Twisted by Blair Babylon

Author:Blair Babylon [Babylon, Blair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Malachite Publishing LLC

6

Private Terminal

Colleen

“You know you shouldn’t go, right?” Anjali asked as she lounged on Colleen’s mattress in the back corner of the room. Her long black hair that fell past her butt spread over the pillows and swirled at the end, lest it trail onto the floor. Anjali was spinning her scrunchie on one finger like a hula hoop. “I feel like I should lock you in a basement so you can’t go tomorrow.”

Colleen folded a blouse and stuffed it into the corner of a roller suitcase. “Houses in Phoenix don’t have basements. With the high levels of uranium naturally occurring in the soil, they’d all be radon caves.”

Anjali sighed and flopped her arms on the mattress. “A closet would work, Ms. I’m-too-literal.”

Colleen rolled a pair of jeans into a bundle. “I will text you everything we do. Morning, noon, and night. Where he says we’re going, and where we actually end up. Just a constant stream of texts and location pins.”

She scowled. “Good, but I still say you’re being stupid. My parents would lock me in the attic if I did something like this, either to prevent me from going or afterward if I ever went home again. Did you even google this guy?”

“Yeah, I did a search. I didn’t find anything incriminating. He doesn’t seem to be on social media much.”

Actually, that wasn’t entirely true.

When Colleen had googled Tristan King, she hadn’t found anything at all, and that was weird. No Facebook. No TikTok. No websites. No blog, no Insta, no driver’s license records, no real estate records, no tax returns, and no pay-to-search results.

No internet tracks at all.

Either Tristan King was very serious about his privacy and knew how to cover his tracks exquisitely well, or Tristan King didn’t exist.

Colleen had even launched her Tor browser and gone onto the dark web, looking for any signs of Tristan King.

Nothing.

Maybe he’d given her a false name, and maybe his business card was fake. It wouldn’t surprise Colleen. People did all sorts of weird things.

However, what was really weird was that there was absolutely no mention of any Tristan King anywhere.

The Google search for Tristan plus King had returned zero results.

Colleen had never seen a Google search return a zero, even for flagrant misspellings.

According to the internet, nobody had ever been named Tristan King.

Nobody in the whole world had Tristan as a first name and King as a surname. Those names were gone. There was a gaping black hole in the internet where the words Tristan King should have been.

Tristan had said he was a coder. Some computer science majors and hackers were paranoid about any sort of presence on the internet. Her parents’ generation had opted into the facial recognition software on all the social media platforms, allowed tracking and spiders to engage because it made buying a toilet seat online so much easier, but computer science majors didn’t allow any tracking or electronic home assistants.

There were, of course, jokes about technology “enthusiasts” who had programmable thermostats, electronic home

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