Heyyyy! Shout out to Hello it's me for the review! Thanks!
Also, I have a question so if anybody can answer it please tell me! How can I go back and edit previous chapters? There's a few grammatical mistakes I want to change but I don't know how to do that. Thanks!
~Hunter
Enjoy!
Max stood still at the base of the steel ladder as she waited for the lights to flip on. After some shuffling in the dark, the LED lights that hung crookedly overhead flickered to life. Max had to blink a few times to adjust to the sudden brightness and Max could tell her father did too as he brought a hand up to cover his eyes for a few moments, his lips frowned in a grimace.
When the two of them had been able to open their eyes without tearing up, they spotted Mo still hovering by the switch on the far side of the room. The area was big enough, renovated to be bigger than it originally was (it was now approximately 65 feet long and 20 feet wide instead of 30 by 15). There were boxes and boxes of files towered along three sides of the room. The last wall consisted of wooden tables pushed together against the wall with a line of computers and wires mangled in heaps with keyboards somehow part of the mess.
In front of the array of technology stood Mo, long fingers still lightly brushing the lever and watching them with wide eyes. Max hadn't seen her in almost two weeks and Mo had always been a thin girl, but now she was disgustingly malnourished and unclean and looked as if she hadn't changed her clothes in a week.
Max knew it wasn't the girl's fault.
But though she sympathized for her co-worker's poor condition, she kept her voice even and devoid of emotion. "You hacked into the restaurant's security cameras as well as the streets' traffic cameras and erased the crucial footage, yes?" There wasn't a "hello" or "welcome home," it was work and it was a no-feeling zone...
As long as her father was there.
"Yes," Mo murmured, and Max had to strain to hear her from across the room. The skinny kid looked down to her feet shyly, letting her mass of unruly hair shower around her sunken cheeks and bony jaw.
Max examined her further; her knees were like door knobs against flat boards of wood and her gray tank top hung loosely around her nonexistent stomach while the spaghetti straps slipped off her slender shoulders.
She was starving.
Turning to face her father, Max muttered under her breath, "She won't be of much use to you if you starve her to death, you know."
"She'll be fine," was the dismissive reply. The blonde rolled her eyes as he raised his voice and coldly told Mo to get back to work. She slunk into her broken swivel chair quietly and started typing furiously on one keyboard.
"When does Ig get back?" Ig, the only other co-worker in their business and they're designated pyromaniac, had been the driver back in London. He had gone to a separate country, but of course Max was not told of his location for security reasons. They would not hear of each other or see the other until they were both home, and it was obvious Ig hadn't made it to the bunker yet.
"Three more days. He's been in Ireland on an individual task. Monique has been screening for him."
And that was Mo's contribution to the team. She was a tech wiz and computer prodigy, and even Max (who knew hardly anything about the computer gadgets and what-nots) could tell she was insanely talented. She could hack into any security system, video network, encrypted website; basically anything that was stored in a chip or computer or database. She'd broken down firewalls to classified information in multiple countries without them knowing. She called it her "invisibility cloak." Once on the inside of these databases, she could monitor everything that was stored after she cracked the encryption it was shielded by. Decrypting codes had never been hard for Mo; it was as if she spoke the garbled language as her native tongue.
And maybe this was true as she didn't speak English nearly as much.
Max watched as Mo snuck into security cameras videoing some pawn shop and slid an empty frame of the same picture over the video as Ig stalked in, glancing up at the security camera and wiggling his eyebrows three times. The hacker slid the video of Ig to the right and onto another computer screen as she had the other video loop.
She was making Ig virtually disappear.
Not caring to watch any longer, Max made her way to the beaten yellow sofa sitting practically in the middle of the room. She was tired and felt selfish as she laid down, glancing back at Mo who sat hunched with her face inches from one of the blindingly bright computer screens, probably witnessing Ig make a kill or a bribe or a steal or some form of crime. Max could just imagine how puffy and lifeless her chocolate eyes were. The poor thirteen year old needed sun, sugar, and fun.
And sleep. Like Max was going to be getting.
Max felt her stomach clench as she thought about how much more Mo deserved sleep than she did.
New character! Yay! Sort of a filler but it's got some character development...
Review! Let me know what I can work on! Thanks!
Song of the chapter: Sleep Like a Baby Tonight by U2