This far from town, the night was dark. The stars shone bright enough to touch overhead, and it only took him a moment to use them to orient himself to face south. He withdrew his tablet and the tube that held his portable satellite dish.
An irritating necessity. Before they’d gone rogue, they’d had a permanent dish attached to their transport truck, wired into an onboard modem with a wireless signal amplifier. They’d had instant access to the TechCorps network and the CityNet from anywhere within line of sight of the vehicle.
And the TechCorps had had instant access to their current GPS coordinates at any moment.
The new uplink was anonymous. Clever, too. The cylindrical case broke apart to form a base and stand for the antenna within—a parabolic dish made of a composite fabric so light it could be folded down to the width of two fingers. When freed from the tube, it snapped open without a single wrinkle or crease. It only took a few minutes to assemble and connect the slim solar battery.
Knox still resented it. A few minutes was too long, given Nina’s habit of wandering.
His tablet unfolded into a smooth screen that glowed softly in the darkness. Conall’s irreverent sense of humor was to blame for the cartoonish outline of a ghost in the bottom corner of the tablet. Tapping it launched a simple window with a blinking white cursor.
Knox watched it, counting the blinks that seemed to keep time with his thudding heart. After eleven beats, text rolled across the screen.
connected to the ghost network …
Nobody knew how the GhostNet had started. Nobody knew how it persisted. The best network specialists in the TechCorps had spent years trying to snuff it out, but every Protectorate raid had yielded only abandoned buildings and baffled neighbors. Conall was convinced that its mysterious architect was someone high enough up in the TechCorps’ tech admin ranks to protect their creation, but who that benefactor might be was a mystery.
It didn’t matter. Black market dealers, criminals, and revolutionaries all over the city paid for access to untraceable communication. The fee was outrageous, but it came with a satellite uplink and a secret back door through the TechCorps’ satellite system. Conall had tried to explain how it worked once, but the details didn’t matter to Knox.
Only the access did.
He had one message waiting for him, a clickable IP address. He tapped it and waited for the connection to open.
It didn’t take long.
Provide proof of acquisition.
Knox found the digital footage Conall had surreptitiously shot that morning of the three women loading gear into their truck and sent it to whoever was waiting. Within a minute, he received a reply.
Relay your GPS coordinates.
The demands were stark, unblunted by greetings or small talk. Not that he expected a kidnapper to be polite, but something about the terseness of the messages bothered Knox. Every sentence had been stripped down to the bare bones of communication. There was nothing to indicate who was on the other side—where they came from, who they were working for. Why they wanted Nina.
Nothing grated on Knox’s nerves like incomplete data.
First provide proof of life, he sent back. I want to talk to Luna.
No response.
His heart was beating faster than that blinking cursor now. Finally, a picture appeared. If there had been anything left inside him but numbness, it would have broken his damn heart.
Luna’s light brown skin was sallow, and her dark hair hung in tangled strands. The pink stripes framing her face were incongruous, too bright and cheerful for her tight expression. Smudged eyeliner enhanced dark circles under brown eyes that sparked with barely contained rage.
Desperately glad that Rafe wasn’t here to see it, Knox took a steadying breath. She looked disheveled but unharmed, but there was no way of knowing how long ago the picture had been taken—or what could have happened to her in the meantime. Not good enough. Video or the deal is off.
Another endless pause. Knox was starting to hate that blinking cursor, along with the helplessness it implied. If the kidnapper called his bluff—if they retaliated against Luna—
The tablet beeped. Incoming video request.
He accepted it.
Luna’s face appeared on his screen, looking the same as in the picture. The camera’s focus was so tight he could only see a foot on either side of her head, nondescript concrete walls with no identifying features. The light came from behind whoever was holding the camera, shining brightly on Luna’s face and casting everything else into shadow.