Burn Code

Prologue

A knock at the door interrupted my dance.

I continued on, allowing the motion cameras to record my movements. With a series of fingertip gestures, I relayed the loop command to my computer. Adding the moves to the queue, I set it to repeat and the avatar I controlled kept dancing for her audience.

Paul greeted me with a terse smile when I finally opened the door. Dark eyes weary, he looked like he hadn’t seen a bed in three days.

“I thought you had to work tonight,” I said, pleasantly surprised with his appearance at my door.

Smoothing my hands up the lapels of his jacket, my fingers sought the back of his neck. I leaned in for a kiss, but he stiffened and kept his lips out of my reach.

“Cara.” He shook his head once and his smile turned sullen. “I’m sorry.”

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. The patrol officer beside Paul pushed himself from the wall.

Amused, I smiled wide. “Get arrested?”

Paul’s expression remained the same. “No.”

Panic began to rise and clutch its fist around my chest. My computer ran a lot more than the dancing avatar. Half its data stores were loaded with my hacking scripts and malicious code. Another portion held the account numbers and open ports I hadn’t sold yet. All of it was several shades of illegal.

“Then what’s the cop doing here?”

Paul chewed his lip before using his body to move us into my apartment. The patrol officer followed behind a few steps.

Finally he let me go to reach inside his breast pocket. Removing a black wallet and a folded letter, he sighed.

He sucked on his front teeth as he held up the wallet and flipped it open. A gold shield stared back at me. The fist of panic morphed into a strange mix of anger and terror.

“Paul?” My breath left in a gasp when I suddenly realized the man I had been seeing for a year was a complete fabrication.

He took a step forward and I mirrored with a step back.

When I found the ability to breathe again, I called up a bundle of code in the Persian boteh tattoo that swirled up my right arm. In my optics, I watched as it interfaced with my computer and I sent the command to purge it all.

“That’s not what I’m here for,” he said as if he knew what I was doing. “I know you’re a hacker, Cara, but that isn’t on the indictment.”

I swore at him. “You bastard! The whole damned time -- a cop?”

“Yes.” He reached a hand out for me, but I slapped it away.

I scanned the room with the rest of the tech on my body and looked for the private PIP that allowed me to interface with him. Completely gone — the only thing that remained was his public port.

Detective Paul Fesserton labeled it in my optics. Even with a half hour of uninterrupted access, I could never hack a police port. The damn things were hard wired to retaliate with a jack to snuff the hacker’s tech.

“Don’t do something stupid.” He shook his head and his jaw set in a hard line. “It’s not worth adding to this.”

Paul held out the indictment. I snatched it from his hand. Unfurling it, I read through in search of the punch line.

“Cara Blume.” His words come out strangled as he pulled a pair of handcuffs from his belt. “You’re under arrest. Suspicion of unauthorized neutralization.”