My father was a licensed contractor. He’d inherited the business from his father and assumed I’d take it over at some undefined future time. He bought property, fixed it, sold or rented it. He renovated and rebuilt houses if he liked the owners. It wasn’t unusual for my father to work Saturday and Sunday, miss dinner, come home with a beard after being gone for days at a time. I’d never met a man who worked harder for every penny he had, and for me and the citizens of our little world, he had plenty.

My mother stayed at home with me and my little sister until she started school, then Mom kept the books at my dad’s business and brought us to the office after school and on weekends. She’d always been good with numbers, but at one point, she stopped using the calculator because it slowed her down. Once Dad ascertained that she hadn’t made a single mistake, he thought Mom’s genius was her most charming trait and bragged incessantly.

Once Mom started working, Dad started taking me to jobs. If I was old enough to hold a wrench, I was old enough to tighten elbow joints. I learned everything he taught me, and I learned a lot of stuff he didn’t.

He talked to my mother differently than he talked to me, and his tone with her in the office was different than his tone at home. He spoke to the guys who worked for him differently than he spoke to my mother. When he took me to the bank, his body language talking to the guy in the suit was different than the lady behind the glass.

And always, always, always, he was in charge. My dad had a very small kingdom in the state of New Jersey. He didn’t have a big name or millions of dollars in disposable income. We didn’t have servants or an army. We were regular people.

But he was a king.

So in sixth grade, when they took me out of St. Thomas and put me in Poly Prep, I was in for the shock of my life.

I had everything I needed, but there were people with more. Much more. People who didn’t work as hard. People whose power wasn’t earned but inherited or lucked into.

A year at Poly cost more than double the national average income. I didn’t learn that until much later, but I knew at the time that something was off. The kids at Poly were different in ways I couldn’t pinpoint. They didn’t really know what their parents did for money and spent no time thinking about it. They didn’t know how to fix things and didn’t know how to find out. And Dad was different around their parents. Still confident but louder, brasher, less astute.

It was as if he didn’t know how to crack their code.

He didn’t know how to crack Mom’s either.

Just as I was settling in, the stress of the money, the culture, the missed signals snapped her. She cleaned the house. Redid the books from the past two years. Accelerated every plan and activity.

She was manic, and she was everywhere. Bake sales. Theater department treasurer. Substitute statistics teacher.

Then she was depressed, and she was nowhere, and her room smelled of sweaty sheets and unbrushed teeth.

I swore to myself it didn’t affect me. I swore I had it under control.

And I did—as long as I was on land.

Gov (short for Governor, I kid you not), my best bud in that first year, invited me out on his dad’s sailboat for the weekend. In the first few hours, pulling out from the dock on Wiggins Park Marina, heading down the Delaware River and out toward the bay, the taste of salt and the thrust of the boat put me in high spirits. Gov and I talked about the kids in school, the sights on the banks of the river, and fantasized about the size of the fish we’d catch.

As the Delaware Bay fell away and the dark fists of landmasses grew smaller on the horizon, I grew uneasy. Following Gov, I did some tasks below deck, got ready for lunch, and stayed calm.

But it was out there. I knew it was out there.

Gov and I were in the front of the boat, watching the lap and curl of the water around the tip of the boat. He left me there so he could pee or eat or answer his father’s call. With a sandwich in one hand and a can of Coke in the other, I was alone.

Utterly alone.

I didn’t have a landmass to orient by. The horizon was an endless circle around a spotless, treacherous sea. The sky was a flat blue, and the boat was nothing, nowhere, the finitely small about to be crushed by the infinitely large.

The sky had weight, and it pressed against my chest. I was being snuffed out of existence as if I were no more than an offensive insect sliding on the curves of a pure white bathtub. I had to get out, but I was hemmed in by the indifferent sea.

Gov said I threw up. Maybe that part was seasickness. The rest was a good old-fashioned panic attack.

I pretended to laugh it off later, but inside, I never wanted to feel that insignificant again.

In Barrington, with the sound of crickets outside, I didn’t just think about defeating Harper. I was distracted by the huge, unchanging physical landscape. Human instability. The breakdown of the small while the infinite spaces above could crush me with indifference.

I had to remove all emotion. Breathe. Keep the panic at bay. I had to break down my judgments and preconceived notions so I could see the code and only the code.

What could Harper want? Not a job. She hated me. Money? Capital? Power? Bragging rights? Sex?

She could have had any of those things by asking, but she hadn’t asked. I went through her reactions to everything I’d said and done, but I hadn’t been trying to figure her out all day. I’d been looking past her instead of at her.

I was rusty.

I kept thinking of her polychrome eyes, her ombré lashes, the crease in her lower lip. The body she’d hid behind a plaid coat was tight and feminine. Her tits alone distracted me for an hour.

And the hack.

When I could get my mind off her body, I went back to the hack.

She’d found her way into a closed system. I doubted it was a social engineering hack. Had to be a pure exploit. God damn. I wanted to hire her, fuck her, kill her, and decode her.

After she released QI4.

I didn’t know how long it would take to patch the flaw she’d found, and it was more important than ever to do GreyHatC0n to prove the system was secure. I’d increase the prize. Lengthen the time.

Then I was back to the tits.

The eyes.

The code.

Dad.

How she did it.

When I could get out.

Of course a woman did this.

What did she want?

Crickets.

Tits.

Eyes.

Code.

Time.

Dad.

How.