Page 49 of You Were Warned: Part One

“What the fuck,” I growl.

404 doesn’t answer, while Clay moves closer, and as he stares at the screen his face drains of color. As I keep watching it gets worse, then anger hits before I have time to process everything. My hands curl into fists at my sides.

“Keep going.”

404 glances at me.

“Rue?” Clay says.

“I said keep fucking going,” I snap.

404 opens another file.

Clay makes a weird sound beside me, and I glance over. He turns away from the desk, and he gets two steps before bending over the wastebasket.

“Fuck.”

I move toward him, but he holds a hand out and throws up. The sound makes my stomach turn, but it doesn’t come close to what is sitting on that fucking screen. I turn away from Clay and look back at the laptop. My jaw hurts from clenching my teeth so hard.

“He was supposed to hand this over?”

404 doesn’t respond to my question—it wasn’t aimed at him, and I think he knows it. I slam my palm down against the desk.

“What sort of monster would pay someone to get this?”

“Jensen would have just been the middleman,” 404 says. “It’s the way a lot of trafficking happens.”

“But they’re just fucking kids.”

“I have a contact I can forward this to—someone who isn’t corrupt. That is all the information they would need to help these kids.”

“Do it,” Clay says as he spits into the bin and stands again. His face is pale and he looks like shit. “Close the fucking thing. I can’t see any more.”

404 closes it, and the screen changes, but it doesn’t help me unsee what I did.

“He was right not to hand it over.”

Clay wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Yeah.”

I look at 404. “Can you find out who hired him?”

“Maybe,” he says, turning back to his screen. “What information do you have?”

We explain that we don’t have a lot of information, only that it was arranged through the dark web. 404 asks if we have usernames, any other names, or if we have any useful information, which we do not.

“Do you know anything at all?”

“His name is Jensen fucking Layne, and you just told us he is as good as you, so find him,” Clay snaps.

404 shakes his head. “I said his encryption was as good as mine. I don’t know if the rest of his work is.”

“Find out,” Clay demands.

He spends the next hour typing away, and every so often something flashes across the screen, then vanishes again. After a while he stops and turns to face us.

“He is invisible. I can find Jensen Layne and all his personal information, but nothing about his aliases. He would have at least one.”

“That makes no sense,” I say.