Twenty-One

ALICE

So much for Operation EagleFly. It was a stupid name, anyway.

Now that we weren’t meeting and planning, we had no reason to talk to each other in school. A week had passed, and we were back to living in parallel universes. It was weird. Sometimes I’d see Dakota or Benny in the hallway and I’d start to raise my hand in greeting, out of habit. Then I’d have to jerk it down quickly before anyone noticed.

Then there was Jason—he was mostly alone. He slunk in and out of Design class without making eye contact. He didn’t carry his guitar around anymore. He no longer had any comebacks to the taunts in the hallway. He never really said much of anything. It was hard to watch.

I guess Greg was fine with being my goblet-wielding fallback, because he seemed happy that I was free after school again. He even agreed to stay for dinner one night, which helped because then my mom could spend the whole time asking him questions. He only gave one-word answers—he wasn’t exactly a great charmer—but she didn’t seem to notice. Still, I was starting to wonder if she knew something was up with my dad because the dinners were steadily getting more slapdash—packaged salad mixes with bottled dressing, canned soup, and one night she even went straight for the frozen pizza, which is not really pizza at all but puffy bread masked in tasteless sauce and rubber cheese. When you can’t make the effort to call for delivery, something is really wrong.

I still hadn’t said anything, and maybe all that secret-keeping (i.e. hiding in my room and studying) was another sign for her, because she had asked me a few times if I was depressed about something.

“No,” I told her. “Just trying to keep all the balls in the air.”

“Drop some of them,” she said. “You should have a life, Alice. Go out on a date. Do something fun.”

I appreciated that she was coming from a place of concern, but what she didn’t realize was that for a few weeks there, I’d had a life—a criminal life, yes, but a fun one—and now it was gone. Now everything about my ordinary life seemed flatter, grayer in comparison. Plus, my mother telling me to date was the definition of sad.

But it was time to move on. Put my criminal past behind me and get back down to my schoolwork. All that was left to do was to get back into the system and get rid of the design. Erase that history from the browser and my mind.

I logged onto the wifi system and found the Mint login screen, decorated with Liberty Bells and flags.

3x5542*TGP0z12Q*5J49iii>Dr8&}29w

It was a decent password as far as passwords went, but a password was only numbers and symbols and letters in a finite sequence, meant to be cracked. The way I saw it, I was helping these people understand just how vulnerable their systems were. They paid experts to do this kind of thing—they called it “benevolent hacking”—so they should be thanking me.

I clicked enter and in I went, the same way I had the last time.

Straight to the discard folder where I’d left the file.

MississippiState50. I dragged it over to the trashcan icon and hovered it there for a while. It felt so final, throwing away Jason’s design. If I did this, it would really be all over. Everything.

I could leave it in, I thought deviously. Teach Jason a lesson—the others, too—about messing with me. About using people. They’d be forced to figure it all out themselves.

It was sort of tempting. But it was also ridiculous. I couldn’t get us all arrested just because I was pissed. I wasn’t some vengeful badass. I was a girl in a dorky hat who knew a lot about computers and very little about anything else. Clearly I knew nothing about people.

No, it was better to just walk away, wash my hands of the whole thing. I released the button on my mouse.

Only the file didn’t go into the trash. The file disappeared.

What the hell? Was it snarfed?

I went back out and in, thinking I must have missed it.

I scrolled through the other folders—job, project, engineering workbench, activities, reports—opening each one and scanning through. No sign of the document. Nothing.

The only folder I hadn’t tried was work orders in progress. It wouldn’t be there, would it?

I clicked anyway, just for thoroughness.

And blammo, wouldn’t you know? There it was. MississippiState50.

I must have mistakenly dropped it there with a flick of my wrist. Well, the hows didn’t matter—I just needed to get rid of it.

I selected the file and pressed the delete key. No change. Tried dragging it into the little trashcan icon again. Nothing doing. It stayed put.

The thing refused to budge. It hovered there in its open window, a little rectangle taunting me. In fact, I noticed that the outline of it was gray, so it was actually unclickable. How could that be? There had to be a way to destroy it.

I opened up the software’s control dashboard and looked for the work orders in progress module. On the left hand side was a bar graph of inventory. Above that, in a little box, was a list of items in progress including our coin design.

05022014:17:15

“Wait wait wait,” I said out loud. I couldn’t be seeing what I thought I was seeing. Could I?

Those were dates. The run was scheduled for May 2nd.

This was pessimal. How could it be scheduled? And May 2nd? That was in nine days!

I hit the edit option next to the file. Again, denied. Bagbiter! A message came up in a bubble: this order is locked. no further changes can be made.

No changes? What the hell kind of bullshit software was this? Why couldn’t you make a change? What if you made a mistake and needed to fix it?

’Cause we’d made one.

Okay, I had.

And it was a big one. Really big.

In all my hacking experience, I’d never come across a problem like this. It seemed so simple, and yet . . .

I tried a few more times to delete, edit, reboot, hide, destroy the file. I did some searching; I went onto chat rooms to try to find answers. And the next time I looked at the digital readout at the top of my screen, it was three hours later and I had nothing.

Panic sweat collected at the edge of my hairline.

If we didn’t get rid of this thing, the coins were going to be minted, and if we couldn’t get in the building to pick them up, they’d know exactly what happened. From there it would only take a team of insurance company experts to find our trail. The worst part of all was that I’d thought of doing this very thing—yes, I decided against punishing them, but somehow, subconsciously, I must have made it happen.

I grabbed my phone and texted Jason.

CALL ME WHEN YOU GET THIS. IMPORTANT!!!

I gripped my phone in my hand, all the blood pressed out of my fingers, until it rang three minutes later.

He answered sounding like he had a mouthful of cereal. “What’s up, Al? I can’t talk for long.” In another situation I would have loved to talk to him. In another situation, my texting him would have been an excuse to get him on the phone. But that was before I found out what he really thought about me. Now I hated him.

I spoke coldly, all business. I couldn’t tell him the whole story—just the facts he needed to know. “Something happened with our file. In the Mint system. I tried to go in and get rid of it, but it’s been queued.”

“What does that mean? I thought you said you hid it. In a ‘dusty corner’, if I remember your exact words.”

“I thought I did,” I tried to skirt the issue. “It doesn’t matter. Now that thing is set to go, on May second.”

“So what? It’ll just look like a mistake.”

“Jason, I don’t think you realize what’s going on. Our error coin design in there will be evidence of tampering. And in situations like this, they could bring in a whole team of investigators. Forensics, like on TV? Except for computer stuff. They can trace back all of the logins in the system, and they can trace it back to my IP address. I used a VPN, but they’ll get past that in an instant.”

“What?” his panicked voice went up an octave. Then he quieted his voice some. “Al. This was supposed to be freaking foolproof. I thought you had this locked down!!”

“I did, when we were actually going to go through with it. But we can’t ignore it. Those coins—we have to figure out how to get them out. We don’t have a choice.”

“This is your problem. I’m sorry, but you have to figure it out.”

That’s when I lost my temper. “No, Jason. This is your problem. You were the great leader. So don’t go putting this all on me. If you do, I’ll rat your ass out. And who are they going to believe, Harry Potter or the pothead whose dad bankrupted the school?”

I couldn’t believe I was being so harsh. But at the same time, I couldn’t believe we were even in this situation.

“Shit,” he said. I heard some banging around on his end. “Shit, Al. We can’t go to jail for a crime we didn’t even mean to commit. What should we do? What should we do?”

“How about call a meeting?”

“Right. I’m calling a meeting.”

“When?” I asked.

“Right now?”

“Jason, it’s almost one-thirty in the morning. Are you crazy??”

“Do you know where the old canoe house is?”

“The what?”

“It’s on the nature preserve. Just meet me at the entrance of the nature preserve. I’ll text the others.”

So there I was, sneaking out on a Tuesday night to secretly meet the boy I used to crush on in the woods behind our school. I probably would’ve been way more psyched about the whole thing if, you know, it wasn’t because we had a major emergency on our hands.