Can they trust like this?
Can Warden go with her somewhere he doesn’t know?
Should she let him?
When she looks at the boy in front of her, she sees a stranger – a stranger she could never trust this quickly – but when he talks, she hears Warden. Her mind seems to squirm, arguing with itself, because it doesn’t matter how much she wants to believe all he’s told her about his real life, how much she feels like she can. It’s about what’s logical, and sometimes your feelings can be wrong about even the people you trust the most. She knows that. She thinks of his name on the screen, that voice she’s spoken to every day for more than two years. They have never really minced their words before. Why start now? She wouldn’t as Echo.
‘I’ve not lied to you,’ Mallory says. ‘Everything today has been straight up. It’s up to you if you trust me on that, but if you’re not who you’ve said you are, this is your last chance to back out.’ Warden’s eyes widen again and he starts to shake his head.
‘Echo, no – ’
‘Because if you come back with me,’ she continues, cutting him off, ‘and you’re not, and anything happens to me or my dad or my brother, there won’t be a single place you can hide on this whole planet that I won’t come find you and destroy you.’ He stares back, mouth hanging open just a little. It was kind of harsh, and probably unnecessary, but it’s Jed’s safety she’s banking on him. ‘Plus,’ she adds, a little self-consciously, ‘my dad was a Marine Sergeant, so you try anything, he’ll rip you a new one.’ She doesn’t mention that that second part’s not exactly true any more.
‘Right,’ Warden says, after a moment. ‘Destroying, and a ripped new one.’ Then, ‘For the record, I’m just Warden. I haven’t lied either. I’m rubbish at lying face-to-face anyway; you’d be able to tell. The only person who ever believes me is my mother and that’s usually because she’s already had a couple of Tom Collinses by the time I’m back from school. I’m just Gilbert Ward from Sun City – well, and Guildford – but I already told you that. Nothing else. I wouldn’t – ’
‘So are you coming then?’
‘Just to check, you’ll only destroy me if I do something wrong, right? Otherwise, I’m safe?’
‘As long as you don’t piss me off.’ Mallory turns, resisting a sudden urge to smile again, and heads into the garage. ‘I make no promises.’
‘That’s a joke, right?’ he calls after her. She can hear him following, though, wheelie suitcase rattling against the concrete, and something about that makes her disproportionately pleased. Whether she should be or not, she’s glad that he’s coming. ‘Right? I’m taking that silence as a yes.’
She pays for the ticket and they take the elevator down to the basement floor where she left the car.
‘Whoa, a seventy-one Chevy?’ says Warden, when he sees Roger’s blue Nova parked in the bay. ‘Proper old school.’
Mallory gets in, dumping her bag on the back seat, while Warden puts his suitcase in the trunk. She starts up the engine. It makes an unhealthy rattling sound. The exhaust is coming loose again. The one Roger said he’d fixed.
Damn it.
‘Exhaust’s going,’ Warden says, getting in beside her. A trace of anxiety wells as he does; cars are small and enclosed, and she’s not used to being stuck in one with anyone other than Jed. She tries to shake it off. She knew this was part of asking him. ‘I could fix it for you tomorrow,’ Warden adds, as Mallory pulls out of the space, ‘if you want.’
‘You know cars?’ she asked, trying to distract herself.
He nods.
‘Work most afternoons in my dad’s dealership. I help fix them up, then he and my brothers sell them on to unsuspecting customers. You would not believe the dregs they give me to start with.’
‘Do you like doing it?’ Something about his tone makes her ask.
‘It’s not so bad, I guess. I like seeing how things work.’
‘Like safes.’
‘Like safes.’ He grins. Mallory turns right on to the street. ‘I suppose I’m not such a fan of cars if I’m honest. I like motorbikes better; more compact, neater. But my dad doesn’t get many of those in.’
‘Have you got one yourself?’ The image of him on a Harley in his sweater vest doesn’t exactly gel.
‘A bike?’ he responds. ‘Hell, no. Sodding death traps. I would not want to go seventy with nothing on either side of my legs but leather and air… That sounded weird. I just like the engines.’
‘Okay.’ Mallory focuses on the road, not knowing what else to say and trying not to think about how close he’s sitting to her, trying not to notice every single tick or movement he makes. She opens the window a crack, letting in a blast of cold October air.
You hacked a nightclub, she thinks, you can manage two hours in a car with Warden.
She merges onto the interstate and accelerates, careful to keep to the speed limit – the last thing she needs is to be stopped, driving this time of night on a learner’s permit with a passenger.
‘It’s what my dad wants me to do,’ Warden says softly. ‘Fix cars,’ he adds. ‘Wants me to join the family business full time after high school.’ Mallory glances over. He looks about as morose at that as he sounded. She notices him shivering and reluctantly closes the window.
‘And what do you want?’ she asks.
‘To go to college,’ he says, ‘MIT, if I can get in. Massachusetts is suitably far away from California. Major in electrical science and engineering, or something like that. You don’t have to decide right away there. Dad doesn’t like it, though, says he won’t pay thousands of dollars for me to learn ‘all that computer shit’ and end up working for the ‘pothead Democrats in government’. I’d have to get a scholarship, or work while I’m there and have no social life. So, not too much different from now then.’ He laughs, but it’s kind of forced. Mallory feels like she wants to say something helpful, but doesn’t know quite what. She becomes deeply engrossed in checking her mirrors instead. ‘How about you? he asks. ‘How old are you actually, by the way?’
‘Sixteen,’ she says, ‘but I skipped second grade.’
‘So it’s senior year for you too?’ She nods. ‘Got any plans for college?’
Mallory feels the same, trickling disquiet she gets whenever anyone brings that up. She grips the wheel a little tighter… but she doesn’t lie like she usually does. Something about it being him asking just then makes her want to tell the truth.
‘No,’ she tells him. ‘I mean, I don’t know. Everyone keeps asking that, saying how all the deadlines are coming up, but I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t know how you do know. And, plus, with my dad and my brother needing help and stuff…’ She stops.
‘That’s okay,’ Warden answers, ‘the not knowing.’
‘You’re the only person who’s said that.’
‘I know you,’ he answers, shrugging – like it’s not a big thing he’s just said, though it sets her cheeks going all warm again – ‘you’ll figure it out. You figure out most things.’
‘I’m not sure with this. I don’t know how to start.’
‘Well, what do you like doing the most? What gives you, I don’t know, purpose, meaning, er, that kind of thing?’
‘The Asker,’ she says, a little too quickly. She feels a pang of worry, but pushes it down. ‘He’s so sure of everything, so sure of right and wrong, and when I’m on a hack, it’s like nothing else matters and all the other crap that’s going on just gives it a rest for a second. ’ She cuts out.
‘You ever thought about doing computer science?’ Warden asks. ‘Now I’m not saying specifically MIT’ – though it sort of sounds like he is – ‘but the place is pretty much at the cutting edge of anything new in CS. From there, you could get into security or software development. It’s not like you could stay a grey-hat forever and live off it – unless you go full black-hat and start stealing money, which is kind of a sucky thing to do.’
His phone buzzes then, making him
jump and thankfully stopping the conversation. He takes it out of his pocket. ‘Friend from home,’ he says, though she hadn’t asked. ‘Not a girlfriend or anything. I don’t have one,’ he adds, then goes bright red like he isn’t sure why he did. Mallory feels a kind of flutter of jitters at that, though she isn’t sure why either. It’s not like it matters. She glances at the clock. It’s late, but then back home for him means three hours behind.
‘Where do they think you are?’ she asks – in New York to hack a nightclub seems unlikely.
‘Visiting MIT, as it happens.’ He starts typing out a reply. ‘Seeing the campus, checking out the general area.’
‘I thought you said you couldn’t lie convincingly.’
‘This is text,’ he answers. ‘I said I couldn’t lie face-to-face, except to my mother, and she’s not so set against college. She believed me when I said I was visiting, even called me in sick with school so I could get here in time.’ He puts the phone away. ‘I don’t know what she’d do if I told her the truth.’ His voice drops. ‘She thinks I spend all that time at my computer online gaming. I’ve never actually told anyone what it really is. Have you?’ he asks. Mallory shakes her head. She’s not exactly sure what Roger and Jed think, but the thought of them knowing the truth… In the same way as it feels vulnerable to have someone from the Forum see her real face, having those in her real life know about Echo Six would be equally… unsettling. ‘I suppose it’s not exactly a thing you just say, is it?’ Warden says. Then he frowns. ‘Do you ever think about how it’s all illegal?’ Mallory glances over sharply. ‘I mean,’ he goes on, ‘I think we do a lot of good stuff in the Forum, but it’s technically against the law – like, very much so.’
The other reason she’s never told her family. Her fingers stretch against the wheel.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I… well, of course I know it nominally, but it doesn’t really feel like that, not when I’m doing it.’ It’s true. She just feels this driving urgency, like she is trying to win at something – like she should win at it. It feels right, if there is a right or wrong about it. It’s not like there aren’t rules they follow, they are just The Asker’s. They don’t ever steal – not money or real things – and they don’t set out to hurt people, just to show the truth. It jars, thinking about the actual legality… not getting caught is just part of the hack. She doesn’t often think about what would happen if she did, just focuses on it not happening.
‘I was fourteen when The Asker invited me to join,’ Warden says. ‘I didn’t really consider it being illegal so much then. I was just excited. It was kind of like, well, like it was an online game. Like I said, I’ve always liked working out how things work – that was why I started hacking at all – and the Forum… the Forum was like a doorway into the ultimate puzzles.’ He pauses. ‘I guess that sounds stupid.’ It doesn’t, though, not to Mallory. ‘And then,’ he goes on, ‘the more I did, the more I began to realize that everything The Asker ever asked me to do, every hack I ever took, it exposed some really bad thing that needed exposing. It was humbling and overwhelming to realize the extent of it, of what people will hide, what they’ll do in the first place, to end up needing to hide it. I started to feel like maybe we were doing something about it. Like it meant something. But lots of people would say that’s bull, lots of smart people who have their own, very sensible ideas about right and wrong. And sometimes, if I’m honest, I don’t quite know myself, because we could really go to prison for it, and if the internet was just a free-for-all – everyone knowing whatever they wanted – well, I’m not sure that would really be better, and who are we to choose what gets released and what doesn’t?’
Mallory shifts uncomfortably, these kinds of questions exactly why she normally tries not to think about this stuff.
‘Are you saying you think we should stop?’ she asks.
‘I’m not quite sure,’ Warden sighs. ‘No. I don’t. It’s just… it’s made me think even more about it with him gone. We’re minors, but we’re legally culpable, Echo. We could go to jail for what we did tonight, for any one of our Forum hacks. Are you really saying that never occurs to you?’
She falters, her mind feeling too crowded. She’s just tired, that’s what it is, making everything heightened…
‘I guess sometimes,’ she responds. Then, ‘The FBI tried to trace me once, about a year back.’
‘They what?’
‘I thought about it then, I suppose,’ she says. ‘It was after the Roberson hack. The Feds were already monitoring the system when I got in and someone tried to piggyback out. I never told anyone that, not even The Asker. I thought he might freak and ban me.’
‘Bloody hell,’ breathes Warden. ‘How do you know it was them?’
‘I counter-traced back to an IP address at the Javits Federal Building.’
‘And didn’t that scare you?’
She doesn’t answer for a moment. It had made her think, but the real answer was, no, it didn’t scare her, not as much as maybe it should have. It didn’t, because she’d dealt with it. It had actually kind of made her feel good, sort of unstoppable…
‘They hadn’t got very far,’ she says instead.
‘But if they’d caught you – ’
‘They didn’t. They didn’t even get close.’
‘Wow,’ Warden says simply. He sounds half impressed, half a little frightened. He goes silent for a while then, and she’s glad of it because she doesn’t know how her answers sounded to him, but they didn’t seem quite good enough to her and she doesn’t want him to push into that. She just wants things to go back to how they were, where these questions didn’t feel like hers to answer. She stares at the road, trying not think about all the things he’s stirred up, the doubts she usually suppresses about the potential consequences of the Forum, possibilities she tries to never fully acknowledge because she doesn’t want to stop, doesn’t ever want it to end… But she can’t quite shut them off, not after everything that’s happened, not after what they’ve just done.
This is really real.
That’s what Warden had said back in the club, when she’d pointed out the first delta tattoo. It’s real. And real life is more complicated than online. It is somewhere that maybe Echo Six can never fully exist, whatever glimpses there may be, because there are too many facets of it that Mallory doesn’t understand, too many things that, however much she tries, she can’t predict or control. There are no clear cut rules. It is flowing and unwieldy. Yet, in what they have done tonight, they have stepped out of their comprehensible online world and exposed themselves to the real risks outside of it. They have done something illegal, in person, and they have done it looking into unknown circumstances that have already caused five other hackers to go off the grid. Mallory Park has, not Echo Six. Gilbert Ward, not Warden.
No, she can’t turn off the thoughts he has stirred.
We had to do it, she thinks. They couldn’t leave The Asker, they couldn’t… but going to the club, that had been her idea, and as she drives the long way back to the real house she shares with her real dad and her very real little brother, she can’t help wondering what she might have got them all into by doing it.
Welcome Party
By the time they reach Oakville, Mallory is shattered. She is edgy and riled, and her mind would not shut up its second guessing the whole time Warden wasn’t talking – which, admittedly, wasn’t that much in the end. She checks the dashboard clock as they pull into the driveway.
One fourteen.
They get out of the car and she gulps down the chill night air like there hadn’t been any inside the Nova. She feels a little calmer now she’s home, the strangeness of Warden being there less apparent than she’d been expecting it to be – although what Roger and Jed will make of her new ‘friend’ and why she wasn’t back till the early hours remains to be seen. The house is dark and she signals Warden not to speak, not wanting to wake anyone. Those problems, as least, can wait until morning. They creep down the
driveway as quietly as they can – almost impossible given that it’s gravel – and she puts her key in the lock. The front door opens before she can turn it, jerking it out of her hand.
‘Mal, is that you?’
‘Shit, Roger!’ she gasps. He’s standing in the doorway, curly hair sticking up like he’s been repeatedly running his fingers through it. ‘Damn it…’ She takes a deep breath, switching on the porch light. Her dad blinks in the brightness, his newly illuminated face so filled with concern that it cuts right through her alarm.
‘Sorry I startled you,’ he says. ‘You were just so late back.’
He stayed up for me, Mallory realizes with a jolt. He actually stayed up. She feels an odd kind of elation.
‘Jed had said you’d gone out,’ he continues, ‘but then – ’ He stops mid-sentence, eyes falling on Warden behind her.
Oh crap.
‘Er,’ Warden mumbles helpfully. ‘Hello, sir, Mr Park.’ He moves forwards, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Gilbert Ward. It’s nice to meet you. Sir,’ he adds again.
For a moment, a hardness enters Roger’s eyes, a glimmer of something that demands, Who the hell are you and what are you doing with my daughter at one in the morning? Something inside Mallory knots up as she sees it, there so unmistakably that Warden’s feet shuffle like he wants to take a step back.
Say it, she finds herself thinking at Roger, finds herself almost hoping – though she shouldn’t, because of course she doesn’t want him to say it and cause problems. Why would she want that? But, for a moment, just a moment, she even actually thinks he might…
And then it falls away.
She sees that happen as well, the fight dissipating as quickly as it had come, lost in some secret internal struggle.
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