Apparently, Naz’s family, and Roz’s ... well, they were criminals. Not the kind of criminals that hurt Penny, but criminals under the law, anyway. And they had been that way for a long time. Penny never asked about it, she didn’t think the details of what the internet told her where mafia families had reigned in New York for years was something she really needed to understand, but here she was.
“What’s the code for?” Penny asked.
Naz sucked air through his teeth. “That’s ... a harder answer.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“That’s a non-answer.”
Naz gave her a look. “I just don’t think I should talk—”
“Is it about the mafia?”
He kept staring at her, expression unmovable. “And what do you know about that?”
“What I found on the internet.”
“That shit lies.”
“But does it really?”
Naz’s cheek twitched. “Are we talking about this code or the fucking mafia?”
“You’re not a very good liar, are you?”
“Not to people I care about, no.”
Huh.
He cared about her.
Penny peeked at the screen. “Is it going to run something?”
“Yes, a program.”
“That does what?”
“Crawls the dark web, the public internet, and government servers, so long as they don’t detect it. It’ll cross countries, it’ll even break through the secure internet protections countries like China has that they use to monitor and control their citizens.”
Penny’s brow dipped. “But why?”
“That’s the hard part.”
“Why?”
Naz straightened and folded his hands over his knees as he stared at her. “You told Roz there was a network of people involved in the ... thing your father was doing. Right?”
Penny swallowed hard. “So what?”
“When the police asked you for more information about that, you went quiet.”
“Because look what they did with my father.”
“Right,” Naz said, “but there are still people out there, Penny ... hurting kids.”
“And?”
“This program is going to catch them—or at the very least, identify them, and then gather evidence of their business on the dark web, which will then be compiled into zipped, protected files before being delivered to whichever law enforcement is closest to their areas.”
She blinked.
That sounded ... “That’s impossible.”
“No, it isn’t. I had a base program to work off—one that was made decades ago called Thorn. It crawled the dark web looking for child porn, which it would then try to match using facial recognition and other landmarks, should the photos include those, to real children. The problem was, that was a white hat system. It only worked legally. It didn’t go over the line into the gray, or outright black, sides of hacking on the dark web. So, it had limitations. Mine does not, and since it will run constantly without me needing to touch it, and as I have it going through so many servers that it’ll never be traced back to me. Or rather, it would take them a very long time to figure out it was me.
“This program will hack into government databases, into school databases. It will pull pictures of children from online yearbooks, and teachers from school websites. It will pull criminal records, and it will look into workers whose photos are on the internet. I have a friend who is also working with a guy that runs a program which hacks into every single security camera that runs on Wi-Fi, which means at some point, it will also be able to just—”
“Run through faces from the general public,” Penny said faintly.
Naz nodded and pointed at the laptop. “That was the last bit of code needed. All I have to do now is hit that black button where it says RUN in the left-hand corner, and the system will be live in the dark web.”
“Can’t other people detect it, or—”
“Highly unlikely, given the way it was designed.”
“Don’t the people using the dark web have things to protect—”
“It’s going to hack into those systems, too. It’ll create small wormholes that will be virtually undetectable, which will suck in their coded information, before running through it to decode as much of it as it possibly can. That will leave the program with information of the people behind the forums.”
Holy shit.
“I know it doesn’t change what’s already happened,” Naz murmured, “and it’s not going to make your life better or easier to get through what’s been done to you, Penny, but it’s going to help someone else. It’s going to save someone else. Nobody gets to change the past—we can only change the future.”
“Yeah ...”
“The code is finished. You can press the black button, if you’d like.”
She stared at the screen for a while.
Naz waited her out.
Then, without warning, Penny leaned forward, and hit the RUN button. The screen blinked, the white background turning black as the words turned white and began to scroll. It was almost beautiful, really.
“I still wish he was dead,” Penny muttered.
“I can make that happen, too.”
Naz said it so flippantly.
That’s how she knew he wasn’t lying.
“But would you?” she asked quietly.
“You should watch the news more often,” Naz said instead, “I hear you learn a lot from it.”
What did that even mean?
He didn’t give her the chance to ask.
“How many names of people do you know that can be tied to this ring your father was involved in?”
“Not many. I rarely got their names.”
“But some,” he pressed.
“A few,” she whispered.
“Would you write them down for me?”
Penny glanced over at him. “Why?”
“Sometimes, we just don’t get what we want from the law, Penny.”
Well ...
He wasn’t wrong.
“MISS DUNSWORTH, WHAT is the square root of—”
“Pass,” Penny muttered.
“You can’t just pass a question because you don’t want to answer it, Penny.”
She sighed. “Pass.”
Light laughter filtered through the classroom, but Penny was more interested in staring out the window. She would much rather do her studies online, or even with a tutor at home, but the chick who came around every once in a while to check in on Penny, and her living situation being fostered with Roz and Naz said it would be better for her to be in school.
With people.
Yuck.
The only good thing about this hell was the fact that Roz had allowed Penny to pick what school she wanted to attend, and then Naz came in to drop a whole bunch of money to make sure Penny had just enough freedom to breathe here.
Like now.
Sticking her hand up, the teacher’s gaze drifted to her. “Yes?”
“I want to go see Mrs. Canns.”
The school counselor.
The teacher’s lips pursed like she was considering refusing Penny’s request, but the woman eventually nodded with a jerk of her thumb toward the door. It took Penny no time at all to pack up her shit, and head out of the classroom, leaving the rest of the teenaged idiots behind her. She was only here because she needed to be—she needed a fucking diploma.