Page 18 of Make Them Cry
SIX
GAGE
The office is too quiet.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet—this is the heavy, suffocating kind that means everyone’s pretending not to look at the same thing. The same video. The same goddamn lie.
River isn’t here yet. Her desk sits empty, a mug still half full of yesterday’s coffee. Her cardigan hangs off the back of her chair, sleeve draped across the seat like she just stepped away for a second. But she hasn’t been back since she bolted yesterday afternoon, and the whole place hums with the gossip she left behind.
I want to throw something.
I want to find whoever made that deepfake and delete them from existence, line of code by fucking line of code.
Instead, I sit still, pretending to scroll through game logs while my headset crackles with voices.
Arrow:“Trap’s live. The bait server’s mirroring the Cathedral feed. We’re just waiting for a hit.”
Knight:“He’ll bite. They always bite when they think they’ve got something to gloat about.”
Ozzy:“Still can’t believe HR’s doingnothing. If that video had my face on it, I’d torch the building.”
I clench my jaw. “Focus.”
Render:“Got it. Monitoring shadow IPs. One just pinged from NovaPlay’s subnet—internal connection.”
And there it is. The bastard can’t help himself.
The plan’s simple: we’ve built a mock dev server that looks like the company’s testing environment. I coded it myself—complete with fake error logs, user names, and a mirrored folder titledCry.exe.Inside is a compressed “interview” file that leads straight to a dummy backdoor.
Anyone trying to download it gets tagged, traced, and silently logged before the server collapses into a lovely little cascade that wipestheirhard drive instead. Digital karma.
Ozzy calls it poetic justice. I call it foreplay.
Knight:“He’s opening the file. Hook confirmed.”
Arrow:“Tracer’s clean. IP resolves to Mason’s terminal.”
My grip tightens on the mouse. “You’re sure?”
Arrow:“Positive. He’s logged in under his own credentials. That’s his mistake. Overconfidence.”
The room blurs for a second. Mason. That smirking prick. He’s been circling River for months—hovering in doorways, dropping those backhanded compliments.‘You’re really good for a diversity hire.’‘Don’t stress, Quinn. The men don’t bite—hard.’
Now he’s gone and made her a punchline.
“Take him down,” I say, my voice rougher than I intend. “I want everything. IP logs, data pulls, browser history—anything that ties him to this.”
Arrow:“Already done. Trap’s closing.”
I watch the code stream across my secondary monitor. Mason’s machine fights back for a second, sending frantic pings to backup servers. But the script’s too fast, too precise.Cry.exedetonates cleanly, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs right to Cathedral’s admin logs.
Knight:“He’s locked out. Local IT’s gonna think it’s a hardware failure.”
Ozzy:“And Cathedral just booted his user. Account terminated. That’s one troll down.”
Render:“You want me to celebrate with a meme?”
Arrow:“Not yet. We’re still tracking where he got the footage in the first place.”
