by Barry Lyga
“Look up,” Tish demanded, but her voice was lighter, happier. Cassie peered up and gasped.
The alcove had a skylight. An uncovered skylight.
“I don’t know who knows about this spot,” Tish said happily, dropping to her knees and fluffing the cushion. “But it’s where I come when I need a break. I figure the skylight is small enough and high enough that the risk of being spotted is pretty low.” She paused and then looked meaningfully at Cassie. “That doesn’t mean you should tell anyone else about it, OK?”
The remaining sunlight rained down on the top of Tish’s head, turning her purple hair dark blue. Cassie nodded. When Tish patted the space next to her, Cassie fell into it, turning her face up to the skylight, closing her eyes and pretending she could feel the breeze, the dusk, the softening of the day.
“So … Level 6, huh?” Tish whistled. “What’s it feel like to be the girl who was so dangerous that the government had to put a hit out on you?”
Tish’s lighthearted tone aside, the words made Cassie’s head spin. It was impossible to digest what had happened to her over the past few days. And now, with her mom in custody … How could this be real? How could anyone believe she was dangerous?
Something struck Cassie. “I just want her to be OK,” she said. “My mom, I mean. TonyStark said she’ll probably just go home soon but … how can I be sure? And, like — then what?” She chewed her lip. “Things weren’t always great between us, and I left them even worse.”
Tish looked thoughtful. “This is why I don’t want kids.”
“That’s super helpful, Tish, thanks,” Cassie snapped.
“I don’t get a lot of girl talk in here,” she grumbled. “Gimme a break.”
“If she knew I was fine, that we were trying to figure out a plan …”
Tish’s eyes widened. Today they were lined with sparkly green, and little jeweled stickers formed a feather shape across her left eyebrow. “Kid. Stop that line of thinking right now.”
“What line of thinking?” Bryce’s massive form appeared in the alcove.
Tish jumped to her feet. “Shit! What are you doing here?”
He waved his hand around noncommittally. “Relax, I won’t bust your secret place. We all have one of our own. But you’re needed in the hackers’ pit. We might be on to something.”
Cassie leaped up. “Let’s g —”
“Stay here, Cassie,” Bryce said gently. “You need a break. And we’re not ready for you yet.”
“Did you see my mom? Were you at school?”
Bryce nodded, just once. “Look, things are gonna happen fast. But right now, you need to chill a bit and get your feet under you before you’re any good to yourself or your mom or anyone. OK?”
Cassie slumped against the wall and watched Tish and Bryce round a corner and disappear into the belly of the hotel. She looked up; the sky was changing color again, and she traced faint cloud lines and the paths of two distant airplanes. Time passed and the sky darkened. Her fidgeting and her rapid breathing slowed, stopped … Then started again. Try as she might, she couldn’t stay relaxed for more than a few minutes at a time. Bryce meant well, she knew, but he was an idiot to think she couldn’t help. Being agitated just meant she was more engaged.
She wondered if her mom had been released from custody yet. It had been hours.
Something tugged at her. Soon, it became a voice. You could ask someone, it suggested.
It was a bad idea. She knew that, yet her hands moved of their own accord, finding her new-old phone and holding it up to the fading light. She could ask someone to check in on Rachel … it was possible. She had the physical capability to do so … but was it smart?
“Eff smart,” she said aloud. A smart joke was what landed her here in the first place.
Her fingers hovered over the keypad. Not Rowan. No way. Rowan had lured her in, used her for her tech brain, gotten her into this mess in the first place, then tossed her out when she wasn’t convenient anymore. So not Indira, Izzy or Madison either. Adena? Max? Maybe. She let the idea curl around her.
Suddenly, a big, fuzzy, blond ball flashed across her eyes. Sarah. What had she been thinking, keeping Sarah at arm’s length this whole time? What a stupid idea that had been. Sarah was someone true, someone real. She cared about Cassie. She could help. Right?
The hesitation, the risk, warred with her desire to make sure her mom could sleep at night. It was no contest. She tapped out a text.
Sarah, it’s C. Huge favor needed. It’s about my mom.
She waited.
It didn’t take long.
OMG I can’t believe you’re contacting me. Are you crazy? Are you OK?
Cassie broke into a grin. Sarah was wrong — she was desperate, not insane — but this wasn’t the time to tell her that.
Can you get a msg to my mom? Tell her I’m OK? I’m with w/ some people who will totally get me out of this.
A pause. Cassie was already picturing the relief on Rachel’s face when Sarah relayed the message, the weight off her shoulders.
Totes. I can do that. Where r u? Sarah asked.
Some old hotel. Just tell her I’m in the city and I’m safe. k?
It took forever for the comeback. Damn this old tech!
Got it. I’ll tell her.
It was all Cassie could ask for. She texted back a heart and closed her eyes, breathing and wishing at the same time.
*
She emerged from the not-so-secret hiding place to find TonyStark, Bryce and Tish in a low-key but noticeable argument.
“I don’t trust virgins,” TonyStark was saying emphatically, crossing his arms over his chest.
Virgins. People who hadn’t been Hive Mobbed.
“What about me?” Bryce asked hotly.
“I trust you when I can see you,” TonyStark said with admirable bluntness. “Otherwise …”
Bryce snorted and hovered over TonyStark. It was no contest. Bryce could pick up a skinny hacker dude like TonyStark and body-slam him into pulp without even breathing hard.
“Whoa, whoa!” Tish interposed herself between them. “We’re not going to get anywhere by beating each other up.”
“I won’t be getting beat up,” Bryce said. “This little shit! Do you know what I risk by coming here?”
“Do you know what we risk by letting you come here?” To his credit, TonyStark hadn’t flinched, even with a ton of Red Dread looming over him.
“I declare Bryce has the biggest,” Tish said drily. “The dick-measuring contest is now over.”
For the first time, TonyStark seemed to lose his cool. He rounded on Tish. “What? Are you kidding me? Him?”
Tish shrugged. “Look at him. If everything’s in proportion …”
“Jesus!” TonyStark said. Bryce just seemed embarrassed.
“I’m not sayin’,” Tish told them. “I’m just sayin’, is all.”
“And I’m just saying,” Bryce insisted, “that we can trust @Shameless.”
@Shameless? Cassie had been watching from the sidelines, quietly, but now she spoke up. “Who’s @Shameless?”
“No, you can trust @Shameless,” TonyStark said. “We don’t have that luxury.”
“Hey! I said, who’s @Shameless?”
Ignoring her, Bryce fumed at TonyStark. “Man, you can’t tear down the system without a little help on the inside.”
“Says you.”
Bryce stared. “That’s all you’ve got? Says you?”
TonyStark shrugged. “I got neither the time nor the inclination to explain to a rich dude why I’m —”
“Rich? This isn’t about money, man.”
“Everything is about money! Money is power. How many rich people have been Hive Mobbed? Somewhere, someone’s making a profit. Someone always is. And you just don’t see —”
&
nbsp; “Hey!” Cassie yelled through cupped hands. “I asked a question! Who. Is. @Shameless?”
Tish opened her mouth, then shut it. “Nah. Too easy.”
Bryce and TonyStark exchanged glances. “So tell her,” Bryce said.
“Nah, you tell her. It’s your deal.”
“@Shameless is a guy we know —”
“A guy you know.”
Bryce shot a death glare at TonyStark. “Fine. A guy I know. He’s on the inside.”
“Inside of what?”
Bryce stuttered on the first word: “H-hive. Like, Department of Justice, Hive.”
Cassie’s jaw dropped. Tish nodded and TonyStark smirked. “See? My girl is no idiot. She knows better than to trust insiders.”
“I’m not your girl,” Cassie told him. “You were doing so well, actually using my name.”
TonyStark grunted in embarrassment.
“But, yeah,” Cassie went on, “I’m not sure about marching right into the hornets’ nest.”
Bryce shrugged. “OK. Got any better ideas? Maybe poke the president again? That solved everything, didn’t it?”
There was a long silence, broken when Tish said, “Let’s at least hear Bryce out.”
Bryce flashed her a grateful smile, which she waved off like a bad smell. “Look,” he started, “everything we’ve been able to piece together so far indicates that there’s something fishy going on with regard to your Level 6. It’s … Show her,” he said to TonyStark.
“Check it,” TonyStark said, stroking his keyboard. “There’s something happening here. We just have to find it.”
Some of the hackers were reckless with their tools, pounding away at keyboards as though the letters that faded or the keycaps that flew off were able to regenerate themselves. TonyStark, though, was like an artist; his fingers moved over the keys with precision and purpose, with a grace that Cassie loved watching. Every hacker had a style, she was learning. She wondered what hers would ultimately be.
If she lived long enough, obvi.
Now that he was in his milieu, all of TonyStark’s outrage at Bryce melted away. He was cool and professional again. She stood over his shoulder, next to Tish and Bryce, while his screen lit up with Cassie’s BLINQ profile, the feeds moving so fast that no one could read them, the content showcasing the world’s reactions to every facet of Cassie’s life. Her profile picture was still circled in red, with “LEVEL 6 – #KillOnSight” still flashing. She tried not to look at it too closely.
“Shortly after you were made Level 6, I put out the word to @Shameless,” Bryce told Cassie. “I asked him to help us analyze your virality stats. He’s supposed to be pinging me back soon.”
“I thought you guys already did an analysis?” Cassie asked, confused. For the three days and change that she’d been stuck at OHM, she’d seen Tish and TonyStark and some of the others running constant checks on her stats. What was the point of it all?
“We’ve done nothing but analyses,” Tish grumbled, reading her mood and her mind. “Not a damn one of them makes sense.”
Cassie met Bryce’s eyes. “Really?”
Bryce opened his mouth to speak, then shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to overstep my bounds,” he said to TonyStark.
TonyStark threw his hands up. “Dudes. She just called out the president in front of the whole damn world. I think she can handle the truth.”
“Cool. Cool. OK, Cassie, here’s the thing.” Bryce pulled on one of the dreadlocks that had fallen from the knot he’d tied them into at the back of his head. “No one’s ever seen anything like this before. The speed of virality, the sheer number of comments … Statistically, it doesn’t seem to work. Based on that alone, we’re looking at quite possibly hundreds of thousands of people who’ve never participated in Hive actions before who suddenly decided your joke was worth breaking their silence. A few thousand, egged on by the mob mentality and wanting to be a part of it?” Bryce shrugged. “Sure. But this many? It just doesn’t add up.”
“You think someone manipulated the system?” she asked.
TonyStark barked with laughter. “Girl, the system is manipulation. We don’t know what the hell is going on. It’s possible this is all on the up-and-up. But it’s nothing we’ve ever seen before.” He paused, then grinned. “And we’ve seen a lot.”
“And you think @Shameless can shed some light on it?”
“Yes,” Bryce said immediately.
Cassie liked Bryce and owed him a lot. But three days in forced proximity to Tish and TonyStark had given her mad respect for their skills and opinions. “Tish?”
She mulled it over before shrugging. “This @Shameless dude … he’s helped us out before. But on little things. Can’t imagine why he’d want to get involved with something at this level. Too risky.”
“He doesn’t and he won’t,” said TonyStark. “This is how they get you — they help you with the small, insignificant stuff, then snatch you on the big stuff. And it gets no bigger.”
He tapped on his keyboard and the screen flipped to a new view: the latest coverage of Hive Mobs searching for Cassie. Her eyes widened. Throughout the city, streets were clogged with people hunting her. Even with a screen between them, she could feel their hatred, their animal instinct to find her, to drag her. To kill her. No one knew where’d she’d fled, and the entire country was looking for her.
It was one thing to see the online feeds about her, Cassie realized. It was another entirely to see actual physical bodies out on the prowl. In the stale air of the hotel, she shivered.
“I trust the guy.” Bryce checked his watch, a simple analog one that looked like it belonged to his great-grandfather. “He pinged me late last night and said he wanted to talk. Said he had suspicions.”
“Do you really think he can help me?” Cassie chewed her lip, then winced at the pain. Her lips were raw; she needed a new outlet for her anxiety. For the first time she understood why people exercised.
“Us,” Tish corrected her. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re kind of in this together, kid.”
TonyStark nodded once, firmly.
Cassie’s cheeks flooded with warmth. “Thanks,” she mumbled just as Bryce’s phone beeped.
“Here it is,” Bryce whispered. “@Shameless.”
Everyone, even TonyStark, peered at Bryce’s screen. It was a short message, but it was enough:
Critical info. You and the girl at Venecia, 10 p.m.
TonyStark let out a low whistle. Tish’s jaw dropped. Cassie wanted to remark on the way @Shameless had taken away her agency by calling her “the girl” but she was stuck on the sudden change of plans. She and Bryce … out in public … at a club. Tonight.
Bryce was still staring in awe at his phone. “Holy shit.”
“The inside man, in the flesh!” TonyStark led out a loud sound, a cross between a laugh and a guffaw, and slapped Bryce on the shoulder. “Damn, son. Were you expecting that?”
“What if it’s a trap?” Tish said.
“Um, hello? It’s definitely a trap!” Cassie snapped. “Your informant, who works for the government, wants to meet me, alone, in some random club? It’s not safe.” She turned to TonyStark. “Tell them it’s not safe.”
“It’s totally not safe,” TonyStark agreed.
“We’ll go in with a plan,” Bryce said. “And you won’t be alone.”
“Hell, no!”
Bryce regarded her sadly. “Cassie. We don’t have a choice.”
“We don’t, but I do!” she hollered. “I choose not to walk into what’s obviously a setup. I choose not to walk out of this hotel and into a mob that literally wants nothing more than to kill me. No way. If I’m going down, I’m going down fighting!”
“You’ll be fine,” Tish said suddenly. She popped up from her screen; she’d disappeared into her pod while no one was looking. “Check
out the dress code for Venecia.”
In the photos from Venecia’s feed, bodies danced to unheard beats, their heads covered. Grotesque masks with distorted cutouts for eyes and hideous painted mouths swayed, nodded, shook; the result was a disturbing scene straight out of a horror film. It almost looked familiar to Cassie, as though she’d watched that movie back when she liked to watch horror films, before her life had become one.
“This is why @Shameless chose Venecia. Masks are required,” Tish explained. She considered. “Well, the site just says ‘no real faces allowed,’ so we could probably get away with heavy costume makeup. But I don’t have that kind of tool kit anymore. Our best bet is to get a mask.”
She glanced at Bryce. “And some scissors.”
TonyStark leaned back in his chair and let out a long laugh. Bryce’s hands flew to his ponytail, his face wearing an expression of shock so comical that even Cassie couldn’t suppress a tiny smile.
“No way,” he insisted. Tish smiled grimly and held up two fingers in a mock scissors.
TonyStark couldn’t stop chuckling. “It was nice knowing ya, Red Dread.”
“Man,” Bryce said, scowling, “don’t start with me.” To Cassie, he said, “I’m gonna go figure out some masks and such for us. I’ll be in touch about tonight, OK?”
Once he’d left, Cassie found herself back in the alcove, staring at her phone, willing a text from Sarah to pop up. As much as she wanted to hear about her mom, a big part of her — a Rachel-sized part — was second-guessing her decision to ask Sarah for help, and not just because it was a safety risk to her and everyone at OHM. On the one hand, she knew that was what friends did for each other. On the other, by texting Sarah, she’d put her friend in jeopardy. She’d been desperate, yeah, but … Not cool.
In a rush of regret she deleted her text thread with Sarah and expunged the fake phone number that the encrypted app had created for her. That would at least give Sarah plausible deniability if anyone ever asked her about it.
Back in the main room, she made a beeline for one of the kitchenettes. Sometimes there were day-old doughnuts, and a day-old powdered doughnut was actually, in her estimation, superior to freshly baked. Her eyes had just alighted on her white-dusted prize when someone shouted.