Chapter 2

SIGNALS IN THE DARK

​ Kirrily "Rindy" Cross pov

​Night in Byron Bay didn't fall softly; it collapsed like a dark, wet blanket over the cliffs. Outside the cottage, the wind had picked up, making a long,loud sound through the trees with long leaves and shaking the loose timber frames of the bedroom window.​Inside, the only sound was the steady, pattern rise and fall of Toby’s breathing.

​I sat on the edge of his low mattress, one hand resting gently over his small chest, feeling the warmth of his body through his soft, warm pajamas. He turned in his sleep, his little fist holding tightly his worn very soft kangaroo, a faint sigh escaping his lips.​He’s safe. He’s right here. I repeated the words, trying to slow the desperate strong repeated sound in my chest.​An hour had passed since the gravel had made a cracking sound outside an hour in total, struggling to breathe silence. When I had gathered a little bit of courage, grabbed the fire stirring rod from the hearth, and looked closely through the blinds, the driveway had been completely empty. No black SUV. No towering stranger. Only the sea fog moving slowly and quietly across the salt grass and the strange glow of the front entrance light.

​Had I imagined the voice? Was my tiredness finally cracking my sanity?​I kissed Toby’s forehead, not going away against his warm skin, before pulling the knitted blanket up to his chin. Stepping quietly out of his room, I left the wooden door cracked open by two inches just enough to hear him if he woke and walked back into the suffocating glow of my study.​The air in the room was thick, smelling of hot plastic and with a sharp smell of gas.The devices that show information were still dark, blacked out by whatever digital large hammer had hit my local server an hour ago.​My heart hit hard against my ribs as I knelt under the wooden desk. My hands were shaking so hard it took three tries to plug the secondary battery back into the wall outlet.The screens flashed back to life with a quiet hum, casting looking weak  ghostly light across my face.​I didn't open the main trading entrance.I didn't dare touch the Lawson Maritime shipping price indicator. Instead, I brought up my raw, low-level ledger, the hidden background script I had written line by line over two painful years. It was designed to monitor secret code market signals, tracking tiny, strange ease of getting cash sweeps that normal shares traders never noticed.

​It was my early-warning with my device that helps me detect what is nearlyby. If anyone tried to trace my financial footprint, this script was supposed to cause a silent alarm and burn my connection before they could get close.My fingers stayed nearby over the mechanical keyboard, cold and hard. I pressed ALT + F12, executing a deep-packet inspection of the past four hours.​The green text began to flow down the left monitor in a steady stream:​[04:12:09] RECV: 104.22.18.91 PORT8080 [CLEAR][04:12:12] RECV: 104.22.18.91  PORT8080 CLEAR][04:12:15] SYSTEM WARNING: LATENCY SPIKE (11ms)​I held my breath, leaning closer to the glass until the blue glare reflected in my eyes.​There it was.A stuck inside a routine bulk price indicator transaction for Australian agricultural exports, a strange line of code was repeating itself at exact three minute intervals.​PACKET HEADER: LML INTERNAL AUDIT V4 PAYLOAD ENCRYPTION: RSA-4096 / ARCHIVAL CIPHER B​My pulse stuttered. Archival Cipher B.​My hand went limp on the desk, my knuckles turning white against the polished wood.

​That wasn't a standard corporate security set of rules It wasn't a banking firewall. It was specially made for records in secret coding protocol, a mathematical secret code that my sister Evie and I had invented when we were in university, using old 19th-century maritime bookbinding keys to hide our private messages.​Nobody in the world knew that secret code existed except for three people: me, Evie... and the head of  record keeper at the Victorian Historical Repository who had taught us how to list uncommon old writings years ago.

​Tahlia.​My mouth went dry, a cold strong feeling of fear collecting in the pit of my stomach. Why was a very close, custom record keeper secret code buried inside the automated shipping price indicator record  book of Lawson Maritime Logistics? And why was it  a short sound in my private terminal from Melbourne?​I opened a secondary command where people arrived and type in a manual trace request, routing the packet through three encrypted proxy nodes.​TRACING SIGNAL ORIGIN...LOCATION: PORT PHILLIP BAY, MELBOURNE FACILITY: LAWSON DOCKING TERMINAL 4 CONTAINER VAULT 9STATUS: ACTIVE / UNSECURED OUTBOUND PING​A There was a machine problem in the record. A sudden, unauthorized short sound originating from the darkest, most heavily guarded corner of the Melbourne shipyard.The signal wasn't trying to steal my money. It wasn't trying to shut me down.

​It was calling for me.​Or worse... It was a warning sound song, pulling me out of the shadows and back into the trap that had swallowed my sister four years ago.​I sank back into my chair, burying my face in my hands. Tears of frustration and fear from the past  burned behind my eyelids. Four years I had spent hiding in this quiet corner of Byron Bay. Four years of living like a ghost, jumping at every long,low sound of the floorboard, checking every door three times before bed, pretending to be a simple restorer while my soul was badly damaged from the weight of unspoken grief.​I thought I had escaped. I thought if I stayed small enough, quiet enough, the world that murdered Evie would forget I ever breathed.

​“Did you really think I wouldn't trace the ink back to Byron Bay?”​The man’s gravelly voice repeated through my mind again, so vivid it sent a violent shiver down my spine. Banjo Lawson. The billionaire CEO who ruled the Melbourne shipping lanes by day, and the no mercy President of the Iron Skull MC by night.​If he had found my signal, if he had traced my secret code to this room, Why hadn't his men stormed through my front door tonight? Why call me a ghost? Why warn me about the border?​Suddenly, a loud click repeated sound through the desktop speakers.​My head snapped up.​The trace monitor cleared itself completely, wiping the code line by line until only a blank black box remained in the center of the screen.

​Then, a single line of plain text appeared, typing itself out character by character as if an invisible finger were pressing the keys in real-time:​WE KNOW ABOUT THE BOY, KIRRILY.LEAVE THE COTTAGE NOW. LOOK OUT YOUR WINDOW.​A sharp shocked breath caught a moment in my throat.​Instantly, the quiet night outside was shattered by the loud, very scary loud cry of a movement detector alarm at the back of my property.​I jumped up from the chair, knocking the leather stool over with a heavy sound. My feet pounded against the hardwood floor as I raced down the hallway into Toby’s room.

​"Toby!" I screamed, tearing into his room.​The window above his bed was wide open. The cold ocean wind was whipping the curtains in a rough way into the room, blowing rain onto the hardwood floor.​The mattress was empty. His soft and thick kangaroo lay crushed in the wet sheets.​An outside area of grass around the house, made bright by the flashing red light that goes on and off in the security alarm, stood a massive, broad-shouldered shape person in a dark leather vest, holding my sleeping son against his chest.