Free Dark by Erin M. Leaf

“Who is it?”
    “Your girlfriend.”
    “Impossible. I’ve felt her emotions. She’s innocent.” Greyson
fought to keep his voice level. “And she’s not my girlfriend.”
    “Then someone’s using her to gain access,” Solomon said tersely. “I
think the original bug is in her computer. As soon as she plugs it into the
internet, it replicates itself and heads for our net. She doesn’t even have to
do anything except turn it on. I think it’s set up to
connect automatically.”
    “Shit.”
    “Yes, indeed,” his brother agreed.
    Greyson heard voices in the background.
    “Damn. Hang on,” Solomon said.
    Greyson ground his teeth and grabbed a few shirts and a blouse at
random from Eva’s box. He added a few pairs of jeans to the pile, then shoved
the mess into a backpack he’d found by her door. When Solomon came back on the
line, Greyson was just about to force himself to open up a box clearly marked
“panties.”
    “Okay, I can talk now.”
    “Where are you? Are you still at Bruno’s place?” Greyson asked his
brother, tearing the tape from the box like he was ripping a bandage off a
wound. Colorful fabric lay in a disordered pile inside and he had to take a
deep breath to control the surge of arousal rushing through him. The thought of
Eva in her underthings sent his libido skyrocketing.
    “Yeah, I am. I didn’t want him to overhear this,” Solomon said
quietly. “He’s still talking to the President.” He laughed. “I think he’s ready
to tear his hair out.”
    Greyson could imagine. Telling the world that there were aliens
that wanted to eat the planet was bound to be a delicate conversation. “Tell me
what you found in the tech. And how it can get access to
Stronghold. I thought you set up a fail-proof firewall between our stuff
and the internet.”
    Solomon grunted. “I found traces of foreign code in our stuff. I
cleaned it up, but you know how weird it is. The hardware and software are all
co-dependent. Integrated. Honestly? I didn’t think any
mortal could hack our system. It’s
completely alien when compared to human computing.”
    “Yeah, well, obviously we were wrong,” Greyson said, adding
panties and a few bras to the backpack. He wanted to linger over Eva’s
lingerie. Except that would make you the ultimate creepy old man, so don’t
do it, he told himself sternly.
    “I sensed some foreign patterns and smoothed them out. It was very
subtle.”
    “Did it affect the Stronghold net?” Greyson asked, referring to
the sub-molecular network that allowed their viewers and all
their other tech to function. It was the basis of their power as
Sentries: an organic-quantum connection based on subatomic particles.
    “I didn’t find anything at the core. Just traces in the upper
levels.” Solomon paused. Greyson could almost feel his worry through the phone.
“They’d hacked our viewers.”
    Greyson zipped the backpack more violently than he’d intended. “Hell.
That’s not good.”
    “No, it certainly isn’t good.” His brother’s voice was tight. “I
didn’t erase all of the bad code, by the way. I want to use it to track the
hacker back to the source.”
    Greyson shook his head. “Bruno is going to lose it.”
    “Yes.” Solomon sighed. “I’ll tell him as soon as he’s done politicking.”
    “Don’t tell him that it’s coming from Eva’s computer,” Greyson
urged.
    “I have to, brother. You know that.”
    Greyson thought about it. “She got the job through her stepfather.
Maybe he’s the source of the infiltration.”
    Solomon cursed. “Why didn’t I think of that? And if that’s the
case, we can definitely set a trap for him.”
    “No. No way,” Greyson immediately said.
    “It’s the only way,” Solomon argued. “We need to get this fixed.
We have bigger problems, you know that.”
    “This is connected to the Spiders, Solomon. The only reason they’re
swarming here is because someone fucked around with our tech.”
    “That’s exactly my