Free Don't Let Go by Michelle Gagnon

he was a loser. His parents had made their feelings for him abundantly clear, especially after his brother died. As far as they were concerned, the sun rose and set on Jeremy. After losing him, they barely bothered to say good morning to Peter.
    Peter forced back the memories. He’d left home for a reason; his parents were conspiring with Charles Pike, and as far as he was concerned, they were every bit as guilty. Among other things, finding Loki represented a chance to access files proving their culpability.
    He and Noa entered a spindly stand of trees at the edge of a field. The evergreens were at least fifty feet tall; underfoot, a thick carpet of pine fronds muted their footsteps. Peter stopped and stared up: above the swaying treetops, glimpses of a cerulean blue sky. The atmosphere was hushed, like a cathedral. It didn’t seem like the sort of place where you’d find a world-class hacker, and he was starting to seriously question whether he’d found the right IP address after all. If Loki wasn’t here, he and Noa would be forced to keep running, while Teo and Daisy went off on their own. The thought made him want to sink to the ground and stay there.
    Noa was walking closer to him now. Breaking the silence, she asked, “Are you sure this is the right place?”
    Peter shrugged. “Pretty sure. Loki bounced off a bunch of VPNs, but they were usually the same ones, at least when he accessed /ALLIANCE/.”
    “Okay.” Her voice had lost that angry edge, he noted with relief. Maybe she’d forgiven him already.
    The nice thing about being with Noa was that he didn’t have to convert everything into layman’s terms, the way he did with Amanda and pretty much everyone else. She knew exactly what he was talking about: A VPN, or virtual private network, was a good way to protect your identity and data from everyone else on the internet. It was kind of like crawling into a secret tunnel, where most people could only tell where you emerged; your starting point was hidden. But there was a way to track it back. VPNs were most easily accessed by using a gateway close to your home city; and in Loki’s case, that had been Denver. Once Peter narrowed that down, he’d hacked into the VPN provider’s database (no mean feat, especially on an archaic Dell in a public library); then he double-checked the time and date stamps of users until he’d landed on an IP address that matched up with when Loki logged on to /ALLIANCE/. From there, it was easy; lots of sites let you do an instant IP address search, and usually they could pinpoint a computer’s location to within a mile or so.
    Of course, if Loki was half as paranoid as he came across in posts, there was a good chance he’d taken extra precautions to hide his IP origins.
    Peter sighed. Just once, he could really use a break.
    “Look,” Noa said, stopping dead. “There’s something over there.”
    Peter followed her pointing finger. Up ahead, through a break in the trees, there was a glint of light on metal.
    “That’s got to be it!” Peter said excitedly. “C’mon!”
    A small structure jutted out of the ground at an angle. They hurried over to it. As they got closer, Peter’s heart sank and his steps slowed. “It’s just a sign,” he said, disappointed.
    Noa’s face was unreadable. “Let’s see what it says.” The time outside seemed to be doing her some good; she wasn’t dragging the way she’d been lately, and there was some color in her cheeks.
    Noa brushed away the grass covering it and read, “Warning: U.S. Air Force Installation.”
    Peter’s eyes skimmed the rest: It was full of typical military bluster, threats about how trespassers would be handled and the right to search any visitors. Which seemed to stand at odds with the appearance of the sign itself; it was warped, rusty, and pocked with bullet holes. “Well, I don’t see any sign of the Air Force.”
    “Still, I don’t like this.” Noa’s green eyes looked concerned. “We haven’t