Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles (13 page)

I looked up just as the spinning cloud descended. No one seemed to notice the clouds or the wind. How could they not see it? Why weren’t they shouting, pointing, running for cover?

I spun around, eyes searching frantically for the girl. Dust swirled all around and the wind howled louder until I was sure it couldn’t get any louder. A gust toppled me, and I slammed to the ground. I screamed, a howl of fear and anguish, but there was no one to hear me. The streets were empty. The people were gone, as were the cars and rickshaws, the buildings and cows.

Everything was gone. Everything.

The world went dark and for a moment that stretched forever, I could hear only the frantic thump of my own heart and the terrible wind. I felt the familiar sensation of something ending, everything ending—I’d felt it in the hospital when the world had broken apart and vanished. It was an almost unbearable anticipation, a crescendo trembling for release.

“Austin!” I screamed.

My arms flailed and water splashed around me. I tasted it on my lips. Saltwater.

T
EN MINUTES
—that’s all that separated Jon Stone from erasing this problem and the girl along with it. He trusted the intelligence he’d received and the girl’s location, while not confirmed, was highly probable. With any luck she was still in the building. If not, he would wait until she returned.

His objective was simple: discover what she knew, retrieve the data, then burn every thread that led back to BlakBox. He would be fast and thorough, as he’d promised Bell. Every moment she lived put them at greater risk of exposure. Soon, this would all be nothing more than a sweet memory to savor when he pondered jobs well done.

Nine minutes.

Stone opened the glove compartment, removed his Glock semiautomatic pistol, and set it in the center console. He couldn’t simply kill the girl, not until he first learned what she knew, what she’d told others, and where she’d stashed the files. That would require some persuasion, of course. Nothing personal, just business. Always just business.

He turned right, following the directions from the dash-mounted GPS. The digital clock marked the passage of more time.

Eight minutes.

I
STARED
at my own reflection in the windowpane overlooking the Bay from Austin’s apartment. The girl looking back at me seemed like a stranger, so far away. So different.

As I held the cell phone to my ear with one hand, I traced my still trembling fingers over the smooth skin that had once borne a painful reminder of my traumatic past—a jagged, ugly wound that I’d covered up and hid from everyone, including myself. In place of the fleshy, puckered seam that had marred my scalp, there was now flawless skin.

What exactly had happened to me?

That’s what Austin had wanted to know. Apparently his hack had been as bizarre as mine, with the strange jungle and finding Outlaw. But the moment he’d seen my head, he became obsessed with recording every detail of my experience. Whatever I had tapped into changed physical reality. I’d experienced the ultimate goal of all his experiments, but it hadn’t been what I’d expected. I didn’t know what had happened, really.

“C’mon, Lettie. Answer the phone,” I said, pacing now, chewing my fingernail. It was my fifth call.

“I can’t take your call right now . . .”

Voicemail.

“It’s me again. Call me. I’m worried.” My concern was teetering on panic. Lettie had called me three times while we were in the hack. She left one message, her words nearly unintelligible through heavy sobs: “It’s your Mom, Nyah . . . Oh . . . oh . . . something’s wrong . . . ”—garbled words—“ . . . hurry . . .”

The Indian girl’s words came back to her:
She needs you now. Save her, Nyah. Save your mother.

Whether the girl in the hack was real or not didn’t matter. I couldn’t deny what she’d done to me. And if I couldn’t deny that then what she’d said about Mom had to be true too. Mom was going to die. Isn’t that what she’d said? I couldn’t just let it happen.

“I have to go,” I finally said, pocketing the phone and starting across the room.

“These numbers,” Austin said, staring at the control console’s monitors. “They’re unbelievable.” He shook his head in disbelief. He hadn’t heard a word I’d said. He was so fixated on figuring out what had happened to me, I was pretty sure he was oblivious to the fact that he was still shirtless and dripping wet.

No, not fixated, obsessed. At that moment, all that mattered was the data right in front of him. I’d been physically changed and he had to know how. Had to know
right
now
.

There was so much unusual data and so many statistical aberrations that at first Austin had thought the software was corrupt. The system could barely process it fast enough.

Only after running the diagnostics had he realized that we weren’t looking at bad data or a system glitch at all. We were staring at hard evidence of the unexplainable. He was looking for a pattern, details beneath the details, the one elusive key that would open a treasure chest of answers.

Why had the last hack been so different from the others? It all seemed so bizarre, so confusing, so dreamlike, but it had been real. We’d accessed something massive, a layer of consciousness that neither of us could explain.

But that wouldn’t stop him from trying. He was driven by the need to know. We both were, but for me that was secondary to Mom’s well-being. The data would always be there, but my mom wouldn’t.

I hurried across the room to where my backpack and motorcycle helmet sat on a table behind Austin. “I have to go,” I said again, as I passed behind him. “Something’s wrong with my mom. The girl must’ve been right.”

He didn’t bother to answer or look up. Lost in the mirrored maze of his thoughts, he likely didn’t hear me at all.

“Austin?” I said as I shrugged into my backpack. “Did you hear me?”

He must’ve caught a glimpse of me walking toward the door because he jerked upright and turned in my direction. “Wait,” he said. “Where you going?”

“To see my mom.” I tugged a knit cap over my bald head.

“What? No, you can’t leave.”

“Yes, I can. Something’s really wrong. I have to find out what.”

“Hold on.” He closed the distance between us.

I reached for the door first, but he planted a hand on it, bracing it closed.

“It’s too dangerous out there,” he said. “You know that.”

“I don’t have a choice. The girl said I had to save my mother.”

“Listen, I know you’re worried, and maybe what you experienced was true—”

“Maybe? Look at my head.” I pulled off the cap. “There’s no ‘maybe’ here.”

“Stop and think before you leave. Don’t you think the FBI’s watching for you? The minute you get anywhere near your mom, they’ve got you. What then?”

“I don’t know. I’ll figure something out.”

“You won’t have time to figure anything out. You slipped away from them once. They won’t let it happen again. And then there’s BlakBox. They’re probably watching for you too.”

I stood silent. He was right, but it was a chance I was willing to take. It was Mom we were talking about. I slowly stretched the cap back over my head. I said, “I don’t expect you to understand.”

He slipped between me and the door, and put his hands on my shoulders. “I do understand,” he said. “Your mom needs you. But she needs you free . . . and alive. And she needs what you discovered in your hack, a cure. Stay here with me. Let’s do another hack, just one more. It’ll only take a few minutes. We’ll wait for Lettie to call you back. I’m sure everything’s fine.”

I shook off his hands. “I’m leaving.” I pushed him aside and opened the door.

“I’m going to reprogram the hack protocol and upgrade the amount of time we spend in the tanks . . .” Talking as if he hadn’t heard me at all. His eyes blazed with determination. I remembered that I’d thought he was flirting with madness when he first told me about hacking. “Instead of setting the cycle for fifteen seconds,” he continued, “I want to test run a five-minute dosage. It would give us the time we need to experiment more, to experience more.”

“Five minutes? Austin, that sounds risky. You don’t know what kind of stress going that long with have on your body.”

“I have to go deeper.”

“Listen to yourself,” I said. “You need a break. We both do. We’re running on fumes. I know you want to figure this out, so do I, but let’s look at this with fresh eyes. Let me check on my mom, and when I come back we’ll pick up right here. Promise.”

His gaze narrowed on me. “Five more minutes. Just five more. Your mom is going to be fine.”

“I don’t know that and neither do you.”

“I need to go deeper, and I need you here to do that.” His voice was raw from exhaustion and his eyes were etched with red. They flitted from side to side. He hadn’t slept in days and it was showing. And since seeing my healed scar, he’d let desperation get the better of him. It had him in its grip now, I could feel it. “Please,” he said.

“No. But don’t hack until I get back. Promise me you won’t. It’s dangerous.”

“You saw the numbers,” he said, ignoring my words. “Your biometrics during the second half of the hack were off the charts entirely, and your neural imagery looked like a . . . like a freaking electrical storm.”

“Austin—”

“Something unprecedented has happened here! We’re cracking the code. We can go farther. You’re assuming the window will stay open, that we can return to that place you discovered anytime, but maybe we can’t. We have to reset the system as quickly as possible and find a way to extend our hacks.”

“You know what the girl said to me.”

He sighed and relented. “Okay. You’re right. Go see your mom. But get back here. Soon.”

“I won’t be gone long. I promise.”

“And be careful,” he said. “Make sure you take the back way.”

“Stop worrying. No one knows we’re here, remember?”

Austin had pushed himself to his limits, maybe beyond them. But he was right about one thing: when it comes to breaking new ground, it’s not the reasonable person who leads the way, and the history books never mention the guy who played it safe.

To set sail in uncharted waters . . . well, that required someone with a fixation on the horizon that bordered on lunacy, someone who sees the future before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

A person who’s willing to die to prove that the world isn’t flat after all.

A person like Austin, and that had me worried the most.

“Promise me you won’t do it alone,” I said. “Wait until I’m back before you hack again.”

He stood silent.

“Promise me,” I pressed.

He nodded. “Okay.”

“I’ll be back soon,” I said and slipped out the door.

I left his building by using an old loading dock behind the building, pausing in the shadows to watch for signs of movement in the street before sprinting across it to the abandoned warehouse one block over. I slipped into the alleyway, ran to the end of it, and entered the old building through a rusted service door that opened to the dark, cavernous space. I’d parked my motorcycle out of sight, next to Austin’s Jeep.

Helmet on now, I jumped on my bike, started it, and pulled onto the street with the girl’s words echoing through my mind.

Save your mother.

I had to get to Mom. I had to know she was okay. I had to save her.

D
ARKENED WAREHOUSES
, long forsaken in the name of progress, lined the quiet streets by the Bay. This was the girl’s haven, her safe harbor. Or so she believed.

Stone pulled his black BMW onto a street lit by a single stuttering lamp. The ancient smell of seawater drifted through his open window.

As the car rounded the corner, its headlights swept across a storefront, glinting off the jagged edges of a vandalized window. The girl was in a building two blocks south. He would approach it from behind, park out of view, then make his way on foot. He wondered to whom the girl had run and whether that person would be there and thus require dispatching as well.

As he eased to a stop, something drew his attention—the burr of an engine echoing nearby. It was out of place in the deserted streets. A motorcycle.

He tilted his head, listening as he rolled forward and eased to a stop at the next cross street.

The engine whined louder, drawing closer. He looked through the passenger window just as a motorcycle emerged from an alleyway halfway down the street. Same model as the one registered to the girl. Had to be her.

The rider’s head turned his way to check for traffic, and he dipped below the level of the dash for a second. The motorcycle turned away from him and sped down the street—fast, but not in a way that indicated she’d spotted him.

Stone pulled away from the curb and stomped the accelerator pedal to the floor. The engine growl filled the night air. A hundred yards ahead, the motorcycle’s taillight flickered red, the bike leaned hard to the left and disappeared down another alley.

He roared past the alley, glimpsing the rider as he sped by. The gap between the buildings was too narrow for him to give chase. The only option was to circle the building and hope the girl would turn in his direction when she emerged on the adjacent street.

Stone rounded the building and circled the block, but the girl was already gone. She’d either seen him, or was exercising precautionary maneuvers to avoid tails she hadn’t detected. He drove back to the first alleyway from which she’d emerged and parked nearby.

He found the warehouse door cracked open. The smell of the motorcycle’s exhaust still hung in the air when he entered. In one corner sat a vehicle covered by a tattered canvas tarp, looking like a half-washed-away sand sculpture. He stripped off the cover, revealing an old Jeep, and searched the vehicle. No registration papers and the identification number had been filed off; there wasn’t even a stray crumpled receipt that might betray the owner’s identity.

He lifted his phone and dialed a number. “Run this plate,” he said and recited the dusty numbers from the California plates.

Computer keys clicked on the other end. “Reported as stolen two years ago.”

“Give me a trace on—” His words were interrupted by an incoming call. He glanced at the screen. Bell. No hesitation, he clicked over. “Sir.”

“The mother’s been moved to the hospital,” Bell said.

“The girl just left the warehouse,” he said as he hurried back to the alley. “Must be where she’s headed.”

“The FBI is there too.”

“I’m on my way,” Stone said, already halfway to his car. “We need to get to her first.”