Meeka shrugs. “Because I figured he could have all the data in the world, but it wouldn’t make a bit of difference in a few days. You had your plan. You said you were going through with it. It didn’t matter.”
“Shit,” I blurt out, and suddenly I’m pounding my fist on the hood of her dad’s car. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
And Grayson adds a “Fuckin’ shit” for good measure.
Meeka’s head dips and her eyes turn up, like a guilty dog, but she doesn’t apologize.
I take a deep breath to steady myself. I open my hands, stretch my fingers. “Okay, so Cole could get into Logan’s bootleg cloud. Probably because he had the password. Who cares? That doesn’t matter at this point.”
“He never had the password!” Logan whines.
“He probably didn’t need the password,” Meeka says with a sigh. “I’d bet every dollar I have that GOTCHYA isn’t even a real cloud service. Knowing Cole, it’s something he created. He had all sorts of things like that. Little traps. Stuff to amuse himself. He once rigged up a motion detector, or some Bluetooth thingy that could recognize my phone. Whenever I’d walk into his trailer, it’d send me a text. ‘Hey, bae!’ or whatever. He thought it was cute. I made him take it down because I thought it was creepy as fuck.”
Uh . . . yeah. Über creepy, and totally on brand for Cole. As was conning his “friends.”
“You said this GOTCHYA cloud was free?” I ask Logan. “How much storage space?”
“Two terabytes,” he says.
“That’s the size of a really big hard drive,” I tell him. “My iMac only has a one-terabyte drive, and it’s new.”
“What are you saying?” Logan asks.
“She’s saying that all that shit isn’t floating around in the sky,” Grayson says. “It’s sitting somewhere.”
“Basically,” I add, mildly impressed that Grayson keeps barking up the right trees. “But it’s more complicated than that. Typically, a cloud service shares its information over a few different servers in different locations. And no reputable service would offer that much space for free. Assuming Meeka is right, and this is something Cole set up, then I think it’s probable that there’s a single server somewhere that hosts all of Logan’s files. A honeypot for all his secrets.”
“Which means someone else must have access to that honeypot,” Meeka adds.
“Where is the honeypot, then?” Logan asks.
“I know the first place to check,” Grayson says as he digs into his Carhartt pockets and pulls out a pair of yellow leather wood-chopping gloves. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” Logan says.
Grayson slides the gloves over his hands as he says, “Cole’s trailer. We have to see if that thing is still there.”
“What thing?” we all ask.
“His Heart.”
* * *
• • •
That trailer. That disgusting trailer.
The earthy filth, the electric noise. The stench.
The last time I was inside it, it smelled like pets—multiple pets—but as far as I knew, Cole didn’t have any. He lived alone. Okay, mice were probably there, but they don’t smell that bad. The odor was in the curtains. In the frayed carpet, in his sheets.
The last time I was inside was a week before Meeka and Cole broke up. She brought me along to help her collect things she’d left behind. She didn’t tell me the breakup was imminent. She didn’t have to. They’d been fighting for weeks, ever since the condom scare. Every time they “got back together,” she did it with the enthusiasm of someone taking the last sips of cold soup.
Even though Cole didn’t know it, things were through.
“Laundry day!” Meeka hollered as we busted into the place. She started grabbing any clothes she could find—hers, his—and stuffing them into a trash bag. At the same time, she was stuffing the bag with other things that belonged to her. Or ones she thought should belong to her. Not that Cole noticed. He was sitting on his bed, immersed in a book, the light of his Kindle cast over his bloodshot eyes.
“Love you, meerkat,” he called out. “Add a little more fabric softener this time if you could. Pretty please with kisses on top.”
“What’re you reading?” I asked.
“Everything,” he said, without looking up.
“As in?”
“How everything works. What our fragile lil’ world depends on.”
God, I hate when people read on Kindles. Perhaps you can’t judge a book by a cover, but you can judge a person by one. With Kindles, people can lie about what they’re reading. Or, like Cole—patronize. Why didn’t he just tell me the title of the book? Was he embarrassed? No. It’s because he assumed that I would never know what the book was, let alone understand it.
“It’s about physics, in other words?” I asked. “Quantum theory? The laws of the universe?”
Cole shook his head. He pointed to a bright red cube that sat on a table. “You know what that is? It’s my Heart. And it beats because of two simple things. Ones and zeroes, baby. True and false. That might sound simple, but you know what it’s capable of? It’s a cavalry. It turns boys into men and men into warriors. It’s a beacon poised to spark a revolution.”
“You’re talking . . . video games?” I asked, because honestly that’s what I thought it might be: some special gaming console.
“You’re so naïve.”
I threw my hands up in the air. “I’m trying to figure out what the heck you’re talking about, Cole.”
“You probably think guys like me are cowards, don’t you?”
“Well, if the VR headset fits,” I said, which made Meeka snort.
Cole simply sneered and said, “We’re only lying in wait, biding our time. But we’re ready to change the world. And mark my words, we will change the world.”
“First you’ll have to change your sheets. But good luck with the world too, pal.”
He turned back to his Kindle. “I don’t need luck. Just the ones and zeroes, the only things a guy can count on these days.”
The only things? That felt like a slap in the face to Meeka, but I really didn’t care. She was done with him and so was I. No more cryptic rants. No more casual misogyny. My plan was to cut off all ties as soon as the split was official. I didn’t care if Grayson continued to hang out with Cole, because Grayson was always a free agent. But I planned to make sure Logan stayed away. The breakup was an inevitability, so sides had to be chosen. Cemented.