Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,43
plans?”
“Since I’m an independent young woman who doesn’t have to answer to a controlling uncle-person type.”
“Josephine,” he said.
She returned his glare. Then sighed, her shoulders rolling forward. “Fii-nuh.” She drew the word into two syllables. “But it better be quick.”
She stepped back, retreating to her workstation, a pod of monitors and computers that served as her hacking nerve center. The ridgeback went crazy, wiggling against Evan, shoving into his thighs, demanding to be petted. The pup had bulked up to at least a hundred pounds, his coat looked shiny and healthy, and the scars from his bait-dog days had healed nicely. An expensive-looking fabric collar, candy-cane-striped for the holidays, gleamed against his russet-tan fur. Contented with Evan’s affection, he trotted away and plopped down on his plush bolster bed.
He hoisted his hound eyes at Joey, who was already typing away at her station, and gave a gentle whine for her attention.
“Quiet, Dog,” she said. She’d refused to name the dog because she didn’t want to grow attached to him.
Which she definitely wasn’t. Attached to him. Not at all.
“Fancy new collar,” Evan observed.
Joey kept her gaze unbroken on the monitors. “It was on sale.”
“And the bed. Is that a pillowtop?”
“It’s just what some website recommended for big dogs. ’Cuz their joints or something. I don’t know.”
She looked up finally to scowl at Evan.
At her shift in focus, Dog the dog’s tail went thump-thump-thump against the bolster bed.
She went back to work. Snuck another look at the dog.
Thump-thump-thump.
Joey’s face softened with affection.
Evan pretended not to notice the lovefest. One of the many arcane rules he’d learned when it came to dealing with a sixteen-year-old girl was to let her express herself in her own time.
“How are your courses going?” he asked.
One of the conditions of her living in here under his unofficial supervision was that she stay enrolled at UCLA. She’d chosen a computer-science major, promptly tested out of a raft of classes, and was struggling to slow her brain down enough to tolerate the remaining ones.
She guffawed. “Dull and last-gen theoretical. They’re way outta date on machine learning, neural networks, and neuromorphic computing. The other day in lecture, the prof was going on—incorrectly—about PyTorch with some boring-ass PowerPoint, and I was, like, dying of tedium, so I thought I’d, ya know, crack the staff-only Wi-Fi. I did a quick deauth attack to force a reconnect and then sent the captured key hashes to the CrackStation critters, and next thing you know I’m inside the network and then into his laptop using a handy Metasploit payload, so I replaced one of his PowerPoint slides with a pic I found in his Photos of him and his wife in puppy-play sex outfits at the Folsom Street Fair. And it came up, and everyone was all like, ‘Ah, kill that shit with fire,’ and then he knocked over the laptop and it broke, and then lecture got canceled.”
Evan cleared his throat. Staved off the ice-pick headache threatening to bore through his frontal lobe. “Let’s just pretend I didn’t ask.”
“Or…” Fingers templed like a Bond villain’s, she swiveled magisterially in her gamer chair to face him. “We could sit here and bask in your discomfort until the heat death of the universe.”
“You need to stay in school.”
“Even though I could, like, teach the professors?”
“We’re not having this discussion again. Pick another major.”
“But then I’d have to do work. When we both know that—especially now that you’re in your dotage—my talents would be better spent taking over for you. I’d be a way better Orphan X. You’re a middle-aged white dude. Get with the times. C’mon, X, tell me the world’s not ready for a rebrand.”
That ice pick made further headway, burrowing toward the brain stem. “The world’s not ready for a rebrand,” he said wearily. “I’m not even Orphan X anymore. We’ve discussed this. I retired.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I just need help on a … thing I’m looking into.”
She rolled her eyes, shot a glance at the wall clock. “Can we get on with whatever it is you need?”
“I need to hack into the CDCR website—”
“Even a two-digit-IQ noob like you should be able to manage that.”
“—and get cleared as a visitor to Kern Valley State Prison. And get put on the log under one of my fake IDs to meet with the inmate. For tomorrow.”
She frowned. “Hmm. Which ID you wanna use?”
He told her. As his unofficial in-house hacker, she kept files on his various identities and papers.