Chapter 6: Signed Out

My mother deleted the text.

Then she went into the bathroom and ran the water so I wouldn't hear her.

I heard her anyway.

When she came out her eyes were red and her voice was steady.

"Don't you dare sign anything on my account," she said. "I've been poor before. I know how it goes."

"Mom, it's thirty years of clients."

"They were never my friends. They were my Tuesdays." She scraped the burnt eggs into the trash. "Eat some toast."

I sat at her little table with my laptop and started looking for work.

Senior engineer. Backend developer. Anything.

Every application wanted the same things.

Work history. References. A portfolio.

I had written eighty thousand lines of code in five years.

Every line of it lived on Northlight's private servers, under Mitchell's account.

My résumé said I graduated from Saint Jude's and then nothing. Five blank years.

"Freelance," my mother suggested, reading over my shoulder.

"Freelance for who?"

She didn't have an answer.

I stared at the screen until the words blurred.

Then I remembered the library.

At Saint Jude's, every senior thesis in computer science was bound in dark red.

Each one went into the library archive with the student's name stamped on the spine.

Mine had been called Tidewise.

A scheduling engine for Silverport harbor. Which ship docks where, which crane moves first, how to keep forty tons of cargo from sitting in the rain.

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