Page 13 of Make Them Cry
She stayed at Tasha’s last night.
I know because I watched the building security cams Arrow patched me into, saw her blurry outline walk into the Eastwood apartment complex at 1:42 a.m., hoodie up, tension coiled in every step. I saw the front door buzz open, and Tasha’s silhouette letting her in.
And yeah, I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
Because I’ve seen what happens to people who don’t have somewhere safe to go. The streets are full of them. Forums are full of them. Ghost stories in the making.
River Quinn doesn’t get to be one of those stories.
Not on my watch.
This morning, I’m running on three hours of sleep, a cup of the worst gas station coffee known to mankind, and a metric ton of adrenaline. I sit in my usual chair across the aisle from her empty desk at NovaPlay Studios, pretending to debug somethingwhile my real screen is split between work logs, two dark net forums, and the backend of our internal server.
Knight’s on comms from his apartment, Ozzy is monitoring a Cathedral chat crawler from his rooftop (because he claims “airflow improves accuracy”), and Arrow’s in the back room of our place, fingers flying across his keyboard like we’re running black ops instead of vigilante recon.
Render’s… probably taking photos of pigeons and hacking street cams again. Kid’s weird, but effective.
Poe’s … who even knows what Poe is doing.
I’ve even brought on my little sister, Lark, to help. She’s combing the Cathedral forums, looking for any new threads about River.
“Anything from the honeypot?” I ask through the mic clipped to my collar.
Arrow’s voice crackles through my AirPod. “Yeah. Pinged at 3:12 a.m. Someone poked around the test server using her name as a key.”
I grip my mouse a little tighter.
“Credentials?” I ask.
Ozzy chimes in. “Not standard. It was an internal tool—NVisionAudit.”
My stomach drops. That’sourtool. NovaPlay’s proprietary QA log system. Meant for debugging in-game crashes, but with admin access, you can use it to seeanythingtied to a user account. Chat logs. Logins. Dev sandbox footage. Internal notes.
I minimize the browser and pull up the audit log.
There it is.
Psalm88.zip
Created byAdminMask, downloaded byGhost88, two hours after River went dark.
“Open it,” I say.
Arrow already has it decrypting. “Password wasbiscuitbug. Sound familiar?”
I smile, bitter. “It’s what she named her stubbornest bug fix last year.”
He’s targeting her with thingsonly someone on the inside would know.
The zip file opens. Inside:
Chat transcripts.
