“Vin’s gonna be here,” he called back.
She heard him close the door, heard his footfalls as he left, and then slowly settled into the silence of the house. Cracking her neck, her shoulder twinging just slightly, Morana pulled her laptop across the table towards herself and turned the screen on.
Her programs that had been progressing at a shockingly slow rate were at ninety-four percent. Satisfied, but still suspicious, Morana logged into her system and opened her software for facial recognition, uploading the assassin’s picture and hitting search to run in the background. Then, she got digging into all Tenebrae Outfit related news dated back twenty years ago. A killing here, a robbery there, nothing too conspicuous and nothing too alarming. She sat on the couch, reading article after article, news clipping after news clipping, and finding nothing that could hint towards the end of the Alliance. This was surprising because usually when alliances broke, there was always a brief period of bloodshed that followed in the wake of the dissatisfaction. Twenty years ago though? Nothing. Spotless. Unreal.
Annoyed but intrigued, she changed the settings and started going through the reports on the missing girls. There were many, way too many, for it to be okay. Wild theories linking the disappearances to serial killers and pedophiles, to conspiracy theories about aliens with particular tastes in human girl babies ran rampant in the reports. The multiple cases, though well-investigated, were still open but sitting cold after so many years, rotting in the back of some shelf. The facts were mysterious - baby girls up to 3 years of age vanished. Some from parks, some from homes. One girl had disappeared from her pram in the split second her mother turned to check her bag on the street. Another had been playing outside with her sister while their mother kept an eye on them from the kitchen. One second they had been there, and the next both were gone. Cases after cases, stories after stories, unbelievable but true, went through her screen.
By the time Morana finished reading the last one, her gut was churning and eyes burning with rage. She knew for a fact two stories never made it in the reports. Two girls.
Luna Caine, disappeared from her bedroom in the middle of the night, a bedroom that had been impossible to get to without waking up her protective brother; and she, Morana Vitalio, disappeared and returned. While the media and police never connected the cases with the mob, Morana knew they were. There was no reason, other than the fact that she was the daughter of the Shadow Port Boss, why she was returned and others were not.
Morana opened up her systems and checked on her programs one by one. With facial recognition running on the man who had assaulted her at night and her older programs tweaked to find information about what was going on, she took a deep breath and opened up her tor window. It was called the darknet for a reason after all. What could not be found in the normal World Wide Web usually always existed in the shadow net.
Morana had specialized her tor window and cloaked it in layers with not one but multiple VPNs that bounced her signal to all over the world every second in real-time. This was what made tracking her or her footprints almost close to impossible. She didn’t engage in finding things through that part of the net though. Not just because it was dangerous but because the things she was forced to see while browsing made her sick to her stomach. The depravity ran unprecedented and unchecked.
It was one of the reasons she had waited so long to venture into the shadow net. But there was no other choice now. She was dead certain she’d find some clues, some answers there.
Opening up the cloaked window, Morana tuned out everything else around her and quietly fed in her keywords. Although she wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for, she knew the starting point was Tenebrae twenty years ago and the missing girls. She pressed enter.
Almost immediately, a stream of results flooded her screen rapidly, popping up one after the other. Morana kept her attention on the screen, her gaze flying back and forth over the words, saving and discarding data at a speed that marked her as a genius.
Suddenly, a dialogue box popped up on the side of her screen with a message.
imreaper00: you’re missing a keyword.
Morana froze, surprise at the message making her shake her head. This shouldn’t have been possible. Forget just finding her under the cloaks of her online identity, forget tracking her down at the speed at which her signal was flying all around the world, it should have been impossible for anyone to even discern what she was doing there. Absolutely impossible.
Yet, the message blinked at her, seemingly innocent.
She quickly clicked on the message to see the online id of the person who’d sent it, a grudging seed of admiration filling her because they flew through all her security. Her security was the shit.
A black and white skull made the icon, the negative space behind the skull making it pop on the screen. Still stunned over the fact that this reaper person had found her and made contact, Morana decided to play it by the ear and quickly typed back a response.
nerdytechgoddess00: which keyword?
She waited for a heartbeat and saw the reply pop up.
imreaper00: flesh trade
Morana felt her breath catch for a long second, the implication of those two words making her heart sink. No, god no.
nerdytechgoddess00: who are you?
The clock ticked on the wall be
hind her as she waited for the reply on the black screen.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick-
imreaper00: a friend.