Cyber Dawn (A Ben Raine Novel) (10 page)

Not helping.

Sorry
, she texted. A long pause.
I still can’t believe you contacted her.

Me either.

Gotta run,
Jessica typed.
I’ll text you later.

K.

I dropped the phone on my bed and went back to staring at my history e-book. Most midterm exams were over, but I still had an assignment due Friday. Why Mrs. Bradley assigned homework during midterm week, I didn’t know. Just as I finished a chapter on Fifteenth Century Scottish architecture, my phone buzzed again. I glanced at the message.

U home?

I read the text several times. I didn’t recognize the number, so I replied:

Who is this?

A moment later, a response:

Sarah

Sarah?

I sat up straight and thought back to our earlier conversation and its abrupt end. Like Katherine the day before, Sarah was the last person I expected to hear from. Ever.

After a pause, I replied:

Yeah, I’m home. Need somebody to hit?

Funny. Can I come in? It’s freezing out here.

It took my brain several seconds to put two and two together. And then it hit me.

Sarah is at my house!

With shaky fingers, I typed:

One sec

I shot out of bed and ran to my bathroom. I looked a bit more disheveled than I would have liked. Sure, the last time we’d met she called me a jerk and punched me in the arm. But she was still cute.

Really cute.

I splashed water on my face, half-swished and half-swallowed a capful of mouthwash, and then pulled on a clean t-shirt. I ran down the stairs and stopped at the front door to give my heart a chance to slow down. A million questions flowed through my mind.

What is she doing here? How did she find my house? And why I am so excited to see her?

I grabbed the handle, took a deep breath, and pulled the door open.

Sarah stood on the porch shivering. She wore khaki cargo pants and a heavy blue jacket. A light layer of snow covered her shoulders and hair and a pair of stylish dark-rimmed glasses perfectly framed her brown eyes.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” she replied.

We stared at each other. Finally, she said, “Um, can I come in?”

“That depends, are you going to hit me again?”

“Only if you don’t let me in.”

I laughed and stepped aside. “Well, in that case . . .”

Sarah walked into the entryway and looked around. “Nice house. Your parents home?”

“Nope. They’re in Europe.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. My dad’s a professor. He’s teaching a class in England for two months. They’ll be back in a few weeks for Thanksgiving.”

“That’s cool,” she said. “They leave you home alone?”

“I wish. Our housekeeper, Sofia, lives here, too. But she’s out to dinner with a few friends tonight.”

I motioned down the hall toward the kitchen. “Come on in. Can I get you something to drink?”

“What do you got?”

I walked to the fridge and opened it. “Mostly soda. Water, juice, milk, that sort of thing.”

“Soda sounds good.”

I pulled two cans out and handed one to her. We stood on opposite sides of the large kitchen island. Sarah picked up her soda and pretended to read the label. I desperately wanted her to say something. Tell me why she stopped by. Anything.

When she stayed silent, I broke down, and asked, “So, what’s up?”

“I felt bad about earlier,” she quickly replied. “Wanted to apologize.”

“No problem,” I said. “But you could have just texted me. You didn’t have to drive over in a snowstorm.”

Sarah focused on her soda can again. She seemed nervous. After a moment, she said, “You said you needed a hacker.”

“You said you weren’t one.”

“Well of course I did,” she said. A hint of her earlier anger returned, then faded. “Mrs. Watson was walking down the hall.”

Way to go, Ben,
I thought.
You dork.

Out loud, I said, “Oh. Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine.”

“So . . . you are one then?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

The room was silent again as we both sipped from our cans. Having never engaged a hacker before, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. Sarah remained quiet, again forcing me to drive the conversation.

“So, how does this work?” I asked. “Like, how much do you charge?”

She took a drink from her can and started talking. Fast. “Look, unlike most kids at school, I don’t have rich parents. So I get by how I can. My dad left my mom and me when I was nine.” She took a quick breath, then continued. “My mom works nights as a waitress. I work at a coffee shop. Combined, we can barely pay the bills.”

“Sarah, it’s okay,” I interjected.

“So I hack. I can make more in one job than my mom makes in a week from tips.” She stopped. “Wait, did you say it’s okay?”

“Yeah, it’s cool. I get it.”

Sarah blushed, and said, “Sorry. Guess I’m a little nervous. I can do just about anything with a computer, but asking for money? Not my strong point.”

“No need to explain,” I said.

“Thanks,” she replied, biting her lip. “To answer your question, I usually charge different amounts for different jobs. Depends on the risk. What are you looking for? Access to your parents’ email account? Want your history grade changed? Need to spy on Katherine’s Facebook page?”

I groaned.
Not her, too.

“Sorry,” she chuckled. “Couldn’t resist.”

“It seems nobody can,” I said. “But no, none of the above. I need . . .”

In an instant, my confidence disappeared.

My face must have betrayed that fact, because Sarah said, “Look, your secret is safe with me. What I do . . . well, let’s just say it’s usually not legal. So I’m putting trust in you to keep it a secret as well.”

I still hesitated.

Her eyes locked on mine.

Well, that did the trick.

Not wanting to disappoint the amazing brown eyes, I blurted out, “I need a copy of my medical record.”

“Medical record?” Sarah said. “Why not just ask for it?”

I explained the process. When I finished, she stared down at the kitchen island and picked at her soda can.

After a few moments, she said, “Look Ben, I can’t help you. Hacking into a hospital network is . . . well, it’s too risky.”

“Isn’t all hacking risky?”

“Sure,” she said. “But I usually do simple stuff—mobile phones, social networks, email passwords, the occasional grade or two. Hacking into a hospital’s secure database is on another level.”

“You can’t do it or you won’t do it?” I asked.

“Won’t,” she snapped. After a long pause, she added, “Look, Ben, I’m sorry. I really am. I got kicked out of my last school for hacking. And I did a job recently where I almost got caught. I have to stick to the simple stuff. For now anyway.”

“Kicked out?”

“Yeah,” she replied with a shrug.

“What’d you do?”

“A kid who hired me to hack his sister’s iPhone got a little chatty with his friend. Who in turn got chatty with his parents. And, well, you can figure out the rest.”

I nodded, then gazed out the kitchen window, lost in thought. The excitement of Sarah showing up at my door faded away. Frustration filled the void. The for-hire hacker thing still didn’t match the girl standing in my kitchen. Nor did her being expelled from school. But it didn’t change the fact that I needed her to help me. I could either stay frustrated. Or do something about it.

“What about $500?” I asked, turning back around to face her. “That enough compensation for the risk?”

A look of shock flashed across her face. “Did you say . . . $500?”

If her reaction to my offer was any indication, I had just become her best customer.

“You’re serious?” she said.

“Half now, half when I have the records.”

She still hesitated, but I could tell she was now on the fence. I just needed to get her to climb all the way over. “Be right back,” I said.

I hurried down the hall to my dad’s office. My parents had left Sofia and me an emergency fund of cash in the office safe. As long as I replaced it with money from my savings account, neither my parents nor Sofia would find out. I unlocked the safe, pulled out three one-hundred-dollar bills, and closed it.

When I stepped back into the kitchen, I noticed Sarah now sat at the table. She had taken off her jacket and was reaching down to pull a laptop from her bag. She wore a white t-shirt that said
GOT LINUX?
in black letters on the front. I stared at the words trying to figure out what
Linux
was. I also didn’t fail to notice her very curvy figure.

“Can I help you?”

I looked up, eyes wide. “Um, I was . . . just wondering what
Linux
was.”

A corner of her mouth rose. “Uh huh.”

You idiot,
I thought.

“Um, I wasn’t . . .”

“Oh calm down, Romeo,” she said, shaking her head. “A teenage boy looking at a teenage girl’s chest. Big shocker.”

I sat down in the chair across from her, unsure if I should run away or start laughing.

“Sorry,” I said instead. I set the money on the table. “Is that going to cost me extra?”

She stared at the money for a moment. “Nah, I don’t charge for
looking
.”

If my eyes could grow any wider, they would have.

Sarah laughed. “I’m
kidding,
Ben. Lighten up.”

Cute, confident, and a great sense of humor.
This is not helping
, I thought.
Focus, Ben—this is about Megan.

You never had cancer.

Sarah opened the lid on her laptop and turned it on. While it booted, she said, “You must really want these records.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Which hospital?”

“Colorado Pediatric.”

A half-minute later, she turned her laptop so I could see the screen. A browser window displayed the CPH homepage, the same one I visited the day before.

“This it?” she asked.

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

She turned the laptop back around and started typing.

“You’re . . . not hacking in now are you?”

“No, just looking around a bit,” she laughed. “Besides,
if
—and that’s still a big
if
—I decide to do this, I wouldn’t do it from your kitchen table. In the unlikely event I messed up, they might trace the hack back to your house.”

“They can do that?” A hint of panic crept into my mind.

She looked over the laptop lid. Her face formed a
well duh
expression. Something I was used to when discussing computers. “Uh, yeah, that’s sort of the trick with hacking,” she said. “Being traced.”

I suddenly realized I should have put more thought into the process. I let my eagerness to solve Megan’s riddle get the best of me.

After another few moments of working on her laptop, Sarah stopped and leaned back in her chair. “Okay, Ben. I need you to tell me
why
you need your record.”

I grimaced.
Something else I didn’t think about.

“Look, I know it’s none of my business,” she continued. “Normally I don’t ask. But if I help you, I’m taking a pretty big risk. And honestly, so are you. We have to trust each other. If that’s too much to ask, I get it. But you’ll need to find someone else.”

When I didn’t answer right away, she shrugged, closed the lid on her laptop, and placed it in her bag. She stood.

My eyes moistened. I had refused to cry in front of anyone. Not Megan. Not Sofia. Not the police. And yet, here I was, starting to tear up in front of Sarah—someone I barely knew. Why her and why then, I didn’t know.

She noticed. “Ben?”

“It’s sort of a long story,” I said. “I have to go back a few years for you to understand.”

She rested her bag back on the floor, looked at me, and nodded.

I took in a deep breath and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. My brain told me to keep my mouth shut. That there was no way I could tell an almost total stranger my secret. Especially not after what happened the weekend before. But it had been two days since Megan’s death and I was no closer to figuring out what she’d meant. I needed help.

I stared at Sarah.

Damn, those brown eyes.

She stared back at me and smiled.

It was the eyes that did me in. The eyes that changed my life.

CyberLife and its army of lawyers can go to hell.

15

Throughout the story, Sarah kept quiet and listened intently. By the time I finished, thirty minutes later, she was the one with tears in her eyes.

“That’s a pretty amazing story, Ben,” she said quietly.

“Probably a little hard to believe.”

She wiped the tears away and shook her head. “I believe you.”

“Want to see it?”

“Of course,” she said.

I moved my chair around to her side of the table, bent down, and pulled my pant leg up.

Sarah leaned over and inspected it. “It looks so real,” she observed. “No wonder nobody knows about it.”

“The synthetic skin they use is very lifelike,” I said. “Hair and everything. I can even feel hot and cold with it.” I reached out, took her hand, and pressed her fingers into the skin of my knee. “Feel the difference?”

She moved her fingers around and nodded. “It’s more . . . I don’t know . . . rubbery than real skin though.”

“It’s elastic so it doesn’t tear.”

“I can feel the metal under there,” she said. She continued poking her fingers around. “Seriously, Ben. This is like the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I just wish I could tell more people about it. Keeping it a secret sucks.”

“Mason and Jessica don’t even know?”