Page 17 of Hunted

Fleur jerked, and my head whipped around to stare at her, almost as startled as she was. Her lazy smirk dropped out of sheer panic, and her fingers fidgeted with the lip of her desk as she straightened like she’d just been caught passing notes in high school.

“How do you know if you’ve tripped a silent alarm?” he asked again.

The rest of the class twisted in their seats to stare at her too—the daughter of a biotech company’s CEO and founder. If anyone should know the answer, it ought to be her.

Unfortunately for Fleur, her brain wasn’t wired like her mother’s, and she floundered, blinking SOS at me in Morse code.

“The patterns change,” I said before I could talk myself out of diverting attention my way.

Fleur mouthed a quick thank you before I turned away to face the consequences of that generosity.

Lockwood’s gaze crashed back into mine with a force so intense it was almost tangible. He slowly raised a solitary brow over the rim of his circular glasses, crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned back to park his ass against his desk. Not that I was thinking about his ass. “Explain.”

“There’s no one-size-fits-all way to know if you’ve been detected, but you can hazard an educated guess by noticing the subtle anomalies.”

I felt Ethan’s hard stare pressing into my right cheek as I blushed furiously. I hated that I was so undone by a little nudity and intellectual tango—and that my friends were absolutely going to tease the everloving fuck out of me for it later.

“Go on,” Lockwood prompted. His face brightened, the waves in his eyes churning harder, piercing mine in a way that felt even more revealing than the bathroom debacle had been.

“Unusual latency,” I explained drily. This was some first-year bullshit. “Unexpected access denials, or conversely, passwords that seem a little too easy to crack, which lead you in circles upon circles of utter fuckery.”

His lips twitched. “Good.” He pushed off the edge of the desk and clicked the remote I hadn’t noticed was tucked into the crook of his sweater-covered arm. The enormous screen at the front of the room flashed to life, depicting a green and black map—of what, I had no idea.

“Bad news, class: today is a multi-assessment day⁠—”

He was interrupted by a chorus of groans.

My unwanted brethren provided the backing track—just now realising they’d been physically slaughtered on Devil’s Pass this morning, and were now being subjected to Lockwood’s idea of technological warfare—all in the effort to give us appropriate and earned assignments by Graduation.

I straightened, rubbing my frozen fingers together in an attempt to get them to defrost, and stared at the front screen.

While Lockwood waited for the others to shut the fuck up, I was already whirling through at least twenty different potential scenarios. Just as he inhaled, I worked it out.

It was a map… of Devil’s Pass. And all those blinking lights at the bottom left of the screen were us—mice, about to hack their way through a maze to see if we could retrieve the proverbial cheese.

Holy fuck.

Devil’s Pass had been the plan all along—it hadn’t been a consequential change of mind for Hunter Beckett. No, this had been planned. All three of them had worked together and plotted this with psychopathic precision. No way Evander Lockwood could have whipped this up during lunch hour.

“Your task today is to make your way through each level of the map. When you trip the silent alarms—and you will”—he smirked, eliciting a second, quieter round of groans—“it’ll be entirely up to you how you go about handling them. Identify which system you triggered, then find a way around it.”

He clicked his remote again, and each of our laptop screens blinked to life—neon green typeset awaiting our commands.

“The purpose of today’s assessment is to see how well you can manage setbacks and alerts while looking for a certain piece of information I’ve hidden somewhere within the mock system. If you retrieve the info, it’s an automatic pass. If you can stay within the system by the time the assessment ends, a marginal pass. But…” Lockwood’s gaze passed over the myriad faces staring at him with varying levels of panic. Once again, he landed on me, and his brows twitched when he registered that I wasn’t exhibiting anything other than sheer boredom. “If the system catches you snooping—if it boots you out—instant fail,” he finished quietly.

I could practically smell the shit leaking out of their assholes.

“You have one hour. Go.”

Flurries of fingertips sped across the dozens of keyboards—a staccato symphony of plastic and pressure. Some were rapid-fire, interspersed with periods of silence like half a thought unfinished; others were slower, more fluent, like a continuous stream of consciousness.

I leaned back in my chair, ignoring Fleur’s alarmed glance and Ethan’s suspicious frown, simply shrugging at both.

They didn’t spare me another thought after that—they didn’t have time to. As I watched the blinking dots on the front screen make their way up the virtual Black Mountain, my theory was confirmed.

Several green dots made it all the way to the peak before blinking out and reappearing halfway back down the map. Mine remained flashing slowly, steadily at the base, like it had all the time in the world to do the impossible.

“FUCK,” Sebastos roared. His laptop flew across the room a second later, smashing into the wall beside Lockwood’s main screen. His green dot vanished from the top of the digital Sapphire Ridge, never to reappear.