I knew how to do that. Did anyone else at school? Who else would want to trash Wes other than Dean and the other bullying victims? At least I’d find out what Dean’s skills were over the next few days. Even if I discovered he could do this kind of prank, what should I do about it? In some ways it was really not my business, but it was also wrong.

  My phone vibrated with a text from Eddie.

  Great. Just what I need. Can you look at my laptop in the morning too and make sure it’s okay?

  Of course. Theo’s tech support to the rescue!

  Thanks. Love you!

  Love back atcha.

  A knock at the door and Dad’s face popping up on one of my screens prompted me to close the email. I entered the combination on the keyboard to open the door.

  “Upgrade?” Dad looked at the door as he came in. “How’d you know it was me?”

  “Oh yeah, did it last week.” I might have sounded too proud of the new tech. “Replaced one of the nails in the door frame with a tiny camera and added a controller in the doorknob so I can release it from here.”

  “Seems a bit lazy.” Dad came in and took a seat across the desk, and we traded smirks.

  “Not lazy, efficient.” I gave it my best salesman voice before I revealed the truth. “I’m testing it out. It’s part of updated security protocols for safe houses or agents’ homes. I designed the software for the remote unlocking, which can be set up for any device on the internet and can be made to interact with the camera too.”

  “Well done. I think your room is better secured than most of the house.”

  I grinned. “I can fix that. I’ve got another one of these I can install.” I opened the drawer and held up the nail camera. “Front door? Your office?”

  “Promise you won’t make it so we can’t get in.”

  I made a dismissive sound. “Of course not. That’d be a bug. I don’t do bugs.”

  He chuckled, which lightened my mood headed into what we had to talk about. “So what’s up?”

  I told Dad about Keys and Lorenzo’s offer, and I even managed to do it with limited cracks in my voice.

  “I’m sorry about Keys. She was pretty extraordinary. You doing okay? You don’t sound good.”

  “It’s hard… and weird.” I took a breath. I’ve cried in front of Dad many times, including because of TOS work. I still hated it because I thought I should have better control. “I mean she’s a coworker, a mentor… a friend. And she’s just gone. It’s a little surreal because I didn’t see her in person very much, but we worked together and taught each other a lot. I’ve already talked to Shields a couple of times now.”

  He was pleased. A slight smile appeared. “I’m glad you’re talking to her. I know it’s not easy keeping it inside when you’re around your friends.”

  I didn’t tell him that I’d sorta told Eddie. Dad’s soothing voice pushed the right emotional buttons, though, and I couldn’t stop myself from losing it. He got up, came over next to the chair, and wrapped me in an awkward sideways hug. The side of my head pushed into his stomach, and I wrapped one arm around him.

  This was nowhere near as hard as I’d cried on the bridge the other day, but it was another release. I pushed myself out of the chair so I could get a better hug. I’d thought I’d cried all this out during my talks with Shields, but my heart had other ideas.

  Dad held on until I let him go. I looked around and, once again, had nothing to wipe my eyes on, so I used the sleeve of my sweatshirt to dry my face.

  “You know, it wouldn’t hurt to keep tissues in here. They’re always handy.” I caught Dad’s slight smile as I pulled myself back together.

  “You’re probably right.”

  “Better?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This promotion.” He ran his hand through his hair and across his forehead—a sure giveaway the idea troubled him. “I have no doubt you can do the job—but you know your mom and I think school, hockey, Eddie, and being a somewhat normal teenager’s got to be in the mix too. Do you want the job?”

  I spun around in my chair—my favorite thing to do when I didn’t have an instant answer. I stopped after a couple twirls to face Dad. “I feel like I always learned more from Keys than she did from me. I don’t know how I’m supposed to replace her.”

  “Lorenzo wouldn’t have offered the job if he didn’t think you could do it. But you should talk to him about your reservations, or simply decline if you don’t think you’re ready for it.”

  “You’re going to let me take it?”

  Silence said a lot, especially combined with that head rub before. “I’m conflicted like you are, but for different reasons. If you say you want to take it, I don’t think I’d say no. You’re more than capable of making your own decisions, and you know what our expectations are. I know you’ll push yourself to do an excellent job with anything you decide to do.” He sighed. “I worry you’re not a kid enough. You need to do more stuff like you did tonight with Mitch and Eddie.”

  “That was homework, though.”

  “But your friends studied with you, so even though you worked, I’m sure you guys goofed off too. I don’t want you to become the kid who stays holed up in his room all the time. That’s not healthy. And I’m—” The abrupt stop wasn’t like him, and neither was the sadness that fell over his face. “I’ve got to be honest, and I know your mom feels the same. We’re scared of losing you. We’re very aware that you were in a lot of danger on the tracker case. I still have nightmares about aiming my gun at you. Now you’ve been offered the chance to take over for someone who died in the line of duty. Nothing about this is an easy choice.”

  For a moment I thought it was my turn to hug Dad, because he looked on the verge of crying. He kept it together, though.

  “I don’t want to tell you no, because you’re responsible enough to make the decision. Make sure it’s what you want right now and consider the time ramifications. I don’t want you to get to my age and wonder what you did with your childhood.” He paused again, but I could tell he hadn’t finished. “You’re so talented, Theo. You’re going to be able to do whatever you want in life. There’s no reason to do so much now if you don’t want to.”

  We looked at each other and I finally nodded. “You know, I kinda hoped you’d give me the answer.”

  He looked like he was about to roll his eyes, which made us both laugh. “No you didn’t.”

  I shrugged. He was right, of course. “I’ll think about it some more, especially what you said. I’ll talk to Lorenzo too.”

  He nodded and stood. “We can talk more if you want, anytime. It’s a big step, and I’m proud that you do the kind of work that gets you that offer.” I nodded as he spoke. I didn’t know how else to take the high praise. “You headed to sleep soon?”

  “Yeah. Just a couple things to check on first.” I turned to the keyboard to get started.

  “All right. Good night.”

  “Night. Thanks, Dad.”

  He smiled before he walked out and closed the door.

  Nine

  Wes skipped school on Friday. The email was the topic of the day in the hallways, and several people asked me if I could send emails like that and if I had any idea who did. No one believed Wes had done it.

  The only time it didn’t come up was the computer-science team meeting. When I arrived, I found the team working and I asked about their progress. They’d been busy and had cracked the third puzzle. They were eager to talk about the fourth one because it repeatedly blew up on them.

  “We weren’t expecting that,” Jessie said. “And it keeps happening. We couldn’t do anything to avoid it. I think we tried five or six different scenarios.”

  “It was five.” Alice held up her tablet filled with notes. “I made notes so we wouldn’t repeat our mistakes.”

  “Want to show me what you’re doing?”

  “It’s sneaky, though, because the trigger isn’t just in one place.” Alice came forward with her tablet. “We’d repeat things that worked, but then get shut down at a different point.”

  “Exactly.” I raised my eyebrows at them. “Now how do you get by it?”

  The team broke up, but in different groupings than the other day. I liked that there were more people on terminals. For the tournament, everyone could be at a computer, or they could put themselves in groups. Mrs. H and I went among different groups and talked with them to find out what their strategies were. I offered guidance where I thought appropriate. Each of them had a good grasp of the theories involved. It only took about half an hour before they cracked number four, which they did by working simultaneously from three terminals.

  “Great teamwork. Sometimes that’s what it takes to get the job done effectively. I’m not sure if we’ll run into anything like that at the competition, but it’s good to be prepared.”

  “All right.” Mrs. H got our attention. “Instead of cracking another of Theo’s modules, I want us to take a look at the file you’re creating for the other teams to hack.” She brought up the code on the big screen. “Theo, do you want to discuss your suggestions?”

  I brought up the code and the students settled into their seats. I focused on where I thought they had weaknesses and the principles that made those areas exploitable. Preparing to talk to the team had been a great way to decompress last night after some work on the TOS bots to make them more robust.

  I asked them to tell me about the vulnerabilities they discovered in the puzzles I’d designed and how they found them. I underestimated what the team knew, and especially Dean. The more he talked, the more I thought maybe he did send out all that stuff about Wes.

  “Okay.” I focused on Dean. “Given your analysis of problem four, how would you suggest rebuilding the team’s security protocols so I can’t crack them?”

  “Uhm. Well, we could create something like you did, but I’d want to make it even stronger.” The distressed look on Dean’s face made me feel bad that I’d singled him out. “I’ve been looking at problem five and had some ideas based on it.”

  Dean walked up to the board, and I moved the big monitor out of the way. He looked like he wanted to keep himself from taking up too much space. Once he started writing, though, his speech became stronger, like he’d found his groove. His ideas were good, and if they decided to build what he outlined, they’d be in much better shape.

  They all studied the board while Dean returned to his seat. No one looked confused.

  “A couple of questions,” I finally said when no one else spoke up. “Given you were able to show us this, why haven’t you cracked number five yet?”

  “I just haven’t,” he said abruptly. I hadn’t expected the defensiveness, and his body language told me he probably lied about that.

  “Okay. Not a problem. Consider this, though….” I went over and grabbed a marker to annotate what he’d written. “This subroutine could become a problem and so could this one.”

  As I wrote, my watch pulsed and the screen flashed the word icing. My phone’s low-level defenses were pinged. It could be nothing since I monitored incoming traffic more than necessary. I’d check the logs later to see if I needed to modify anything.

  “How would you secure those?”

  Three people initially talked over each other. Each of them, and eventually Dean, offered up a slightly different solution on the problem.

  “Great.” I put the marker down. “Good work, Dean and all of you.” He shrugged and slumped down in his chair. “How about spending the rest of today working together to create this type of security for your file? If you can, spend time this weekend on it too since we’ve only got a week to go before the competition. It’d be awesome to see something Monday afternoon.”

  “Can we ask you questions over the weekend?” Jessie asked.

  “Of course.”

  The team circled around and talked while I grabbed my laptop and went to my usual desk. I pulled up my phone’s logs, which I stored on my secure server at home. It was a valid warning. Someone tried to access my phone, like they were testing the security—similar to how someone might jiggle a doorknob to see if it’s locked. My phone used the school Wi-Fi, along with the hundreds of other student and staff phones.

  My phone wasn’t named anything obvious, though—

  01001101011110010010000001010000

  01101000011011110110111001100101

  —and if anyone read binary, it would simply translate to My Phone.

  It could be nothing more than someone seeing if they could get data off a stranger’s phone. The school used secure Wi-Fi—far more secure than most homes. Two years ago I’d recommended an upgrade to the principal under the guise of making sure people who used it wouldn’t be susceptible to identify theft. And that wasn’t a lie; it had been a wide-open Wi-Fi connection before my changes. Of course, I had ulterior motives too. I needed the security so I could do TOS work if necessary. Everyone else simply benefited from it.

  In this case, someone inside this network had pinged my phone. That didn’t make sense, not unless the network had been compromised.

  My watch pulsed stronger this time. Penalty displayed on the face.

  “Aw, fu—” Dean slammed his fist on the desk but kept the rest of the word in his mouth as he sent a guilty look toward Mrs. H’s desk. “Sorry.” The outburst was a surprise. I didn’t know he had that in him.

  “What happened?” I went to his desk and Mrs. H also came over. My phone could wait. The “penalty” message meant someone had triggered security countermeasures. If something more serious happened, I’d get a “misconduct” message.

  “Nothing.” He jabbed at the corner of the keyboard. “Just need to reboot.”

  Once I got behind him, I saw the familiar angry emojis across his screen.

  How was that possible? Dean had triggered my phone’s defense protocol. He’d shown solid skills a few minutes ago, but I hadn’t expected this level from anyone in here.

  “Jeez, Dean, what’d you do?” Alice peered over to see his screen.

  Dean looked at me, and I raised my eyebrow at him.

  “I don’t know. Must’ve tripped something in problem six.” His look shifted between defiant and scared.

  “You’re supposed to be on the file encryption,” Jessie chastised him.

  “You should switch machines. This one will need to be recovered.” I closed the lid on it and we stared at each other for a moment. “I’m afraid that was left over from a school project,” I said to Mrs. H, who stood next to me. “I’ll make sure the machine is fixed.”

  “That must’ve been a hard-core trigger,” Jessie said. “I’d love to learn how to do that.”

  “We can look at that if there’s still time once your encryption for the competition is complete.” I circled back to the front of the class. This wasn’t the time to deal with Dean. “We wouldn’t want to use that sort of defense in competition because you wouldn’t want to take out a competitor’s computer.”

  “But that would be spectacular.” Jessie’s enthusiasm and her competitive streak were cool.

  “Spectacular, yes, but against the rules.” I turned as Mrs. H spoke while walking back to her desk. “The encryption designed cannot disable a computer. However—” She paused until she got to her desk and brought up something on her screen. “—it can, and I quote, sound an alarm, and display a message indicating the computer is disabled. However, the message must be able to be cleared with a simple reboot of the computer.”

  “So we could do it?” Jessie held on to the idea, and Alice looked between me and her.

  “I can show you the principles.” I walked back to the whiteboard. “It’s on you to figure out how to write it.”

  “And you’ll have to show me that it can be cleared per the rules,” Mrs. H said. “We don’t want to get disqualified.”

  “Show us, please. It might be the edge we need,” Alice pleaded like this mattered more than anything else.

  I could throw a lot of information at them related to this. I suspected Dean could write it for them given that he tripped my protections. For the rest it might be over their skill level. I spent the next twenty minutes going over the basics, taking questions.

  My watch lit up with a notification from Lorenzo, and it said he needed to talk as soon as I finished. That, unfortunately, meant I had to let Dean go without talking to him. It turned out he had no desire to talk to me either because he bolted from the classroom when Mrs. H dismissed the team.

  Ten

  I loved Saturday afternoons in the dead of winter because I got to hang out at the aquatic center a couple of times a month for swim meets. Eddie’s swim season ran from mid-December into mid-February, and he attended my Friday games and I went to his Saturday meets.

  Mitch and his girlfriend Iris were with me, as usual. This became our thing at the start of this swim season. It’s not a well-attended sport at our school. When I told Mitch that sometimes I was the only student in the stands who didn’t seem forced to be there by their parents, they decided to support Eddie too. It was cool of them to do that. Eddie’s parents were usually here too, but they were missing this one.

  “Look at him.” Iris poked me in the ribs and subtly pointed at one of the competitors. “Could he have more abs?”

  “Oh, here we go.” Mitch rolled his eyes. “Do I need to go sit over there?” He pointed to an empty section of bleachers.

  “What?” Iris asked. “How can you not be impressed by that?”

  “She’s right, man,” I said. “The dude’s lean. Do you think he actually eats?”

  “Maybe he should ditch swimming for modeling,” Iris threw out.

  “What real guy could wear the clothes that he’d wear?” Mitch didn’t usually chime in on comments like this. In fact, he usually tuned us out. Iris and I looked at him like he’d mutated. “Don’t look at me like that, Theo. We’d never fit in anything he’d wear. Eddie couldn’t either.”