Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
I message River before I can overthink it.
MASK: Want to help hunt?
Dots. Then:
RIVER: Yes.
I put on the Ghostface mask, and use the front entrance. She pads further into the room—hoodie, bare feet, jaw set—I feel something settle in my chest I didn’t know was loose.
“Briefing,” I say, voice filtered through the modulator clipped to my collar. I keep the hood up, the mask on, hands gloved. Distance. Rules. Boundaries I intend to honor right up until they kill me.
She takes the chair opposite, curls one leg under her, and looks at me like she could dismantle me with a semicolon.
“What’s the plan?”
I push the laptop toward her. “We bait Sopranette into a private DM, then trace the route when he grabs the prize.”
“What’s the prize?”
“A file he thinks is the uncut interview. What he’ll actually get is our tracer. And a very bad day.”
A corner of her mouth lifts. “So… mean girl, but make it cyber.”
I shouldn’t find that hot, but I absolutely do.
I pull up a Cathedral mirror in a sandboxed browser. “We need bait that sounds like you—but not too much like you.”
“Because they’ll smell the switch if it’s perfect,” she says, already typing. She drafts a post in sixty seconds: just spiky enough to yank a troll across the room by his ego. It’s playful, irreverent, threaded with that sharp kindness that drives men like Sopranette insane.
I watch her hands and pretend I’m watching the words.
“Good,” I say. “Now add three mistakes.”
She shoots me a look. “Excuse me?”
“On purpose. A typo. An extra space. That weird double-sentence thing you do when you’re excited.”
Her eyes narrow. “I don’t—”
“You do.” My mouth gets ahead of my good sense. “You also overuse em dashes when you’re nervous. And you drink coffee too hot, then pretend you didn’t burn your tongue. And you hum when the unit tests pass.”
She stares at me for a beat that lasts a year. “You pay attention.” She’s cautious as she keeps staring at me.
“Occupational hazard.”
She sprinkles in the flaws. The post reads like River at midnight, not River at war. We push it live on the mirror. Sopranette bites exactly four minutes later, showing up in DMs with a string of keyboard courage.
SOPRANETTE: Prove it’s you.
River doesn’t ask me what to say. She doesn’t look to me for confirmation. She just… knows.
RIVER (BAIT): Prove you’re not boring.
He takes the hook, wide open.
SOPRANETTE: Link?
She glances up. I nod. Render’s single-use lure is ready. She sends it.
Now we wait.
Arrow’s voice crackles over the encrypted channel. “Tracer armed.”
Knight: “Outer ring clear. No cross-traffic on their end yet.”
Ozzy: “I have a twenty that says he’s on hotel Wi-Fi.”
“Twenty says coworking space,” I mutter, eyes on the packet captures spooling like rain.
On River’s screen, the status badge flips: download started.
“Come on,” she whispers, leaning in, hair slipping loose from her knot. “Come on, you little troll.”
Traffic spikes. A soft port opens—just a sliver—and our hook slides through. We catch a device signature, then a MAC, then the invisible thread that ties Sopranette’s bravado to something with a street address.
Ozzy crows. “Got him! Hello, No-Sleep CoLab, floor three, downtown. And look at that—guest network, but he authenticated to print.”
“Name?” Knight asks.
“Working,” Arrow says, coaxing the printer spool like a snake charmer.
River’s knee bumps mine under the table. She doesn’t move away. Neither do I.
The name pops onto the shared console.
Kyle M. Anders. Twenty-three. Lives in his mother’s basement in the suburbs. Commutes in to “network.” Five posts on a failed startup blog. Thirty-two on Cathedral. He runs a mean account and a small life.
“Let’s say hi,” I tell Arrow.
River’s eyes are bright, a little wild. “What do we do?”
“We introduce Kyle to natural consequences.” I send Render a link. “Make me a collage.”
Ten minutes later, Kyle’s manager at No-Sleep CoLab receives an anonymous packet: Kyle’s Cathedral posts, thread IDs, the messages he sent under a handle logged in from their Wi-Fi. Alongside it, a compilation of his nastiest comments about “making her scream.” A nudge to their code of conduct. And a suggestion they might not want him using company printers for harassment.
Addendum: a pre-written apology he can send, if he chooses to be a person today.
By lunch, Kyle is suspended. By afternoon, Kyle is very sorry. The apology lands in River’s burner with the punctuation of a dog who peed on the rug and knows it.
She reads it. She does not smile.
But something eases in her shoulders.
Power, returning to its rightful owner.
I send one more note to Sopranette: Next time you want attention, try kindness. It scales better.
He doesn’t reply.
River sags back in her chair, breath leaving like she’s been holding it for months. Then she looks at me.
Not the mask—me.
“Again,” she says.
I should say no. I should cite burnout and the number of favors we’ve already burned this week.
“Okay,” I say.