Novels by Blaqwritez

Sophia was halfway across the ballroom when her mother caught her arm."Sophia! Photos, darling, photos!" Helena's mascara had run, but her smile was enormous. "Dr. Reyes wants a picture with the whole family. The newspapers are here. Come, come!"Sophia tried to pull away. "Mom, wait, I need to...""Whatever it is can wait. This is the most important night of your father's life!"Helena dragged her back toward the stage, where the photographers were already lining up the Tans beside Dr. Reyes. Jason pushed himself into the middle of the picture. Bernard put his heavy arm around Philip's shoulders. Grandma Grace stood a little apart, leaning on her jade stick, saying nothing.Sophia stood at the end of the row. Every time a flash went off, her eyes slid away from the camera and back across the room to the shadows by the sound booth.I didn't wait for her to break free.I pushed my empty cart through the service door, left it in the kitchen corridor and slipped out the back of the hote

For one second, nothing happened.Then the blue light on the giant screen flickered, very slightly, like a candle when a door opens somewhere far away."Thank you for the question, Director Corbin," AURA said in its calm, kind voice. "I will answer honestly."Corbin smiled at the audience. "Of course you will."The screen changed.The soft blue light disappeared, and in its place came a map, clean and bright, a chart of lines and boxes. At the top was a small icon of a hospital worker. A line ran from the worker to a box labeled Sentinel Systems."When Sentinel collects a scan," AURA said, "it is first sent here.""Exactly," Corbin said, nodding. "Safe and secure in our own...""Then," AURA went on, as if he hadn't spoken, "it is sent here."The line kept moving. It left the Sentinel box, passed through three small grey boxes marked Relay, and ended at a final box in the corner of the screen. The box had no name. Only a code.ANX-7."The information is stored on an unlisted government

The ballroom of the Crestport Grand Hotel was the kind of place where rich people went to look at other rich people.Crystal chandeliers hung from a ceiling painted with gold clouds. Round tables covered in white silk filled the floor, each with a tall glass vase of white roses in the middle. At the front stood a stage with a giant screen behind it, already glowing with a slow, beautiful animation: the Sentinel Systems logo, a silver shield, turning gently in the air.I carried my fortieth box of brochures through the side door and set it down on a cart."Faster," Helena hissed, sweeping past me in her new green silk dress. Her diamond earrings swung as she turned her head. "The Hendersons are already here. And fix your collar. You look like a waiter.""I'm dressed as a waiter, Helena.""Mother," she said through her teeth, and smiled at a man across the room.By seven o'clock, the ballroom was full and loud. Three hundred guests: bankers, hospital directors, tech company owners and h

"You'll carry the brochure boxes," Helena said, without looking up from the dress catalog on her lap. "Two hundred of them. From the van to the ballroom, then to every table. And you'll wear the black waiter's jacket. I won't have you embarrassing us in that hoodie in front of the whole city.""Yes, Helena.""Mother." She turned a page. "In public, you call me Mother. People talk."It was Wednesday evening, three days before the gala, and the Tan family was busy with the most important thing in the world: what Helena would wear. She'd ordered a new dress in deep green silk from a shop on Harbor Avenue that cost more than the company paid me in six months. Philip had signed the credit card slip without a word.Nobody had asked if the company could afford it, least of all Helena. Since the new Pulse, everyone in the house acted as if the fifty-million-dollar debt had already disappeared."And don't speak to anyone important," Philip added quietly from the doorway, not unkindly. "Not ton

I didn't run down the stairs. Running gets noticed. I walked, at the speed of a bored man with an armful of cables, all the way back to the IT desk on the third floor.Then I sat down and opened the security system.The cameras at Tan Dynamics ran on a cheap AURA security package, the same kind half the offices in Crestport used. I could have opened it with the Ghost Key in a second. But I didn't need to. I was the night-shift IT worker, and the camera system was part of my job.I pulled up the eighth-floor hallway and scrolled back to four in the morning.The screen was grey.I frowned and scrolled further. Four ten, grey. Four twenty, grey. A small line of text sat in the corner of the window: Recording error. File corrupted. 4:02 a.m. to 4:40 a.m.Exactly the minutes I'd been in Sophia's office. Not a minute more, not a minute less.I hadn't touched it. Not once.I sat there with my hand on the mouse for a long time. Old cameras broke all the time; the system was cheap. That was wh

The night shift at Tan Dynamics started at ten. By eleven, the building was empty except for me, a security guard named Gus who slept in the lobby, and the hum of the servers.It was perfect.I didn't use my old laptop. I didn't use the Ghost Key. If I was going to rebuild Pulse, it had to be clean, with not a single line of Genesis code anywhere inside it. Anyone who knew Genesis well enough might recognize my hand in it, and the people who knew Genesis well enough were the people hunting me.So I started with a blank screen and the company's own tired computers.The first night, I tore Pulse apart.It was worse than I'd thought. Somebody years ago had built the patient records on top of an old billing program, then built the medicine schedules on top of that, then built the surgery lists on top of that. It was a tower of wobbly blocks, and every time a hospital added a new patient, the tower leaned a little more.I didn't patch it. I made a list of everything Pulse needed to do, eve