I had been so distracted by the evening’s events that I almost forgot about the invitation to the new portal that I was supposed to be receiving that evening. I remembered a minute after I stepped through the front door of my cabin, and after using the bathroom and grabbing a bottle of Nurmeal, I settled into bed and logged on to Operation Hood.

The little red number hovering above the messages tab told me that I had two new emails, and I quickly clicked to open my inbox. A small smile played on my lips as I saw that the most recent was a friend request from Gabby. I checked the time it had arrived and realized she had sent it about ten minutes after we left. It came with a little note:

“Hey, Robin. Thanks for visiting us today. Look forward to seeing what happens with Nathan’s new project. Hopefully I get an invite along with my parents. In the meantime, I’ll keep chipping away at those shadow bastards.

- Gabby x”

I typed a quick reply:

“Thanks for having us. And yes, I hope to see you around in the new portal. Good luck with that project. Keep me posted and stay safe. R. x”

And then I returned to my inbox. I was eager to check the second message, which was indeed an invite to the new portal. It had been sent by one of the admins: ZombieBrainz. I frowned, wondering for a moment if that might be Nathan, but I had no way of knowing, so I proceeded to click on the link provided in the message. It led me to a blank login page. Since no new username or password had been included in the message, I supposed my main OH credentials would work, and I entered them.

They worked. The login page disappeared, and the next screen that flashed up was a familiar interface. Its minimalistic gray-and-brown design was like the main network’s, except this was a stripped-down version, with a group forum being the most prominently displayed module.

The site’s official opening was supposed to be next Monday, so this had to be a beta version. Nathan must still be working on the bells and whistles, but released it early to get the new recruits in ASAP. And there were already eleven active members browsing the forum. I clicked on the link to add one to that number and found, to my excitement, that there were three conversation threads, all of them with intriguing titles:

“First stunt…”

“Facilities/resources you can put on the table”

“Changing perspectives”

As well as a pinned post at the top:

“Security best practices: READ FIRST”

Before I could click on any of them, however, my phone rang. I leapt off the mattress to fetch it from where I’d left it in the living room and checked the screen. It was Nelson.

“Hey,” I said, answering the call. I put it on loudspeaker and set the device down on my mattress.

“Hey,” her voice came back, slightly morphed and crackly thanks to our encryption protocol. “I see you logged in to the new portal. You back home now?”

“Yes. You received the invite too?” I asked.

“Yup. I’m logged in and looking at your glowing green avatar as we speak.”

“Where do I find the full list of members?” I asked, searching around for it.

“It’s just under the—”

“Ah, yeah, I got it,” I replied, having just spotted the link at the bottom, beneath the forum.

I blew out as the list appeared. There were eleven active members in the forum, but thirty members in the portal already. Granted, many of those were probably admins, but still, this was happening! There had been talk of the portal all week, but actually seeing it in the flesh sent a thrum of excitement through me.

I scanned the list to find that Nelson, Julia, Marco, and the twins had already joined, and were all showing up as online. I frowned when I saw that Jackie wasn’t there, but then shook it off. Maybe she had just been busy this evening.

Davine and Noreen were also there, though currently showing as offline, but Gabby and her family were still waiting for their invites, it seemed. Hux had only just recruited them a couple of hours ago, though, so I supposed they’d receive theirs tomorrow sometime.

“Have you checked out the forum yet?” Nelson asked.

“No,” I said, quickly navigating back over to the forum. “I was just about to when you called. I’m back in there now.”

“I just wondered if you’d read through any of the comments yet under ‘First stunt.’”

“Let me go in there now.” I clicked on the thread and began to read. A guy (or girl) whose profile name was Zion Rey (handle: LionZion) was the thread starter.

“Obviously, this requires a lot of thought and discussion, but interested to hear everyone’s initial ideas on what our first move could/should be, once we’re all in here…”

To my amusement, Abe had been the first to reply:

“Something that doesn’t get us all killed.”

“Yeah, I figured that was kind of a given…” Zion replied, evidently not catching on to Abe’s humor.

“A mass robbery of a holding center,” a girl (or guy) with the profile name Winter De Ville (SnowQueen) suggested.

“I’d say that falls under the above-mentioned category,” Marco had replied, less than a minute after Winter posted.

“Agreed,” Nelson had added curtly, along with several others.

And I would agree with them, too. Holding centers were facilities where kids were sometimes kept by the Ministry, when immediate delivery to a family wasn’t possible. For example, if they lived in another part of the country, or the paperwork/adoption admin fee transfer was delayed. I’d never visited one, but from what I’d heard, they were always well populated by nurses looking after the children, along with twenty-four-hour security, to prevent kidnapping rings from getting any funny ideas.

Plus, it would be a horribly crude way to introduce ourselves to the world. We stole children, yes, but we also had discrimination regarding which ones we targeted. At least, the people I worked with did. Not only did we have an age limit, but we also only took back what was ours—or more specifically, the families’ we were helping.

We needed to project a positive image of ourselves to the mass of people, if they were to take us seriously. If we pulled off a stunt like that, the media would be quick to tarnish us with the same brush as the shady kidnappers and other troublemaking criminals, which would cause more damage to us than good.

Not to mention, what would we do with all the kids, even if we did manage to steal them? If we didn’t have access to the government’s adoption archives, we’d have no clue whom to return them to.

No, that seemed like a thoroughly stupid and irresponsible idea.

Whatever we did, it had to be intelligent, and staged in such a way that would make it clear to the media, beyond any doubt, that we weren’t just your average rebels without a cause, but a serious, organized group seeking to reform, rather than hurt, our country.

How we were going to pull off anything remotely close to that, I still didn’t know. I needed more time to think about it, so I decided to shelve it for now, and returned my focus to the screen.

“Hey, you there?” Nelson’s voice crackled up from the bed, interrupting me.

“Oh, sorry!” I said. “Forgot you were still on the line. I’m just reading.”

“It’s fine. Was just curious to hear your thoughts, but I know it’s a lot to absorb. We can catch up another time because I gotta go offline for a bit. Oh, and you need to tell me how it went today with Hux.”

“It went fine. Another successful visit,” I replied, then went on to give her a summary of everything that had happened. As expected, she was horrified to learn about the kidnapping site, as well as intrigued by my description of Gabby, saying that she looked forward to her joining the forum so she could have a chat with her.

Then, once she’d finished asking me questions and I’d told her all I had to say, she exhaled and said, “Okay, Robin. Thanks for the recap. I’ll catch you later.”

Bidding her goodnight, I cut the call, then looked once more to the screen, continuing to scroll down the page. Several more suggestions popped up, no less rash than Winter’s—and in some cases, even rasher, like targeting schools in wealthy areas, or even children’s hospitals. All of those got a massive no from me, and I was glad to see that others, including my own team, commenting in the forum shared my disagreement. We needed to do better.

By the fifth page of comments, I was starting to feel overwhelmed by the bombardment of ideas and random trains of thought. The open dialogue was great—it was the first step in the right direction—but I could see that we really were going to need to have some better organization and management of thoughts and ideas if we were to get anywhere. There were only ten or so people even taking part in this discussion right now; I couldn’t imagine what it would be like once more joined, and we got into the hundreds.

Realistically, we were probably going to need to meet in person somewhere, at some point, and have a moderated meeting overlooked by an appointed chairman. Online, people tended to be scatterbrained and less organized. But until we trusted each other enough for a real meetup, Nathan would most likely institute some kind of voting system—a modified version of the polls we had on the main network, to allow the most popular ideas to rise to the top and gain the most visibility. I just had to try to be patient and wait until Monday, for when the official site rolled out, and we could really start getting things moving. Five more days.

For now, I decided to click out of that “stunt” thread, to give my brain a rest, and check out the list of security best practices.

That thread had been started by the one and only Mr. X, to my pleasant surprise, who was currently showing as offline. Perhaps he hadn’t reached… wherever his home was… yet. Or had gone straight to bed when he got in.

I read through the list of security advice, and most of it was obvious to me, thanks to my training from Nelson. All of the guidance basically amounted to the same thing: share information only as strictly necessary. There was one line that caught my eye, however, which might not have been completely intuitive to me:

“We advise you to avoid posting specific information in the Facilities/Resources thread until you have gotten to know this community better. Especially where said facilities/resources could give valuable intel about loopholes to a government mole.”

That made sense. I checked the resources thread just to see if anyone had fudged over that advice and posted anyway, but no, it was still bare of comments.

My eyes were starting to droop, the lack of sleep last night and the long day today catching up with me, but I managed to keep them open long enough to scan through the final “Changing Perspectives” thread. It wasn’t very long, with the opening being a general statement by a member named Stayhome Dad (hairy_poppins), expressing that the best, and only, hope we had of effecting change was to affect the consciousness of the people, because there had to be only so much external, public pressure that even a leadership as stubborn as ours could take. If enough people rallied together, change could happen.

And as I finally sank into my pillows and closed my eyes, I just hoped that was true.