Page 60 of The Honeymoon Hack

Server Location: A string of alphanumeric characters.

Shit.

Not a readable location code. A hash. Probably salted, which meant even if I had hours to work on it, I’d never decrypt it without knowing the algorithm and salt value.

I stared at the encrypted field, mind racing through possibilities. There had to be another way to find it. Were maintenance logs an option? Or work orders where someone had physically accessed?—

Movement in my periphery.

Claire and Ken had finished.

I closed the Meridian results before Ken reached my desk. He didn’t look relaxed and friendly anymore. Maybe a little embarrassed. Definitely annoyed.

“Sorry about that.” He pulled his ID card from the slot, and my screen went blank. “Claire’s right. Probably better to stick to the training videos for now. Protocol and all that.”

“Of course. Thanks for showing me around, though. It was helpful.”

“Anytime,” Ken said, his voice full of sarcasm. He grabbed his coffee mug and headed back to his own workstation across The Bridge.

I re-inserted my own ID, and the training video popped up again. The boring woman was ready to tell me how to escalate tickets to supervisors. I put my headset back on and hit play.

Claire settled into the chair Ken had vacated. She said nothing at first, just watched the video with me for a few seconds. “How much of the system did you explore?”

A test. Obviously a test.

“We’d only started.” I paused the video and took off my headset. “Ken showed me how to search for a client, and we looked at one of his recent cases. A company with multiple subsidiaries.”

“Did he show you how authentication works across subsidiary accounts?”

“He explained each subsidiary can have its own authentication, but they’re all linked to the parent company in the system.” I kept my eyes on the training video. “It was fairly straightforward.”

“It is, once you understand the architecture.” Claire was still watching me, not the screen. “When you were at Redoubt, did you work with clients who had complex corporate structures like that?”

Like everything with Claire, the question came out casually. It was anything but.

“Not really,” I said. “Redoubt’s client base was mostly small to medium businesses. Pretty simple setups. This is definitely more complex than what I’m used to.”

“You’ll adjust quickly. Finish the training modules. Once you’ve completed them and demonstrate proficiency with the basics, we’ll get you into the client database properly.” Clairestood, apparently satisfied with whatever she’d been testing for. “With your own credentials.”

Chapter 23

Will

“The server’s location was encrypted,”Brie muttered as she paced the length of our room. From the window-like display, past the bed and the bathroom, to the door, and back again. “There’s no way for me to decrypt it. I wasthisclose to what we were looking for!”

I nodded from my desk chair, absently fiddling with my dismantled earbud case. The tiny components gave my hands something to do while my mind processed her report.

“You found the client that links back to Fenix,” I said, glancing up at her. “Don’t devalue such amazing news.”

“But knowing they exist doesn’t get us into the actual server.” She twisted her wedding band around her finger. This was why she rarely wore jewelry—she was too much of a fidgeter. “Ken has yellow access. If it was encrypted when he logged in, that means the server location details require the user to be at least white level.”

“Good thing Scarlett’s taking care of your access tomorrow.” I turned back to my earbuds, grabbing a set of tweezers to replace the battery. Hopefully, the final touches I’d made overthe past couple of days would allow the earbuds to connect to the Wi-Fi directly, without triggering the AI.

Brie halted suddenly, voice pitching up. “Even with better access, I can’t log into the Meridian server from my terminal in The Bridge. Do you know how easy it is to see anyone else’s screen? And they allknowI’m a greenie, so if I access something I shouldn’t, it would be obvious!”

“You need to get into the server room for local access.”

“Exactly.” Physical movement had always helped both of us process complex challenges, but her idea of movement was much larger than mine. She paced; I tinkered. “I’d still need to deal with the cameras, but from what I saw when we arrived on Wednesday, the guards in the control center aren’t analyzing every face of every person in the server rooms.”