Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Dedication
- Pulse
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY–ONE
- TWENTY–TWO
- TWENTY–THREE
- TWENTY–FOUR
- TWENTY–FIVE
- TWENTY–SIX
- TWENTY–SEVEN
- TWENTY–EIGHT
- TWENTY–NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY–ONE
- THIRTY–TWO
- THIRTY–THREE
- THIRTY–FOUR
- THIRTY–FIVE
- THIRTY–SIX
- THIRTY–SEVEN
- THIRTY–EIGHT
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- RESOURCES
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- What’s next onyour reading list?
She couldn’t spend the afternoon across from Eric after he’d seen her meltdown. She couldn’t spend the afternoon punching buttons on a microwave for ten dollars an hour that didn’t matter now that her parents had sold the theater. She couldn’t spend the afternoon pretending that her life hadn’t imploded all around her.
So she didn’t. She sank her head into Lucy’s pillow, made softer thanks to the gift of Maddie’s plush sheets, and opened Delia’s Den.
She’d been adding functionality to Ready for Hedy, a torpedo-based coding game that paid homage to the 1940s Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr. Her beauty supposedly inspired Disney’s Snow White, but she was also an avid inventor, with her work leading to the development of wireless technology used in everything from Wi-Fi to GPS to Bluetooth.
Wanting to help the Allied cause in World War II, she focused on torpedoes, powerful weapons that, she reasoned, could be better controlled if they were radio-guided. But radio signals could be jammed. Along with her co-inventor, Lamarr came up with the idea for frequency hopping, a way of moving around on radio frequencies to avoid a third party jamming the signal. Skeptical, the military didn’t use it then, only integrating it after. Decades passed before she was recognized for her revolutionary work.
The game was quickly becoming Delia’s favorite.
She was lost in it when Maddie and Lucy charged through the door.
“We know what he’s doing,” Lucy said.
“Ryan,” Maddie said. “With Pulse. It’s—”
“Manipulating—”
“Everything—”
“We’re sure of it—”
“We just need to prove it.”
Lucy stepped deeper into the room. She crouched at Delia’s bedside. “We need you to prove it.”
* * *
Delia’s head was spinning from Lucy and Maddie being so in sync as much as from what they’d said about Gavin and Ryan and Lucy’s notebook and Pulse. The evidence was circumstantial. Yes, Lucy and Emma’s rankings shot up and down quickly—quicker than most? Delia wasn’t familiar enough with Pulse to know that. And Lucy and Maddie had no way to support their theory that Emma had brushed off Ryan’s advances, causing him to retaliate through Pulse in the same way they were convinced he had with Lucy. Still, there was the discrepancy in Emma’s social media feeds—that all her likes and favorites and everything were still high but her Pulse was Comatose. So . . . maybe?