Page 100 of Make Them Cry
They’re not just random cruelty.
They’re cover-ups.
And I’m the loose end they didn’t expect to unravel.
“We need to go through that drive,” Gage says, standing. “And we need to be careful.”
I look up at him, feeling like the floor has just shifted under my feet.
“Do you think Tasha knows?”
He hesitates. “If she’s working under Helena, she might. Or maybe she’s just being manipulated too.”
“What if she’s more than that?”
“We’ll find out Friday,” he says. “We’re planting a tracker in Helena’s bag. Arrow has a listening device. We’ll be monitoring every conversation she has at that party.”
“And if we get proof?” I ask.
“Then we bring them down.”
The words don’t feel real.
But I know now—we’re not just trying to survive this.
We’re going to end it.
And when we do, I’m going to finally get my life back.
THIRTY-FOUR
GAGE
We spread the contents of River’s backup drive across two laptops and an external monitor like a crime scene—timestamps, folder trees, filenames that mean nothing until they suddenly mean everything. On the coffee table: still-warm cartons of Chinese, chopsticks, two sweating cans of ginger ale, a bottle of chili oil that could qualify as a weapon.
“Rules,” I say, cracking open the sesame chicken. “One—no coding while hungry. Two—if you find a smoking gun you’re legally required to take a victory dumpling.”
River salutes me with a spring roll. “Addendum: if you quote legal statutes while eating lo mein, you’re banished.”
“Cruel.”
“Necessary,” she says, eyes dancing.
We eat over spreadsheets—me driving the directory crawl, her surfacing the human context only she would remember. It’s comfortable in a way that should scare me and doesn’t. She hooks one bare foot under my thigh without noticing, and thecasual touch feels like someone just drew a circle around us and wrotehome.
“Here,” she says, pointing at the monitor. “That project folder. Odin Patch — ‘Odin_revC.’ Shawn worked on that.”
I scroll. “Two weeks before his ‘car accident.’”
She flinches on the last words, then leans in until her shoulder bumps mine. I click into/Odin_revC/HR-shadow/. A handful of PDFs, redacted names in the filenames, and one encrypted text bundle labeledPSALM88-notes.enc.
My heart does a slow, heavy thud. “Psalm 88.”
Her breath catches. “Open it?”
“Trying.” I drag it into a clean sandbox, fire up a local decryptor, and try common corp keys. No dice. “Whoever encrypted this didn’t want IT reading it.”
“Try ‘HelenaAuth’ as a seed,” she says, voice dry. “She loves naming things after herself.”
