Hard Wired Trilogy DeAnna Pearce (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud txt) 📖

“Just about. It wasn’t that good.” Harini rubbed her bare arms.

“You’ve been here a lot with Tricky. Almost as much as Sue. I never knew you two were so close.” Ari felt guilty for not being here more, helping, even though there wasn’t much to do.

“Hard for anyone to be close to Tricky, besides her brother. I just figured if we are supposed to be a family, we should act like it.”

Ari tried not to be defensive. “We’re all worried and working as much as we can.”

“I know.” Harini watched Tricky, something unsettled in her expression. “She’ll make it. She’s stronger than most.”

“True.” But what then? Ari needed to make this right. More than ever she needed to convince Patrick to be on the team to find the programmer. “I gotta go.”

Hari stepped into the hall and found the others headed her way.

In the midst, Marco was complaining. “I’m not buying that the zombie really loved her. He kept looking at her as a midnight snack.”

“Who knows?” Patrick replied, but was focused on Ari in front of them. “Joe, do you have a minute to talk with Ari and I?”

Joe nodded.

“Let’s head to my office.” Patrick looked around at the people still visiting.

“What about business?” Marco asked.

“Your sister had a proposition she wanted to discuss.”

“Nothing big.” She told her brother.

“Care if I join?” Marco said.

Ari said, “No,” at the same time Patrick said, “Sure.”

“Great,” Marco placed a hand on her shoulder. “Lead the way.”

She couldn’t help but roll her eyes as her nosy brother joined them on the way to the office. Patrick and Joe were up ahead, and Marco stayed near with a hand on her shoulder.

“I know something is up, little sis. You can’t hide it from me.”

“Just shut it for once. Okay.” She glared at him.

Turning into the office, they all took a seat around the table.

“Do you want to tell them or should I?” Patrick asked Ari.

Ari focused her argument. “I think that hiring an outside security team to get the designer will be too dangerous. It exposes us as a team.”

Looking around the table, Joe and Marco didn’t protest. Her argument made sense, but neither of them outright agreed either. Marco gave her a familiar questioning look.

“And…” Patrick pushed her to continue.

“And I think with my past training, I should go and retrieve.” She tried to look confident, a lot more confident than she felt. It wouldn’t be easy to retrieve it, but it would give her an excuse to leave. She’d have to figure out how to rescue Reed and retrieve the drive.

Marco chuckled. “That’s a good one. Yeah, Mom would let you go out alone to steal a drive from some dirty programmer.”

“She wouldn’t have to go alone.” Joe’s calm demeanor actually appeared to be considering it.

Ari wanted to go alone, though. “I don’t want to endanger anyone else.”

“That isn’t your call to make,” Patrick told her, some bite in his voice. He wasn’t happy about Joe’s agreement. “I won’t send you out alone, if I send you out at all. I’ll respect you enough to have a discussion about it. Joe knows this contact the best, so I wanted his opinion.”

Everyone turned to Joe. “I agree. An outside security team is only motivated by money, and someone would have to go out just to retrieve the drive. Dealing with those kinds of people is always tricky.”

“You think we’re capable of retrieving the drive on our own?”

Joe shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s worth the recon to find out. There are rumors of a guy that goes by Echo on the dark web, but they are rumors. I don’t know who or what we’ll come into. I had to pay a lot and dig a ton to get this address. Finding what’s there and what we’re up against would be smart before we decide our next step.”

“If it’s recon, then Ari doesn’t have to go. I can.” Marco leaned forward.

“No.” Her abrupt response had everyone turning towards her. She couldn’t give her hand away now. “I want to go. I want to be the one that helps Tricky. I was there when she went under.” Ari stared at her hands on the table. It helped that this lie was partly true. After a difficult swallow, she turned to Patrick. “I want to go, please.”

“Since everyone is so eager to go, how about all three of you?” Patrick purposed. “I can’t leave right now, but I trust you three to stay out of trouble.”

Marco’s grin grew a little too wide.

Chapter 19

That night, Reed came to her in her sleep. He stood in the middle the road in VLEX with shops and restaurants lining both sides of the street, except the VR morphed around them. Shops changed color or grew twice their size. One rolled backwards, a new store popping up in its place. It felt like a warper took too many tabs and couldn’t think straight. But amid all the confusion, Reed remained focused on her.

She tried to step forward and reach out for his hand, but with every step the distance between them grew. As her steps increased the distance still didn’t change, like she was on some sort of treadmill. Finally, she screamed out his name and flung herself forward.

Sitting up in bed with sheets twisted around her legs, she panted as if she had been running a mile. Turning to see if she woke her mother, Ari found Cynthia already gone. Checking the time on her HUB, she realized her mom must be getting an early start on breakfast.

Without dwelling on her dream and the knot of guilt in her stomach, Ari hurried to get ready for the day. The sooner they left, the sooner she could find Reed. There was a red-eye flight that night to Central Europe that she wanted to be on.

Once in the sky, Marco continued to give her sideways looks. She ignored him and kept her emotions tucked nicely away. Ari lucked out that