PEERED OUT: CHAPTER II
The first thing she does after signed out for the last time from the Academy is head to the bank. If there was a plus side to spending time at the Academy it was this, she actually had money for once. Academy cadets received a small stipend, typically enough for personal hygiene items, dry cleaning, and a night out once a week but for a kid who had never even received an allowance, the zeroes in her account were enough to make her slightly dizzy.
She makes quick work of emptying her account and heads to a local hotel. It's not in the nicest part of town, especially for a single female carrying a sizeable amount of cash but is it clean, and quiet, and more importantly located near a 24-hour Internet café. The name and ID she uses is from one of her former classmates. Fortunately for her, the clerk at the desk was more interested in the Nationals spring training game than her and fails to notice she looks nothing like the driver's license she slid across the counter.
She makes her way to her room. It's small, slightly musty smelling, but clean nonetheless. She takes her money and begins to divide it amongst her meager belongings. It's a trick she learned years ago bouncing from home to home and old habits die-hard. It has served her well in the past and she prays to the patron saint of lost causes that it serves her well again. She smiles a small wry smile. The old penguins were right, there is some things you just never forget and in the great cosmic joke that has been her life the patron saint of lost causes is the one thing that has stuck with her. Lost causes, like this search, a voice niggles in the back of her mind. She pushes it aside; it won't serve her any good to focus on the parts of her past she can't fix. She's a shark and must keep moving forward.
The Internet café is quiet for this time of day. She buys a subscription and makes her way to a booth towards the back of the store, away from noisy neighbors and the prying eyes that followed her into the café. She logs in quickly to a off-shore server via a back channel access she installed prior to entering the Academy. Her account information is all there. "Perfect," she thinks. She will need this to access the Dark Internet, the parts of the 'net away from cat videos and Facebook status updates. The parts where, for the right amount of money, you can get drugs, weapons, child porn, or the created identity of a Midwestern only daughter of a single mother. She checks her account. It's low. She'll have to move some funds to her bit-coin account in order to pay for what she wants to do. In the meantime she'll move some funds from her fellow motel customers to her account to pay for her room. That will buy her a few days while she waits for a reply to her online request.
If she's lucky the same person who responded the first time will get in touch with her. If she's not, and she usually isn't, she'll have to go through whatever dance the new seller calls.
So she waits
And watches cat videos
There is no wrong ever in cat videos.