Page 32 of Into the Fire

Joey Morales was the finest hacker Evan had ever encountered.

She was also a washout from the Orphan Program. She’d once had a target on her head, but Evan had saved her, and in a manner of speaking she’d saved him, too. She’d been the last of the Orphans whom Jack had trained. His dying wish was that Evan look after her, a burden that had become a responsibility that had in turn morphed into something deeply meaningful to him in ways he could neither understand nor express.

Evan had cleared her out of the country, parking her in a Swiss boarding school until he could eliminate those who wanted to eradicate her and anyone else with Orphan training. Once the threats had been neutralized, he’d relocated her here. Or, more precisely, she’d relocated herself.

He’d come home one night to find his unpickable front door unlocked and his impenetrable alarm system incapacitated. He’d drawn his ARES 1911 and made an adrenalized tactical approach across the great room only to find Joey sitting barefoot on the couch eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

Napkinless.

Though she never admitted as much, she wanted to live close to him. And though he never admitted as much, the feeling was mutual. So after he didn’t shoot her on his couch, he oversaw her move to the apartment a few miles away. He’d already set her up with some money stashed in a trust and with fake documents making her a legal adult, so she’d rented the place herself and furnished it with hardware befitting her genius hacker brain. As part of his ongoing attempt to mainstream her into normal civilian life, he insisted that she enroll in courses at UCLA in the coming semester, an arrangement she wasn’t happy with and was already no doubt scheming to undermine.

He’d spent the past few months doing his best to keep track of her.

Keeping track of a sixteen-year-old girl, he’d learned, was more challenging than neutralizing a high-value target inside a guarded desert training camp.

She currently held a Big Gulp, which she waved in his direction. “What’s with the ‘kay’?”

She seemed indignant.

Evan said, “What?”

“‘Kay’ is angry in textspeak. Like, passive-aggressive pissed off, you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“And the worst? Is the lowercase-k ‘kay.’ ’Cuz you know the person put effort into taking off the caps lock. Lowercase k is a declaration of war.” To punctuate the point, she raised the Big Gulp to her mouth and slurped a hit of soda through the wide red straw.

“There are words coming out of your face,” Evan said. “But they don’t make any sense in the actual world out here.”

“Come on, X. Get with the times.”

He pointed back at the door. “You have to throw the dead bolts. Every time. How you do anything is how you—”

She was mouthing the Second Commandment along with him, her eyes rolled to white. She stopped when he stopped, a thumbprint dimple marking her right cheek as she grinned. She had a radiant smile that got her out of trouble more often than it should have.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Anyone breaks in here, you know I’ll beat his ass silly.”

Evan circled the massive workstation and checked the broken latch on the window. It was the second floor, but still. “They haven’t fixed this yet?”

“Could you puh-lease get a hobby?” Joey said.

The windowsill was covered with all order of elaborate Rubik’s Cubes—magic cubes and speed cubes and shape-shifters blown out in all dimensions. Some kids played video games to pass the time; Joey did cubes thirteen rows deep and high that would’ve knotted Evan’s brain into a pretzel.

He almost knocked over a giant Megaminx twist puzzle as he fussed with the faulty window latch. “You need a dog,” he said. “A guard dog.”

“I don’t need a dog. I need more money. Like, an allowance.”

“An allowance? I gave you a trust fund that pays a monthly dividend of—”

“Do you know how expensive hardware is?” She disappeared back into the workstation and collapsed into a rolling gamer chair. Leaning over, she petted a rackmount Brutalis box. “This eight-GPU password-cracking monster was over twenty g’s.”

“I’d rather you spent your money on a safer apartment.”

“If I paid for a safer apartment, I couldn’t afford all this hardware. Which—I seem to recall—you make regular use of. So it’s not really an allowance I’m asking for. It’s more like a raise.”

Evan came into the pod and leaned against the inside curve of the desk. The temperature here in the inner sanctum was at least ten degrees hotter, and the air carried a whiff of burning rubber.

He crossed his arms. “A raise.”