Chapter Eleven
I huddled on the wall in my parker with my hat and gloves on and still shivered against the cold. How Liliana actually had her fingers exposed so she could type I had no idea.
My friends had been kind enough to just not mention my part in the gala and, in all honestly, I'd moved past it quicker than I thought I would. Only Amber had mentioned it and I was getting better at letting everything she said go straight over my head.
Liliana's fingers clacked away and Dean and Callum looked over each of her shoulders eagerly. I sat to the side a little bit, quite happy to listen to their running commentary whilst the cold buffeted me.
"They're arranging a website to target," she explained, translating the technical jargon for the three of us. "They've been practising on smaller targets, but they want to target someone worthwhile today."
"Which one?"
"An Australian oil company that had a spill on the Great Barrier Reef last year. They want to DDOS the site."
"You think they can do it?" Callum peered over and squinted at the screen. It might have been freezing outside, but the sun was high in the sky and I doubted that any of them could see the screen very well.
"Definitely."
I rapped my nails against the back of my mobile. "Isn't that illegal?"
"Technically, yes," Liliana continued to tap along. "But you'd have to be a moron to get caught. And it's only a minor offense really, I doubt you'd get jail time."
My eyebrows knitted, but she wasn't paying any attention.
Dean raised an eyebrow. "You want to get involved?"
Liliana was nodding eagerly. "Yes. Of course. Finally something that I can help with."
"You're using the Academy's internet, is that really a good idea?" I checked, watching the trio from my perch with incredulity.
Liliana tapped the dongle plugged into her laptop. "I'm using a phone network, the Academy has no idea. A lot of people here do that to escape their Wi-Fi restrictions."
"Oh." That sounded reasonable.
"And the whole process to not even have my activity tracked back to this is really easy. It's no problem." She took her gaze from the screen for a second to grin at me. "You don't need to worry about me."
It soothed me a little, but I still kept myself way away from the screen. I didn't want to be implicated in this when the police came knocking on her door for attempting to hack an international company.
Callum and Dean bounced in their seats as they watched her work. "Can you imagine the people sat in their stupid little offices have a panic as their website goes down?" Callum barked out a laugh. "The idiots."
"Scrambling around in their big posh office that probably pollutes just as much as their stupid refining plants," Dean spat on the ground. "They're not just stupid, they're evil."
I shifted in my seat. They were seriously invested in this green movement thing. I was an outsider solely by not sharing their outrage. I mean, it was bad, I could see that, but I also didn't really blame the people working the office jobs to pay their way as evil.
"We're in!" Liliana slumped in her seat looked to her friends. "We got them. Assuming they have basic defences, their site should be down for a good twenty-four hours."
There were celebrations all round, and luckily no one looked to me for their congratulations. I was neither as invested in their cause nor as convinced that this was a fantastic idea.
As long as it stuck to dealing with people from behind a computer screen, though, I supposed they couldn't get into that much trouble.
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So this is a pretty short and rubbish-y chapter, but the next one is big on Ethan!
Thanks for all your support so far <3