Page 38 of Make Them Cry
Ozzy says, “Ping. Different session. NovaPlay subnet. Fast fingers.”
My pulse spikes. “Regent again?”
“Negative,” Arrow says, eyes narrowing at the telemetry. “Signature’s wrong. This isn’t him. Different keyboard cadence, different TTL. But…” He pauses, frowning. “This device knows our internal routes.”
“Who?” Knight asks.
Render zooms the capture and drops a block of metadata on the main monitor. IP:10.24.13.42. Subnet:HR/Finance VLAN.The tracer we embedded crawls upstream, following DHCP bread crumbs.
My stomach drops out. I know that number. Not the exact digits—IP leases shuffle—but thehistorybehind them. Arrow starts peeling back the asset logs the way a surgeon peels back skin.
“Ninety days ago,” he narrates, “.42 belonged to a workstation on the Engineering floor. Desk C-17.”
“That’s River’s old desk,” I say, before I can stop myself.
“Was,” Arrow corrects. “Two months ago, IT reimaged and moved the tower to… HR.”
The room goes very still.
Knight exhales through his nose. “So someone in HR just clicked our bait pretending to be a Cathedral user, from River’soldIP lineage.”
Ozzy whistles low. “That’s not sloppy. That’scocky.”
My hands curl into fists. “Who sits at that machine now?”
Arrow pulls a list. The new assignment sits on the screen like a stain. No name, just “HR Shared Workstation.” That covers adozen staff. But the DHCP table shows one MAC address seen most often between 6 p.m. and midnight.
Render overlays badge access logs from the building—he shouldn’t have them; he does anyway—and cross-correlates late-night HR swipes with that MAC uptime.
Three names bubble to the top. He highlights them.
Justin, financials.
Aaron, compliance.
Shawn: developer
Tasha, People Ops.
Tasha.
I hear the name and see River’s face soften—the way it only does for a handful of people. I see a pineapple-print sleep shirt and a couch. I see a door opening at 1:42 a.m.
“Could be any of them,” Knight says quickly, like he can feel the way my chest just caved in. “We don’t jump.”
“Yeah,” I say, voice rough. My heart’s thudding in my throat. “We don’t jump.”
On-screen, the HR workstation session doesn’t hesitate. It DMs our bait account. The ask is efficient, practiced.
“Link. Now.”
Render sends the hook. A single-use URL to the “uncut interview” zip. Inside: our tripwire.
They click.
The tracer sinks in like a tooth.
Arrow says, “We’ve got ‘em. Payload deployed. Packet capture rolling.”
