.5 To Have and To Code by Debora Geary Read Free Book Online Page B

parts of that sentence were bad enough.  The last had little red spots flying behind her eyes.  Nobody raided her spell caches and lived to tell about it.  Nell slammed into a chair, fingers already heating up.  The miscreant was going down.
    “He’s gone.”  Jamie brushed spray sprinkles into his palm and licked.  “Vanished about two minutes ago.  You just missed him.”
    She glared at the messenger and yanked her hands up off the keyboard.  Fire-witch fury was never good for the electronics.  “Dammit, why didn’t you stop him?”
    “I thought the guys had it handled.”  Her brother shrugged, continuing to decimate donuts.  “It was a minion avatar he stole, and they had him pinned behind a bush.”
    Nell’s brain was making its way through the haze of fury.  “Wait, what?  Back up.”  Stealing avatars was bad, and way against the game rules, but minions had really limited abilities.  “He shielded with a minion?  Against freaking lightning bolts?”
    “Yup.  Wrote some really sweet lines of code to do it.”  Jamie grinned.  “While crouching behind a bush.  Govin nearly got him with a dagger.”
    Govin had very few weapons—and unerring aim.  He also had a very upright set of morals.  Not the guy to steal from.  Nell pulled up the gaming logs, scrolling backwards through the action.  “When did he come online?”
    “Midnight.”  Jamie crunched, adding Doritos to his donut breakfast.  “Spent most of the night in stealth mode.  Got flashed this morning when he tried to activate one of the minion’s spells.”
    Minion spells required less magic than sneezing.  “What happened?”
    “He tried it with straight coding.”
    The big difference between Realm’s public levels and the elite, private ones was the ability to blend computer code and magic.  Throwing the switch between the two was second nature to all their witch players.  Someone had obviously been way too focused on being an obnoxious ass-hat.
    Nell looked at her screen with scorn.  “Thiefs an avatar and can’t even get his basic spellcode right?”  She pulled up user data.  “Who is this joker?”  Somebody needed a refresher course on polite game play.  That happened fairly often in the public levels, but witches usually had better ethics.
    “Dunno.  I was just about to take a look when you arrived with donuts.” 
    Nell waited almost patiently—grunt work was what little brothers were for.  She helped herself to the last raspberry cream-filled.
    “Huh.”  Jamie looked a lot more serious now.  “His IP address is cloaked and his other info doesn’t match any players that have logged in for the last year.”
    There were no good reasons to cloak your IP address.  “We have a hacker?”  That was serious business—they had a lot of teenage witches in Realm to keep safe.
    The fire beginning to shoot out of her brother’s eyes was a bad sign—Jamie was a good fire witch in his own right.  Nell started scanning logs and code, looking for traces.  There were very few—whoever this was, they were very, very good.
    She got to the shielding spell he’d concocted behind the bush and felt the hard snap of two and two crashing together.  “The Hacker.  The guy who ran the levels of The Eternal Tower.  It’s him.”
    “Can’t be.  He doesn’t have access.”  Jamie’s fingers were flying again, the raucous cadence of stampeding elephants.  Or one pissed-off witch.
    “Doesn’t have legal access.”  But he’d found a way in.  Nell pulled up the shielding code again.  “It’s him.”  She was dead sure—enough time looking at someone’s code, and you learned their signature moves.  The Hacker’s style was stamped all over the intruder’s game play.  Hot coding, sneaky tricks, and dishonesty to the bone. 
    And he’d held off some of Realm’s best players with a handful of stolen spells and a bush.
    A bush .
    Jamie leaned over her shoulder, his mind easing off high