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Paige Penderson shiveredand yanked her down jacket tighter around her shoulders. The van’s heater sputtered against the damp chill of a Croatian winter as her breath fogged the air. Outside, the Adriatic stretched gray and uninviting, contrasting its usual postcard-perfect blue.
Normally, excitement would buzz through her, her fingers itching to dance across her keyboard. As Redemption Inc’s cybersecurity expert, these missions let her flex her considerable tech muscles and prove her worth. She relished being the invisible puppet master, manipulating digital strings to safeguard her friends and clarify their objectives.
But today, the usual thrill eluded her. The screens before her, typically a source of comfort and control, taunted her with blinking cursors and scrolling data. Ever since that disastrous Arctic mission three weeks ago, a flatness had invaded Paige’s world. It drained the color, leaving only shades of gray as dull as the sea outside.
She shook her head, attempting to banish the funk. Her team needed her at her best, especially with Jason still missing. They’d chased their teammate across the globe and back thesepast few months, but with the Consortium hounding him, he couldn’t linger in one place long enough for them to rescue him.
If they didn’t persuade him to rejoin them soon, the Consortium would find him. Eventually.
Paige’s thoughts drifted to her father, gone two years now. What would he do in this situation? The legendary coder would have relished the challenge. His words echoed in her mind, carrying that familiar playful tone: “The beauty of networks, kiddo, is that they’re living things. They breathe, they grow, they leave footprints. You just need to learn to track them.”
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, remembering the late nights they’d spent huddled over lines of code, her father teaching her the art of digital warfare. He would have found a way to buy Jason time, to throw the Consortium off balance. Maybe a distributed denial-of-service attack on their communications network? Or a cleverly disguised backdoor into their tracking systems?
A sad smile tugged at her lips. Her father would have reveled in outmaneuvering the Consortium, seeing it as the ultimate test of his skills. But that was before the bad times. Before she got kicked out of college and a chilling distance had grown between them. The fact was, though he died two years ago, Atticus Penderson had kept her at arm’s length ever since. No more words of wisdom. No more gentle teasing. No more coding challenges late into the night, complete with burned microwave popcorn.
Not since MIT.
She gritted her teeth, flexing her fingers hard against the ache of loss. Nothing she could do about that now. The mission was her focus.
She straightened in her chair, a newfound determination coursing through her veins. She might not be able to match herfather’s legendary status, but she had inherited his stubborn resilience. And right now, Jason needed that more than ever.
“Some vacation spot,” she muttered, her eyes darting between the array of screens before her. The van hummed with the latest tech, a stark contrast to the dreary weather outside. “Mason, how’s it looking out there?”
Mason’s gravelly voice came through her earpiece. “All quiet. Too quiet.”
Paige nodded, though he couldn’t see her. The knot in her stomach tightened as she watched Bridger and Fenn’s heat signatures move through the abandoned mansion on her thermal imaging display.
“Tai, give me a drone’s eye view of the south wing,” she requested.
“Coming up now,” Tai replied. A new feed popped up, showing a bird’s eye view of the once-grand Baroque edifice. Broken windows gaped like missing teeth, and an algae-filled swimming pool lurked in the overgrown garden, a sickly green against the winter-dead grass.
“Kate, status at the airfield?” Paige asked, running through her mental checklist.
“All clear here,” Kate’s steady voice responded. “Plane’s fueled and preflighted. We can be wheels up in five.”
Paige took a deep breath, trying to settle her nerves. “Graham, how’s the perimeter?”
“Secure,” came the terse reply. “No movement detected.”
As Bridger and Fenn moved deeper into the mansion, Paige watched their progress with growing unease. The interior looked like something out of a horror movie—punched-out walls, mold-covered wallpaper peeling in long strips, broken furniture scattered like discarded toys.
“Getting some weird echoes here,” Fenn reported. “This place is seriously creepy.”
“Stay focused,” Bridger ordered. “Paige, any signs of recent activity?”
She scanned her readouts. “Nothing definitive. Wait—Fenn, pan left. What’s that?”
The camera shifted, revealing a single designer stiletto with a broken heel, dust and pin-sized spots of black mildew obscuring the original color.
“Well, well,” Fenn drawled. “Looks like Cinderella had a rough night.”
“Can we stay on mission, please?” Paige snapped, more harshly than she intended.
Minutes ticked by as the team methodically cleared room after room. With each empty space, her hope dwindled. Finally, Bridger’s voice came through, heavy with disappointment.
“Place is full on empty. A total bust. Whoever sent that intel was wrong.”