Page 33 of Victorious
Up until the site went down, he had been making progress.
It had been painstakingly slow, full of trial and error, but over the course of those first two years on the run, he’d peeled back the layers of the EON mainframe. Carefully, so he wouldn’t trigger any recoil, he slipped behind their digital defenses. EON’s computers had always been a complex system, the information nested so that each subset had to be accessed independently, the employee roster stored in a separate section from the building details, the files on the EOs—both those being targeted and those already captured—buried even deeper.
But he could tell, he was getting closer. He was almost through.
And then, one day, the system suddenly fought back.
Mitch found himself rebuffed, expelled. Which would have been bad enough, but worse, the system pursued him when he fled. Leaping like a virus from their server onto his computer, attacking as it tried to unearth anything and everything it could with terrifying speed. Mitch had triggered a self-destruct program, wiping the laptop and burning the hard drive. Dumping the hardware and forcing Syd to upend her life again. She hadn’t even had time to unpack.
Mitch should have quit trying, then and there, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the sudden change. The most likely answer was that they’d upgraded the underlying tech, but it was still a system, and every system could be hacked.
So he bought another laptop and went back.
Told himself he had to, to make sure they weren’t hunting Sydney, and that was true, but it was also true that Mitchell Turner liked a challenge.
The next time he tried (and failed to so much as crack the outer layers of the EON mainframe), the system didn’t chase him off again. Instead, after rebuffing his attempts, it responded with two words.
TRY HARDER.
He’d stared at the rebuke, wondering if the program, or whoever had coded it, was taunting him.
Now, as he stared at the same message for the hundredth time, the words blinking on the screen, he was sure of it.
Someone at EON wanted his attention.
And they had it.
XIVNOW. THEN.
MEANWHILE, AN HOUR NORTH OF MERIT …
THE new house was full of light.
Floor-to-ceiling windows filled the back wall, looking out onto a garden that walked the line between manicured and wild before giving way to trees. The furniture was soft, but minimal, the palette undoubtedly more muted than Iris would have picked—but then, Iris didn’t seem to have a strong opinion these days.
About anything.
She sat perfectly still on the couch and stared into the middle distance while Ian sat cross-legged on the floor and read—or pretended to read, turning the page at steady intervals.
It had been three months since the accident. Two since Gabriel had brought his family back, and every day he hoped to glimpse a spark behind their eyes, some semblance of their old selves beginning to rekindle.
Traumatic incidents took time, he told himself.
Healing was a process.
Gabriel was trying to be patient.
He sat at the kitchen table, engaged in the slow, laborious process of recreating the notes he’d lost on Paul Barnett. (Iris no longer made a comment about him bringing his work home.)
The events of that night hadn’t turned him off his research. If anything, they’d only demonstrated the importance of his work, the dire need to understand the power of the mind to manifest. Of course, what Gabriel needed most were more patients, a larger sample size from which to extract data, distill it into comprehension.
He set his notes on Paul aside and turned to the ones he’d started on his only other subject: himself. As he worked, the hiss of his pencil disappeared beneath the music that blanketed the room. At first, he’d played Iris’s and Ian’s favorite songs, hoping to trigger something in them, shake loose their memories, the way one might a patient with dementia.
But memory didn’t seem to be the issue.
Now, he simply let the music play to distract from the relentless silence that filled the house.
The light slid low beyond the window. Another day, gone.
