Chapter 5

The final bell rang. Zero walked out of the school gates, her backpack slung casually over one shoulder. The students parted for her, their eyes filled with a chaotic mix of fear and newfound infatuation.

Walter had the Rolls-Royce idling at the curb. He opened the door, bowing slightly.

Zero tossed her bag onto the leather seat and slid in. "Take me to Queens. 42nd Street. The underground electronics market."

Walter froze, his hand still on the door handle. He looked at her through the rearview mirror, his face pale. "Young Master, Madam instructed me to take you straight home to study..."

Zero shifted her gaze to the mirror. Her dark eyes were flat, swirling with a quiet, terrifying violence.

"Walter," Zero said, her voice dropping an octave. "In this family, I am your master."

The oppressive weight of her stare crushed the air out of Walter's lungs. He swallowed hard, his hands trembling as he gripped the steering wheel. "Y-Yes, Young Master."

The luxury car merged into traffic, leaving the pristine streets of the upper east side and descending into the gritty, neon-lit underbelly of Queens.

The Rolls-Royce parked near a damp alleyway. Zero pulled a black baseball cap from her bag, pulling the brim low over her eyes. She stepped out into the humid air, the smell of ozone and motor oil hitting her nose.

She walked down a narrow flight of concrete stairs into the sprawling underground market. It was a chaotic maze of stalls selling smuggled hardware and stolen tech.

Zero kept her hands in her pockets, her sharp eyes scanning the booths. She stopped in front of a stall run by a heavy-set, bald man with a thick scar across his neck.

She tapped her knuckles against the glass display case. She pointed to a dusty, heavy piece of metal shoved in the back corner.

"The decommissioned military-grade X-900 motherboard. And the smuggled liquid-cooled GPU next to it. Take them out," she ordered.

The bald boss looked at the tailored Ivy League uniform and the soft, pale skin of the boy in front of him. A greedy smile stretched across his face. A rich, dumb kid.

He pulled the parts out and slammed them on the counter. "Ten grand. Cash." It was three times the market value.

Zero let out a short, harsh laugh. She didn't have a single dollar to her name right now. She leaned over the counter, her eyes drifting to the boss's personal laptop, which was currently locked out by a nasty, flashing ransomware screen. "You're locked out of your own inventory database," Zero noted, her voice smooth.

"The left capacitor on that board is burned from overclocking anyway. The soldering job is amateur garbage." She rattled off a string of highly classified low-level code parameters regarding the ransomware encryption that made the boss's blood run cold.

She tilted her cap up just enough to let him see her dead, predatory eyes. "I will decrypt your system and save your entire black-market ledger. In exchange, I take the motherboard, the GPU, and..." Her eyes caught a dusty, heavy mechanical military watch sitting in a junk bin. "...that vintage micro-terminal watch. Deal?"

The boss's greedy smile vanished. Cold sweat broke out on his neck as he realized he was dealing with a top-tier shark. He shoved the laptop toward her. Ten minutes and a blur of keystrokes later, his screen unlocked.

Zero walked out of the market carrying two heavy black plastic bags filled with metal, the heavy military watch already strapped securely to her left wrist.

When she returned to the Vance estate, Reginald stared at the bags of junk.

"Don't let anyone near my room tonight," Zero commanded, walking up the stairs. "And don't bring dinner."

Inside her bedroom, Zero locked the heavy oak door. She pulled the thick blackout curtains shut, plunging the room into darkness.

She tossed her blazer onto the bed, ripped off her tie, and unbuttoned the top two buttons of her shirt. She rolled up her sleeves, exposing her pale, lean forearms.

She dumped the hardware onto the massive mahogany desk. Her eyes changed. The lazy arrogance vanished, replaced by a hyper-focused, terrifying intensity. This was her battlefield.

She grabbed a multi-tool screwdriver. Her fingers moved in a blur. Motherboard, CPU, GPU, cooling tubes-she assembled them with surgical precision. She routed the complex wiring with obsessive perfection.

Three hours later, the machine sat on her desk. The casing was battered and ugly, but inside, it was a mechanical beast.

She connected three high-definition monitors. She took a deep breath and hit the power button.

The fans roared to life with a deep, vibrating hum. The three screens flared blinding white, then shifted to black. Cascades of green code poured down the monitors as her custom operating system booted up.

Zero dropped into her leather chair. She hovered her hands over the mechanical keyboard. Her lips curled into a bloodthirsty smile.

Before she started hacking, she needed to stress-test the hardware's latency. She clicked on the icon for Hero, the most popular competitive esports game in the world.

The dramatic orchestral music of the login screen blasted through her speakers. Zero's fingers flew across the keys, bypassing the registration limits.

She typed in a brand new ID that was about to terrorize the entire server.

Spade Z.