Page 11 of Guarding Truth

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MONDAY, 11:45 P.M.

Every minute that ticked by seemed like an eternity for Ivy.

Grounded again. No electronics. No computer, TV, radio, or anything. She rolled over on her bed after having already taken two naps.

The pink walls started to close in on her like a coffin.

She flung a stuffed unicorn across the room. Silly toys for a high school girl. She’d only hacked into the school system to prove to the kids in her class she could do it. If only she belonged somewhere for once. But the kids in her new school were older, more sophisticated. And that one boy had made fun of her, so she’d needed to show him up.

Hacking into the school system was as easy as riding a bike. And it made her classmates pay attention to her.

She rolled over again and looked at the door to her room. An upperclassman had invited her to game tonight. Her first high school invitation, the equivalent of a sleepover. They’d stay up late and chat while completing a quest. She couldn’t even get a message to her new friend that she’d miss out tonight.

So not fair. She launched her pillow to join the unicorn on the floor.

Her analog watch indicated that it was 11:45 p.m. Ugh. Fifteen minutes until the quest. Time to find a way online. The sound of the shower hissed in the background, and Ivy slipped out of the room. The password to the Wi-Fi wouldn’t be an issue. He’d created a challenging system to change the password each time, but give her fifteen minutes and she’d get in. Nothing was hard for her to figure out with her eidetic memory.

The box of laptops on the dining room table called to her like candy on Halloween night. She got out of bed and padded across the apartment, calculating the odds of Uncle Caleb noticing that one laptop was missing. If he came back to work tonight, he’d notice it immediately. But if he quit for the evening, she’d have all night to return the stolen computer. She accepted the odds and slid the laptop from the middle of the stack, careful not to topple the rest of them.

She tucked her uncle’s phone into her jeans pocket and bolted for her bedroom.

With a sweep of her arm, she cleared the textbooks off her desk to make room for herself to work.

“Well, this is weird.” Instead of a normal operating system, this laptop booted up with only one program showing. She double-clicked one icon, and multiple windows popped up.

“What in the world…” Ivy stared at the screen. Numbers and letters scrolled across the windows. Her heartbeat double-timed. She checked the connection, and the laptop wasn’t online, but the program held a massive database of information.

“Yes!” She clamped a hand over her mouth to contain her excitement. This had to be a cipher from her uncle. Just like he used to send her when her parents were alive. He’d probably created a code and left it for her to finish.

Forget gaming. This was much more interesting.

Her mind whirred faster than the program spat out numbers and letters across the screen. The information seared itself into her permanent memory banks, whether she wanted it there or not.

This was some kind of program. And not a good program, either. Hmm. Maybe Uncle Caleb wanted her to figure out ways to stop this kind of program, like his company did.

“Finally, a challenge worthy of my skills!”

Numbers and letters imprinted on her brain as she read through lines and lines of code. But the code was missing a piece. If she launched it, it wouldn’t work.

It would be just like her uncle to plant this for her to find. But what was she supposed to do with this information? Fill in the missing code?

She poked around the rest of the computer, the game long forgotten.

A different file popped up. A text file.

This contained a coded note, and with a little bit of thought, she uncovered an email address and password.

The sound of the shower stopped. Ivy used her uncle’s phone to log in to the free email account with the information she’d discovered.

The email account was empty. No new emails or any signs that it was an active account. She clicked on the only folder that showed signs of activity: the drafts folder.

Several unsent emails popped up. She opened one to find more letters, numbers, and symbols. A burst of energy pulsed in her veins. Had she just discovered a cipher? It was another one of Uncle Caleb’s puzzles for her to figure out.

She grabbed the pen and notepad, not that she needed it. What she needed to work out was the key to decode the messages.

Ivy scrolled through the string of numbers and letters in the body of the email. It was an email exchange by a few different people, like they were leaving messages to each other. Her hand ached from writing. While information stuck in her brain like glue, writing helped keep her thoughts organized. And she needed a clue to discover the key to the cipher.