A newscaster announced. “Breaking tonight, you’ll want to secure your data. Officials are scrambling as we speak to get encryption servers back up and running after an apparent error in the code has broken password security for a majority of online accounts. Some experts are cautioning that you will want to change your password as soon as possible, but others are saying this may not be enough. Even deleted data or images uploaded to social media—”

“Here we are,” Tattletale said. She reached back, her phone dangling from her fingers.

My email, and she was signed into my account.

I checked my phone. I hadn’t been notified, and it hadn’t requested permission to sign in.

The radio kept going.

“Any password will get you into any account, if you know what their username or email is,” Tattletale said. “Browser history, files mirrored from desktop, email, social media… it’s all out there now.”

I glanced back at the other group. They drove carefully after. Egg was talking a lot.

On Tattletale’s phone, I dug through the files on my account.

I found the diary, mirrored onto an online account from desktop.

“It won’t be long now before people start looking and finding the planted stuff. Secret identities and any nudes you took will be the least of it,” Tattletale said.

“No nudes,” I told her.

“Small mercies,” she answered.

I thought of Presley, Natalie, and of Jester. In part because I knew how devastated Presley would be, and how bothered Ashley would be that her biggest fan might get the wrong impression. Natalie… I could see her reading the diary, believing it, and never trusting us again.

Jester was… just a friend. One I’d hate to see go.

It gutted me, thinking about it on that level, like someone had shivved me, dragged the blade across my midsection, and left me with a horrible, hollow pain there.

“It’ll feel very organic to the public, that they find the bad stuff. It’ll lead to bigger problems.”

“Can you just—” I started.

“Can I what?”

“Trust us to connect the dots and realize how bad this is?” I asked.

“Okay. You want me to shut up.”

“Please.”

On a level, I wasn’t surprised. It was fully within his power to do something like this, to release it en masse. I hadn’t expected this specific angle, but… it made sense. That, in the weirdest way, didn’t even touch me, didn’t elicit the smallest emotional reaction. It was only the specific cases that, even thinking about them for the second time, hit me hard with the impact of it.

Maybe I’d been too disconnected from the public for too long, if I was this unbothered.

Maybe it was a strange shape or kind shock.