35
Staropramenná 2, Prague, Czech Republic
November 29
Eva collapsed on the sofa, pressed her hands to her face. The mask was so tight on her, and she itched at the edge, groaning. Pyotr rummaged through the pack of supplies he’d stolen from the depot, took out a half-litre aerosol can.
“Better stand up,” he said, shaking it. “We’ve got to sterilize everything before we take off these masks. I’m not taking any chances with whatever those nut jobs had.”
Eva sighed, got to her feet, and spread her arms and legs so Pyotr could coat her with the spray. It tingled as it hit her skin, gave her a second chill, on top of the cold. When he finished, she sprayed him, careful around his eyes, shut tight.
They stood there, looking at each other.
“Do the room,” he said. “I want to try sleeping without this thing on my face.”
She nodded, proceeded to dose the entire room with antiseptic. He took out a second can, shook it vigourously, and joined her, doing the undersides and ceilings where she had trouble reaching. They finished, sweating and out of breath, and unlatched their masks to breathe in the vile lemony air.
“Home sweet home,” Pyotr smirked.
Eva coughed at the taste. She sat down on the floor, legs crossed, then lay back, staring out the window, at the stars. The clouds were disappearing, the deep blue sky shimmering gently.
“So we’re done for the night,” Pyotr said, laying down next to her.
“Where’d you get that gun from anyway?” she asked suddenly. “They give those out at the food depot?”
“No,” he sighed. “Saw a guard leave it at his station when I was heading out, figured it’d be a good thing to have, given the atmosphere at the university.”
“Good call,” Eva said.
Pyotr yawned loudly.
“So where do we go tomorrow morning? Another insane asylum? Or do you want to branch out a bit?”
Eva slapped his arm with a friendly hand, laughed.
“I don’t know,” she said, becoming sombre. “That was our only lead. I have no idea where else to look.”
Pyotr sighed.
“Well, like I said: maybe she’s already left town. If that guy was telling the truth, maybe she went looking for… whoever that buyer is. Maybe she’s in Russia or something.”
“Not too likely. She might run into my dad.”
“They’re not close, eh?”
“Let’s put it this way… his sending me to jail wasn’t even close to the biggest reason they got a divorce.”
“Ouch,” Pyotr nodded appreciatively. “So, if you don’t mind me asking… why’d you hack a bank anyway? You didn’t get rich off it, I’m guessing.”
Eva winced, turned her head slightly away.
“It wasn’t about the money. Not really, anyway. I mean, I could have moved billions while I was in there, but that’s not what it was about.”
Pyotr thought a moment.
“So if not money, then what?”
Eva sighed, propped her head up on her arm and faced Pyotr. She was distant, reminiscing.
“My dad had a bit of a gambling problem. Nothing dramatic, not what you’d expect. A little here and there, but it was always under control.
“One day, my mother comes home absolutely furious, because the bank had given her a call, saying they were overdrawn on their joint account. He’d lost a mountain of money on the wrong bet, and even with everything they had, it wasn’t enough to pay it all off. All he had was this stock in a second-best security firm that was on its way out. He was scared shitless.”
“So you… you what, you stole the money back or something?”
Eva closed her eyes, shook her head.
“I thought I could fix it. I worked at it and I researched and I found a way into the bank’s systems through a stupid back door software glitch. Unpatched for years, it turns out… if they’d looked at things, they would have seen it.
“I got in one night, thought I should just steal a little bit from every account in the system. Just a tiny bit, and maybe nobody would notice.”
“Not likely. They’d see the pattern right away.”
“Exactly. Even a string of five transfers would probably get traced before I’d logged off. But that got me thinking… I didn’t need the money, really. I just needed to set things right. So I wrote a script that did a mad sweep through the accounts, moving money around. A hundred dollars from one person to another, back and forth, all over the map. I wasn’t doing anything they couldn’t undo, but when people checked their balances the next morning, they’d be in for a surprise, one way or another.”
“Mayhem. Got it.”
“The bank had to issue a warning, take massive write-downs after the ‘gifted’ customers spent money they shouldn’t have had. It was all over the news, an unstoppable scandal. Lawsuits filed, lots of firings. And the company that provided their security, they got canned right away.”
“Oh hell, you mean—”
“Yeah, the company my dad invested in picked up the pieces, and their stock surged.”
Pyotr whistled.
“Now that’s some fancy footwork.”
Eva lay back again, covered her face with her crossed arms.
“Not fancy enough. The cops traced me across ten proxy servers, figured out which internet cafe I’d been in at the time, got a bunch of CCTV footage and nailed me a week later. I didn’t even get a chance to deny it, they were so sure.
“And so I’m sitting there in jail, a fifteen year old girl, desperate for some kind of news. Anything I can get. And my dad comes in — first time I’ve seen him in weeks — and I ask him if everything’s okay with money. And he says everything’s fine. And then… then he says he wants me to confess to the police, because it’s worse for me if I don’t. And I believed him. I mean, why wouldn’t I?”
Pyotr said nothing, watching Eva speak, her voice trembling.
“He told them to try me as an adult. He basically forced them to try me as an adult. He took the money I made him, and he took his girlfriend and he moved back to Russia, and left me to rot in prison.”
“That must have hurt…”
“First six months I was there, it’s all I could think about. I wanted to get out, to find him and ruin his life. Like completely. I knew I could… there’s so much you know about your parents you can use if you try. I could have got him in such deep shit with the wrong people, they never would have found his body.”
She took a long, rattling breath, stared out at the stars again.
“But then he sent me a letter, and it changed things.”
“Changed how?” Pyotr asked gently.
“He told why he’d had them punish me. It wasn’t vindictive or petty or anything like that. He was afraid for me. He thought, ‘here is this girl I raised, and she’s become some kind of monster who breaks the law like it means nothing’, and it freaked him out. He wanted me to be better than I was, and he thought the best way to show me the right path was to punish me like that. Show me the consequences for breaking the rules.”
“Mean-fucking-spirited and messed up, Eva,” said Pyotr. “What a bastard. And wrong.”
Eva shrugged.
“He was wrong,” she said. “But he was right, in a way. Or at least, I think he showed me something I hadn’t seen. When I’d heard about his money troubles, I thought a good and reasonable way to deal with that badness was to break the rules, to even the playing field. It was justified to me. It made sense.
“And to him, putting me in prison seemed like a justifiable way to fix a problem. It was evil, and I know it ruined whatever chance he had of making up with my mother… but it made sense, you know? He thought it through, and that’s what he felt needed to be done.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” Pyotr said.
“No, it doesn’t. But it taught me something I hadn’t really seen before: nothing makes a wrong become right. These viruses, all the suffering they bring, it’s all just some fool thinking what they’re doing makes sense. And it doesn’t. They took something good and pure and fantastic and they used it to shit all over humanity.”
They lay there in the dark. Pyotr shrugged.
“See, if you told that to the cops, they might believe you’re not a virus-maker.”
She laughed, wiped a tear from her eye with her sleeve, sniffled.
“The fewer people that know that story, the better, I think,” she said.
“I think you’re wrong,” he said, propping himself up, closer to her. “I think you hiding that side of yourself, it’s just dumb. I knew you how long in university? And never once did you mention you had an inkling about computers. I thought you were all about the painting. Could never figure out why you wanted to hang around with us geeks.”
She sniffled, smiled.
“I was trying to steal you away from Maselle,” she admitted.
He laughed loudly.
“Are you saying you settled for Rhodri?”
She shrugged, avoided eye contact.
“Sometimes I like to think that was it, yeah.”
They lay there, their faces close, neither saying a word. Pyotr seemed to be thinking something, took a tentative breath, then smiled.
“We should take Pathenex boosters,” he said, getting to his knees, digging through the bag from the depot. He pulled out a pair of pill bottles, popped the tops open. He handed a pair of pills to Eva, and a small bottle of water. His went down quickly.
“What’s the second one for?” she asked, shaking the pair around in her palm.
“It’s some kind of emergency immuno-booster, plus the regular Pathenex. Should fight off whatever random crap may have made it into our systems this afternoon.”
Eva cracked open the water, swallowed both pills ably. She re-capped the bottle and put it on the floor next to her.
“We should leave first thing tomorrow,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “You’re right. My mom is probably gone already, and we’re just risking our lives by staying here. We’ve got to get moving.”
Pyotr nodded.
“I’ll go steal some more supplies tomorrow morning,” he said.
She looked at him, shy, smiled.
“Thank you for everything,” she said. “I wouldn’t have made it this far without you.”
He shrugged it off, knelt down next to her, rubbed her shoulder gently. She felt so warm, she closed her eyes and breathed into a sudden wash of tranquility.
“It’s nothing, Eva. Really. And Rhodri—”
“Not Rhodri again…” she warned, pushing his hand away. “I’m so sick of Rhodri…”
He put his hand on her cheek, brushed the hair out of her face, spoke softly.
“I’m not telling you to call Rhodri,” he said. “I was going to say… having spent this time with you… he was a fool to let you go. You’re worth fighting for.”
She smiled, but it was cut short by a kiss, and she found herself kissing back, harder and stronger, her arms wrapping round him. She shuddered as he nuzzled her neck, gripping his back with grasping fingers; and when her shirt came off, his lips on her flesh, she didn’t feel the cold, but disappeared into a swarm of colours that flowed into the night.