Chapter One: The Job

"Bye Mr. Marco. Mrs. Rosa. I'm done for the night, so I'll be heading out." Eva waved to the kind older couple she had the pleasure of working for. The sandwich shop, Giovanni's, was closed for the night and everything was just about cleaned up. Eva wanted to get home before it got too late. The big city can be a dangerous place at night and she had more work she needed to do at home.

"Have a good night girl. Thanks again for all your help today." Mr. Maro called to her as he was putting some produce in the walk-in fridge. "Have a safe walk home. We'll see you for the lunch rush tomorrow."

"Of course. Have a good night you two." Eva liked her job at the sandwich shop. The pay wasn't great, but the couple was very nice and they never hounded her while she was at work. Their oldest son used to work here and help out with the shop, but he decided to move on to bigger and better things she guessed. She had seen the ad for the job while searching the local job offers online and applied on a whim. When she met the older couple, she instantly felt comfortable around them and they clearly needed the help with both of them approaching their sixties. It had been about six months now that she'd been working for them, and her only real complaint was how far it was from her apartment.

The shop sat on the corner of a street in a not-so-great part of town. It was about a mile from her house, which was far enough it made walking annoying sometimes, but not far enough that it was worth going out of her way to take the subway. For the most part, though, Eva didn't mind. She didn't dislike walking particularly, she just didn't like how long she had to be out in the cold. Here in the city, there was always raining and it never seemed to warm up much, even in the middle of summer.

As Eva walked back to her apartment, she paid attention to the dark alleys she walked past. She noted every piece of litter and every stray cat that seemed to dart about. This part of the city was dank and desolate this time of night, it being almost midnight. The shop closed at ten and it took the three of them about two hours to clean everything up. The older couple always took extra care to make their shop look nice, even if the surrounding buildings left something to be desired. Eva guessed that was just their old school mentality or something.

As she got closer to her apartment, Eva grabbed her keys from her pocket and rushed up to the door of the apartment building, punching in her access code. The door made a soft buzzing noise and she heard it unlock. A couple of the tenants were chatting in front of the mailboxes and Eva pretended not to notice them as she swiftly walked past them and up the stair. She wasn't a particularly social person at the best of times. She was good at throwing on that customer service voice while she was at work, but by the time she was getting home, Eva was done with people for the day.

Eva wasn't the type of person to go out and party and she didn't have many friends. She was your typical introvert, not rude necessarily, but not exactly the most friendly person, mostly replying with short curt answers to whatever anyone asked her. She liked to be left alone and spend most of her free time in her apartment which was her own little oasis in the suffocating desert of a crowded big city. She had moved here for more opportunities for work but quickly discovered that all the good jobs were taken and held on to like the last life jacket on a sinking ship. Her true passion was in computer engineering and coding. Even from a young age, Eva always thought the idea of computers and the interconnected network that keeps people from all over the globe interacting with one another to be fascinating. She has started learning basic coding languages like Javascript and HTML when she was still in her early teens. She even started diving into the deep web and the blacklisted job sites as she got older. Truth be told, that's how Eva made most of her money. The sandwich shop was nice and gave her an excuse to get out of the house, but it didn't pay particularly well, and living in the big city was expensive. Plus, the last thing Eva wanted was a roommate. She wasn't a people person already and the idea of sharing her private space with some stranger was absolutely appalling to her. Her home was her opportunity to get away from people and have her private time.

She didn't take big jobs and she wasn't a particularly important person in the hacking community, but she was good at what she did. Eva took mostly small jobs. The jealous girlfriend who wants to know what her boyfriend is up to online. The worried parent who thinks their kid has joined a cult or is doing drugs or something. Even the odd teen who wants custom software for hiding their IP address online. Nothing big, but when you do a lot of them, the income comes in pretty well.

As Eva stepped into her apartment, she switched on the light and threw her keys in a little bowl on the table by her door. She turned around and locked the door handle, deadbolt, and chain. She then walked over and booted up her computer, which was sitting in the corner of her small living room area, before changing into a pair of shorts and a black t-shirt, getting out of her work clothes that smelled like various kinds of meats.

Once she was changed, Eva sat down at her computer and started loading in all of her software that she used before getting online. Once she was online, Eva adopted her hacking persona, Zen404. The first thing she does every time she gets online is to check the forums to see if there are any new job offers. As she was browsing through them, Eva noticed the usual ones, "Please help me, I think my wife is cheating on me", "There was money stolen from my bank account, can you track down who it was", "I want someone who can find dirt on this guy who was harassing me", etc, etc.

But as Eva was scrolling through the job offers, one caught her attention. The tag line said "Daughter and her two friends missing. Please help me." She noticed it had been posted just seventeen minutes ago and no one had replied to it yet. When she clicked on the post, it read as such:

Please help me. I am a father in the New York area. My daughter and her two friends went to a nightclub on the outskirts of the city called Crimson a couple of nights ago. The problem is my daughter never came home that night, which is completely unlike her. I also haven't been able to get ahold of her on her phone or any of her friends' phones. I tried contacting the police but was told that because she was an adult and there is no evidence to suspect she might have been harmed, there is nothing they can do. They even told me she is probably shacking up with some guy! My daughter would never do that and she certainly wouldn't stop replying to me. I know my daughter very well and we are very close. I even went by the nightclub to try and find her, but everyone there told me they had never seen her or her two friends. I know they have cameras there and I know she was there. If anyone can help me find her, I'm willing to pay a high reward. I just want to know my daughter is okay.

- Joe

"Well, that's something new," Eva muttered to herself as she got to the end of the post. "This is a bit above my usual stuff, but honestly the cops are probably right. She's most likely fine and just found herself a boyfriend or something." Even though she thought it was probably not the crisis this Joe guy was making it out to be, Eva still thought the promise of a high reward sounded nice. She could use some extra cash right now and if it turns out this guy's daughter just decided to ghost him for a few days to party, it should be a quick and easy case.

Eva grabbed this Joe guy's email from his post and sent him a reply. She asked him for all the details of what happened, his daughter's phone number and the phone number of her friends, pictures of all three of the girls, a description of what they were wearing the night they went out, as well as how much he was looking to pay. The man replied within a minute saying he would send her everything she asked for and that he would pay her five thousand dollars. Looking at the price she was going to get paid, Eva started to get really excited about this job. She agreed to the price but requested that he send her one thousand now and the rest after it was done. She explained it was for "work costs associated with the case". The man didn't even put up any amount of argument before he sent the money on an encrypted link through the email. Eva transferred it to her bank and as soon as the money showed in her account, Eva knew this guy was serious.

She got to work right away digging up all the information she could about the nightclub, trying to see if anyone else had reported someone going missing after visiting there, but no such luck. She did get the phone number for Crismon as well as the current owner, Jerrik Black. Looking at a photo of him, he appeared to be a tall man with shoulder-length dark brown hair and what looks like green eyes. The picture didn't show him very well. It appeared to be an older picture that isn't of very good quality. Everything online that Eva could find about the place didn't seem very up-to-date. It appeared that it was all posted when the nightclub opened about ten years ago.

After doing as much digging into the place as she could, Eva decided she was ready to make her move. She ran the phone number through one of her software and was able to find their phone logs and salvage some recordings of the conversations on it. After listening to about an hour of recordings and just hearing the same customer-to-staff conversations over and over again, she finally got to one that was useful. She found a conversation where one of the staff members was talking to their surveillance company about one of their cameras not working. In the conversation, she was able to get the make, model, and circuit passcode for their camera systems.

Now that she had the information she needed, all that was left to do what for Eva to actually hack into the camera systems and get her eyes on the footage recorded on them. Once she was in the system, Eva found all the footage from the cameras on the night the girls went there to today. She downloaded the footage, which took about thirty minutes, and then got to work on reviewing it. Eva must have spent the better part of an hour combing through footage looking for these girls and was about to call it a night and look into it more tomorrow, seeing as it was almost four in the morning at this point. As she was watching the entrance camera, however, she saw three girls walking up in what appeared to be the clothing Joe had described the girls leaving in that night.

Eva watched as the three girls got let into the club and she switched to a different camera feed inside. The girls walked straight up to the bar and ordered their drinks, presumably. After they got their drinks, they all walked to the middle of the floor where a large crowd of people was dancing and grinding on one another. Because of the number of people, it was hard to tell where the girls were. A few minutes passed by before Eva could tell where one of the girls was. She was dancing with some guy dressed in black, pushing her bottom into his crotch. It didn't look like Joe's daughter, so it must have been one of the two friends.

Eva must have watched those cameras for another hour, fast-forwarding through the footage, keeping her eye on the three girls. Eventually at about one in the morning, according to the time stamp on the video, Eva could see the three girls go away from the main group of people with a couple of men. All three girls seemed to be intoxicated by the way they were swaying around and one of them was holding herself up using one of the men's arms. They seemed to walk behind the bar and through a door that said: "Employees Only".

After going through the door, Eva lost sight of the group. She was combing through the other video feeds trying to find them and figure out what happened to these three girls next. Finally after going through over twenty different camera feeds, she saw the girls and the two guys walk into a dark door labeled: "Basement One" in the corner of the camera screen. Eva could barely make out the shapes of four or five other figures in the room as the door opened and closed behind the group. Only a few moments later, some dim lighting was turned on in this room and what Eva saw next, sent shivers up her spine...