Page 163 of Return To You

She gives me a small nod and kisses my lips.

“You better be sleeping when I get back,” I whisper, trailing the dark circles under her eyes.

“Going to bed right now,” she whispers back.

I give her one last kiss, then text Noah, give Damian a scratch behind the ears, check that my keys are in my pocket, and I’m out the door.

At the high school, Zach, one of the kids I met in Noah’s Coding Club, is waiting for me at the entrance, under the awning. He whips his wheelchair around to open the door for me. “We’re working on quarantining the infected endpoints,” he fills me in as we swiftly move to the admin offices.

“Do we know what the attack vector was?”

“Not sure yet. Could have been a phishing email. Admins here aren’t really up to speed on those kinds of things—no offense.”

“How did they first find out?”

He coughs. “I saw some weird activity on the network.”

That doesn’t sound right. I’m going to play stupid for half a second, but not more. “Was your portal hacked?’

“Um—no. Not exactly.”

“So you were in the system, and you saw you had company.”

“I’m so fucked,” he mumbles.

“Ah, I wouldn’t worry too much about it at this point. They’ll be able to identify what you did and didn’t do. And if all you did was hack the system just to see if you could, and that helped catch a cyberattack before it could do too much damage… Who knows.” I can’t speak for the school administration, or Zach’s parents. “How long did it take you to speak up?”

“I texted Mister N. soon’s I found out.”

Good kid. “What’d he say?”

“To leave it with him.”

“Those guys in there know what you did?” I whisper as we approach a windowed office where Noah is huddled with a man and a woman over two monitors.

He shrugs as he swerves into the office. “Mister K. is here.”

They turn their faces to me, then back to the screens.

We keep the introductions to a minimum, then I get to work.

Five hours and a gallon of Coke later, I summarize it for them. “It’s gonna take an A-team a few weeks to fix this.”

“We’re fudged,” the woman says.

“Lemme see if I can do something more. Give me a couple-three hours.”

We leave before the sunrise, and I get home quietly, remembering to kill the engine so I don’t wake up Grace.

I settle on the deck, elbows on the railing, facing Woodbury Knoll, and finally open my C.O.’s message, which is, in essence, that I need to report in tomorrow. Not too bad. That explains the no follow-up phone call when I ghosted him.

I open the secure, encrypted app we use for sensitive information.

Me

I identified an opportunity for the Air Force to gain more points with the local community.

CO

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