Stolen Soul (Yliaster Crystal Book 1) by Alex Rivers

Author:Alex Rivers [Rivers, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2018-02-25T07:00:00+00:00

To keep away from Shade hunters, Harutaka was staying at the mansion we used for surveillance. We had decided to neglect mentioning that fact to anyone concerned. I called Kane, asking him to meet me there, to go over some final details before the job.

I took an Uber to the mansion, the driver mercifully quiet for the entire ride. He gave me a sly look as we got there, probably deciding that I was the owner’s current lover.

Harutaka sat in the dining room downstairs, his laptop on the table, the monitor’s light illuminating his face in an eerie neon blue. The room was dark, the blinds pulled down. I flicked the light on. He squinted and peered up at me. He had a pair of earphones in his ears, and he removed them, unplugging them from the computer.

“Lou!” he said. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

“It’s nine in the morning.”

“It’s tomorrow already?”

I folded my arms. “You never went to sleep?”

“This security system is fascinating! So many different encryptions, so many loopholes and dead ends and small traps. It’s clearly the work of several different people, who weren’t allowed to see each other’s work. That way, no one has the lock to this strongbox. It’s a great way to avoid someone hacking from inside. But it also leaves tiny cracks and holes for someone like me to use.”

“So you hacked it, right?”

“Well… most of it. There are still some parts I don’t have access to. I’m currently trying to get access to the mansion’s electricity and lights. It’s all automated.”

His fingers glided across the keyboard, making a strange sound—not so much typing, but more like a whirring, the sound of keys tapped fast enough to buzz like bees. I sat next to him and glanced at the monitor. He typed a set of incomprehensible instructions, but the weird part was that some characters were not in the English alphabet. In fact, they weren’t in any language I recognized. One of them, which repeated several times, matched the rune on the USB stick I had used the day before.

“Are those runes?” I asked.

“Yes.” He nodded, his fingers never pausing their dance. “A lot of their files are encrypted by 256-bit AES keys. I could just try to brute-force through them, but it would take too long.”

“How long?”

“Well…” He glanced at the time in the bottom right corner of the monitor. “It’s now seventeen minutes past nine in the morning. Brute-forcing these encryptions with this computer would take about… enough time for the sun to become a red giant. Humanity would be extinct, and we’d be late for the banquet.”

“Okay. Not brute force, then.”

“No.” He shook his head sharply. “That’s why I use chaos.” He pointed at one of the runes.

I scrutinized the character representing the rune. It seemed to almost pulse on the screen. The letters around it occasionally shimmered, as if just their proximity somehow affected them. I knew I was watching nothing more than pixels on the screen, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that what I witnessed was somehow a form of magic.

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