Page 18 of Hunted

Lockwood said nothing, just smiled to himself like he wasn’t the least bit surprised, and was rewarded by a subsequent boom—the sound of Seb slamming the door behind himself after storming out of the class.

When Eth cursed loudly a few minutes later, and another dot rerouted from the top left back down to the bottom, I knew he’d tripped one of the bigger alerts, effectively wiping his screen back to square one.

“How the fuck am I meant to get across that gap in the matrix?” he grumbled, twisting to glare at me again. “And why the fuck aren’t you even attempting to?”

My lips tugged up into a lazy grin, and I stretched my arms back behind my head, reclining further in the hard plastic seat. My shoulder wound grabbed painfully, and I hissed—karma for cocky indifference, I guess.

Eth smirked in response, cracked his knuckles, and began pounding his keyboard anew. “You’ll fail if you don’t even try, Ads.”

“Will I? He never said anything about not participating at all, just that attempting will field you one of three results: instant pass, instant fail, or a virtual wrestle to just make it through by the skin of your teeth.”

His fingers stilled, and his dark gaze clashed with mine. “Well, shit. You’re waiting it out until the hour’s up so you don’t have to spend as long wrestling to pass,” he guessed.

I relaxed into my seat and closed my eyes, having seen everything I needed to already. “Something like that.”

The minutes passed much quicker when I could ignore the handsome instructor’s keen stare.

Something about the persistent tapping of keys soothed me. I found myself drifting off, relaxing into the knowledge that I wouldn’t be woken by a bucket of ice water.

“Five minutes left,” Lockwood boomed across the room, startling me awake.

Perfect.

A collective surge of panic rushed through the initiates still remaining as blinking dots on virtual mountains—with mine still lazing about at the bottom. Their typing became frantic and sloppy, and dots started vanishing amid a crescendo of frustration.

My fingers flew across the keyboard with a casual ease, one keystroke merging into another like a melody. It was muscle memory, just swapping one set of keys out for another, less musical kind.

My dot vanished on the map, and I exhaled.

It reappeared beneath the visible map, in a layer no one else had seen—a read-only screen. An observation tunnel.

Lockwood’s head snapped round to mine, surprise evident in the lines of his brow. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, staring hard.

All the better to see me with, my thoughts trilled.

My screen flickered, and I pushed out all other thoughts, all other input. It was just me and these commands—nothing else existed. I’d bypassed all of Lockwood’s defensive programming to a page allowing me access to the map’s mind, for lack of a better word. I watched as ten or so individual sets of inputs flashed across its surface; watched as it shut every single one of them down, rerouted them, or removed them entirely depending on which trigger was tripped.

The map was targeting their intent.

Like a digital viper, as soon as it realised we were seeking out its secrets, it struck back twice as hard with virtual fangs. So, I didn’t even try to find it. Lockwood said that I just had to remain on the screen to pass—but what would be the fun in that?

I grinned as my fingers flew across the keys once more, flirting with the map’s programming and learning a whole lot about its creator’s mind in the process.

Sidestepping the entire map after a series of neutral and non-complex commands, my dot blinked brightly on the other side of the screen—at the base of Sapphire Ridge and Lockwood’s virtual finish line.

His sharp gasp did all sorts of things to my traitorous body, but I wasn’t done yet. He hadn’t expected anyone to reach the other side at all, much less in three minutes flat—so, when I zeroed in on the layer of dead space just below his finish line, I was able to pass through the suggestion of a security layer with little more than the hacker’s version of please.

Lockwood’s password wasn’t even hard: simply the phrase Blackw1ng—with a one in lieu of an “I” complete with a capital B.

Bingo.

His idea of valuable information was a homemade video of himself leaping out of an airplane with a cheesy grin plastered across his face. The video cut right after his parachute snapped out and the camera had flipped to show the glory of the world from a thousand metres above it.

He cleared his throat, forcibly diverting his gaze from my triumphant grin. “Time’s up. Well done to those of you who managed to stay in the system for the whole hour. Class dismissed.”

I closed my laptop screen and stood, waiting for Ethan and Fleur to do the same.

“A word, please, Sinclair,” Lockwood called before I could so much as whisper about my grumbling stomach.