#ncstart

[binarynight-blog]

She’d been far away when it happened, at least physically. Mentally, she was effortlessly blasting through several simple passwords linked to some rich yachter’s security system. Her client wanted information on the yacht itself, for some reason---one that she didn’t bother to waste her time on. It had been custom built, half the parts imported from another country, and outfitted with a healthy combination of alcohol storage and private compartments. A party boat, essentially, built by the very poor for the very rich. None of that was out of the ordinary, but the stored records of the yacht suddenly going dead along with every connected system was.

At first, she thought it must have been some sort of countermeasure. But she was better than that, she would have seen it. She egressed from the dead end quickly, tried to ingress into another local server, and found herself up against the same block. After a few minutes of scouting around, she found an intact security camera, and fire swam before her vision. She pulled out a bit more, tried one further away, and saw the remnants of several buildings.

Later, after two hours of sifting through various news sources, police logs and computers, working security cameras, and connected phones that had recorded the event, Bo decided to reach out to one of her colleagues, or, as she’d begun to think of them, her proxies---gathering information for her while she simply sat at home and processed it.

It was a text message, simple, from an unknown and untraceable number.

East End “gas leak” location, need eyes on the wreckage. Don’t do a shitty job and I won’t have to come down there myself.  ---B

[bbydclll-blog]

Through a paneless window, Elle watches East End burn like a candle. She’s a block down from the warehouse, holed up in a faceless building equally as decrepit as anything characterizing the city-- even here, inside its damp walls, her face close to the peeling paint, she feels the heat of that menace fire on her cheeks. “What a joke,” she tells the baby doll in her unzipped backpack. 

She’d been nowhere near the neighborhood when the explosion had first happened, rocking the block, but she’d felt its violence anyways: first a vibration in the soles of her sneakers, like a humming bird or the chattering of skeletal teeth, and then its ear-splitting noise. She hadn’t made it there before the cops, of course not. She watches them now with the wide and glassy eyes of a china doll, wary and impatient. The swarm of policemen have mostly cleared; the papers filed, the tired eyes rubbed at, the sirens gone quiet. Now, only a few hover at the edges of the warehouse, and a lone cruiser flashes its classic red-and-blue, casting Elle’s face in a wash of warmth and cold by turn. 

Patience has never been her strong suit. She can be placated, maybe, at the expense of someone else’s efforts-- but never will she quite master stillness. She shifts her weight restlessly; blows stray hairs from her face; searches the ceiling for the secrets of the universe. What she does not do is pay attention. She hardly knows she’s in the company of someone until they’re all but right behind her.