Page 306 of Lodestar

“Fuck, Conor, that’s the goofiest coding language—” I groaned. “You wrote it withnoxxioussongs in mind, didn’t you?”

I'd just bet one of my dad's songs was the key to decoding it!

“I love that you know I would.” He grinned at me. “Hey, the joys of esoteric languages is that few people ever give that much of a fuck about them.”

“True.”

“Have you heard of an emo kid who’s a hacker?”

I pulled a face. “Narrow it down.”

“Barely twenty. Her roots were auburn but she dyed her hair black.”

“Who is she?” I asked after I shook my head.

“She was the chick who was supposed to replace me as the NSA’s go-to cracker.”

“You’ll always be crackers to me, Conor,” I teased when it registered that he was pouting.

“Har-har-har,” he groused.

Amused, I just said, “You know that IDs are handles and not faces in our world.”

“It was a long shot.”

“I’m assuming you think she had something to do with all this?”

He hummed. “Would make sense.”

“If they found that, what else could they have uncovered?”

“Nothing major. I always keep that computer clean just in case they haul my ass in. It had the worm on there because I thought I might need to use it, but I had that better secured than Nimue.”

“How am I just learning this program’s name now?”

“Because I named her today.”

“Years later?”

“Better now than never,” was his pious retort.

“Why was Nimue on there?”

“Because I always run it when I’m with the NSA. Just in case shit is being said around me that I want to—” His eyes lit up. “I’m a moron, Star. You officially made me a moron.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“It’s to counteract the heartburn I give you,” he retorted, hurling his wheeled desk chair over to another desk where he started pounding on the keyboard like he was playing it with the intent to make music.

Unable to stop myself, I smiled. Then, when I realized I was smiling, I stopped. Then, when I realized I wasallowedto smile around him because he wouldn’t view it as a weakness, I went back to it.

Wandering over to him, I watched the streams of code on his monitor but found myself unable to read it because it was in goddamn Velato. Still, he was at ease with it, and then, out of nowhere, a recording played:

“Fuck, what kind of language even is this?”

Conor looked at me over his shoulder.

“Can you open the program or not?”

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