by CD Reiss
“Not over this half of the house.”
She walked out onto a balcony that I wouldn’t have trusted to hold the weight of a kitten. But she did, so I joined her.
The autumn air was cool and breezy. The interstate banded parallel to the northern horizon, invisible until headlights drifted along it like fireflies. Below us, light from the downstairs windows landed in the first few yards of the property. At first, I thought I was looking at a pit of snakes, but it was thorn bushes. Hundreds of branches were tangled together in a mass of sticks and rose hips.
Harper put her elbows on the railing, crossed her ankles, and stuck out her ass. What a work of beauty it was. I had to stop myself from slapping it as I passed.
“How far back does the property go?” I asked.
“To the river.” She pointed straight back.
The river, if I could tell correctly in the moonlight, was a little more than an eighth of a mile away, where the reeds and a line of trees broke up the sightline. Above and beyond that was the roof of the factory.
A light flicked on in the house, and my instincts tracked the movement back to the yard and the tangle of thorn bushes. I didn’t say anything, but she followed my gaze down below. The bushes took up about as much space as my first apartment in San Jose. The rest of the property to the river was trimmed and landscaped.
“We like it that way,” she said. “It blooms in the summer.”
“I wish I could see that.” I did want to see it. Summer was on the other side of the next year, but I wanted to see it.
“The room next to this one is nice.” She jerked her thumb toward another set of French doors on the other side if the balcony. “You should crash there.”
My elbows joined hers on the railing. “I’m sorry about before. I was frustrated.”
“Next time I won’t be so nice about it.”
“Really?”
“I can knock a guy’s balls so fast he won’t even know it until he screams soprano.”
I laughed.
“I’m serious. Wanna try me?” She put her hands up and tried to look severe. It didn’t work. She rotated her hands, angling the fingers, one knee up, mouth exposing her fight teeth.
I laughed again.
“Don’t test me, stranger,” she growled.
“Stranger?” I put my hands on hers. “We’ve shared a meal.” I laced my fingers in hers, and she let me. “I’ve met your family and friends.” I pulled her close. She let me do that too. “We broke into a building together.”
“We’re practically best friends,” she whispered.
“The minute I saw you, I thought you were beautiful.” I let my lips brush hers, and they crackled with ozone. “I could barely even speak.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Drawing my lips over her cheek and down her neck, I felt the vibration in her throat when she moaned. I didn’t want to rush, but I didn’t have a lot of time.
She might tell me the hacker’s name in the morning, when she was careless, maybe a little ashamed, wondering if she’d see me again.
Which was possible. If everything worked out with QI4, if I found the hacker and got this thing off the ground, I might get involved with a beautiful creature from a foreign land.
“Believe me,” I whispered. “I’d never lie about something like this.”
My lips found hers. When she spoke, I felt them move. “You’re staying tonight though? The car.”
She wanted it. Her voice was soaked in it. I could seal the deal in three to five minutes.
“I’m staying tonight.”
“Good.”
Lips at the side of her mouth, fingers stroking her neck, I asked, “Do you like to fuck, Harper?”
A little vowel sound escaped her lips. I was too close to see her expression, but her voice told me I’d gotten where I wanted to.
“I think you’re beautiful. I want to see you naked. I want to make you come with my mouth. I’ll make it last a long time.” I paused. She didn’t pull away. “I’d love to bury my cock in you until you come again. And again. And again.”
Her breath fell heavy on my cheek. I pulled back to get a look at her face to see if she was horrified or turned off.
Her lips were parted and wet. Expressive and open. I kissed her.
I couldn’t tell if she kissed me back.
She pressed her face into mine, but her lips weren’t moving or responding. Not that my dick cared either way. It just knew I was smelling and tasting her. It felt me pull her body into it and burst into a raging erection before I had my tongue fully in her mouth.
Her arms stayed around me, but she didn’t move any more than her tongue.
I disengaged completely. I wanted to seduce her, but I didn’t want to take what wasn’t offered. I’d overplayed my hand. Shit.
“Sorry,” I said.
“No, it’s fine.”
“I misread your signals.”
“You didn’t!” She kneaded her hands together. Her eyebrows made an inverted V.
I wanted to believe her. On that balcony, she had a sincerity that went deeper than it had all day. Maybe I’d caught her by surprise, or maybe that was how they kissed out here.
“Well, thank you then.” I reached behind the French doors and hoisted my bag over my shoulder. “Can I get into this room from here?” I pointed at the adjacent set of doors.
“Yeah. Sure. I, uh—”
“I really should get to bed.”
She got in front of me. “I’ll put sheets on it.”
I hadn’t known her for more than a day, but her desperation surprised me. She didn’t seem the type. She was acting as if my attention had higher stakes than a less-than-satisfactory kiss. Of course, I could have been misreading her the way I had a second before. Which she denied. Which meant I wasn’t misreading.
The snake ate its tail.
I spoke tenderly and took her hand. In that moment, she seemed too vulnerable for careless courtesies. “I’ll do it. You’ve done enough to help me today.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“I’ll feel bad if you do it.” I squeezed her hand and let it go. “The linen closet is off the bathroom?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Thank you. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Okay.”
I still wanted to seduce her, fuck her, get the name out of her. That strategy was on life support either way. Outside the strategy, human to human, I wanted to tell her something that was true.
“I meant it. You’re really beautiful, Harper.”
“Yeah, well… I know.” She said it as if I was telling her the sky was blue. No embarrassment or fake humility. It was what it was.
“Hey, uh, you have Wi-Fi?”
“Yeah, the router, the thing with the antenna?” She wiggled two fingers at the sky. “Kind of old and spotty. You can get cellular in the backyard sometimes.”
“Thank you.”
“Good night.”
“Bye.”
I went into the adjacent room and snapped the door closed. The door to the master suite closed a few seconds later. I was alone.
XIII
I found the light switch. Two frosted glass sconces hung on either side of the bed, lighting the ceiling and casting the rest of the room in diffused light. It was as bare as the others. I put sheets on the metal-framed twin bed and got in the shower.
It had been a long fucking day. I had no way out of town, and I was in a mansion without a couch. My hacker wanted me to stay, and I was getting the fuck out of here. I’d pay the rental car company whatever they wanted once the battery was in as long as I could get on a fucking flight.
But Harper.
The moments before that kiss.
When her skin tingled under my lips.
She’d made me so fucking hard.
And I was again. Just thinking about it made blood rush to my cock. I ran my hand over it.
There had been something inexperienced about t
he kiss. As if she’d wanted to but didn’t know how and nerves had kept her from going with her instincts. Was she that innocent? When I stripped her down, told her to sit on the bed, and stared at her naked body, would her chest break out in hot pink? When I gently asked her to lean back and spread her legs so I could see her pussy, would she hesitate? When I said I wanted to see her touch herself—
I grunted and came before I could finish the fantasy, shooting my load in the cleft of a cracked tile.
I finished washing myself, put on sweat pants, and plugged in my phone. A cone of lines appeared in the corner of the screen.
Live Wi-Fi. If she was right, it would be on and off.
Password protected. PassCrack, an app I’d developed and sold for Bitcoin donations back in the day, didn’t work. WarWalk didn’t either. It looked like a simple WEP but obviously wasn’t. Weird. Even in Silicon Valley, which was riddled with IT guys, one of those would have worked.
A human sound came through the walls. A woman crying. More than crying. Wailing uncontrollably. I stood. Harper? No. There was a lightness in it. A crispness. Harper was throatier. The cries came from everywhere. Right, left, downstairs. For a second, they seemed to come from the balcony. Then the crying drifted away.
Seduction was out. As much as I wanted to fuck that girl, and I really wanted to fuck her, this place was crazytown. The internet made the world small enough to find the hacker from home, without risking my sanity. I could fuck Raven anytime.
Raven’s not going to be half as good as Harper.
That was my inner predator talking. Raven was fine. I had to focus on getting Wi-Fi.
I had one last toy in my toolbox. An offline app I had been dicking with when I was bored and missing the old days. I’d developed it to pick stocks, and it had lost everyone money, but repurposed, it was a decent password finder. I ran it.
Boom. I was on. Notifications flowed in.
The crying started again—but closer.
Ignore it.
All previous messages from Deepak had self-destructed, but the new ones flowed, decrypting with my fingerprint on the device.
bonus. What did he find?>
He uploaded a picture. The resolution was shit, but the smile was Harper. The girl in the picture had dark hair. She was a little rounder. Standing on Vassar St., in front of Building 32, with its metal façade that was designed to look as though it was in a constant state of collapse.
I knew 32 well. Computer science. The AI lab.
Another picture came up. She had on a knit hat and pinched her bottom lip between two fingers.
Did she have a boyfriend who was studying at Stata?
Well, no, she had the books. The Visual Disp— was clearly visible when I stretched the photo.
“Display of Quantitative Information,” I said to myself, finishing the title. “That’s not even coursework, Harper. What are you doing?”
I flipped between the two. Yep. Same girl. Take the dark hair out of the equation, and there she was.
I couldn’t remember her. I lived in a world where the smartest men in the world gathered and were too awkward to make it with the small percentage of fuckable women. Women had always been easy to get into bed, but I’d never fucked her. Not a blond her and not a brunette her. I was sure I wouldn’t have forgotten it.
I’d remember this girl>
The crying got louder and stayed consistent.
you split>
How many girls at MIT were that hot? You’d think my dick would at least have a little recollection. The photo of her had self-destructed already, but the cognitive consonance of her paired with MIT had imprinted the photo on my mind. It was her. Harper Watson. No bell was rung, except for the Sherlock Holmes story in the scattered code comments of the poison pill.
Watson was a really common name, but the connection was made.
I typed the statement but didn’t hit Send. He’d ask why I thought that. My answer was simple. I knew all the female hackers with the skills to pull this off, and she wasn’t one of them. I sent the message.
NO CONNECTION
The Wi-Fi had dropped. Reconnecting didn’t work. I ran the hacking apps and my network protocol analyzer to check for available signal. As a despairing female wail rattled the walls, the packet sniffer did its job.
SCRAMBLER PRESENT
A chill immobilized my spine.
She’d seen I was on the Wi-Fi and cut me off.
No.
The name. Watson. Sidekick? Why not Sherlock or Holmes? Was I reading into it?
Maybe the signal had just dropped.
For all she knew, I was watching porn or checking email. Or could she see my conversation? It was encrypted end to end, but if she was good enough to hack QI4, nothing was safe.
I swung my legs over the bed and went into the hall in bare feet, shirtless, sweat pants hiked up over the right knee but not the left.
The crying was louder in the hall and seemed to be coming from every doorway. Harper had taken such a roundabout tour and there were so few markers that I was lost.
Not that I knew what I was looking for. A sound besides crying. A light in the wrong place. The smell of ozone.
“Ow!”
I picked up my foot, leaned on the wall, and looked at the bottom of my big toe. I plucked out the splinter, but once I started walking again, I realized I hadn’t gotten all of it.
“You need to redo these floors,” I grumbled to Harper as if she was in front of me and I had the authority to tell her what to do with her house.
Taking my hand off the wall, I noticed I was close to the stairwell up to the third floor. I favored the toe as I climbed quietly. Too quietly. Every floorboard in the house groaned and squeaked, but not the stairs to the third floor. They were as worn as a 1911 staircase and as quiet as if they’d been built yesterday.
She didn’t want anyone to know when she was going up here. Because I knew for shit sure, by the time I hit the top of the stairs, that she was behind that door. When I saw the photos at the top of the stairwell, I was even more sure. It was dark, but my eyes adjusted. It was her. Graduation cap. Braces. Clear, dewy skin and freckles. Prom. Satin dress and diamond earrings. Receiving an award. I couldn’t see the details of the award, but she was blond again. She was blond in all of them.
I put my ear to the door, pressing against it until the crying inside the walls disappeared and all I could hear was the sound on the other side.
Clicks. Tons of them. She was typing like a fiend.
That was why she had tape on her fingers.
My God. It was her. Harper had hacked QI4.
What was with the kiss that wasn’t a kiss?
What about the message on the factory roof?
And the name?
Why change it?
Had she been married?
How had she gotten the poison pill in the monitor?
Was she still married?
More than the name and the comfortable possibility that a man was involved in the hack, the thought of her having a husband didn’t sit right with me.
I leaned on the door, listening to the pattern of the keystrokes. No waiting. Straight typing. Not waiting for a response from someone on the other side of the wires.
The spacebar made a different sound. I pressed my ear to the door. How often it was hit told the story. Coding and English had a different
spacebar cadence.
A husband belied her tight innocence, and though none of it fucking mattered, I became momentarily obsessed with the idea that she was married. Maybe her rigidity was guilt. Maybe Mr. Watson was in a faraway desert war or making a living in another part of the country. He could be dead.
I forgot to listen for the spacebar patterns. I didn’t notice when the keys stopped clicking at all. All I noticed was the change in gravity as its force went from beneath my feet to beneath my head as I fell. I got my feet under me in two steps, tumbling into the room when the door was opened.
Standing straight, I whipped around to find Harper with her hand on the doorknob.
“I knew it!” I said even though I’d known nothing until three minutes before.
She yanked the door all the way open, teeth grinding, throat mid-growl. Her skin was lit by the whitish-blue of flat-screens, and the finger she pointed at me was wrapped with white tape. “Get out!”
“How did you do it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
We circled each other like boxers in a ring. Behind her was the door, a desk, three monitors scrolling code, an ajar bathroom door. The monitors were flowing C++, a deep web database for a retailer, and a Tor chat. Following my gaze, she hit a key, then another, and the screens went dark.
“How did you get into QI4?”
She turned back to me, and we circled each other again. “Fuck you.”
“Are you married?
We stopped circling.
“What?”
I didn’t know what had come over me, and it didn’t matter. I didn’t care if she was married or not. I needed her to give me my life back.
The utter stupidity of my question forced me to step away from my surprise and hostility. She’d hacked me. Fine. We had work to do. She and I.
But I kept losing focus.