I Hid My Perfect Score novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: The Backup

I sat in the basement with my hands flat on the box and didn't breathe.

Then I went up the stairs two at a time.

Dodie was at the stove in her pajamas, feeding her starter.

"It's gone," I said. "The logs. The model. The cloud too. Everything."

She put the spoon down.

She didn't say oh no.

She went straight to her locker and took out the coffee can where she kept her bakery tips.

Under the bills, in a sandwich bag, was the thumb drive.

"Twice," she said. "Every night. Then it lives with me."

She put it in my hand and closed my fingers over it.

"Things vanish," she said. "I told you."

I plugged it in at the kitchen table while the crew woke up around me.

Every folder was there.

1994 to 2023, typed.

The pattern. The model, through the night of the twenty-sixth.

I'd lost one night.

I put my face on the table and laughed until Dodie rubbed my back.

Emory came in from his run with frost on his beard and stopped in the doorway.

"What happened?"

"Somebody deleted Joss's project," Dodie said. "At night. Off the lab laptop. And the cloud with it."

The kitchen went quiet.

Everybody looked at the dayroom.

Paisley was in the shower, humming.

The captain walked in with his mug, read the room in one look, and turned to me.

"When?"

I pulled up the cloud's activity page.

"Deleted from the lab laptop. Two forty-one a.m."

The captain set his mug down.

"Camera on the basement stairs since 1998," he said. "Somebody stole a box of logs once."

He went to his office and came back with the remote for the TV, the same TV Dodie had played my dog video on all day.

Paisley came out with a towel around her hair to find the whole crew at the long table.

The captain had the footage paused on the screen.

A girl in pink pajamas, holding a phone flashlight, on the basement stairs.

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