The food court at the mall was busy enough that he didn’t stand out to security, so he took his time squeezing a strip of ketchup from the ridiculously small packet along the edge of his French fry. It was a habit he had developed as a kid. No double dipping for him. It kept things neat, and provided an even spread of the condiment. He could not eat his fries any other way. It allowed him to savor each bite.

Just as he savored each byte of data he stole from Harry. He tweaked the angle of his laptop so that it faced the wall behind him. He didn’t want the nosy hipster dude next to him to see the text scrolling down his screen. But the guy kept glancing at him. Aiden scowled at him over his French fry.

The tension of the past day lifted a little as the food hit his blood stream, leaving a deep fatigue in his muscles. He still didn’t have a place to sleep tonight. His plan was to hit up Tr0lz when he came. They were about to become partners, right? Even if he had never met the guy before.

He sipped his soda as he scanned the online news.

What the hell?

There had been, “an incident in the Intensive Care Unit of the Greater Halifax General Hospital. An armed man attempted to shoot accused Leah Roberts, charged with the break-and-enter of the parental home of MP Harry Owen.”

Who was the armed man?

It couldn’t have been Harry Owen, could it?

Was that why he hadn’t answered Aiden’s blackmail demand?

If it was Harry Owen who attempted to kill Leah again, this might screw everything up. If he was arrested, it would make it difficult—if not impossible—to get the blackmail money from him.

The cheeseburger churned in his stomach. He’d been waiting for years to serve his revenge on Harry Owen, the rabidly ambitious lawyer from Halifax, who made a name for ‘protecting’ the public and ‘keeping citizens safe’ when he appeared as the government’s witness in Aiden’s criminal trial.

“We cannot allow indiscriminate and malicious hacking into our government systems,” the Honorable Member said, his voice somber. “This case was especially egregious, as it not only exposed the vulnerabilities of a key network system of a provincial judicial department, but caused untold harm to the victims whose sealed cases were posted online for all the world to see…”

Aiden had poked a stick in the eye of the Minister of Justice, the courts, and the police—and they had their revenge. The only thing that saved him from a very long sentence was the fact that he was seventeen, “with tremendous promise” according to his defense lawyer.