But the 10s? That everyone Crushing It was put there? Because beautiful faces, skinny waistlines, six packs, and pearly white teeth were coveted? Because who you knew, not what you knew, mattered most? That it all led to an endless loop of more likes and favorites and followers and popularity that drew advertisers like bees to pollen? That in turn meant Pulse drew advertisers and investors and enough cash to buy every theater in the country if Ryan wanted? Fund thousands of scholarships every year? Give him his hot tub and surround him with water views?

That couldn’t happen because Ryan was manipulating individual accounts on a whim. It had to be in the code. In Pulse’s code. It had to be Pulse.

“I don’t know,” Delia finally said.

“But it’s possible?” Maddie asked.

“Anything’s possible,” Delia said. “It’s just so . . .”

“Slimy?” Lucy said.

“Fraudulent?” Maddie said.

“Wrong.” Delia moved her aging laptop to the end of her bed. If she were a 10 she would have had the newest one on the market. “It’s wrong.”

But how could Ryan have done it? Delia ran through what she knew of Pulse—some of which was the same as Lit. The rankings had to be determined in real time by the app based on data from the user’s social media accounts. There was no hard-coded number associated with an account that could be changed with a stroke on a keyboard. The rankings would be regenerated any time someone loaded their Pulse account.

So could Ryan hack it? No. But then again, he wouldn’t need to hack it. He controlled the source code. And the databases.

Delia sat up straighter. Of course!

The very thing she’d been immersing herself in for weeks. If Ryan was doing this . . . if he was manipulating Pulse rankings not just for himself but for all of Pulse in order to give advertisers what they wanted—or maybe even what they asked for?—he’d do it using the database. He’d need to have his own private list—a table in the database that only he could access. If the table had the person’s name and a rating that Ryan could change at will, then the code would have to do what? Somehow override the automatically generated ratings. So the code would need to have a function that would check this table first to see if a user was in it. If a name was there, then the code would tell the program to display Ryan’s chosen rating. If not, then the normal calculated rating would appear. An extra step. One that could be done quickly enough. One that would change a person’s rating. For better or worse. Just as he’d done with Emma and Lucy. Just as he could do with anyone—for anyone. Anyone who offered him something in return.