I found the light switch. Two frosted glass sconces hung on either side of the bed, lighting the ceiling and casting the rest of the room in diffused light. It was as bare as the others. I put sheets on the metal-framed twin bed and got in the shower.

It had been a long fucking day. I had no way out of town, and I was in a mansion without a couch. My hacker wanted me to stay, and I was getting the fuck out of here. I’d pay the rental car company whatever they wanted once the battery was in as long as I could get on a fucking flight.

But Harper.

The moments before that kiss.

When her skin tingled under my lips.

She’d made me so fucking hard.

And I was again. Just thinking about it made blood rush to my cock. I ran my hand over it.

There had been something inexperienced about the kiss. As if she’d wanted to but didn’t know how and nerves had kept her from going with her instincts. Was she that innocent? When I stripped her down, told her to sit on the bed, and stared at her naked body, would her chest break out in hot pink? When I gently asked her to lean back and spread her legs so I could see her pussy, would she hesitate? When I said I wanted to see her touch herself—

I grunted and came before I could finish the fantasy, shooting my load in the cleft of a cracked tile.

I finished washing myself, put on sweat pants, and plugged in my phone. A cone of lines appeared in the corner of the screen.

Live Wi-Fi. If she was right, it would be on and off.

Password protected. PassCrack, an app I’d developed and sold for Bitcoin donations back in the day, didn’t work. WarWalk didn’t either. It looked like a simple WEP but obviously wasn’t. Weird. Even in Silicon Valley, which was riddled with IT guys, one of those would have worked.

A human sound came through the walls. A woman crying. More than crying. Wailing uncontrollably. I stood. Harper? No. There was a lightness in it. A crispness. Harper was throatier. The cries came from everywhere. Right, left, downstairs. For a second, they seemed to come from the balcony. Then the crying drifted away.

Seduction was out. As much as I wanted to fuck that girl, and I really wanted to fuck her, this place was crazytown. The internet made the world small enough to find the hacker from home, without risking my sanity. I could fuck Raven anytime.

Raven’s not going to be half as good as Harper.

That was my inner predator talking. Raven was fine. I had to focus on getting Wi-Fi.

I had one last toy in my toolbox. An offline app I had been dicking with when I was bored and missing the old days. I’d developed it to pick stocks, and it had lost everyone money, but repurposed, it was a decent password finder. I ran it.

Boom. I was on. Notifications flowed in.

The crying started again—but closer.

Ignore it.

All previous messages from Deepak had self-destructed, but the new ones flowed, decrypting with my fingerprint on the device.

He uploaded a picture. The resolution was shit, but the smile was Harper. The girl in the picture had dark hair. She was a little rounder. Standing on Vassar St., in front of Building 32, with its metal façade that was designed to look as though it was in a constant state of collapse.

I knew 32 well. Computer science. The AI lab.

Another picture came up. She had on a knit hat and pinched her bottom lip between two fingers.

Did she have a boyfriend who was studying at Stata?

Well, no, she had the books. The Visual Disp— was clearly visible when I stretched the photo.

“Display of Quantitative Information,” I said to myself, finishing the title. “That’s not even coursework, Harper. What are you doing?”

I flipped between the two. Yep. Same girl. Take the dark hair out of the equation, and there she was.

I couldn’t remember her. I lived in a world where the smartest men in the world gathered and were too awkward to make it with the small percentage of fuckable women. Women had always been easy to get into bed, but I’d never fucked her. Not a blond her and not a brunette her. I was sure I wouldn’t have forgotten it.

The crying got louder and stayed consistent.

How many girls at MIT were that hot? You’d think my dick would at least have a little recollection. The photo of her had self-destructed already, but the cognitive consonance of her paired with MIT had imprinted the photo on my mind. It was her. Harper Watson. No bell was rung, except for the Sherlock Holmes story in the scattered code comments of the poison pill.

Watson was a really common name, but the connection was made.

I typed the statement but didn’t hit Send. He’d ask why I thought that. My answer was simple. I knew all the female hackers with the skills to pull this off, and she wasn’t one of them. I sent the message.

The Wi-Fi had dropped. Reconnecting didn’t work. I ran the hacking apps and my network protocol analyzer to check for available signal. As a despairing female wail rattled the walls, the packet sniffer did its job.

A chill immobilized my spine.

She’d seen I was on the Wi-Fi and cut me off.

No.

The name. Watson. Sidekick? Why not Sherlock or Holmes? Was I reading into it?

Maybe the signal had just dropped.

For all she knew, I was watching porn or checking email. Or could she see my conversation? It was encrypted end to end, but if she was good enough to hack QI4, nothing was safe.

I swung my legs over the bed and went into the hall in bare feet, shirtless, sweat pants hiked up over the right knee but not the left.

The crying was louder in the hall and seemed to be coming from every doorway. Harper had taken such a roundabout tour and there were so few markers that I was lost.

Not that I knew what I was looking for. A sound besides crying. A light in the wrong place. The smell of ozone.

“Ow!”

I picked up my foot, leaned on the wall, and looked at the bottom of my big toe. I plucked out the splinter, but once I started walking again, I realized I hadn’t gotten all of it.

“You need to redo these floors,” I grumbled to Harper as if she was in front of me and I had the authority to tell her what to do with her house.

Taking my hand off the wall, I noticed I was close to the stairwell up to the third floor. I favored the toe as I climbed quietly. Too quietly. Every floorboard in the house groaned and squeaked, but not the stairs to the third floor. They were as worn as a 1911 staircase and as quiet as if they’d been built yesterday.

She didn’t want anyone to know when she was going up here. Because I knew for shit sure, by the time I hit the top of the stairs, that she was behind that door. When I saw the photos at the top of the stairwell, I was even more sure. It was dark, but my eyes adjusted. It was her. Graduation cap. Braces. Clear, dewy skin and freckles. Prom. Satin dress and diamond earrings. Receiving an award. I couldn’t see the details of the award, but she was blond again. She was blond in all of them.

I put my ear to the door, pressing against it until the crying inside the walls disappeared and all I could hear was the sound on the other side.

Clicks. Tons of them. She was typing like a fiend.

That was why she had tape on her fingers.

My God. It was her. Harper had hacked QI4.

What was with the kiss that wasn’t a kiss?

What about the message on the factory roof?

And the name?

Why change it?

Had she been married?

How had she gotten the poison pill in the monitor?

Was she still married?

More than the name and the comfortable possibility that a man was involved in the hack, the thought of her having a husband didn’t sit right with me.

I leaned on the door, listening to the pattern of the keystrokes. No waiting. Straight typing. Not waiting for a response from someone on the other side of the wires.

The spacebar made a different sound. I pressed my ear to the door. How often it was hit told the story. Coding and English had a different spacebar cadence.

A husband belied her tight innocence, and though none of it fucking mattered, I became momentarily obsessed with the idea that she was married. Maybe her rigidity was guilt. Maybe Mr. Watson was in a faraway desert war or making a living in another part of the country. He could be dead.

I forgot to listen for the spacebar patterns. I didn’t notice when the keys stopped clicking at all. All I noticed was the change in gravity as its force went from beneath my feet to beneath my head as I fell. I got my feet under me in two steps, tumbling into the room when the door was opened.

Standing straight, I whipped around to find Harper with her hand on the doorknob.

“I knew it!” I said even though I’d known nothing until three minutes before.

She yanked the door all the way open, teeth grinding, throat mid-growl. Her skin was lit by the whitish-blue of flat-screens, and the finger she pointed at me was wrapped with white tape. “Get out!”

“How did you do it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

We circled each other like boxers in a ring. Behind her was the door, a desk, three monitors scrolling code, an ajar bathroom door. The monitors were flowing C++, a deep web database for a retailer, and a Tor chat. Following my gaze, she hit a key, then another, and the screens went dark.

“How did you get into QI4?”

She turned back to me, and we circled each other again. “Fuck you.”

“Are you married?

We stopped circling.

“What?”

I didn’t know what had come over me, and it didn’t matter. I didn’t care if she was married or not. I needed her to give me my life back.

The utter stupidity of my question forced me to step away from my surprise and hostility. She’d hacked me. Fine. We had work to do. She and I.

But I kept losing focus.

She was that smart.

In that body.

Under a sleeveless ribbed tank, she was braless. Her nipples were rock hard. Her gym shorts rode low, giving me a peek at the smooth skin of her belly. If I kissed it, I’d be close enough to smell her.

“Watson. Harper Watson. Who is Mr. Watson?”

“Wait. Let me just…” Her eyes drifted over my face, down my naked torso, landing between my legs.

I was wearing sweat pants, and I was very, very hard. Of course. The body always betrays the mind.

She crossed her arms, covering her nipples but hiking her shirt up a little. “I’m not married.”

“That’s good to know. Um, this is a surprise, but—”

“Why? Because I live in flyover country or because I’m a woman?”

“Yes.”

“You are fucked up, Taylor Harden. You were always fucked up.”

“Always fucked up?” She locked her jaw against another word, so I filled in. “Did I know you from MIT?”

Her eyes flickered. I knew more than I was supposed to, and it unnerved her. Good.

“IHTFP.” She unlocked her jaw enough to hiss the campus acronym for I hate this fucking place.

“I didn’t… we didn’t…”

“No. We didn’t. I was a freshman. You were fourth year, and you never came back after Christmas break.”

I scanned my mind again, narrowing the parameters to the years before I left. Brunette Harper still wasn’t there, but the photos hadn’t lied.

“You had dark hair. Why?”

“No one takes blondes seriously.”

“No one takes… what?”

“I know how it goes in tech. No one takes women seriously. We’re unemployable, unfinanceable, useless. And a blonde? All blondes are good for is sucking dick. I’ve been around Tor sites. As a guy. I know how you assholes talk. I know what you think.”

Deny. Set yourself up as an exception.

“I’m sorry.” I wasn’t. But whatever. I needed to get off the subject and onto more important topics, like what the fuck we were going to do about this mess. “First of all, I want to say… the hack? Wow.” I slow-clapped. I couldn’t tell if she appreciated my admiration at all, so I stopped. “How did you—”

“Fat chance.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not telling you shit.”

I’d never met a hacker who wasn’t a show-off. Telling the community how you breached a target was ninety percent of the exploit’s fun.

“Harper, you exposed a serious vulnerability. I’m willing to offer you a lot of money.”

“Too late.”

There wasn’t a hacker on earth who didn’t want to give the gory details of their exploits. At least none I knew, but they were all dudes. This was another planet.

She just needed a little prodding.

“It was Jack’s receipt on the desk. You run it through a sharpening algorithm? So you could see what we were ordering and from where? How did you intercept the monitors? The distro center outside town is Amazon. We got it from a store in Denver.”

Her face didn’t change. That told me more than any expression. The effort to not signal acceptance or rejection was harder code than subtly answering without saying anything.

She wasn’t telling me shit.

“What do you want?” I asked.

She turned toward the monitors and tapped her fist against her mouth, but she didn’t say what she wanted. I got the sense she never would.

“Why did you bring me here?” I asked gently because she held all the cards and her exploit wasn’t going as planned. That much I could tell.

“I didn’t think you’d come here.”

“Why leave the coordinates then?”

“I thought you’d send people, like law enforcement or the news or anyone. I thought then everyone would see what’s happening here and feel sorry and understand and do something. But you didn’t, and now I don’t know what to do.”

Like a soundtrack, the crying in the walls rose again. It had more of a sad, weeping quality and less of a wailing despair.

“That’s not you,” I said.

“It’s not.”

“Who is it? Catherine?”

“She’s sensitive. She gets like this a few times a week. Her heart breaks for everyone but herself.”

“Who’s she crying for today?”

Her throat expanded and contracted as she swallowed. The monitors made her eyes white at the edges. She was thinking, but I couldn’t tell what was on her mind.

“Here’s what you’re going to do, Taylor Harden.” Her gaze went over my body again.

My boner was gone, so her gaze lingered just above my waistband. I realized that though her expression was sexual and hungry and I liked sex as much as the next guy, I had no power in the relationship. The feeling wasn’t pleasant.

“Go back to your room. Rest up. We’ll talk tomorrow morning.”

“No. We talk now.”

She spun the Herman Miller chair to face her. Twelve hundred dollars new. The most expensive piece of furniture in the house.

“Good night.” She sat and swiveled herself in front of the bank of screens.

“Now, Harper.”

She acted as if I hadn’t spoken at all. With her back to me, she was still and calm. One screen came to life, asking for a password. The others stayed black, and I could see her reflection in them. She was crying, but somehow, she held her body still.

“Close the door on the way out,” she said without a hitch in her breath. I’d never seen a woman with such control.

She didn’t want comfort. Offering it could only make the situation worse. I had to do what she’d asked. What choice did I have? I opened the door, noticing the deadbolt for the first time. I could pick that if I needed to get back in.

“Taylor?” The sexy, innocent girl who was suddenly more terrifying than any guy I’d ever met. Even crying, she was scary.

“Yeah?”

“I have a scrambler on your cellular data. And you won’t be able to get into the Wi-Fi again. I plugged that.”

“You’re fast.”

“Yep.”

I had nothing left to say. I wasn’t going to stand there and beg for an answer.

When you have no negotiating power, you have to use the only leverage you have.

You walk away.