After many awkwardly silent laps, I stopped the bike in the center field. “I think I really have the hang of this. Thanks, Bailen.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “But you still have one more thing to learn.”
“What?” Hadn’t we done enough for one day?
“Flying.”
Ugh! In all the confusion, I’d completely forgotten that. “Now?”
“Yeah, why not?” He placed his hand on my shoulder, sending tingles through me. I resisted the urge to shiver, even though a part of me wanted him to know I enjoyed being closer. The closer I was, the more I forgot the awful parts of my life. The part where I lost everyone I cared about.
“Besides, you know everything except how to go up and down. That’s the easy part.”
Sweat formed on my forehead. “Okay, what do I do?”
“Move the lever in front of the handlebars. That releases the yoke and engages the flying mechanism.”
I thrust the lever to the right, feeling it lock into place.
“If you pull back on the handlebars, the bike will go up. If you push forward, it will go down.”
“Easy enough,” I said, glad the hard part of crotchrocket training was over. The hard part of my life was something else entirely.
“Now build up enough speed to get off the ground.”
After everything today, that sounded simple. I started the bike and increased the throttle. As we rolled toward the edge of the clearing, my sense of adventure returned.
“A little faster, then pull back on the handles.” Bailen tightened his grip around my waist. My insides warred. A mixture of guilt and excitement swirled.
I shifted into the highest gear. As we neared the trees, I pulled back on the handlebars, sending the bike into the air. My stomach tightened as the ground sank beneath us and wind rushed around me. I was doing it. The skyrises in the distance had never looked so beautiful before.
Bailen’s voice sounded in my helmet. “See, simple.”
I laughed and twisted the throttle. The biked sped on. My worries whisked away with the wind.
Hours later, we pulled into the barn as the sun set behind us. I took off my helmet and hung it off the handlebars.
“Thanks. I don’t know how I can repay you.”
“It was nothing.” He shrugged and took a step away from me.
I wanted him to stop backing away. Unfortunately, things were too complicated. I gave him a weak smile, but his expression remained even. I hoped it was enough to convey how I was feeling, but deep down, I knew it wasn’t. How could I show him what I wanted if my emotions were a swirling, confusing mess that I couldn’t even understand?
Before I could open the trap door and escape the awkwardness, it swung open and Peyton emerged.
She pointed her finger at Bailen’s chest. “Where have you been? I’ve been searching everywhere for you.”
“I was teaching Kaya to ride.” Bailen put his helmet on the seat of the bike.
Peyton gave Bailen an oh please expression, grabbed his arm, and yanked him down the stairs.
“We need you to do some coding. You have to come too. We finally understand how to use that loophole we found.”
“Can it wait?” Bailen asked, gazing at me like we’d just been interrupted, even though we hadn’t been.
“No. We have a thirty-minute window before Global Tracking Systems finishes their upgrade and locks the system down even tighter than it already is.”
Bailen’s shoulders slumped, which I never expected to see from him in a conversation about tech. “I thought the upgrade wasn’t until next week.”
“They must have suspected an attack. They started it ahead of schedule.”
“We can never catch a break.” Bailen bolted to the trap door with Peyton on his heels, leaving me several paces behind them.
Before I knew it, I was back in the chair in the computer room. Wires draped from my arms, legs, and head. A dozen people stood around Bailen, who tapped on the keyboard behind his row of monitors. His dad sat on one side, periodically pointing to things. At the station to their left, Jeremy was engrossed with his work.
“Is this really necessary?” I sat up from the lab chair, trying to ignore the people staring at me.
Peyton pushed me into the seat. “Yes. Now stop moving. We don’t have much time.” As I was about to ask time for what, she pulled up a chair next to me and watched me like I was a prisoner about to escape.
I huffed and tried to remain still, but my feet shook, restless to get out of the room. Her scrutiny bore into me, making me squirm. But it wasn’t what it implied that made me uneasy. It was my thoughts, my emotions, and my guilt. Shouldn’t I be holed up in my room crying over Jake and not worrying about boys? But when my grandmother had died, the rabbi had told us to mourn in whatever way felt right. Being alone felt wrong, alienating, and lonely, like the last person on Earth. Bailen filled an empty void. Kept my mind off things.
It had started as an escape from reality, but I’d never expected to enjoy it. To crave his company. I wanted Bailen to fill the void Jake had left, have him do something reassuring like Jake would have, but on a whole other level.
I closed my eyes to block out the room. I took a few deep breaths in a futile attempt to expel the churning guilt.
Maybe if the loophole worked, I’d be able to see everyone again, pick up where I’d left things. Well. almost. Harlow would be there, but Jake wouldn’t.
And I still owed Harlow the truth—why I’d run instead of trusting the authorities. What I’d done with Bailen. Telling him wouldn’t be easy. But did I even want things to go back the way they were? So much had changed. The world and the people I cared about no longer had a filter on them.
I shifted in the chair, searching for an escape route. There wasn’t one. The wires weighed heavily on me, but my thoughts were heavier. Going home also meant telling my parents about Jake. Even if Myles helped, the thought of the conversation numbed my body. What if they blamed me? No matter what Bailen said, it was my fault. Things would have turned out very differently if Jake hadn’t tried to protect me.
Now I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go back to my old life. It seemed easier to hide out with the Ghosts. The absence of my tracker felt simpler in a lot of ways, but other parts of my life were much more complicated. I couldn’t hide by turning to the network. Staying with the Ghosts meant never seeing my family again—or what was left of them. It also meant dealing with Peyton and Bailen.
But none of it mattered if the exploit didn’t work. I had to clean up the mess I’d created—all the pain I’d caused. My brain moved a million miles an hour, matching the swirling feeling inside me.
The sudden hum of the discs on my temples brought the conversations of the room to my attention.
“We’re online. Jeremy, start cloning Kaya’s signal. I have to finish the application code.”
Jeremy hit several keys at his station. The discs buzzed in my ears—a sound that normally would have annoyed me but instead slowed my horrible stream of thoughts.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.
“Yes, stay still. We have fifteen minutes to clone your signal and apply it to our trackers before the system maintenance completes. If we can mimic your signal and send the data to the network, we’ll be able to disconnect people without the authorities knowing. But if the maintenance finishes before we do, game over.” Bailen peeked over the monitors at me with a quick grin that should have been reassuring but wasn’t.
“Game over? What do you mean?” I asked, hoping the discussion would distract me.
He continued to type and didn’t answer. I turned to Peyton, who was still glaring at me like she saw through some ruse I didn’t know existed. I wished I were a mouse so I could scurry through a hole and hide between the walls.
“Game over, as in the authorities will be able to track what we’re doing. Then they’ll know where we are.” She pulled her hair into a messy ponytail. “We have
to finish and get out of the system before it’s back online.”
“But if we’re really lucky, I might be able to sneak in some sleeper code that can start unraveling their defenses from the inside.” Bailen’s devious, I-love-tech grin appeared on his face.
Despite the high spirits, my muscles tightened. It was a huge risk they were taking on me and my faulty tracker.
Several others came in and sat down at their stations, murmuring to one another and pointing at their screens occasionally. There was no escaping the tension swimming in the room. I bit the inside of my cheek, trying to diffuse some of my anxious energy. It didn’t work.
“I’m almost done with the cloned signal,” Jeremy said to Bailen, breaking the long silence.
“Great. Send it over the second it finishes,” Bailen said, his attention glued to his monitor. “I need a time check.”
Peyton illuminated her watch. “Seven minutes.”
“Seven? That’s it? Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“I wish I was, but this is no joke.”
He bit his bottom lip and I forced myself to look away before I had any more inappropriate thoughts about him. “We aren’t going to make it.”
She stood from her chair and joined him on the other side of the monitors. “I’m not a coding prodigy, but can I do anything?”
“Do you remember when I showed you how to install memory?”
“I think so.” Her voice sounded confident, but her deer-in-headlights expression betrayed her words. I’d never seen Peyton so terrified.
“Good.” He reached across the desk and held up a small silver chip.
I recognized it immediately. It was the chip I’d found at the building where Jake… I stopped myself from allowing the memory to persist. If I did, I’d have lost it.
“Install this five thousand series chip in the secondary server. We need all the power and speed we can get.” Bailen passed her the chip.
“Don’t you need to shut down the server so I can install it? Can you afford to be down a server for a minute or two?”
“Not really, but if you’re fast enough, the new chip should more than make up the difference.”
“Okay. I trust you. You’re the tech genius.”
“The server will be offline in ten seconds.”
The fact that Bailen didn’t acknowledge the compliment told me how much was riding on the exploit.
“You know I like a challenge, but this is insane. Kaya, keep the time.” She tossed me her watch then bolted to the far corner.
I caught it and peeked at it. The countdown showed five minutes and thirty seconds left. My heart pounded in rhythm to the ticking seconds.
“The cloned signal is on its way to you,” Jeremy said before heading to where Peyton was pulling a large rack out of a huge metal box.
“Great. I’ve got it.” The clicking of Bailen’s keys increased in speed. “Time check?”
“Four minutes and forty-five seconds,” I said.
Why was it when I wanted a class to end, the clock crawled, but now that every second counted, it zoomed by?
Peyton shoved the rack into the metal box and slammed the door shut. “The chip is in!” she yelled across the room.
“I’ll bring it back online.” Myles stepped up to another terminal and his fingers passed over the keyboard with a speed that rivaled Bailen’s. It was like they were racing each other instead of the clock.
“Good. Just in time to enable the cloned signal,” Bailen said. “How much time?”
“Three minutes fifty seconds,” I said, watching the seconds tick away.
“Five percent complete.” Bailen rubbed his hands together. “It’s going to be tight. Let me know when we get to one minute and again at thirty seconds.”
I gulped, trying to ease the giant lump forming in my throat. All attention was glued on Bailen’s monitors, but I fixated on the watch, letting the changing numbers hypnotize me. For every second that passed, my gut squeezed tighter.
When the watch hit the first marker, I could barely choke out, “One minute.”
“Eighty-two percent complete,” Bailen called out.
Peyton moved next to my chair and watched the clock with me. I opened my mouth to call out the next time marker, but Peyton beat me to it. “Thirty seconds.”
“We’re at ninety percent complete,” Bailen replied.
As the final thirty seconds ticked down, the walls crawled toward me and the ceiling lowered. My chest tightened, making it difficult to breathe. Everyone held their breaths, including me, as Peyton and Bailen tracked the final seconds and percentages. When twenty seconds remained, Bailen said, “Ninety-five percent… Ninety-six.”
“Ten seconds.”
“Shut it down!” Myles yelled.
“What? Dad, are you nuts?”
“There’s no time. It won’t complete, and we can’t risk them finding us.” Before Bailen could protest further, Myles flipped a switch, and the computer fell silent.
My heart sank to my feet as I watched the final seconds tick away.
Bailen slammed his fists on the desk. “Ninety-eight percent. We had it!”
But the room fell silent as the main screens went black and green text scrawled across them.
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU’RE AFTER.
YOU MAY THINK YOU’RE CLEVER, BUT I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN.
CROSS ME AGAIN AND THERE WILL BE SEVERE CONSEQUENCES.
-R.S.
Bailen slumped in his chair. Myles put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “See? They were onto us. Luckily, they didn’t get much from their location trace.”
“We lost our window by sheer seconds.”
“I know, son.”
“It’ll be weeks before there’s another upgrade or maintenance. And who knows if we’ll be able to catch it in enough time.”
“I know. We will beat them.” But his words didn’t feel like enough.
Bailen shot up from his chair. “How? They’re always ten steps ahead of us. They know our plans before we do. They got in our system! We’re never going to be able to take down the tracker network and free people if we can’t get inside their defenses. When are we going to catch a break?”
“We’ll find another way. We always do.”
Despite Myles’s hope, Bailen’s reaction had me wondering if the years of dodging the authorities were catching up with them, if they were running out of chances.
Sixteen
Every time I closed my eyes over the next few nights, I was transported back to the explosion. No matter what I did differently in my dreams, they always ended the same, with Jake coughing up blood in my arms. I tossed and turned, trying to prevent sleep from taking me, but each time, my eyelids grew heavy, and the nightmare returned.
As time went on, the nightmare expanded. My brain added the signal cloning, but then Jake turned into a zombie authority and shut the program down before it could complete.
I flicked on the light, but my memories still went to Jake. Whether I was awake or asleep, there were reminders of him everywhere, reminders of what I’d lost. I let out an exasperated scream and threw off the covers. I pulled on a hooded sweatshirt and plodded across the room to the dresser. I opened the top drawer searched the emptiness then slammed it shut with a thud. As I reached for the next drawer, a soft plop caught my attention. I pushed the dresser aside and found a black-and-white notebook folded in half, held that way with a rubber band.
I pulled off the rubber band and flipped through the pages, instantly recognizing Jake’s handwriting. I shuffled back to the bed and leaned against the wall, turning the pages but not really reading. There were lots of poems early on. Words like pinprick of light in a fog stood out. He’d obviously found something small worthwhile here. But the more I examined through the pages, the more erratic the writing became.
Some pages had very few words, or just big question marks. Until I found the final pages with writing. Four words spanned the two pages—WHY CAN’T I REME
MBER?
More puzzles from Jake. Who or what was he forgetting? With distance from the tracker network, maybe he was missing his videos and family images.
I flipped backward through the writing and found phrases like lost chunks of time and extreme exhaustion, but no answers to the mounting questions. Maybe it was the stress of the Ghost life, or the fight against the authorities. There was no way to know for sure. I thought we shared our secrets, but the journal was something else he’d kept from me.
I held it to my chest and curled into a ball. It was the last piece of him I had, and it didn’t make sense. Just like his death.
A soft knock at my door made me jump. I hid the journal under my pillow, trudged across the room, and wiped my snot-covered face. I heaved the door open to find Bailen standing wide-eyed. His messy hair stuck out of his sweatshirt hood.
“Trouble sleeping?” he asked.
“Yeah, you?”
“I can’t get it out of my head. We were so close. I feel like we lost everything.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s fine.” I cut him off. I’d thought about Jake enough. I didn’t need to talk about it too. “What time is it?”
Bailen checked his wristwatch. “8:00 p.m.”
“You mean we both slept a whole hour?” I’d turned into a pathetic loser sulking around and going to bed at seven.
“Seems like it.” He paused. “Also seems like we both need a distraction.”
I was starting to get stir crazy. I needed out of this room before I lost it again.
A smile tugged on Bailen’s lips. The first hint of one I’d seen in days. “Good. Meet me in the computer room in half an hour. And dress nice. I’ve got an idea on how to get us out of here.”
“Done.” I shut the door and collapsed on the bed again, exhaustion washing over me. Maybe it was a bad idea.
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