ZerOes Read Online Free Page B

grade?
    Melanie echoes the sentiment. “We’re not in kindergarten, Aleena. You’re supposed to go before you get here. Uh, hello.”
    A quiet murmur of uncomfortable laughs from those gathered.
    â€œI don’t feel well.” Aleena holds her hand over her stomach. Her brother Nas always said, You want to get out of a day’s work, just tellthem you have diarrhea. Nobody will ask you to come in if you’ve got the shits .
    â€œGo,” Melanie says, her look of disgust deepening.
    Aleena hurries toward the door, ignoring all the looks that follow her out.

    She texts as she walks, all of it in Arabic.
    What do you need from me?
    Qasim returns: We can’t get into the station without Khalid you need to shut down their broadcast
    She texts back: How am I supposed to do that?
    Qasim sends four texts in rapid succession.
    You’re the one with the bag of tricks Aleena
    They’re broadcasting lies and we can stop them we can show the truth
    Please Aleena
    Others have been shot—we are pinned down
    Aleena responds: I’m working on it
    She jogs down the hallway.

    This would have been her plan all along. To hack the broadcast. That’s the power of what she does. Nobody needs to die. Nobody needs to step in the way of a sniper’s bullet. But some of her people over there, they want to make a show of it. Qasim and Khalid said they needed the people to see them doing it—masks and homemade flash-bangs and AKs chattering. So that when they took over the state media, other media around the world would show images of them storming the stations.
    They don’t understand what she does. Not really. Not yet. But her fingerprints and those of her fellow “hacktivists” were all over the Arab Spring. Helping protesters kick through firewalls, setting up wireless hot spots or dial-up access, running direct denial-of-service attacks on government websites, hacking the sites to deface them, spreading restricted images and videos across social media, leaking secret documents.
    She threads her way through the cubicle farm. There’s been some talk about moving to an open floor plan, which would be terrible for what she does. These fuzzy gray cubicle walls give her all the privacy she needs.
    She navigates the grid, turns right at the copier, left at the paper cutter—
    Someone is sitting in her cubicle. Right in front of her computer.
    He’s government. She can see that by the way he sits, the dark suit, the earpiece nesting in his ear. Though she wonders about those muttonchops: an unusual style. He’s opening her drawers. Rifling through files. Humming.
    She has to go. She’s busted. Aleena knows the stakes—if they catch her, she’ll end up in a dark hole in some desert. Her and every Muslim goatherd suspected of terrorism, lorded over by soldiers with high-powered weapons.
    But she also knows the stakes in what’s happening right now. She needs to help Qasim. She can’t keep anyone from dying today. But maybe by ending the government broadcast, she can get the rebels— her rebels—international attention. She can save people going forward.
    The truth can save people.
    And that means she has to work.
    Aleena pivots before the government man can see her. She hates leaving her computer behind, but everything there was done through a proxy—she has no evidence on that system. And while she has items in the desk she would otherwise want to keep (lip balm, snacks, an appointment book), none of it is meaningful, nor does it point to her activities in any actionable way.
    She stops in the break room. Kay Weldon is there—one of the executive secretaries. Red hair like a helmet, shellacked with so much hair spray it reminds Aleena of her brother’s Lego figurines, like you could pop the hair on and off with ease.
    â€œAren’t you in Melanie’s meeting right now?” Kay asks. Kay knows everyone’s schedule. Kay