing investigation of the hacking incident during Tuesday’s presidential debate.”
“Damn,” Max said.
“We can’t be seen with you. Please, Max. Just go. Now.”
“Deety—or whatever your name is. Did you know Evan doxxed everyone in Dramatis Personai? Including you?”
The younger girl gasped.
Max glanced at her. “And the ‘silence of six’? Six people have died under suspicious circumstances. Including hackers. Your friends. Infiltraitor. @sskicker. L0NELYB0Y. Who knows who’ll be next?”
“I just have to make sure it isn’t someone else I care about,” Deety said.
“Like Evan? Like your sister?” Max glanced at the younger girl. “Deety, it’s up to us to make sure no one else gets hurt. That’s what Evan wanted us to do.”
“You don’t know what Evan wanted any more than I do. And we can’t take any chances.” Deety spread her hands and looked around. “This is our life.”
“Don’t I get any say?” her sister asked.
“No,” Deety said. “You have this file with you, Max?”
He tapped his laptop. “Encrypted. It’s still on the CD too.”
“Destroy it. That’s the only way out of this.” She nodded to the side of the cafeteria. “There’s a microwave. Burn it. Deny everything.”
“Penny! We don’t destroy information,” her sister said.
“Penny?” Max asked. “That’s much nicer than Deety.”
“Risse—” Penny caught herself. She slapped the table in frustration.
“Risse is a nice name, too,” Max said.
“It’s short for Clarisse.” The younger girl smiled.
“I thought you said Evan doxxed me,” Penny said.
“He did, but it didn’t feel right to read your file.” Max had avoided looking at the file named DoubleThink.odt, out of a weird sense of respect for Evan’s only other close friend—and maybe more than that. “I bet that sounds stupid, but. . . .”
“No. That’s the first thing you’ve said that makes me interested in helping you,” Penny said.
“Really?”
She sighed. “I’ll at least look at what you’ve got. But I mean it. We can’t be seen talking to each other. And you shouldn’t be seen at all.”
Penny handed him her black knit cap and computer glasses. “Put these on before someone else recognizes you. Start thinking like a fugitive.”
Max pulled the hat low and slid on the glasses.
“Have you been on the run before?” Max asked.
“I just have common sense,” she snapped.
Penny typed on her laptop. “I’m wiping the school’s security footage from this morning. I bet you’re all over it.”
Max looked up. Another dome camera was positioned by the entrance, with a clear view of him. He ducked his head.
“You can do that?” Max asked.
“Already done.” She hit the Enter key and closed her laptop. “Let’s go. Lunch is the best time to sneak out. I’ll take you somewhere that should be safe, but we have to stop at my house on the way.”
Risse closed her laptop too.
“Nope. You’re staying here,” Penny said.
“What?” Risse asked.
“I don’t want you involved.”
“I’m already involved. We’re a team.”
Penny shook her head.
“If you’re going home first, that means you’re worried. Whatever you’re planning, it’ll go twice as fast with my help,” Risse said.
“Not if I’m more worried about you,” Penny said.
“You know I’m the smarter, better half of DoubleThink,” Risse said.
“Facepalm,” Penny muttered. “Damn it, Risse.”
“I thought he knew about that already! You never tell me anything,” Risse said.
“Because you’ll just blab it to everyone!”
Risse was also DoubleThink?
Max snapped his fingers. “The other night, one of you was typing in the chat room, and the other was talking to me.”
Mind. Blown.
“We make a pretty good team. Online, anyway. In the real world, Pen’s a little bossy.”
“Oh?” Max said.
“You can’t tell anyone,” Penny said. “Please, Max.”
“That you’re bossy?”
She just glared at him.
11
Max drove, with Penny giving him directions from the passenger seat and Risse in the back watching out the rear window to make sure they weren’t being followed. He parked a block away from their house on Luellen Drive and the sisters walked to a weathered white split-level. The front yard was overgrown with scraggly bushes and weeds among patches of dirt. The rusted hull of an old pickup truck sat in front of the driveway.
Max waited in the car while they went inside. They needed to destroy evidence of their extracurricular activities as DoubleThink before leaving. Penny might be acting paranoid, but better to be paranoid than foolish, he thought, and he was already learning to trust her instincts.
After Max noticed the same gray SUV drive down the street for the third time, he
wondered if she had good cause for concern. The vehicle moved slowly, as if guided by an unfamiliar driver looking for a certain street number. The windows were tinted so he couldn’t see its occupants, but when it parked directly across from Penny and Risse’s house and no one got out, he felt his pulse quicken.
He had to warn the girls. If necessary, he’d find a way to lead these people away from the house to give them time to escape. He fumbled with his backpack and dumped his laptop onto the seat next to him. He opened it and sent the command to start the car and left the engine running. He glanced down the street. The mysterious visitors hadn’t seemed to notice him yet.
He dialed Penny’s phone number and waited impatiently while it rang.
“Hello?” a girl answered.
“Penny!” Max said.
“No, it’s Risse. Max?”
Max heard Penny’s voice in the background. “Give me that.”
“It looks just like mine,” Risse said.
“But it was in my bag,” Penny said, then spoke directly into the phone. “Max? What’s up?”
“Listen. Try not to freak out.”
“I don’t freak out,” she said.
“There’s a car outside your house. A gray SUV with tinted windows. It drove past twice.”
“FBI?” She sounded frightened.
“They haven’t exactly introduced themselves.”
The driver and passenger side doors of the SUV opened in tandem. A dark-haired man in a light brown suit and a blond woman in a long flower-print dress got out of the car and walked toward the house, black books clutched to their chests in the crooks of their arms. Bibles?
For a moment Max doubted they were dangerous—which was an excellent reason for them to choose those particular disguises. He was sticking to the plan. If he was wrong, they could laugh about it later.
“You need to get out of there,” he said.
“We’re almost done,” Penny said.
“It’s too late. Bring whatever you can’t erase with you. Do you have a back door?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll drive around the block. Go downstairs and lock your front door, then sneak out the back and lock that too. I’ll pick you up on the next street.”