Ciphers, Matt Rogers [a court of thorns and roses ebook free TXT] 📗

do. There was nothing King could do. If they tried to make a lunge, the other three would bite down on their pills out of reflex. They weren’t really kids — they were twenty-somethings — but they were still at risk of contagious behaviour, just like the rest of the world.

The two boys saw the first guy die.

They could have reacted in either direction.

One way, or the other.

They split right down the middle.

One panicked, one didn’t.

Slater’s stomach fell further.

The boy on the left — pale, sweaty, wide eyes — closed his eyes and bit down.

The boy on the right — caramel-skinned, maybe Latino — saw the violent aftermath of his friend’s demise and spat his pill across the room.

The girl let the pill fall from her mouth, too.

Slater said, ‘Look at me.’

The pair looked at him.

Slater said, ‘Don’t look away.’

They didn’t.

The pale guy coughed and spluttered and violently succumbed to the cyanide.

Slater kept his eyes on the two remaining hackers.

They kept their eyes on him.

With a final gurgling throat-rattle, the pale guy slid down in his chair and went still.

No one spoke for a long time.

The vault’s atmosphere tightened, constricted. There were now two corpses in here with them all, corpses that had once been people. Corpses that had once had personalities, had talked and bantered and maybe sometimes laughed. Now dead, forever.

Slater doubted that the two surviving hackers had ever seen a body before.

With his heart in his throat, he said, ‘Please, for the love of God, tell me that one of you knows the ciphers.’

Slowly, one by one, they both nodded.

Slater said, ‘Are you going to do it?’

They both stared at him.

King turned around.

Gave Slater a look.

Over to you.

Slater knew what he had to do.

Now was the time to cut deep.

He walked over to the chair containing the kid with the dyed hair and spun it around so the corpse faced the two living, breathing occupants.

They went pale.

Slater said, ‘You see this? This is a body. This is a dead man. There’s going to be thousands of them out there if you don’t fix this. Remember when you were kids, and you saw an old lady crossing the street, or a young couple hand in hand? Remember back then, before you grew up and started to hate the world. Those people still exist. They’re the majority. And you’re going to kill them, turn them on each other, make them inhuman. Look at this guy right here and ask yourself if that’s what you really want.’

Neither of them spoke.

Neither of them budged.

They need more.

Slater took a deep breath and said, ‘You want to know something I probably shouldn’t tell you?’

The boy stayed mute.

The girl nodded.

Slater said, ‘I’m an alcoholic. I drink to forget all the hard shit I’ve had to do. But I did those hard things because they made the world a slightly better place. I made life brutal for myself so I could stop people getting taken advantage of, and then I dulled all my memories with booze. Which isn’t the right response to hard times. Just like this isn’t. There’s better solutions. Sometimes life isn’t fair. But you don’t need to do this. Other people recruited you to do it because they were angry, but you’re not really angry. You’re confused.’

The guy clammed up, reacting harshly to the criticism, to the suggestion that he was naive.

The girl didn’t.

She looked Slater in the eyes and tilted her chin downward.

It took him longer than it should have to realise that she’d nodded.

He said, ‘Will you fix this?’

She said, ‘Yes.’

The guy wheeled around in his chair, venom in his eyes, and lunged at her, a crude switchblade in his hand.

79

But King was there.

He’d seen the resolve in the boy’s eyes. He’d seen him double down on his beliefs, refusing to come out of his shell, refusing to admit the fact that he might be wrong.

And then the knife was there, a last-ditch effort to preserve the operation.

He’d seen all that in milliseconds.

And he’d lunged, too.

The boy flew off his chair with his knife hand outstretched and a look of pure terror came over the girl’s face, but King darted in and caught him around the waist and threw him like he weighed twenty pounds. The gangly kid rotated an entire revolution in the air and smashed into the safe deposit box framework, probably breaking a couple of bones in the process, and the switchblade fell from his hands.

King picked it up and tucked it away.

The girl watched, horrified.

‘You see?’ King said. ‘We’re here to help.’

She nodded, scared, but ultimately glad she was safe.

Slater said, ‘Tell us how you did it.’

‘I didn’t write the code,’ she said. ‘Dex did.’

‘Who’s Dex?’

‘Long hair.’

‘Got it.’

‘Then the four of us implemented it.’

‘What came first — Gavin, or the code?’

‘Gavin,’ she said. ‘He didn’t know how to do it, but he thought it could be done. He showed us some holes in the system. The power grids rely on systems that need to balance supply and demand. If you screw with that balance, the whole thing collapses in on itself. So once we were in, that’s all we needed to do. And Dex wrote the code that got us in.’

‘How?’

‘Do you have all day?’

‘Summarise it.’

‘It’s a worm,’ she said. ‘It was designed to be invisible, but I’m sure you already know that. It showed the engineers that all was fine, but it gave us control of the regional transmission organisations and the independent system operators. RTOs and ISOs, for short. Once we had those, it was like clockwork. We could change passwords as we pleased. We could shut everyone out. But we didn’t do it until we were sure that you’d never be able to get back in unless we wanted you to.’

A chill ran down King’s spine.

Then he asked the question both he and Slater desperately needed the answer to.

‘How easy was it?’

She looked up at him. ‘Easier than Dex thought it would be.’

‘Is Dex the only person capable of creating a worm