Page 32 of Make Them Cry
My phone buzzes. A message.
MASK:Keep practicing the stance. We go again tomorrow.
I don’t reply.
But I do smile.
Because for the first time in days, I’m not just surviving.
I’mfighting.
TEN
GAGE
I haven’t stopped pacing.
Knight calls it my “burn-a-hole-in-the-floor” routine. Arrow calls it “pent-up alpha nerd syndrome.”
Whatever. I call itpanic.
Because last night? Teaching River how to fight? That was a terrible idea.
And also the best one I’ve ever had.
But Iknowshe knows. Or at least… suspects. The way she looked at me—thepause. That sharp glint in her eye, like her brain was running facial recognition against her internal Gage Dawson hate file.
I used the modulator. Idouble-checkedthe settings. The pitch was down, the distortion up. I even ran my lines through the filter beforehand. It should’ve worked.
But when she whispered, “Have we met before?”
I almost slipped.
Almost dropped the act and almost told her my name.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it?
This isn’t just about some anonymous dev getting harassed anymore. Not for me. This isRiver. And I’m indeep.
Arrow whistles low from across the room. “You gonna stare a hole through the wall, or you wanna see what Render found?”
I move toward the array of monitors, where Knight’s booted up the NovaPlay dev log server in our living room. “What am I looking at?”
Render’s voice crackles over comms from his studio apartment across town: “Digital fingerprints.”
He brings up a split-screen showing access logs—one side with admin clearance, the other with security metadata.
“What you’re seeing,” Render explains, “is someone using aghost key—it’s a clone credential. It mimics admin access but doesn’t leave an identity flag unless you know where to look.”
“Jesus,” Knight mutters. “They’re logging into NovaSecure? That’s internal security, not even the execs touch that.”
“They’re scraping camera logs,” I say as it clicks. “Office floor, elevators… parking garage.”
Arrow stiffens. “That’s how they got the photo of her apartment window.”
My hands curl into fists before I realize it.
Render’s cursor circles a string of code. “Here’s where it gets interesting. They routed it through an onion mask—but not perfectly. One ping leaked through a soft port.”
