Hacker

Chapter 16 - Codes

"Welcome back!" My roommate, Hayley, greeted me excitedly.

I closed the door and glanced at my watch. 11 pm. "You haven't slept yet?"

Hayley wasn't a night owl. She usually went to bed at like 10. It's surprising to see her still awake around this time.

"No, I wanna go to the bathroom. But," She tailed off, eyes looking at my handbag and phone. "I need you to accompany me." She requested.

The bathroom was only a few steps away. She wasn't a coward so this was quite unusual.

"Please?" She made a childish grinned.

I was still tired from today's drama but feeling something's off, I hesitantly agreed. "Sure," I said. "Just let me put these down first." I put my things on the study table and walked out of the room after her.

Instead of walking to the bathroom's direction, she went towards the room at the end of the hallway.

The owner opened the door after the 4th knock. "Yes?"

"Hi, sorry for disturbing you at this hour. Can I borrow your hijab?" She asked directly.

"Yeah, sure." She went in a few seconds before appearing back with a hijab.

"Thank you," She said. "I'll give it back in a few minutes, insyaAllah." She smiled.

The owner smiled back before closing the door.

I still confusingly stood in front of my room. We didn't need hijab to go to the bathroom. It's a close place. We only needed it to go outside.

Once she wore the hijab, she walked back to me. Index finger on her lips, signed me to be quiet. She took my hand and lead me outside.

Only after we're alone I noticed her expression was a bit scared. She pulled out a piece of paper and a red pen drive from her trousers' pocket, then handed them to me.

"Zack met me." She stated.

An alarm set up in my brain. Poor Hayley, that's why she's scared. An unexpected encounter with the infamous hacker was never a pleasant experience.

"He said if you are not back in 24 hours, make a report asap no matter what reason I hear. But if you do, he requested me to pass you these." She glanced at my hand that held the stuff. "I didn't check the content yet, but he wanted you to use my phone to read it because he said whatever techno you bring back isn't safe."

I swallowed my lump. That'd include the pen drive I brought back from Ed's. The piece of paper opened slowly on my hand. Hayley activated her phone's flashlight to brighten up the paper's content.

It was a QR code.

Without me asking, she opened the QR app in her phone and scanned it. The screen popped up a separate window, showing a sentence.

Do you remember when I said I need to trust you?

The background was blank and the words were too close. I scrolled up and down, tried the 'select all' but there's nothing else on the page.

Page?

My finger scrolled all the way up again. I noticed it had a URL. It was a website.

I quickly typed 'view-source:' before the URL and clicked enter, redirecting us to the page's source. Honestly, that was one of the simplest tricks of giving someone a secret code.

"Woah." Hayley already seemed done with the random letters and numbers viewed on the screen. "What does he think we are? Hackers?"

Yeah, well me, specifically. But she didn't need to know that.