Page 37 of Hollow Code
"What if Zadie helped you?"
"I’m pretty sure she knows code better than I do, so probably."
"Add that to the long list of things you two will be doing." Darwin's mouth curved into a smile. "Speaking of which. Do you want to explain what I walked into earlier?"
Gideon dragged his hand across his mouth. "No."
"Oh, I think I deserve an answer to that question.’
"It’s none of your business." Gideon didn’t want to smile, but his lips were still warm, and it was a struggle to keep them from curving upward.
"Did you know her before all this crazy shit happened?"
"Not in person." Gideon picked up the broken device again, mostly because his hands needed something to do. "You remember the gamer I used to talk about? The one I kept trying to meet?"
Darwin's eyebrows climbed above the crooked frames. "Hopper?"
"Yeah." Gideon couldn't fight the pull at the corner of his mouth any more than he could explain the strange, impossible math that had put him in a bunker two stories underground with the woman he'd been falling for through a headset. "Well, that's her."
Darwin stared at him. Then he laughed. Loud.
"Not sure why you find it funny."
"I don’t. It’s just that you always told me the universe was a massive place."
Gideon set the device back in the box and closed the lid. "I guess it wasn't as big as I thought."
Chapter Eight
Zadie had been staring at the same six waypoints for forty minutes, and they still weren't telling her a story that made sense.
The GPS data spread across the center monitor in a crude scatter—six pins dropped on a topographical map of the BC interior, pulled from the navigation system they’d retrieved during the Ramsey operation. She'd run every extraction tool she had on the vehicle's onboard system, scraped cached routes, recovered deleted destinations, and cross-referenced timestamps against satellite imagery. This was all it had to give.
Coulter leaned against the edge of the second desk with his arms crossed. Neve sat on the desk with her favorite mug in hand. Scout stood in front of the screen, staring at it with her arms folded across her chest. The woman couldn't think while sitting down.
"I’m still working on trying to pull more waypoints and other data," Zadie said. "I’ve got timestamps of how long the vehicle stopped, but not much more."
"I don't understand it." Scout tapped two of the waypoints. "These are long stretches of road in the middle of nowhere. Nothing’s out there." She moved her finger to a third pin. "Coulter and I sat on this one at five this morning."
"For over an hour," Coulter added. "We saw three cars and one bear."
"Fifty miles between structures." Scout dropped her hand to her side. "There’s nothing here to stake out."
"So, what were Ramsey's people doing there?" Neve asked.
"That’s what Coulter and I kept asking each other all morning." Scout turned. "But that vehicle was at some of these waypoints for a good forty minutes to an hour."
"I can poke around on the dark web," Zadie said. "See if there’s any chatter about weird shit going down in these areas."
"I can help with that." Gideon's voice rolled into the room like hot honey. He strolled in with his hands in his pockets and a relaxed stride that she hadn’t seen from him since… ever. His hair was damp and pushed back from his face. He wore clothes that were actually clean, and the dark circles under his eyes had disappeared.
"Could any of those spots be connected to your telemetry system?" Coulter asked.
Gideon walked up to the screen and stood where Scout had been, his gaze focused on the information, while Zadie couldn’t seem to peel her eyes off him. She tried blinking. She tried shifting in her chair. She even tried reaching for her drink. But all she could do was stare at the sexy legend she’d been admiring from a distance for years.
"At first glance, it doesn’t appear so." Gideon tilted his head slightly. "But I'd need to overlay these against my ETHER map to know for sure. I built ghost routes into the network—false pathways designed to mislead anyone trying to map the system from the outside. Decoys that look like real data corridors but carry nothing. I'd need to strip those out before I could tell you whether any of these waypoints sit on actual infrastructure."
"How long would that take?" Neve asked.
