.5 To Have and To Code (14 page)

She tried to avoid thinking about the alternatives.  “I’ll handle it.”

He frowned.  Started to say at least two different things.  And stopped, looking more uncomfortable than she’d ever seen him.

This day was not getting better.  “What?  Out with it.”  Nell stabbed a dill pickle and tried to ignore the fork warming in her palm—she didn’t want her pickle freaking toasted.

He blushed again, this time fire-engine red.  “You know what Caro would tell you.”

Yeah.  Their trainer had always been extremely clear.  Blocking fire magic was bad.  Period.  And there were only so many ways to let it out.  The fun choices required a partner.

Which left her the magical equivalent of a cold shower or knitting a scarf long enough to stretch across the continent.  Nell stabbed another pickle.  She really,
really
hated knitting.

Govin reached a hand across the table.  “Take a break.  You can’t go back there today.”

“Can’t.  We have work to do.”

He didn’t say a word.  Didn’t move his hand.  And when Nell finally looked up, his eyes held quiet, immovable mountains. 

“I hate it when you’re right.”

He grinned and stole her pickle.  “I know.”

She munched on her sandwich, resistance gone.  “I’ll send him downtown.  They always have paperwork.  He can fill some out.”  Anything was better than knitting.

Govin grinned and bit into her pickle.  “That’ll teach him to steal my avatars.”

Nell was pretty sure even paperwork wouldn’t tame The Hacker for long.

Chapter 9

Nell walked down the last two stairs to The Dungeon, more of Sammy’s cookies loaded on a plate.  Day two survival food.  And saw sexy brown curls disappearing under her desk. Good grief, did the man not use a computer like regular people?  She craned her neck, trying to see without spilling the cookies.  After the server room yesterday, she wasn’t wedging herself into any more tight places with one Daniel Walker.   “Now what?”

The curls popped back out.  “Morning.  Most people spend lots of money on Internet security and forget about the basics of keeping their equipment secure in the first place.”  He shrugged.  “You guys use top-of-the-line stuff, but someone could just walk in and take off with half of it.”

Nell felt her jaw hit the floor.  Was he stark, raving mad?  Nobody stole things from the Sullivans. 

He waved at the server room.  “There’s not even a lock on the door.”

Those were fairly redundant when you had a figure-eight sentry spell in place.  “Magic’s pretty effective at deterring thieves.”  Most of them.

Now it was Daniel’s turn to stare.  And then he crawled out from under the desk, a very odd look on his face.  He opened his mouth, presumably to explain whatever weirdness was suddenly going on—when alarms started flashing on every monitor in the room.

Nell jumped to her keyboard, fingers flying.  “Shit, shit, shit!”

Daniel was leaning over her shoulder in a heartbeat, scanning the screen.  “What?”

“Realm emergency.  Big one.”  She jabbed her finger at the screen.  “Marcus Buchanan.  Third-best player in the game.  Launched some kind of sneak attack that’s backwashing through the game-level spellcode somehow.”  Magic run amok, and from a guy who coded almost as well as she did.

She yanked on first-aid code, trying to stem the bleeding—and knew one set of hands was never going to get it done.  Three quick keystrokes and she popped the guts of Realm up on her second monitor.  Tossing a keyboard at Daniel, she split and synched their screens.  “There’s a hole in the dike somewhere.  Until we plug that, it’s just going to get worse.  Find it.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Surrounded by smart-ass men—she needed a life.  Just as soon as this emergency was fixed.  Nell ran traces on Marcus’s imploded spell, trying to find the piece that had destabilized 250,000 lines of code.  Needle-in-the-haystack time—and Jamie was off on a beach somewhere, singing sonnets to his motorcycle.

“Got it.”  Daniel’s finger drilled the screen.  “One of those weird dead-variable calls wasn’t really dead.”

She had absolutely no idea what he was talking about—but Nell, zooming in on his finger point, didn’t care.  He’d found the needle.  A freaking magical hiccup.  Pulling power, she readied a containment spell and flung it down the lines of code.  Time to de-snot the engine room of Realm.  And then she needed to have a chat with a certain grumpy witch and tell him to take his hand off the mouse
before
he sneezed next time.

Her containment spell melded into the mess and warning alarms started shutting down all over Realm.  Disaster averted—the game would stay online.  “Got it.  We need a serious cleanup in aisle three, but I think the rest is under control.”

When she finally looked up, Daniel was still mopping errant lines of code.  “You can leave that for now.  We’ll work on it this afternoon when Jamie’s back.  Cleanup’s his job this week.” 

He rolled away from the keyboard, eyes quizzical.  “This happens often?”

The truth would likely make him run screaming.  “Something that breaches the admin code—no.  That’s fairly rare.  But we get alarm bells in here every day or two.”  It amused her brother to feel like he worked on the bridge of the starship Enterprise.

“You give players a huge amount of latitude,” said Daniel slowly.  “Lots of freedoms that most other games don’t allow.”

Most games bored her silly inside of a week.  “Witches like to have fun.”

“Makes a lot of work for you.”

Nell leaned back in her chair, suddenly wanting him to understand.  “Games let us be different than the person we are in real life.  It lets people try on new things, maybe find something they can take out of the game with them.”

His head tipped to the side, considering.  “I’ve always thought you could learn a lot about a person from how they play.  I’m not sure much changes offline except the window dressing.”

She couldn’t resist.  “You spend a lot of time behind bushes in real life?”

His snorting laughter came easily—and poked at the part of her that still considered him a lowlife and a thief.  She grabbed a cookie off the plate.  Day two was trading an inferno of sparks for something far more complicated.  Sexy as hell, she could hold at arms’ length.  A guy who could laugh at himself?  That was going to be far harder to resist.

She gritted her teeth.  Time to do something a lot more boring.  “Let’s fix security problems.”  She waved at Daniel’s screen and recited Govin’s passwords from memory.  All three levels of them.

He nodded in approval, fingers flying on the keys.  “Let’s start with the image leaks.”

Nell snorted.  “You think we left open the door you came in?  Fixed those days ago.” 

He scanned the screen.  “You didn’t fix your brother’s.”

She opened her mouth to protest—and then her brain caught up with her mouth.  She’d fixed them for several two-bit players with piss-poor security on their personal computers.  It had never occurred to her to check her brother’s account.  “Wait. 
Jamie
has image-security issues?”

“Yup.”  The hint of smugness on Daniel’s face was a faint shadow of the bucketful in his mind.  “Even the best get sloppy occasionally.”

Not Jamie.  He was a teenage slob in real life, but no way—  Nell felt her fury spiking again and embraced it as an old friend.  “Wait.  You hacked into Realm through my brother’s account?”

Smug fled, replaced by something that looked suspiciously like anger.  “Yeah.  I don’t hack kids and people who use their dog’s name as their password.”

What kind of bank robber looked for the hardest way into the vault?  Nell shook her head.  And tried to fight the niggling voice at the back of her head that said it was entirely possible.  If Jamie had a weakness, it was his gypsy avatar’s freaking wardrobe.  She had enough outfits to dress half of Berkeley—assuming half of Berkeley liked gaudy silk and sparkly jewels.  He claimed it distracted the competition. 

Nell leaned forward, trying to put her mad on ice for long enough to figure out who to kill.  “Show me.”

“It was a really small hole.”  Daniel picked up his keyboard, hit a few keys, and pulled up a profile on screen.  “Here, in the last round of costume images that got added.”

She looked.  And froze.

It wasn’t Esmerelda onscreen.  It was The Wizard.

Not Jamie’s account.  Hers. 

She sucked in air and read the damning lines onscreen.  Realm’s creator and number-one player—and she’d left the barn door unlocked. 

-o0o-

Daniel could hear the landmines clicking again.  He’d stepped in something—and he had no idea what.  “It’s an easy fix.”

“I know that.”  Her words were clipped and diamond hard.  “But I never should have screwed up in the first place.”

“You can’t be watching every Realm player all the time.”

Nell stared at the screen another moment, forehead wrinkled—and then started to laugh, the hard edges suddenly melting away.  “I know.”  She turned her chair toward his and handed him a cookie, eyes suddenly dancing with mischief.  “But in this case, the watching should have been easy.”

He was so lost.

She grinned, with the kind of voltage that sent his hormones leaping for the light.  “Jamie isn’t the top player in Realm.  I am.”

He hoped the melting in his brain wasn’t terminal.  “
You’re
the Wizard?”

“Yup.”  She bit into her own cookie, face still alight with amusement—and something far more dangerous.  “And you’re the sneaky, sniveling bastard who stole my spells.”

Oh, God.  “Your brother’s the gypsy.”  The very sexy gypsy.  Daniel’s respect for Jamie flew up several dozen notches.

“Yes.  Don’t change the subject.”

It was all pretty much the same mind-blowing subject in his world.  He’d gotten them backwards.  Mixed up the sexiest woman in the world and her kid brother.  “You’re a hell of a fighter.”

“If that surprises you, you’re a hell of an idiot.”

Daniel winced.  He’d totally deserved that one.  “It was supposed to be a compliment.”

“Yeah.  Sorry.”  Her voice quieted some.  “I screwed up and it’s making me touchy.”  She sighed, breaking off another chunk of cookie.  “Too much to do and not enough brainpower for all the details.”

He settled back, finding himself intrigued, yet again, by the layers of Nell Sullivan.  He’d have expected anger, or some kind of hot-headed recrimination.  Then again, he’d also thought she wore flamboyant gypsy skirts and use her wiles on the unsuspecting men of Realm.

Ha.  She blasted them with lightning bolts.  While her teenage brother wore the skirts.

He should have figured it out.  She didn’t have the gypsy’s easy flair—and The Wizard’s fast, powerful, in-your-face gameplay suited her personality down to the ground.

Derailed by stupid assumptions.  “Sorry.  I didn’t figure your brother for the skirt-wearing type.”  And oh, shit, that had come out forty kinds of wrong.

Hot fire spit in her eyes, the kind that said mama lion was about to have somebody for breakfast.  “You have a problem with that?”

No.  Hell, no.  Some of his best friends wore skirts.  “No.  Dammit, I’m sorry.  I made a really stupid assumption, okay?  Your brother is nineteen?  And that avatar’s been playing for what, five years or so?”  It took hundreds, maybe thousands of hours to rack up that kind of game points and Esmerelda’s poised, easy play.

“Yeah.”  Nell was holding her fire, at least temporarily.  “Something like that.”

Daniel shrugged.  “So how many fourteen-year-old boys do you know with the smarts to play a female persona that well?”

A grin slid onto Nell’s face.  “Esmerelda used to look a little different.”

He could only imagine.  “Most of us don’t grow out of our comic-book-girl phase for a while.  It’s a failing.”

“Hmm.”  She seemed amused.  “And when did you grow out of yours, exactly?”

He heaped mental blessings on the head of Tiffany Perkins—high school gamer, total hottie, and the one who had convinced him that avatars with boobs bigger than their heads were rude, disrespectful, and totally impractical.  “My first librarian avatar was female.”

Nell raised a skeptical eyebrow.  “Was she an old, ugly spinster?”

He knew better than to face-plant into two stereotypes in one afternoon.  “Nope.  She was smart, sneaky, and gorgeous.”  Modeled after Tiffany Perkins, but he was smart enough to keep that part to himself.  Hadn’t gotten him anywhere good with Tiffany, either—but it had taught him the value of gaming with avatars that other players tended to underestimate. 

“Uh, huh.”  Nell’s skeptical meter climbed higher—and then the oddest look crossed her face.  “Wait.  Blonde bombshell librarian.  Totally sneaky, and way smarter than she looked.  Oh, my God.  You were Sigrún.”

Oh, hell.  Daniel wondered what incredibly stupid lasting impression he’d managed to leave at sixteen.  “I can’t be blamed for anything I did before the Internet was born.”  At sixteen, he’d been playing Maze Wars on a green-screen terminal.

And then the second shoe dropped.  Maze Wars.  “Your mom.  She was at Ames.”  The NASA center that had been the birthplace of modern gaming.