They took turns driving, and crying, all the way to the Nevada border. The Dotties were booked to play a show at the border town of West Wendover, a tourist trap dotted with casinos. That night’s venue was a faux biker bar lined with slot machines and video poker. A stopover for vacationers headed for something better in Vegas or California, most of them in their fifties and half drunk by 2 p.m. Not exactly The Dotties’ usual crowd.

They dropped off whatever gear they could on stage with whatever energy they could muster. The substance-filled late night in the salt flats, coupled with the blow of getting punked out of their product, was the perfect motivation for them to abandon their shit-show of a tour. And it was pretty much the only topic they’d discussed on their otherwise silent departure of Utah.

Utah, where shitty bands go to die.

Now that they were all spiritually dead, it was time to think rationally. Heading any further into the desolation of Nevada seemed like a wasted enterprise without their product, their real meal ticket. Their next spate of shows in rural and depressed mining towns along the interstate was bound to bring in the worst numbers of the tour.

The younger and more financially stable version of Carly would have continued on regardless, persevering, playing for “the love of music.” But this newer, poorer, more broken iteration was ready to call it quits. She was ready to surrender, giving up her music dream in the parking lot of Sandy’s Bar & Slots.

“We don’t even have enough money to get home,” said Megan, snuffling in an attempt to not start sobbing again. The two of them sat out of the van’s rear door while Taylor paced around the parking lot on her phone. She’d been trying to wrangle up some funds, any kind of funds, for almost an hour.

“Maybe I could put it on my credit cards,” said Carly, despite not knowing for sure if she could actually do so. Before anything, she wanted to actually say it out loud, to test how it felt and sounded. “But I don’t know . . . I’m almost maxed out.” It sounded horrific.

“Goddamn it,” Megan muttered. “And the fucking cash, too.”

“We’re lucky they left us the instruments.”

Taylor, having finished her phone call, returned to the girls with a blank look on her face.

“Anything?” asked Megan.

“Nothing,” she said, leaning against the van with a sigh. “What about you?”

“The same,” said Megan.

“And you?”

Carly wanted to say no when Taylor asked if she could make any calls. She wanted to lie about her only remaining option, an opportunity to make a quick fifty thousand by doing what she did best. It would be so much easier to stay low-key and broke, to not “get back into it” by whoring herself out for the first time since her mistake with Bryce Johnson. Maybe she would just charge everything to her credit cards. She could always max everything out and then file bankruptcy. That would be playing it safe.

“I don’t know,” said Carly as she scrolled through the names in her phone’s contact list.

“Do you have any ideas at all?” asked Taylor.

Carly looked at her recent call log, scrolling as far back as the previous afternoon when she turned down that suspicious job offer—when she still thought she was employed. “Maybe,” she said.

“Hey,” called a raspy voice from the bar’s rear service door. It was the manager, an ex-biker-looking guy who’d recently been reformed via semi-casual business attire. “Did you girls come to play or what?”

They hadn’t. But they said yes, and went inside and took the stage, and played music while people gambled.

* * *

As the Dotties mechanically ran through their songs, Carly’s mind drifted further and further away from the music. Away from Sandy’s Bar & Slots, and West Wendover, and the tour. Her mind seamlessly detached itself from her instrument, her fingers now working through the sheer robotics of muscle memory.

Away from the music she’d once loved playing, her thoughts brought her back to another activity that had similarly gone cold—hacking. Was it meant to stay cold forever? Maybe all she’d needed was a few minor catastrophes to help thaw the ice.

It seemed only natural that she’d come crawling back. Hacking had once defined her in a way that music or web programming never could. It had once been a definition that she was comfortable and completely satisfied with, embracing an online persona she’d worked so hard at creating. Cscape, as she was known to fellow hackers, a name that would pop up regularly at the inner sanctums of their dark web meeting places. It was how she met Tansy, a hacker and military whistleblower who, at the time, was rumored to still be on active duty. Who was also rumored to be communicating from one of Saddam Hussein’s secret bunkers. The claims were usually farfetched, like his ability to commandeer a fleet of drones if his unit required air support, or how he’d amassed full hard drives of blackmail-worthy communiqués so they could be used as protection against the crooked upper echelon of military brass.

His war against military corruption was what initially attracted Carly to him, his fight for the little people, who were often the Iraqis themselves. It was a fight that aligned with Carly’s own motivation for hacking and for enacting change—no matter the legality. They worked in this gray zone, the murky realm of gray-hat tactics, and often worked side by side. A hacking power couple, minus the romance. Their work was too important for that.

But there were feelings. And looking back now, had it been a mistake to deny them? If nothing else, it would have put a lid on the fiasco with Bruce Johnson.

For activists like Cscape and Tansy, the end had always justified the means. Near the end of Cscape’s career, this meant branching away from military causes, and instead aiming for something even dirtier—politics. Although she held a firm hatred of it even now, politics had seemed like the best way for her to damage “the system,” hacking for politicians—at least the ones she thought were not complete and utter slime.

Bryce Johnson had once filled that bill, a staunch supporter of human rights and of a free and equal internet as a human right. It put some distance between her and Tansy’s already-distant relationship, Carly becoming more and more focused on Bryce, and then on his secret email server, then on its need for cover-up, which was when Carly had scrambled back to Tansy for help. There too, the end justified the means: her needing his help.

Some years later, she’d written a song about it for The Dotties. More than anything, it was a song about painful choices. In this case, it was the choice to cut contact with Tansy in order to put distance between him and the investigation. To save him. But now that a fresh investigation had been once again set in motion, she could feel the distance closing.

* * *

“We’ll send you a packet tonight,” said the voice on her phone. “After we make sure that you can receive it safely.”

“I’m not an idiot,” said Carly.

“Of course not. We’re talking to you, aren’t we?”

“They” were indeed talking to her. A conversation between The Dotties’ two music sets, Carly walking back and forth in a small parking lot behind the bar. Against her better judgment, she had called the friend she’d said no to only twenty-four hours before, asking to be put in touch with whomever had requested her services. She tried not to sound desperate, just curious. She was just interested in how high she could talk up the price. That’s all.

“We can pay in installments. Darkcoin.”

“Bitcoin’s fine,” she said, already thinking of how to monetize the cryptocurrency, how it could be used as soon as possible to pay for the food and lodging required for The Dotties to reach California. The plan from there was to meet an old friend who lived in The Emerald Triangle, to invest in another round of honey oil, and to this time play it safe in driving it back to Nevada. No more stupid rock-star bullshit. No more K9s on the salt flats.

“The first installment needs to be immediate,” said Carly. “If that’s okay with you.”

“Of course it is. We’re just glad to hear from you,” said a voice that was almost unisex in its timbre. Not quite deep enough for a man’s voice, but a male nonetheless. Maybe a teenager, or young male. Carly imagined the boy on the other line, talking through a Bluetooth while playing a first-person shooter video game. Energy drinks and pizza rolls. And somehow having access to fifty thousand dollars in bitcoin.

She stopped there.

“I don’t want any personal info in the packet,” she said. “Take it out if it’s there.”

“What? What kind of personal info?”

“Anything,” Carly said. “The less I know, the better.” It was a lesson from the past, one she’d learned the hard way.

“People usually send you their personal info in packets?” He really did sound like a little punk. “Like, their names and social security numbers or something?” He waited a few seconds and then said, “Anyway. . . .”

“And I mean it about the payment,” she said. “I’m starting tonight, so I’ll expect to see something.”

“You’ll see something.”

“Also, I need to know who else you’ve got working on this.”

“No, you don’t,” he snickered. “It’s not a collaborative effort. Just take care of the goals that we spell out in the packet, and you’ll see your bitcoin. Tonight.”

* * *

She got to work immediately following their gig, stretched out on a bed with a laptop in a cheap motel, poaching Wi-Fi from a neighboring casino, drinking an extra-large coffee and wondering how the fuck she ended up having to hack from a two-star Hi-Way Motor Court in West Wendover. It was a far cry from the trendiness of Denver’s Silicon Mountain, the glitzy and ever-expanding tech district that Carly had once called home.

“Are you doing it right now?” asked Megan.

“Do you want us to leave?” Taylor asked.

The questions came out awkwardly, like they didn’t know how or what to ask, like they were unsure if they could just sit around while Carly worked.

“Why?” asked Carly. “It’s not like I’m a webcam model. I don’t have to take my tits out or anything.”

Taylor laughed as she flung her sneakers off her feet and off the bed, tossing them toward the door. “You sure? I heard there’s good money in that. It’s like the newer tech version of being a phone-sex operator.”

“Well, then why don’t you sign up for it? I’ve got an extra laptop.”

“No, that’s okay,” said Taylor. “I’d rather you teach me how to make websites.”

Making websites. . . . That was what they thought she was doing, programming some code for some innocuous company in Delaware. DeBlasio Solutions. They were in an extreme rush. A salvage job for a new site implementation that had gone off the rails.

The more specific the lie, the better.

It wasn’t like her friends didn’t know about Carly’s hacking past. She just preferred they assumed it was still there, in the past. Nice and safe. It was her new policy, since the loss of Tansy, to not drag anyone down with her activities.

“It’s pretty boring,” said Carly. “Hacking websites—I mean building websites.”

“Whoa,” said Megan, laughing.

“Building,” Carly said again. Shit. . . .

“Freudian slip much? Why don’t you tell us how you really feel.”

Carly shook her head, embarrassed. “No, no. Building and implementing corporate websites. Boring stuff.” Just like that, it almost slipped out. She wasn’t used to hiding a secret life. It had been a few years since that burden was necessary.

“We knew it,” said Taylor. “Once a hacker, always a hacker. You always say that’s where the money is.”

Carly wanted to deny it, but it was true. Big mouth. She had always said that. And then she thought of her interview with the journalist in Salt Lake City, how she’d used that exact phrase.

She was an absolute fucking idiot.

Good thing the journalist wasn’t trying to dig up a story about the email server scandal.

Fucking Christ. . . .

Carly focused back on her work—a screen full of gibberish. This was her client’s data pack, several files of encrypted text that would turn into work instructions once she cracked their little code. It was like a qualifications test. If she couldn’t even read the instructions, how could she carry out their hack?

Carly reached for her duffle bag and pulled out a portable hard drive along with its cables, plugging it into the wall and into her laptop, before glancing over to her bandmates on the adjacent bed. They were watching TV, a suspenseful-sounding crime show about a Los Angeles forensics team. Their lives would certainly be a little more entertaining if they knew the details of Carly’s new, secret job. They could turn off their show and watch the real-life suspense transpiring on the bed next to theirs.

But maybe it wasn’t that exciting.

TV shows and movies liked to hype it up. Even just the idea of it was usually more exciting that the actual, often mundane process.

Truth be told, ninety percent of hacking time was usually spent in the tedious doldrums of hair-pulling ennui. There was always so much waiting. Waiting for some screen to freeze or unfreeze. Watching the slow crawl of status bars. Sometimes she’d have to manually type in an almost biblical length of code.

It was probably best that Megan and Taylor—and the rest of the world—stick to their crime shows.

When their show had ended and the lights were all dark except for Carly’s glowing laptop screen, the real mystery had finally been solved. The code had been cracked. The instructions read.

She was qualified.

Carly was to hack into a highly secured server, steal some files, and do it all without leaving a trace. A typical smash and grab—except the smash needed some refining. The server was air-gapped, which means it was physically cut off from the internet, literal physical space separating the ultra-sensitive information from the rest of the hacker-infested internet.

It was one of the more extreme defense strategies. And it was certainly effective. But all that meant for an artisan like Carly was that she’d have a chance to get creative. In the past, she’d used a more old school, physical approach. She could tamper with their newest software or hardware as it was being developed in a different, less secure location. She’d go down the supply chain and attack unsuspecting and usually defenseless third-party manufacturers, imbedding their product with something extra. It was like a preset, a ready-made Trojan horse. Once someone brought it inside the air gap, into the soft and mushy innards of the hive, all that was left to do was to activate it. Such elaborate setups, however, would often require months, if not years of planning. Which sadly comes with the territory for air-gap hacking.

Another lengthy albeit effective method was to target someone on the inside. Get to know them and their habits, their vices, and then compromise them personally. Voila, she’d have her own personal mole. Each case had to be handled differently, of course, as everyone has their own specific dirt to be dug up. But whether it was some secret crime or infidelity, or evidence of a taboo sexual appetite, there was always dirt to be harvested. Always. Especially when it came to computer people, who were natural compartmentalizers.

Carly included.

Just look at her in this motel room, innocent little Cscape building her corporate websites, working so earnestly. Who was it for again? DeBlasio Solutions? From Delaware?

Her real client had no name. Just a voice, and an almost repulsive-sounding one at that. Her target was also, fortunately, nameless. She didn’t want to know anything about them or what they did. Simple strings of characters were sufficient for identification purposes. In this case, she was targeting something called “vf97e8x83.” And she had been targeting it for the last two hours with no luck. She didn’t even have a starting point.

Air-gap operations were notoriously slow to get started, the initial difficult learning curve slowly leveling off once an exploit or two had been identified. But for now, for the initial probing, the introduction, was like walking around an old New England farmhouse by candlelight on a moonless night. Already she had bumped into a wall or two, or thirty. Her thoughts wandered, daydreaming about how much faster she used to be. She shrugged off the thought, only to have its message emerge later as a real-life worry. A lack of confidence that, if left unchecked, would eat away at her creativity, chewing productivity down to a nub.

Could she even do this shit anymore? She’d made a personal choice not to, when she’d dropped out of it after swearing off this type of hacking. Years later she’d still maintained that it was a personal choice, that she could but wouldn’t. But as time wore on, it became harder and harder to believe that her inactivity was still the result of some active, ongoing decision. Even at a shitty motel in West Wendover, with one foot already in the door, the worry was there.

Had things progressed too far without her? Had it all left her behind? Instantaneous obsolescence was the trademark of the internet age, leaving Carly to feel as out of touch as UC Denver’s computer science curriculum.

No, it couldn’t have been that bad.

She could do this.

She could still do this. And would do this.

The rust would no doubt exacerbate the typically slow start. But she’d have to shake it off in a hurry. Her band depended on it.

Feeling a renewed wave of momentum wash over her, Carly reached for her laptop, compelling herself to get back to work. And just as she was about to type the beginning of a code, her mattress suddenly buzzed with the vibration of her phone.

It wasn’t just an unwelcome interruption. It was a random call at three in the morning. What good could come from that?

She grabbed the phone, hoping to see a friendly name.

It was a private call.

Fuck.

It was a lose-lose situation. Answering the call would be a loss for obvious reasons. And not answering the call would most likely produce another set of problems, a whole slew of anxious wondering that would hijack her already-strained concentration.

But maybe it was her client. The man in the shadows. He might have some new information. A 3-a.m. call wouldn’t be too shocking for someone who’d just hired a hacker. For hackers and the people they deal with, overnight was usually prime time. The later the better.

“Fuck it,” she muttered.

Fuck it. Just answer and deal with it.

She took the phone into the bathroom, shut the door, and against her better judgment, answered the call.

“Carly?”

The voice didn’t seem to register. It sounded breathy. Overweight. Sleepy.

“It’s me. It’s Dan Hendricks.”

The name also didn’t register.

“From Mr. Johnson’s office,” he said, slurring slightly.

“What?”

“Well, not currently from his office. But . . . we worked together. Remember me? Dan?”

“Dan?” she said mysteriously. “Ohhh, Dan. Right. Okay.” She felt the memories sliding back. They had become separated and compartmentalized in such a way that simple name recall had taken minutes. Unwanted flashbacks, however, were instantaneous, like waiting in line at the grocery store and hearing an old song, or the smell of a certain cologne while walking down the aisle of a plane, or—

“Dan Hendricks. Danny. We were on his team of aides.”

Of course, Danny. She had even somewhat liked Danny. It was a somewhat nice flashback.

But so fucking late. What the fuck?

“I hope it’s not too late,” he said, sounding like he’d just drunk a case of beer. “I’m in Prague right now, so, uh, the time. . . .”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Sorry, um . . . ” there was a pause, and then the sound of him taking a deep breath. “I guess you know why I’m calling, huh?” His voice had changed. Become more somber.

“No. . . . Is everything okay?”

“You haven’t heard the news? About Joan?”

“What’s wrong?”

“She uh . . . she passed away.”

“Oh, geez.” Carly pictured the smile of her colleague. They’d only met a few times, just like she and Dan, at various conferences.

“Yeah,” he said glumly.

It was sad news, certainly. But the call was still confusing. “That’s terrible,” she said, feeling a little guilty about not feeling worse, although it was certainly alarming in a different way. “I never heard anything. I’ve been on the road for weeks.”

“I don’t know why, but, I found myself worried about you. I just had to call. Sorry this is so out of the blue and everything.”

“No, no, it’s fine. Thanks for, um, letting me know.”

“Carly, uh. . . .” His voice became even quieter. “They say it was suicide, but. . . .”

“But what?”

“Well. . . . It’s, like, suspicious.”

Now the call made sense. Carly opened a browser window on her laptop and began searching for any news stories on the topic.

“You know what I mean?” he said. “I think it has something to do with, you know, what’s going on. She was subpoenaed two days ago to appear at court. The Feds were gonna force her into testifying.”

Carly’s search for news was fruitless. There were no recent sad stories about Joan McIntyre.

“Did you know about that?” Dan asked.

Carly came across a news article about Joan’s upcoming testimony, what she may or may not disclose, and how damaging it would be for Bryce Johnson. “Yeah,” she said weakly. “I just heard about it. . . .”

“Forgive me for asking, but . . . have you been subpoenaed?”

“No,” she said, pushing the laptop aside and stretching her legs out. “Of course not. Why would they?”

“Okay, well it just made me think of you,” Dan continued. “And, just . . . I just wanted to make sure you’re okay and that you’re with people.”

“With people? What do you mean?” Carly gripped the phone a little tighter. “What happened to her? Why is it suspicious?”

“It was ruled self-strangulation,” he said, sighing again. “With an electrical cord.”

Carly still had the mental image of Joan’s smile, only now the smile had changed to a pale grimace.

“Where are you right now?” he asked.

“I’m . . . I’m on the road right now.”

“Where?”

The voice in her head started up again, screaming at her to hang up. Hang up the fucking—

“Are you on vacation?” he asked.

“Listen, Danny. . . . Thanks for calling, but I gotta go.”

He tried to say something else, but it was cut off by her ending the call. Carly sat for a moment, almost shaking, thinking of how utterly bizarre the whole thing was. And then she tried to not think about it, instead racing over the door to check the deadbolt for the third time that night.