by CD Reiss
“You’re hiring me?”
“Yes. I’m sorry it took so long.”
“Taylor.”
“Name your price.”
She put her hands on my face, one on each side, as if she wanted to hold me still. Even as skin pressed against skin and her warmth mixed with mine, her face was down a long, dark tunnel.
“Harper? I mean it. You’re coming on with me.”
“You’re hiring me because you’re sleeping with me.”
“I got to know you because I’m sleeping with you.”
Her hands fell down to my shoulders. “Did you ever want everything to be fair?”
“Sure.” I pulled her down so she straddled me. “But it’s not. Nothing is. You were born brilliant. That gives you advantages. Take it up with God.”
“God didn’t make me sleep with you.” She bit her lip as she did a grind into my erection. “Even though I see Him when I do.”
“You get credit for good choices.” I pushed my hips into her and pulled her down. “You want to see God before you go upstairs?” My fingers ran up her shirt, finding a pebble of a nipple. When I gently pinched it, she tilted her head to one side, parting her lips. I had her. “I’m not going to beg you to let me lick your clit.”
I got on my back and spread my arms. When she got up, I thought she was leaving, but she peeled her pants off.
“You drive a hard bargain,” she said, crawling over me.
“Wait until you work for me. I’m a real pain in the ass.”
She didn’t answer in the affirmative. She didn’t answer at all, which didn’t bother me in the moment.
In the moment, I wanted to taste her as she kneeled over my face. I wanted to suck her hard enough to get her close then let her hover on the edge until she exploded over me, grinding on my mouth.
She came so hard she almost rolled away. I had to hold her tightening thighs down so my tongue could reach her, and even then, she tried to get away.
LVII
“I’m fine! Go away!”
It was ten in the morning, and Harper hadn’t moved from her desk. When I poked my head in, she was bent over the keyboard, tapping lines of code or scouring the Tor forum that was put up just to share theories about QI4’s GreyHatC0n challenge.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“Go away.” She turned away from the screen, a deadly focus in her eyes. “I’m not kidding.”
The system had gone online right on time. Jack had developed an app for the team that counted the number of break-in attempts and fails.
ATTEMPTS: 34,989
FAILS: 34,989
At times, the attempts column was higher, and my chest twisted, hoping it was Harper. I bolted up the steps twice, but the app caught up a few seconds later, and I got back to painting Catherine’s walls with the rest of the guys.
She’d chosen a warm off-white that looked good with the ceiling mural and a pure white for the moldings. We finished right before lunch.
“Harper,” I said after I knocked.
“Go away!”
That was my cue to open the door obviously. “Your sister is going to see her room finished. Do you want to come—”
“No.” She didn’t stop her fingers for even a second.
“It’s important.”
“Not now,” she hissed. “She knows I’m busy.”
I’d done a lot of coding in my day, and there was nothing harder than tearing yourself away when you were on to something.
ATTEMPTS: 89,084,172,651,097
FAILS: 89,084,172,651,097
The guys from the cage were on a chat inside the app, discussing the numbers, considering updating the app to count DDoS attempts separately, and crossing their fingers until they broke.
Two guys were missing: Keaton and Deeprak. Keaton was an antisocial shithead, but there was a big hole in the conversation where Deeprak should have been.
Juanita and Mrs. Boden called gift time, blindfolded the birthday girl, and led her down the hall.
“Is Harper coming down?” Pat whispered to me.
I gave her the official excuse. “She’s not feeling well. Trust me, you don’t want her coming down.”
Juanita removed the blindfold, and everyone shouted, “Happy Birthday!”
Catherine stood in the doorway with her hands folded at her lips. The room stank of paint, and the floor wasn’t done, but she looked happy. Really happy.
“Don’t touch the walls,” Kyle called. “Not yet.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, turning into the crowded hall. She held her hand out to me. “Taylor.”
I took her hand. “Let me show you what we did.”
I showed her the smooth walls, the moldings, the way the painting was completely intact, the updated bathroom, the place where the mushroom used to be, and the reglazed French doors to the balcony. The barbecue smoke from the backyard obscured the view.
“That’s all we could do,” I finished. “But the floor needs to be done, and you need new pipes and a rewire.”
“Can I sleep in it?”
“Paint should be dry by tonight.”
Her cheeks turned eighty-five shades of pink, and she looked at the floor. She hugged me and got pulled out of the room by one of her many, many friends.
“Chris is coming tomorrow,” Pat whispered to me as Catherine went into the hall.
“Is that her old boyfriend’s name?”
“More like secret love. Only love, if you ask me.”
ATTEMPTS: 127,054,836,201,916
FAILS: 127,054,836,201,916
I kept my attention on the third-floor window through conversations about cars and sports, a smattering of politics, and gossip. Harper’s excuse for not being there floated without trouble. In a way, it was the truth. She was indisposed, trying to save everyone from the changing world by disrupting the tools of the change.
When she got in, would she cheer? Would I hear her from the ground? Would she text me? Call out the window? Announce to everyone? Keep it to herself?
I went upstairs with a plate of mushroom salad and a burger. “Open the door, Harper. You know I can pick this lock.”
It clicked, but she didn’t open it. When I did, I found her working. Almost all of her fingers were taped. The roll sat next to the keyboard, its brown core exposed, hanging on to the last inch of white tape.
I put the burger down and looked over her shoulder. “A Plone CMS. Good idea but—”
“Shut it!” She spun toward me, cutting me off with the look of death on her face. “First of all, you’re seeing about ten percent of this script, and second of all, I’m doing this fair.”
I stole a kiss. It was supposed to be a short peck, but I kept it going until she yielded, just a little.
“I’m going.”
She had four hours.
LVIII
The sun got lower on the horizon. The challenge was going to end about half an hour before sunset, but I still kept my eyes on my inaccurate watch. Jack had updated the app with the countdown, but they couldn’t figure out how to isolate the DDoS attacks, so the numbers were exponential.
ATTEMPTS: 389,491,610,776,287
FAILS: 389,491,610,776,287
T-MINUS: 02:12:34
Party guests came and went, their jobs and kids determining how long they stayed. I met so many of them I lost track. They shook my hand and thanked me for saving the mural.
I’d had no idea what the house meant to Barrington. Kyle and Johnny were talking by the thorn bushes, waving their arms at the thorns and shouting words drowned out in the white noise of the party. Pat and Jorge shook their heads at whatever suggestion Johnny offered up. Reggie and three others I’d just met listened but didn’t seem to have much to add.
They cared about the house as if it was their own.
Harper’s not leaving.
She was leaving. Maybe we’d have a long-distance thing for a while, until she figured out how to put the five million to the best use. I could t
ake it.
I was walking toward the thorn bushes to see what the argument was about when I got a message from Deeprak.
You can write your own ticket.>
<… >
I looked up at Harper’s window glowing blue from the screens.
I didn’t. I wanted Harper to have it, even if it meant my own failure. I started to type a bland response. Something on the order of “We’ll see.” But Deeprak shot back a message.
I laughed at how excited I was to have him back. I’d almost agreed to pay him five million dollars.
this: you get paid the same as me.
Salary and bonus.>
< My own projects.>
I heard something from Harper’s window. A clap and a shout.
ATTEMPTS: 710,887,019,611,003
FAILS: 710,887,019,611,003
T-MINUS: 01:54:12
I might have been mixing the sounds up with something else, or misinterpreted what I’d heard, but I bolted up the stairs and poked my head through Harper’s door. She’d left it unlocked.
“I’m not coming up here again.”
Silhouetted against her triple screens, she shook her hands out at the wrists until they blurred. “I’m fine. I think I might have it.”
“Really?” I stepped into the room fully.
“Yeah. It’s… I’m not going to explain it yet. It’s a combination. Zip, then boom, then right under.”
“Can I see?”
“Not until it works.”
“I love you, Harper.”
“I love you. Please get out,” she said absently.
There was something nice about that. To be loved habitually. Thoughtlessly, almost. Being so deep in her heart that she could say she loved me without thinking too hard about it.
I closed the door behind me. She had this. It was happening. She was going to get the money, save the factory, and who even knew? Stay in Barrington? Run it? She’d have to turn a shell into a manufacturing business. QI4 didn’t have the capacity for an operation like that. We had neither the money nor the demand yet.
So if she ran the factory, she couldn’t work for me back at QI4HQ.
But she had to.
I couldn’t stay in Barrington. She had to come back with me. And she wasn’t working for the competition, which was everyone at this point. From retailers to software giants to hardware manufacturers, we were about to disrupt all of it, and she couldn’t work for any of them. She was mine. I’d found her. She was going to sit next to me every goddamned day to share her beautiful mind at work and her beautiful body at home.
“Hard-on!” Butthead called upstairs. “You got someone here!”
“Me?” I stood at the top of the stairs and pointed at myself.
“You know another Hard-on?”
Before I could answer, a man in black jeans and a jacket stood next to him.
Keaton.
LIX
I hadn’t seen Keaton in the flesh in a long time. He kept to the shadows, where he was comfortable, disappearing in crowds, hiding where anyone could see him if they looked.
In Barrington, they watched him in clusters. Young girls giggling and pretending not to look. Groups of men puffing out their chests or singly standing between him and their wives. The primal posturing was unconscious and pretty much standard operating procedure whenever Keaton was in a room full of strangers.
“Nice to see you,” I said when I got to the bottom of the stairs. “Just passing through?”
“On the way to certain victory.” He held up a bottle of Dom Perignon. “Do they have buckets of ice here in… where are we?”
“Barrington.” I took the bottle, and he followed me to the kitchen.
“Well, hello.” Catherine wiped her hands on her apron.
“Catherine, this is my partner.” I coughed back his name. I didn’t know how he wanted to present himself out here.
He held out his hand to her. “Marcus.”
“Welcome. It’s so nice to meet a friend of Taylor’s.”
I held out the bottle. “Do you have a bucket?” I asked before she could mention Harper. I had to tell her he was here. Had to warn her to stay upstairs even if she won it all.
Especially if she won it all.
“Cathy!” a voice came from outside. “We need you!”
“I’ll take care of it.” Mrs. Boden plucked the bottle out of my hands. “Dom. Nice stuff. Real nice. Had it once in Paris when I was in nursing school.”
“You lived in Paris?” Keaton asked.
“After the Second World War.” She slid a silver ice tray out of the freezer. “I cut more metal out of muscle than a butcher at a hunting ground, but I needed ‘more training’ to practice in the States.” She smacked the ice tray on the counter.
Keaton crossed his arms and leaned on the counter. “Paris after the war must have been—”
“Complicated.” She pulled the lever on the tray, releasing the shattered cubes.
Keaton could talk to old people for hours, especially women. Where men tended to clam up as they got older, he found women gave less of a shit about who thought what as they greyed and made more interesting conversation.
He wouldn’t ask about Harper, and even if Mrs. Boden mentioned her, it would be in an innocent context. I backed out of the kitchen. All I had to do was get up the stairs and tell Harper that no matter what happened, she had to stay in that room. Cheer into a pillow. Celebrate her first hours of victory alone, or my partner would figure it out.
Then shit would get really random, really fast.
A hand gripped my bicep and yanked me away. Keaton had broken Mrs. Boden’s magic spell long enough to grab me and pull me into the backyard. The discussion around the thorn bushes still raged, but with Catherine at the center of it.
Keaton let me go and held up his phone.
ATTEMPTS: 1,032,234,165,777,029
FAILS: 1,032,234,165,777,029
T-MINUS: 00:43:34
“I don’t understand what happened to you,” he said, pocketing the device. “What you’re doing here. Why you dripped the decryption out the way you did. I checked everything in your past. Even called your mother—”
“You called my mother? Are you fucked in the head?”
“Excuse me? She was a part of my childhood too. In any case, she says you have no connection to this little town as far as she knows. I found your rental car trail. Not pretty. Intercepted your wireless bill. No calls. No data usage. Found some activity at the lumber yard, a few drinks at a bar in the middle of a parking lot. It’s not much, but you weren’t even trying to hide. Not really. I couldn’t figure out what your game was. How you were trying to screw me. Then it came to me.”
“Taylor!” Butthead cried from the porch. “Did you not give your friend a fucking beer?”
A small, hard projectile came toward me at speed, nothing more than a displacement of air in the near-dark. I reached my hand out and caught the can of beer without realizing what it was until I felt the wet cold against my palm.
I handed it to Keaton. “Just hold it. You don’t have to drink it.”
Another launched then slid off my fingertips and succumbed to gravity with a groan from Butthead.
“I’m dying to hear what came to you.” I picked the can out of the dirt, faced away from my partner, and cracked the top.
Orrin pulled a silver canister from the back of his truck. It looked like a keg in the twilight, but it had a hose on it. Behind him, Damon lugged two red gas containers.
“What are they doing?” Keaton asked.
“No fuck
ing clue.” I slurped the carbonated slurry and made a face.
“They bottle that shit in Mexico,” Damon said as he passed with his gas cans. “That’s why it tastes like piss.”
“They used to bottle it in the factory over that way,” I said to my partner.
Ignoring my recommendation, he took a swig of the beer. “I was trying to figure out your game. Then I thought, maybe you aren’t playing a game. Maybe you were being honest. Stupid, probably. But honest. The only way to know was to come here, look you in the face, and ask you what the fuck is going on.”
The porch lights went on. They didn’t illuminate much, but the way this conversation as going, I preferred the twilight.
“What’s going on,” I said pensively, looking toward the side drive, where Harper’s light fell onto the trees. “It’s stupid.”
“You found the hacker. Obviously. And you’re protecting them. Don’t deny it. I thought, up until a minute ago, that they were related to this girl.”
“Which girl? You assumed there was a girl. I never said shit about it.”
“Please give it a rest. There’s a little…” He held his beer hand up at me, tracing the shape of what he wanted to say. “Softening around the edges? And it explains a lot. Why you’re protecting her friends. Why you stayed here. Why you weren’t hitching on the interstate to get home. Why we got the decryption in pieces. She’s really got you on a leash.”
The suggestion that I was on a woman’s leash was meant to get a reaction out of me, but it didn’t. What made me tense up was how close he was to the truth.
“She’s not related to our hacker.”
With a manner calculated to minimize my reaction, he held the can to his lips and stated a fact as if in passing. “Because she is our hacker.” He swallowed with a gulp. “And you love her.”
Deny, deny, deny…