Free No Escape by Michelle Gagnon

least a debit card to get through the day.
    Noa logged on to her bank account, then checked the credit card companies. None of them could get her cash or a card replacement outside of a twenty-four-hour window, which meant she’d be stuck on the street until then. Not the worst thing in the world, but more than anything right now she wanted to be alone. The girl behind the register was still eyeing her, and Noa met her gaze, glaring her down. When the girl looked away, suddenly extremely interested in the muffin selection, Noa allowed herself a small smile and turned back to the screen.
    Her eyes fell on the clock at the upper right-hand corner, and she frowned. That couldn’t be right.
    A well-thumbed copy of the Boston Globe was splayed across the next table. Noa reached over and grabbed it to double-check the date.
    “Oh my God,” she mumbled aloud. October twenty-fifth. The last day she remembered was October third. She’d lost three weeks.
    Noa leaned back against the wall, stunned. Her hand reflexively went to her chest again, where the incision throbbed dully. She really needed a quiet place to try to figure out what had happened. Which meant that she might have to suck it up and do her least favorite thing in the whole world: Ask someone for help.
    She logged into her email account and scanned through. A few messages from Rocket Science about potential jobs, the tone becoming increasingly annoyed as “Ted” didn’t respond. Some spam, and a couple of online billers.
    Nothing personal. She’d been gone three weeks, and no one had missed her. Noa knew it should make her feel sad, but it was oddly gratifying. It meant she was leaving a tiny footprint, which was exactly what her goal had been.
    Lacking those personal connections was inconvenient now, though. She’d had a foster family a few years ago that had been okay, or at least less awful than the others. She wondered how the Wilsons would react to her showing up on their doorstep....
    As she was debating it, an email popped into her account. She recognized the handle, Vallas, but frowned at the message. Had this been sent accidentally? She hadn’t graced a school in over a year, ever since she figured out how to game the system. Yet the email mentioned a term paper.
    Curious, she responded with, Sure. See you there .
    She closed out her email and logged on to The Quad, an online forum populated entirely by hackers. Tough to find if you didn’t know where to look for it, since it was shielded from all the search engines. You had to be invited to participate, and it was a fairly exclusive community; only the best of the best were asked. Noa had been thrilled when the offer to join came in. One of the only times in her life when she’d really felt like she belonged.
    Online, Noa went by the handle Rain. She’d become curious about her name a few years earlier and nosed around into the origins of it. It turned out to be a relatively common Scandinavian name. One site claimed it derived from Odin; in Denmark “Noa-skeppet” and “Oden-Skeppet” were used interchangeably to describe a type of cloud formation that meant rain was coming.
    She’d always liked rain anyway, not being much of a sun person. So it suited her.
    She waited until Vallas appeared as a user, then invited him into a private chat and typed, What’s up?
    Need help researching AMRF , Vallas wrote.
    That was strange. She mainly knew Vallas from a hacktivist group she frequented, /ALLIANCE/. She generally shied away from that sort of thing, not being much of a joiner. Most were focused on pulling off juvenile pranks anyway, or were downright criminal, and she had no interest in drawing the attention of law enforcement. But /ALLIANCE/ seemed different. Some of what they did struck near and dear to her heart, like when they went after perverts and bullies. So she’d participated in a few of their raids over the past few months.
    Still, with everything she had going on right now, she