Four Months Earlier.

London.

WILD ANIMAL KILLS HOMELESS MAN

Police are yet to reveal the identity of the homeless man killed in the wild animal attack last Tuesday. The animal, believed to be a lion, escaped from Exmoor Zoo earlier the same day. Police are appealing for witnesses to the attack to come forward.

MASS HYSTERIA AT PROTEST

Reports of mass hysteria amongst environmental protestors at the weekend are believed to have been triggered by a gas leak from the factory which many had been camping outside of. Witnesses reported strange glowing lights and an angelic figure appearing in the sky. One person died and three people were injured in the ensuing confusion and panic. A government spokesperson said that the protesters were there illegally and that the gas leak had been quickly contained. No one has been charged to date. The Minister for the Environment stated that plans for new laws to prevent such demonstrations taking place would be brought forward, ‘for the safety of the public.’

“Alice, what are you reading?”

Hannah’s face loomed on my phone. She tapped her screen to get my attention, her purple acrylics focussed in and out on my phone. Half of my attention was on my laptop, the other half trying to put off whatever social plan she was trying to drag me into.

“Sorry, I’m reading a news article. One of them is about that wild animal that’s been going round attacking people. Don’t you think it’s strange that—”

“Do you ever switch your laptop off? Come on, Alice. You see more of that thing than you do of real people.”

Hannah’s eyes grew so large on my phone that I could see every single meticulously mascaraed eyelash. She pulled a comedy ‘I’m soooo bored’ dumb face. I laughed, and she sat back with a grin. “So, are you coming, or what?”

“Or what,” I replied.

I still had more research that I wanted to do, although I didn’t tell her that.

“Come on! It’ll be fun.”

“Hannah, you know how I feel about sticking my feet inside someone else’s shoes. Not to mention sticking my fingers inside a ball that a thousand other people have poked their fingers into. It’s beyond unhygienic.”

“Alright, alright, I get the picture. You’re mad, you know that?”

Hannah had made the argument several times over the years that I’m OCD, basing it on little more than the fact that I preferred to keep away from germs and have a fascination with computers. I loved her to bits, but sometimes she seemed to think that my coding skills were a clear sign of some diagnosable ‘problem’. If I wasn’t OCD then, according to Hannah, I was depressed, semi or completely autistic, ‘on the spectrum’, totally mad or an absolute genius, depending on the day of the week and how much of her homework she needed help with.

Hannah’s eyebrows did the strange little dance routine that meant she either had some gossip or a secret that she wanted to share with me. “Billy’s coming.”

“And?”

A few weeks ago, I’d made the mistake of telling Hannah that I thought Billy was cute after we saw him coaching some younger kids playing football at the park. Since then, she’d made it her mission to set us up on a date. Even though I’d told her I didn’t have time to date, not with exams coming up in a few months.

That wasn’t the principal thing that was keeping me occupied most evenings, though. Hannah didn’t know everything about me, even if we’d been friends since we were five.

If she knew what I spent most of my time working on at my laptop, she’d have settled for ‘totally mad’ and probably try to get me to see a therapist. Or sectioned and locked up.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Which would have been ironic, considering what I’d found out in the last six months about an obscure government department called Section 13. A department so secret that most people didn’t even know it existed.

“And how else is he ever going to realise that you’re alive? An actual, breathing person, you know, and not just this genius who knows the answers to practically every question that anyone’s ever asked about computers.”

Today she’d decided I was a genius, and/or was trying to flatter me into agreeing to come with her.

“Practically every question?”

I flashed her a smile. An afternoon spent at in a bowling alley with a plastic cup of flat lemonade and the buzz of kids discussing how many strikes they needed to win did nothing to tempt me away from what I was reading.

A message appeared on my screen originating from a dark web forum I was part of.

I scanned the message. My heart beat faster at the few choice words contained in it. Whoever was on the other end of the highly encrypted messaging on the hidden and secret forum dedicated to all things weird and wonderful seemed not to care about his privacy at all. He’d actually introduced himself by his real name.

But worse than that:

He knew my real name.

No-one on those forums knew my real name. Hell, none of them even knew which country I was from or how old I was or what I looked like, or anything.

I scanned the contents, trying to decide if the message was a windup or a hoax. Could someone have hacked me, found out what I was looking into and decided to play a prank? I checked my security logs, but there was no sign of a breach. I’d have been alerted the second anyone tried it on, anyway.

Which meant that this guy, whoever he was, had to be legit.

One other option occurred to me. It wasn’t impossible that someone at school had somehow found out about my ‘hobby.’

I must have frowned because Hannah said, “What’s up?”

“I’m not sure. Someone called Sebastian Kane just messaged me. Does he go to our school?”

I didn’t say where he messaged me, of course. If I’d started talking about the dark web and secret forums and supernatural conspiracies, Hannah would have had a total meltdown.

Hannah shook her head and chewed her bottom lip.

“I don’t think so. What does he look like?”

“He’s not included a selfie with his message.”

“How did he get your contact? Is there something you’re not telling me, Alice?” The grin was back.

“No,” I said. “If there’s ever anything to tell, you’ll be the first, and only, person to know about it.”

“What does he want?”

I ran my eyes over the message again. If this guy was legit, then he might have been the confirmation I’d been seeking for months.

“What? What is it?” Hannah insists.

“Nothing.” I shook my head and shrugged. “It’s something to do with the kickboxing club. There’s a competition next month, and he wants to know if I’m entering.”

I was speaking too fast, but I wanted to end the call so that I could give the message my full attention. The kickboxing competition was genuine, so the lie had enough truth in it to sound real. I couldn’t tell Hannah what the message really said. She’d have freaked out.

To be fair, most people would have freaked out if they knew half the stuff that I did. The things I’d found out when I’d been busy poking around in places that I shouldn’t have been poking around in. Databases and servers that should have had more security than they did. Places no teenage hacker in their right minds would go looking around in, even if they had the skill to do so.

In Section 13’s defence, I’m not just an ace with coding. I’m also a hacking semi-genius, if I say so myself. You know you hear stories of those twelve-year-olds who get caught hacking into the Pentagon? Yeah, that’s kinda me.

Without the ‘getting caught’ part.

But the place that I’d hacked into? It had turned out to be much scarier than the US Defence system.

So scary, in fact, that I’d sworn off looking into it again and again, but each time I did, I’d ended up unable to stop myself from going back.

Hannah narrowed her eyes. She didn’t miss a thing.

“I dunno, ‘Sebastian Kane’? Sounds like a creep.”

She opened her mouth to say something else, but I cut her off.

“I’ve got to go, Hannah. My dad’s home.”

I wave goodbye and hit the red button.

I couldn’t tell her the real reason Sebastian Kane had messaged me. She’d never have believed me, anyway. Everything was simple in Hannah’s world. She’d pass all her exams with decent grades, then get into the uni of her choice on the course of her choice. She’d meet ‘the one’ in a few years, if Arron Bristow wasn’t already ‘the one’. They’d get married and have two children, a boy followed by a girl with blonde ringlets, and her life would pan out exactly how she planned it, with the occasional minor deviation.

How could I explain that Sebastian Kane must have known that I’d hacked into Section 13’s servers?

For starters, there was the problem that Section 13 didn’t exist. No one had heard of it. Even on the dark web forums I monitored, it was rarely, if ever, mentioned, and any posts or messages about it were quickly shut down and removed. Then there was the second problem: what Section 13 did.

It was the government’s top secret supernatural monster hunting organisation.

Yeah, I didn’t believe it at first, either.

Initially, I thought the whole thing was a hoax that I’d stumbled across by accident. The idea that the world of monsters existed, and that there was a government organisation dedicated to hunting them and covering up the truth, seemed too absurd to be real.

But then I noticed the pattern.