Chapter 3 Someone is after Isla

AUDREY

I never thought the worst-case scenario would actually happen.

My phone buzzes. Text message.

*Room 15 - water coming down from sprinklers. Isla keeps asking where you are. She's scared but trying not to show it.*

The message is from Mrs. Patterson, one of Isla's teachers. Which means they still have phones. Which means the cell towers are working. Which means whoever's doing this wants communication to stay open.

They want us to suffer through this in real time.

I set up on the hood of my car because it's flat and I can see the building and I need to see what I'm doing. Laptop one connects to my phone's hotspot. Laptop two connects to the portable router. I'm not some action hero with a mobile command center - I'm a desperate mother with equipment I bought on government surplus websites, trying to hack into a system that someone much smarter than me has already compromised.

The school's network appears on my screen. It doesn't look right. Not like the clean architecture I mapped six months ago when I was doing my paranoid security check. Someone has been in here, rewriting protocols, changing access permissions, turning safety systems into weapons.

My hands stop shaking. Not because I'm calm - I'm the opposite of calm. But because I know how to do this. For eight years I've been a cybersecurity consultant. Before that, I hunted cyber criminals for the FBI. This is what I do.

I'm good at this.

I find the first entry point and start working. Not elegant, not careful. Fast and brutal and effective.

CRACK. First firewall down.

Another door opens somewhere in the building. Not Room 15. Goddamnit – it's never the metaphorical Room 15.

"Twenty-six minutes," I mutter, checking the countdown on my phone.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

My insulin pump chooses this moment to remind me I'm human. Blood sugar dropping from stress and adrenaline. I fumble for glucose tablets with one hand while typing with the other. The chalky sweetness dissolves on my tongue, but my body feels disconnected, running on pure maternal fury.

Through the car window, I watch other parents arrive. A woman in yoga pants runs past, screaming her son's name. A man in a business suit pounds on locked doors with his fists until his knuckles bleed. They're all doing the obvious thing – the human thing.

I'm doing the thing that might actually work.

The second layer of encryption cracks. Then the third. But for every barrier I break, two more appear. Whoever wrote this anticipated me. They know how I think, how I solve problems, how I –

Wait.

I stop typing.

Deep in the system architecture, buried in subroutines that look like standard building protocols, there's something that makes my blood freeze.

A code signature.

Not just any signature. Frank's signature. The elegant recursive loops, the specific error correction patterns, the mathematical poetry that made his software legendary. I know this code because I helped write it. Eight years ago. Before everything went wrong.

But Frank would never use his work to hurt children.

Which means someone else has it.

My hands shake as I pull up more code strings. It's not just Frank's signature – it's our signature. Code we wrote together during those late nights in his apartment, when we thought we were building something that would protect people. When I thought I loved him. When I thought he loved me back.

Someone has weaponized our greatest achievement and aimed it at my daughter.

"No, no, no." The words come out as a whisper, but the rage building in my chest is anything but quiet.

BUZZ.

My phone lights up with a text from inside the school: _Room 15 - water coming from ceiling. kids scared. isla asking for you._

The fire suppression pre-spray has started. My daughter is standing in rising water, probably trying to keep the other kids calm while she waits for mommy to save her. Because that's what I do. I fix things. I solve problems. I make the bad things go away.

Except this time, the bad thing knows me.

Twenty-one minutes.

I stop trying to be careful. Stop worrying about preserving the school's systems or following proper protocols. I become digital dynamite, blowing through firewalls with brute force attacks that would make cybersecurity experts weep.

The first classroom door clicks open. CLICK. Room 12. Children pour out, crying and laughing and calling for their parents. But not Room 15. That door stays locked.

I dive deeper into the code, following the malware's structure through layers of obfuscation and misdirection. There – hidden in what looks like routine maintenance scripts – I find the truth.

This isn't about trapping all the children.

This is about trapping one specific child.

Mine.

The other classroom doors have been programmed to open after calculated amounts of pressure and panic. Enough to terrorize, not enough to truly harm. But Room 15 is different. The locks are reinforced. The suppression system is focused. The timeline is accelerated.

Someone wants Isla specifically.

My phone rings. Unknown number.

I answer without thinking. "What?"

"Ms. Romano." The voice is electronically distorted, artificially calm. "Impressive work. But you're not fast enough."

Every nerve in my body goes electric. "Who is this?"

"Someone who knows what you did eight years ago. Someone who knows what you took when you ran."

My laptop screen flickers. New code is being written in real-time, undoing my progress as fast as I can make it. Someone is fighting me from inside the system.

"I didn't take anything."

"You took his child. And now I'm taking yours."

The line goes dead.

Understanding hits me like a physical blow. Someone knows about Isla. Someone knows Frank is her father. Someone is using my daughter as bait to force a confrontation eight years in the making.

But that knowledge gives me something too – focus.

This isn't random terrorism. This is personal. Which means the attacker has emotional investment. Emotional investment makes people predictable. Predictable people make mistakes.

I trace the active connection, following data streams and network traffic patterns with the kind of focused intensity that made me legendary at the FBI. The signal isn't coming from some remote location halfway around the world.

It's coming from inside the school building.

Fourteen minutes.