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ONE
Sadie
I’ve never metan anthill I didn’t want to kick.
Literally or figuratively. All the anthills. All the kicking.
Is it curiosity? Some inherent need in me to stir things up? I haven’t been through enough therapy to know.
The thing I’ve learned, though, is that if I’m going to kick anthills, I need to be ready to jump out of the way. And though I excel at kicking, I’m not the best at jumping.
I learned this the hard way when I was six, visiting Gran on Oakley Island like my sisters and I did most summers. Growing up in the Midwest, I didn’t know about fire ants and the way they don’t start biting until they’ve swarmed, a tactic that maximizes their impact. I have the scars on my ankles to prove it.
I still remember Gran rubbing cream on the angry, pimple-like bites the ants left behind, all while lecturing me on respecting nature and staying out of messes I knew would only cause trouble.
The memory of my grandmother, who died a little less than two years ago, makes my throat tighten. But those aren’t emotions I can handle right now.
The point is: even if fire ants are the insect version of Satan’s minions, I can’t seem to leave them alone. At least not the figurative kind.
A fact evidenced by what I woke up to this morning.
My phone is lit up with notifications for missed calls and texts from my main contact at the government agency where I often do contract work. And by contract work, I mean light hacking and things the government needs done … by someone a few steps removed from theiractualemployees to give them a solid amount of plausible deniability.
Dread tightens my belly. Iimmediatelyknow why Agent German is calling me.
Don’t get me wrong. I might be a trouble-making anthill kicker by nature, but I’ve definitely learned to be careful. Most of the time I’m better than careful—I’m invisible. Especially when it comes to my online activities.
But this time, with the digging I did this week … I wasn’t careful enough.
Before I can even begin to get through the notifications, my phone rings in my hand.
I swallow and clear my throat. “’Sup, German.” Even though alarm bells are going off in my head, I answer my agency contact the way I typically do. Mostly because it exasperates him and I love hearing the sound of him sighing into the phone. But also because I’m still clinging to the hope that this is all just a big misunderstanding.
“What did you do?” he demands.
“You’ll have to be more specific. I do lots of things.”
There are muffled noises, and I’m pretty sure I’m hearing him cover the phone while muttering a long line of curse words I’ve never heard from German before.
I reallydidkick the wrong anthill this time.
“You weren’t supposed to go any deeper into their system. Just a cursory glance—enough to give us what we needed for basic intel. But you couldn’t do that, could you? You had to go deeper.”
His accusatory tone triggers a sense of indignation I can’t tamp down. If it were any other situation, I might feel guilty. But in this case, the network they had me mirror to pull the requested data seemed shady from the start and immediately piqued my interest.
By interest, I mean disgust and a sense of vengeance. Because in addition to the other unsavory activities I uncovered, there were clear things to indicate the slime in charge of the organization had ties to human trafficking. I didn’t even hesitate. A deeper dive into the network was completely necessary, even if risky.
A chance to expose scum who treat human beings like property? Not gonna just sleep on that. Nope. The intel I turned over should be enough to shut everything down as well as expose other key players.
You’re welcome.
But athank youdoesn’t seem to be forthcoming. At least not from German.
“Sounds like you know exactly what I did,” I say. “Why’d you even ask?”
He ignores my very practical question. “There was a reason we asked you to keep it light. You screwed up, Sadie.”
No regrets. Even though I knew going deeper and accessing servers remotely meant more chance I’d leave some kind of trail.
