Page 151 of The Kiss Of Death
“Sure, if perfect is having your own mother die in front of you in a terrorist attack,” I said, picking up the target Tara had thrown on the floor and rearranging the foils scattered around. “Having the person you love the most betray you, along with your father, and oh—” I dusted off my uniform skirt before walking back to her. “Having your violin mentor commit suicide and being goddamn scared of everything my whole life. So much for perfection.”
A flicker of something passed over her features, but she quickly composed herself.
“I understand how you feel toward me,” I continued. “But you’re wrong about Yasmine. You’re her example, and she loves you more than anything.”
“Right.” She swallowed. “If you tell my sister any of this, I’ll kill you.”
She was afraid Yasmine wouldn’t see her as fearless.
I smiled. “Of course not. But for what it’s worth, you should tell her how you feel. Someone who I love thought he was protecting me by keeping the truth away from me, but it hurt me even more. Yas just wants her sister. She’ll have her archery competition soon.” I raised a brow, hoping Yas would forgive me for what I was about to do. “I won’t be there, but she’ll need someone to cheer her on.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Tara mumbled, understanding what I was implying. “Thanks.”
I nodded and exited the fencing gym.
“And Dalia?” She called me back. “I don’t know what Levi did to you, and you should definitely make him pay for it, but I just wanted to say he’s not an entirely bad person. No one is. Sometimes we just play the villains so nothing can get to us.”
Adigital breach pierced through the layers of my computer system, and I stumbled over my seat. My screens blared alert signals, illuminating the dimly lit room.
“They’re in,” I whispered, rousing Miguel. “They just entered the maze.”
I was right. They couldn’t resist meddling with the code. Either Mercier looked guilty and they didn’t trust him or they were just checking for any issues with the drone.
“You got this, Levi,” Kay chimed in from behind, his and Sylas’s faces looming over my shoulder, invading my workspace.
“Let him work, for God’s sake,” Archambault bellowed from the back of the room, causing both of them to stumble backward.
Lines of code scrolled rapidly on the main display as I meticulously monitored incoming data streams from the warfare drone. A series of blinking nodes marked the progress of the intruders, navigating through the labyrinth. Each attempted breach triggered alerts on my screen.
My cursor flickered on and off, and memories of a chess game against Patrice flooded my mind.
“Why am I always the one attacking?”the younger me had questioned.
“Because whoever attacks divulges crucial information. The point is, you should always defend your pawns by having more defenders on it so you can destroy your opponent and winin the long term, little shit,” Patrice had retorted, burning his cigar on my skin as a punctuation mark to his lesson.
Patrice was right.
Only a monster could beat another monster.
“Miguel, stir up some chaos and throw them off balance. Craft a false lead, a decoy, or whatever that’ll make them question every move they make,” I ordered him, knowing that he had a penchant for video games.
I initiated data collection protocols to identify the Los Calaveras’s digital footprint: patterns, preferred attack vectors, and the secrets of their hacking tools to gather maximum information on them while their exact location was being transferred.
Each failure and maneuver on their part contributed to building a profile, much like the strategic moves by the textbook of a chess game.
“What are you doing?” Archambault had joined my “ducklings” as he called them behind me.
“You want water, sir?” Kay asked, promptly shut down by Archambault’s narrowed eyes.
“He’s assigning each digital signature to each intruder,” one of his cybersecurity guard dogs replied. “He’s sorting information into files.”
“How is it possible?” That came from Cillian.
“By running a syntax profiling,” I answered, my fingers dancing over the keyboard, my heart a steady rhythm. “Their coding styles will betray more than technical skills.”
Halting the variations in syntax, from indentation preferences to specific programming constructs, the code on the screen transformed into a digital portrait of each intruder’s individual coding habits. Behavioral biometrics within the maze analyzed the intruders’ mouse movements and typing dynamics. Packet-sniffing data manifested on a secondary screen,illustrating the nuances of each keystroke—one using a Spanish ñ, the other maneuvering an AZERTY keyboard, likely French.
“They’re using a Spanish and French keyboard,” I deduced. “They’re going to find something wrong soon, so we have to be prepared. Keep distracting them, okay?”
