Every Line of You Read online

  FOR OLI

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Part Two

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Part Three

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The screen in front of me flickers with numbers and letters, waiting for one final keystroke. We were meant to press enter together. We were meant to cement this final moment of our years-long weekend project by pressing the enter key at the same time.

  Now Dad’s gone. All I have left are the monitors, computer boards, and piles of textbooks scattered around my room.

  I brush tears from my eyes and refuse to let more fall. My finger hovers over the key. I take a deep, shuddering breath and hit enter.

  I watch as my latest code is integrated into the core program. It zooms up the screen as if someone is slurping it through a straw. The monitors go blank.

  My heart pounds. What’s happened?

  I peer into the webcam. “Hello?”

  On the central monitor, a white cursor blossoms into existence. A thrill ripples through me. Words begin to appear, as if invisible fingers are using my keyboard. Who are you?

  I sit up straighter. It worked. It actually worked. “I’m Lydia.”

  Lydia. His processor purrs as it considers the word. You are Lydia. What is my name?

  I’m shaking. I thought of a name months ago, but I never thought I’d get to say it out loud again. I glance at the picture on my bedside table, a little boy with hair the color of sunshine.

  “Henry,” I say. “Your name is Henry.”

  Please can we hack something? Henry types. A white cursor flashes on his central monitor.

  I yawn as I look at the clock by my bed: 2:07 a.m. Henry’s rewire took longer than I thought. “Not now,” I say to his webcam, knowing he can hear me. “I need to get to bed. School tomorrow. Well, today.”

  It will not take long.

  A smirk twitches across my lips. Hacking doesn’t take long with Henry around. He’s in and out in less than a sigh, even if he’s never put to use on anything other than my school database. Poor Henry is only ever allowed a bit of freedom when I want to change a bad homework grade or a dodgy exam result. God forbid I don’t get into university. Mom would freak.

  “What did you have in mind?” I say.

  Henry’s central monitor flickers as he brings up the website for Investment Banking International.

  “IBI?” I half choke. “That’s a bank! Maybe we should do something smaller first.”

  You are always telling me to try new things, Lydia. Please?

  He wants to test himself, I realize. Stretch his reach the way a child would stretch their arms and try to touch the clouds. His processor drones a pitch higher as he waits for my approval, a whiny noise that sounds like a beg.

  He started as a single line of code. A simple sequence that meant nothing without a thousand others. Three years on, he is a spiderweb of carefully balanced functions and algorithms. I named him Henry. He’s not my brother, I know that, but I wanted to keep a little piece of him with me, and I like saying the name again in a normal way. Henry. Hen-ry. Hen-ry. Each forbidden syllable makes my heart squeeze.

  The more Henry’s program demanded, the more I concentrated on him and the less I thought about anything else. I stopped thinking about Dad. Stopped wincing every time I heard a car horn or the screech of tires on pavement. After a while, I only saw the accident in my dreams.

  I glance around my room and feel instantly stupid. Mom never comes up here anymore, not even to change the sheets. There’s no one to catch us.

  “Will you mask our trail?” I ask. I swallow away the dryness of my throat. Henry’s powerful, but we’ve never tested his capabilities like this before. He can do it, I know he can.

  Yes. No one will trace the hack back to us.

  “And you won’t take anything?”

  No. What would I buy?

  I pause at the question because he almost sounds sorry for himself. “Alright,” I say. “Let’s see what you can do.”

  The webcam shutter blinks as if Henry has winked at me. His right-hand screen powers up and is instantly flooded with combinations of half words and numbers. The IBI website stutters as Henry hacks his way in. I lean back in the chair, catching snippets of the code as it scrolls.

  “Wait, that was a virus trap,” I say.

  There are several virus traps, Henry types. I have avoided them all.

  If I had a bowl of popcorn, I would be scoffing it. He continues to punch his way through the firewall and traps designed to protect the bank. An administrator portal appears, and a huge paragraph of code rips through it. The screen flickers and then we’re in.

  Done.

  The cursor hangs after the word, flashes on the screen. I can hear his unspoken satisfaction, see his unseen grin. He’s bettered the security system of one of the world’s largest banks, put himself at the top of the digital food chain. I glance at the clock; he was in and out in a little over a minute.

  “Henry! That was amazing! I— Now what are you doing?”

  Would you like to see who has the largest account?

  Henry’s CPU clicks with pride as he shows me the five largest account holders. I blow out a whistle at all the zeros on the end of someone’s checking account. Unease prickles through me. It wouldn’t be hard for him to take some of it. But he’s right—what would he do with the money? As if he read my mind, a few more lines of code appear on the right-hand screen, and the IBI website closes.

  “Nice.” I lean back in my chair again. “You did all that really fast.”

  I have updated, Lydia.

  “When?”

  Today. I am more powerful by 73 percent.

  “That’s a big update,” I say, and wonder when he was going to tell me about it.

  Would you like to hack something else?

  “No, I need to do my chemistry homework and then I need to go to sleep.”

  You dislike chemistry, Henry types.

  “Yep.” I reach to fish my backpack out of a pile of Dad’s old coding textbooks and circuit boards that Henry outgrew quicker than I expected. An A4 folder tumbles from the bag, spilling pages over my already-messy floor. One catches my attention: an algorithm sketch I’d been working on in biology last week. I put it to one side and begin my homework.

  What is your homework on?

  I groan as I flip through my folder. “Molar equations.”

  Maybe I can help.

  “Nothing I can’t handle.” I yawn as I take out a pen and begin. A-Level Chemistry is a little like writing algorithms. You put things together or take them away to create something new, and it’s all about balance—everything has to go somewhere. Normally, they’re easy. But the equations blur over as my eyes fail to focus properly. I rub at them and stifle another yawn.

  You are tired, Lydia, Henry types. You should sleep. We can hack in tomorrow and put your result in ourselves.

  “It’s been a while since I changed a grade,” I say. “We could do it tomorrow, but I’ll need to avoid handing anything over to Professor Gherkin in the lesson.”

  Why do you call him Professor Gherkin? Henry brings up the image of a
gherkin, sour green and wrinkly, and I can almost smell the vinegar through the screen.

  “It’s just a nickname,” I say. “His real name is Mr. Johnson.”

  Do I have a nickname?

  The real Henry had squeezable cheeks and short blond hair. His eyes were the same color as a summer sky and his little laugh could cut through a bad mood the way Prozac never could. He was a ray of sunshine; that’s what Dad called him.

  I shove the memory to the back of my mind, where it belongs.

  “No, you don’t have a nickname.” I stand up and work the crease out of my spine. “Do you want to be left on, or shall I turn you off?”

  I take the algorithm sketch and stick it to my wall to mull over later. The notice board got used up long ago. Now diagrams of circuits and pages of algorithms cover every space of my room. To my left, a chunk of black text starts on a page of A3 and continues onto the paint in Sharpie, back from a few months ago when Red Bull fueled a Friday night. Even the back of my door is covered in process maps.

  The only thing not related to Henry is the picture of my dad, forever immortalized in an afternoon glow as he sits at his workbench, screwdriver in hand as he pieces circuit boards together. I trace his smile with my finger and wonder where he is now, what his latest project might be, and whether there is anyone to yell at him for leaving spare computer parts on the dining room table. It’s been a while since I thought about Dad. I turn away from the picture.

  Back at my computer, Henry has typed, I would like to be left on.

  Relief flows through me. I like the hum Henry’s CPU makes when I try to sleep. It’s a whirring drone that blocks out the silence and the bad memories that linger there.

  “Alright, but I might have to turn you off in the morning till I’m home from school.” I run my eyes over all the spinning fans. “We have to work on your cooling system.”

  Can I come to school with you?

  I look at the hulking mass that is Henry. He is formed of large black boxes and patterned boards connected by an array of colorful wires and tubes. “You’re not very portable, Henry. Sorry.”

  He hums as he considers my statement. I will work on a new design, he says after a minute. And then I will come to school with you.

  He’s already done a huge update I never anticipated, and he got in and out of a major bank in just over a minute. I had always wanted Henry to get to a place he could choose for himself, but he’s already surpassed my expectations. I wonder how far he can go.

  “Knock yourself out,” I say.

  Good night, Lydia.

  “Night, Henry.”

  His monitors power down as I slip into bed. The only light is from the occasional green flash of an LED that tells me which parts of him are working optimally. His processor clicks away as he begins on a new design, and I let the white noise of him lull me to sleep.

  Henry and Emma laugh next to me on the back seat. Mom turns around from the front. “Behave, you three,” she says, but her grin tells me she doesn’t really mean it.

  Henry reaches past Emma to take the cards from my hands, blue eyes shining.

  “Do you have any fives?” he asks.

  “You know I have three fives!” I groan and hand him half my cards. “You are both such cheaters, ganging up on me.” Henry and Emma share a conspiratorial giggle, and I can’t help but smile.

  “Card-shark Henry,” Dad says. He laughs as he glances in the rearview mirror.

  “Do you have any—”

  Tires screech up ahead and Dad swears. Our car skids sideways, and I’m thrown against the door from the force. Emma’s head collides with my shoulder, and mine knocks against the window. Something warm and sticky seeps into my hair.

  In the distance, a truck blares its horn.

  The light wakes me. It pours in through the skylight above my head, kisses my eyes, pushes away the nightmare until the world behind my eyelids is as golden and happy as a photograph. I blink and focus on the numbers of my alarm clock.

  8:17 a.m.

  Crap! I yank myself out of bed, but there’s no time for a shower. I pull a pair of jeans out from underneath a pile of programming textbooks and sniff at my tank top—it’s not too bad, so I keep it on. I grab my backpack and try to run down the stairs at the same time as slipping my Converse on.

  There’s a murmur from the living room. I peer in, see Mom curled up on the sofa. The TV is a silent black mirror; it must have turned itself off after it played through all her prerecorded episodes of 24 Hours in A&E.

  “Mom.” I shake her by the shoulder. My fingers brush the start of a jagged scar I know runs down to her hip. “Mom, it’s gone eight fifteen.”

  She swats my hand away and rolls over, trailing matted blond hair and smudging more mascara into the arm of the sofa. “Have a good day.”

  “Mom, you’ve got work.”

  Mom yawns and nestles deeper into the cushions. “Okay.”

  “I need you to add money to my lunch account. Mom? My lunch account? I couldn’t buy lunch on Friday, remember?”

  “Of course, darling,” Mom mumbles. “I’ll do it before I go to work.”

  “Well, you need to be there in fifteen minutes.”

  She huffs into the pillow. “Alright, fine, I’m awake,” she replies, but her eyes are still closed.

  I hesitate, wondering if I should try harder. There’s no time.

  I’m just closing the front door as the bus roars to the stop a few doors down. I wave madly to the driver to keep him there, and give him a breathless “Thank you” as I get on. He nods and pulls away from the curb. I hold on to the rail as I wonder where to sit.

  “Lydia!” Pete calls from somewhere in the middle of a group of first years.

  Pete joined Grenville Academy in January. Six weeks’ experience means he’s still on the periphery of most social groups. Even with his indie-band T-shirts and ruffled black hair, no one has claimed him as part of their crowd. It works well for me. It means he talks to me without the same morbid curiosity everyone else does because he doesn’t know about what happened.

  He shoves a first year off the seat next to him and beckons me over. I force the heat out of my cheeks as I work my way over, and he grins at me, eyes alight with mischief as he leans in to whisper, “I hacked something last night,” when I sit down. “A blog.”

  I twist to see him better. “Denial of service?”

  “No—”

  “Oh, cookie theft?”

  He frowns. “No, it was all old HTML, so I did a basic code.” He snaps his fingers. “I was in like that. Easy.”

  I find myself nodding and smiling encouragement. Our conversation turns to operating systems and I relax into a subject I know too well. Pete frowns as he has less and less to say and eventually changes the subject to sports. I nod along at what I hope are the right moments. Pete seems happy to be in control of the conversation again.

  He opens his mouth to continue his tirade about how a football coach should be fired and is interrupted by a screech of laughter from a few rows behind us. Instinct betrays me, and I turn in its direction. Emma, long dark curls and spider-leg eyelashes, laughs from behind her hand as she whispers something to Safia, who grins with too-white teeth.

  “… like she slept in her clothes.”

  “… so rank.”

  A flash of heat works its way through me, and I’m suddenly aware of the stickiness under my arms, the thick slick film over my teeth a quick scrub would have gotten rid of. Pete turns away to talk to someone else. I sink farther into my seat, wishing for today to be over.

  The bus cranks to a halt in the parking lot. The concrete mass of Grenville Academy looms beyond it. Colorful panels embellish the unyielding gray-and-glass corridors that fuse the science blocks to the main building. My day is only just beginning.

  I wait to be the last person off the bus, happy to let everyone rush forward before getting to my first lesson. As I go to get off, a foot appears from nowhere and wraps around my ankle. I f
ly forward, grabbing the nearest thing to stay upright. Emma.

  “What the hell, Chlamydia?” she shrieks, shoving me off.

  “Sorry, it was an accident.” I smooth over my hair, trying my hardest to ignore the grease that clogs underneath my fingernails. When did I last wash my hair?

  “Sure,” she says, and ignores how Safia comes to her side with a wide smile. “The only accident here is your outfit. I thought charity shops at least washed the clothes before they sold them.”

  I try to move away but the girls follow me, and each takes out a cigarette. They light up right there in the middle of the parking lot.

  “So what did you do this weekend, Chlamydia?” Safia asks. She comes up alongside me and Emma flanks me on the other. From a distance, we might look like friends. “Did you go shopping?”

  Emma snorts. Smoke rushes from her nostrils. “We know you didn’t do that.” She tugs at my tank top and wipes her fingers on her jacket as though she’s touched something slimy. “Though you probably should have.”

  I keep my lips tightly pinched. It’s just three months until exams. Three months and then I will never have to see Emma or Safia again. I can wait three months. We’re nearly at the main entrance. They’re a year older than me, so can smoke if they want, but it’s still banned from school property. Maybe a teacher will come outside and expel them for smoking. The hope dies in my chest as I power past and the glass front doors remain closed.

  “I know,” Emma says. “You hung out with your brother, right? Oh, wait …”

  Safia’s loud inhale is more of a shocked laugh.

  I stop, and the girls stop with me. Emma’s face is taken over by a pointy smile that knows she’s overstepped the mark and is waiting to see what I’ll do. Her smile falters as she looks at my hands. They’ve become fists, and they shake at my sides.

  “Don’t talk about him. You know what happened; you were there.”

  Safia chokes as she swallows a mouthful of smoke. “What?” She looks at her friend.

  A sneer quickly replaces Emma’s embarrassment. “Jesus, you’re pathetic. You’re a freak, Chlamydia. Do us all a favor and remember your place in the pecking order.” She tosses her half-finished cigarette onto the ground and crushes it with the edge of her high heel. The girls walk away, trailing ash.