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Chapter 20 – Willow @ Home“Mom!” Alex squawked.
And her mom went on, “And Willow, you need to start calling me Barbara. Or Barb.”
Alex went ahead and called Louis on her phone, and let Willow brief him. Then she let him sign off and go talk with his dad.
Her mom said, “Now then. I’m going to clean off those bookshelves in your computer room, and Alex is going to bring all the books in. Then we’ll dust them off and put them away.”
“That’ll take hours,” Willow started to complain.
“Not the way Alex does it,” said her mom.
Alex said, “Come on, I want to prove to you that I really am Terawatt.”
Willow winced a little. “You’re not going to undress and change clothes, are you? I’m not big on that kind of stuff.”
Alex remembered hearing Buffy talking about Willow’s boyfriends and then girlfriends. She said, “It’s okay. And if you ever want to tell me anything about your sexual orientation, I’ll understand.”
“What does that mean?” Willow asked suspiciously.
“Umm, I may not have mentioned it, but the other Willow? She met a girl in college, and they …”
“No way,” Willow insisted with a shake of her head and hands waving in a big ‘no’. “Absolutely not.”
Alex nodded. “Buffy said the other Willow was just like that, right up until she found out she wasn’t a nice, normal Jewish girl who was doing exactly what her parents wanted her to, not counting the hacking into computers or the sneaking out in the middle of the night to fight monsters.”
Willow said, “Fine. But I’m not. Not at all. No girl-liking or any of that stuff. It would wreck what little cred I still have in the industry. I can’t afford it.”
Alex said, “I just want you to know it doesn’t matter to me either way.”
Willow asked cautiously, “But you’re not going to take your clothes off, right?”
Alex said, “I don’t have to. I have a shapeshifting power. And I can pick up stuff and drop it off while I’m doing my ‘silver blob’ shapeshifting. Watch.”
She went silvery, while Willow gasped in shock and backed up until she bumped into the garage wall. Alex puddled up a tire, into the car, and into the spare tire compartment. Then she did the clothing switch and puddled back out. She rose up and turned back to normal, even if she was now in her Terawatt uniform. She even lifted about two feet off the floor and put her hands on her hips in superhero style.
“Wow,” Willow murmured. “I mean … That’s absolutely amazing.”
Alex went with her Terawatt voice. “Thank you, citizen. It’s always rewarding to be appreciated for one’s hard work.”
Willow blinked and said, “You don’t really talk like that when you’re in that costume, do you?”
Alex admitted in her own voice, “Well, I do the tone, so I don’t sound like Alex. And I don’t really talk that dorky. I hope. It’s mainly for practice.”
Willow said, “Telekinesis, flight, morphing … Can you change into other shapes, or change your coloration when you morph?”
“Umm, no?” Alex added, “But I can take other stuff along with me, even other people. I rescued my mom and dad from an explosion like that. Here, take my hands.”
She held out her hands and let Willow take them. Then she went silvery again.
“Oh! Oh, no! Oh, my F–…” Willow bubbled frantically as Alex pulled her into the silvery form.
Then Alex raced through the house and brought both of them back to normal in Willow’s bedroom. “See? Easy!”
Willow hastily patted herself all over, like she was afraid she’d find out she was missing some chunks now. “That was … well … freaky. Cool, but … definitely freaksome.”
Alex lifted into the air and said, “Well, watch this!”
And she turned so she was pointing toward the hall, and she flew through the house back to the kitchen. She stood in the kitchen so she could use all her telekinesis and see the boxes to lift out of the car. She had five more boxes floating in the air before Willow got to the kitchen to see what Alex was doing. She had those boxes in the computer room and another five boxes on the way, before Willow got to the computer room. She had all the boxes stacked in the middle of the room before her mom and Willow had the bookshelves all dusted off.
Then Alex started using her telekinesis to lift books and computer journals out of the boxes, clean them off with Willow’s fancy vacuum cleaner to get rid of any dust from the company building, and line them up on the shelves. She got it done almost as fast as Willow could explain where she wanted the books to go.
The last two boxes weren’t books. One was a row of plaques and framed diplomas and framed pictures that someone had thoughtfully wrapped in bubble wrap to protect them. The other was a bunch of junk Alex figured was off Willow’s desk and out of her desk drawers. There were some coffee mugs, some snacks in baggies, some music CD’s, a foam soda can holder, and some loose stuff like a computer screen duster and a jewelcase opener and stuff like that, all with the Red Tree Software logo.
Alex’s mom asked, “What about all your files? And the other things off your walls?”
Willow said, “We don’t do paper files. All that’s electronic. Even our manuals. And anyway, I wouldn’t be allowed to walk off with company files. And this is all the stuff off my walls. I had three computer screens that displayed whatever paintings I wanted, and the paintings are all in here.” She held up a thin jewelcase that looked like it could hold about four CD’s. “Along with stuff I’m not supposed to have.” She gave them a naughty smirk.
She popped one of the CD’s into one of the big computers, and two screens on the walls popped to life with paintings by Monet. Then she smiled. “They didn’t let me work with company software at home, because then how do you keep all the current files current and properly updated for everyone else? So they think they have everything. But this is steganography.”
“What?” Alex was glad her mom asked, even if Alex had no idea either.
Willow explained, “Steganography is the art of hiding valuable data in pictures. Like what I did. Really fancy color storage for really rich color uses millions, even billions of different colors. If you have ten bits for each of red, green, and blue, you have over a billion possible colors. Actually, it comes out to two to the thirtieth, or 1,073,741,824 possibilities. But you have to store things in bytes, because that’s what a computer understands. So four bytes gives you ten bits for each color, plus two bits of padding. And a sneaky person can hide data in the two extra bits. So every four pixels in your painting gives you a byte of data. And if you have a painting stored as twenty million pixels, that’s about eighty megabytes which also have five megs of data hidden away where no one thinks to look. That’s more than enough to hold all the code for any of my freeware programs. So I have all my updated freeware and shareware files right here. They just don’t know it.”
“Wow, and I thought you weren’t sneaky,” her mom said.
Willow grimaced. “I’m sure not when it comes to business. I should have known those guys would shaft me for a giant profit. I mean, that’s what venture capital guys do for a living. But Mom introduced me to Harry, they’re related on Mom’s mother’s side of the family, and I thought I could trust him … Mom and Dad thought I could trust him, too. And he was the one who introduced me to the other venture capital guys, so he just completely shafted a cousin just for some more bucks. And I thought he was a real mensch.”
Alex changed back to her regular clothes while her mom talked with Willow about where to put up the plaques and diplomas. Alex thought they ought to go on the walls in Willow’s home office, but they ended up staying in the box and going into the closet in the office instead, which Alex thought was kind of sad.
Alex looked through the last box and complained, “Geez, they didn’t even let you walk off with a few paper clips!”
Once they got all the emptied boxes broken down and flattened, Willow fixed them some herbal tea. They sat in the kitchen, and Willow asked, “So, you still haven’t told me what you wanted me for.”
Alex said, “Mainly, I just wanted you because you’re awesome. You’re smart, and you can do amazing stuff, even if there’s no magic in this universe. And let me just say I’m really, really glad of it, because fighting demons every night of your life? Ick. But we could really use your help figuring out where the rest of that team is. Jaime Sommers plays tennis. Samantha Carter is an astronaut. We found them. But not Colonel Jack O’Neill, U.S. Air Force. Or Hermione Jane Granger, British twenty-one-year-old. Or Selina Kyle. And I have no idea who that Batman guy really was, so there’s no way to trace him down.”
“That’s it? A little computer support?”
Alex’s mom said, “Maybe a lot of computer support. We don’t know about computer security, and sooner or later someone’s going to be tapping our phone lines and trying to get into our computers and things like that. Or communications, because right now Alex and her friends are just texting each other with code phrases, and that probably won’t be enough even the next time they have to send her to another job for Terawatt, because the news people are all over Paradise Valley.”
Alex added, “And I really liked the other Willow, and I thought it would be cool if you wanted to be part of our group, just because the other Willow was really nice to me, and, well, I thought we could be friends.”
Willow blushed. “I don’t really have a lot of friends. People don’t usually meet me and like me and stuff. I mean, I’m sure the other Willow was all cool and ‘look at me’, but I’m really not.”
Alex said, “What I liked about the other Willow wasn’t the flashy stuff, some of which was pretty doggone dangerous. What I liked was she was really smart, and really nice. And that’s you. I bet you wrote your own code to do the stegosaurus-ography thing.”
“Steganography. And I did it in Perl, because I could basically write the entire program in one long line at a command prompt without having to write a program to disk anywhere.”
Alex’s mom stared in shock. “How could you do all that in one line of code?”
Willow said, “Well, Perl has some really powerful operators and functions, and it lets you write code that pulls in Perl modules you already have. And it lets you pull in the modules with just a flag in the command line. So I used a graphics module and a bit editing module, and then all I had to do was tee the files I wanted and write over the input graphics file, which Perl will let you do with command line operators. One long line of code.”
Alex looked at her mom and said, “See? Super-genius.”
Willow blushed harder than before. She said, “I do have a ton of ideas for phone security. But you should start with burner phones.”
“Burner phones?” her mom asked.
Even Alex knew what that was. “Yeah. Remember we talked about this a few days ago? Burner phones are cheap cell phones you buy for cash with prepaid minutes, so no one knows who has the phone. Terawatt definitely needs a burner phone, so no one connects her with my phone. And Louis needs one to call Terawatt with robbery info.”
Willow said, “And I can make sure your phone calls are pretty much untraceable. And I can hack a phone so it and its friends broadcast to each other using encryption that other phones can’t read.”
“Wow,” Alex said. “That’s pretty awesome. How do you know all this stuff?”
Willow said, “Well, I’m not just RedTree and WillowRose. I’m also a pretty notorious cracker called S4l1x680 that the feds have never been able to catch. I haven’t done any of that stuff for a long while, but S4l1x680 did a lot of poking around in places he wasn’t supposed to look, back when I was in junior high and high school. I didn’t ever steal anything, or damage anything, but … I did change a couple of Cordelia’s grades to D’s and F’s. She and her girl-gang slacked off like ninety percent of the time, and then her dad bought off one of the school secretaries to change their grades, so I just changed ’em back. And … maybe Cordelia didn’t really rack up 400 parking and traffic tickets.”
“Willow!” Alex’s mom fussed. “You can’t just do things like that, even to people who are terrible to you! And I’m not saying she didn’t deserve to get into trouble, but you shouldn’t stoop to her level. And why on earth would you have a codename like that?”
Willow smiled a little. “Salix is the species for willows. The wavelength of light for the color red is centered at about 680 nanometers. Willow Rose. Or Red Willow. Take your pick. It’s not really a smart codename, but I picked it when I was about twelve, and maybe a little too smug.”
“Oh, crud,” Alex muttered as something dawned on her. “Libby. If I give you Libby’s phone number and cell number and email address and twitter account and stuff, can you keep tabs on her and find out if she’s doing something crazy? Because she’s going around school telling people she’s Terawatt, and sooner or later that’s going to get her in a ton of trouble. I don’t like her, but I don’t want one of Danielle Atron’s super-crooks to kill her and her family.”
Willow said, “That sounds pretty easy. This is really sounding a lot more fun than anything I’ve done in months. Designing my database hyperlinking software and tweaking it to be fast? That was fun. Arguing about patent rights for eight months? NOT fun.”
Alex said, “Well, there is something else. You saw my silvery shapeshifting —”
“Your morph,” Willow said.
“— yeah, my morph. I can go through the storm drains that way, and cut all over the city without anyone seeing me. But I don’t have a map of the water runoff system, and I have to figure Danielle has people paid off to tell her if anyone tries to get information like that, or maybe about any soil sampling that gets done. And she may have people trying to hack into my dad’s plant to steal information or find out what he’s working on.”
Her mom said, “If you could figure out where Danielle Atron is hiding, that would be even better.”
“Oh, yeah,” agreed Alex. “I never even thought of that, because how would you find her? She probably has her money in a secret Swiss bank account or whatever, and the police haven’t been able to track her down at all. But she’s got to have some way for crooks to find her so they can go get turned into supervillains.”
Willow tapped her chin and stared at the ceiling. “Hmm … bank-robber kinds of crooks aren’t usually real high-tech guys, or they wouldn’t be robbing banks with guns. So she’s got to be using something pretty simple … I can check some things.” She grinned at Alex. “Wow, I never thought I’d be one of those crimefighting super-hackers on TV, like Penelope Garcia.”
Alex said, “From what I know about the other you, you can do anything you put your mind to. The other Willow only needed about three years to teach herself what most mages needed fifty years and a really great mentor to do, and she only needed four or five years to become one of the most powerful mages on the whole planet! If you can do that, you can do anything.”
Willow ducked her head and said, “Alex, I know you’re really impressed with the other Willow, but that’s not me.”
Alex said, “I know it sounds impossible, but from everything Willow and Buffy told me, I think it is. I think that the other Willow is just you, with enough motivation. I don’t expect you to be able to do magic. No one can. Not in our universe. But I think you have even more potential than you’ve shown so far. No one except me really knows just how amazing you can be, because I’ve seen things that even I wouldn’t have believed could be possible. I saw Willow Rosenberg face down a hellgod. A real, all-powerful hellgoddess in her own dimension, who could use her magic to grow to three hundred feet high. And Willow didn’t flinch. She used D’Lazza’s own power to grow to nearly that big, and she fought D’Lazza in a magical battle to the death. And she won. She stomped D’Lazza. She made a canyon and slammed D’Lazza into it and unmade it, and buried D’Lazza a thousand feet underground for a million years. And it took so much energy that we had ten-point-oh earthquakes. It was awesome. You have that kind of courage inside you. That kind of intelligence. That kind of strength. You don’t need amazing magical powers to be a great force for good in this world. All you need is what you already have.”
They sat there, while Willow thought it over. Alex looked over at her mom, and her mom gave her a big ‘way to go’ wink.
After a couple minutes, the phone rang. “Alex? Louis here. And I’ve got the CEO of Driscoll Enterprises to help.”
Alex looked at Willow and mouthed, ‘his dad’. Willow gave her a small smile.
Louis said, “We pulled up what we could find in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, so we have some background. Willow Rosenberg has a pretty massive golden parachute in her contract, which Oracle is going to be eating for the next thirty years, so they really want maximum profit out of this technology. But that also means Ms. Rosenberg doesn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize that.”
Louis’s dad said, “As Louis explained it, Ms. Rosenberg just wants the freeware and shareware programs she started the company with. And those are pieces that large companies don’t want to deal with, because there’s no direct payback. It costs them more to pay staff to maintain and upgrade the software than they get back, and software that moves from shareware or freeware to payware never makes any money, unless there are massive advances in the technology that make it worth people’s while to upgrade. Like moving to a new Mac OS, so the old programs just don’t work anymore if you have a new system. Larry Ellison has to know all of this. So let’s say Ms. Rosenberg offers him ten K for the rights to the shareware and freeware, and thirty K for the company name and website. Oracle doesn’t need either, and they don’t want to deal with the software. Ellison will negotiate, and he’s good at it. So let’s say we let him talk Ms. Rosenberg up to maybe fifty K for the rights and a hundred K for the company name, but not any higher than that. At that point, all you really want is the company name, the website domain, the toll-free number, and a copy of the current state of the software. Make sure you don’t get stuck with the building, the rent or lease, the utilities, the employee salaries, any of that. Oracle needs all of those pieces, anyway. And once you have the company name back, go ahead and ask if they want to have their marketing areas taken up with Red Tree marketing paraphernalia, like t-shirts or computer bags, and take a couple dozen boxes and just keep them in your garage for computer conferences in future, so you don’t have to pay for new giveaways for a few years. And use the press as a weapon here. Ellison already looks like a bully and a crook over this deal, and the press hates guys like that. Your venture capitalists look like backstabbers, and they could lose a lot of business if no one else wants to work with them. Offer to make a public statement of support if you get your software back, and offer to let his people look it over first.”
Alex looked over, and Willow was taking notes on her smartphone. Alex said, “Thank you, Mr. Driscoll.”
He said, “You’re welcome, Alex. And if Ms. Rosenberg ever writes any business software, I’d love to get a copy.”
“Willow. Please call me Willow.”
“Louis Otto Driscoll, signing off after saving the day!”
Alex said, “Thanks, Louis. You were a huge help. Again.”
Louis said, “Well, maybe you could help me out by talking to Marsha and her dad?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Alex said.
After Louis hung up, her mom asked, “What did Louis do this time?”
So Alex ended up telling the whole story about Louis and the date with Marsha, and by the time she got to the part where Louis got Marsha home an hour late and they were both covered in mud, even her mom was giggling.
They got everything squared away, and exchanged phone numbers and email addresses and everything else with Willow. Alex put the bike carrier back in the rear of the SUV, and they drove off.
Willow was already talking on her phone as she waved goodbye from her garage. “Larry? It’s Willow. I have a deal I think you’re going to like …”
As they drove down the street, her mom patted her on the shoulder and said, “Wow honey, you didn’t tell me you also got lessons in giving a pep talk.”
“I didn’t. I mean … well, come to think of it, I guess I sort of did. Sam was just a lot sneakier about it.”
Her mom said, “I think we need to buy those burner phones out here, where no one knows us. And if anyone can trace ’em back to where they were bought, I don’t want that to say Paradise Valley either.”
“Good idea, Mom.”
They took their time and went into four different stores. They ended up with six burner phones that had a hundred minutes each, and one phone with four hundred pre-paid minutes that would be for Terawatt to carry. Then they drove home, Alex getting each phone out of its packaging and plugging it into the car charger for a bit, and getting it ready to be used, while her mom listened to golden oldie rock and sang along to the songs she liked.
It was a good thing her mom had a decent singing voice. If she’d been stuck in a car for hours listening to her dad trying to sing, that would have been grim. And Annie wasn’t a good singer, either.
After about an hour, she got a phone call from Willow. Three phone numbers to write down and not have on her Alex phone. So Alex carefully entered them on her Terawatt phone. All of them were 1-976 numbers. And the first one was a perfect blind number for calling Willow whenever she wanted, only she needed not to use any identifying words, because this was going to be their super-secure Terawatt-to-base connection. It was kind of weird to think of Willow as like Selina’s Oracle, now that a different Oracle had eaten Willow’s company.
She needed a new codename for Willow. And not one of her known hacker names, and not that known black-hat name, either. Both of them would get the wrong attention looking right at Willow. She asked, “What do you want me to call you?”
Willow said, “You’ll be Terawatt —”
“Or just Tera for short.”
“— and I’ll be … umm … Acid Burn. Burn for short.”
“Acid Burn?” Alex wondered.
“From the movie ‘Hackers’.”
Alex said, “Umm, I guess I’ll have to go watch that one.”
Willow said, “I’ve got more. I’ve got a detail map of the Paradise Valley runoff system with storm drains and creeks marked on it.”
Alex gasped, “Already? Wow, you’re good.”
Willow said, “There just wasn’t any decent protection on the city and county computers or files, and the stuff they have is old enough that there’s some known exploits I could use. They so need to upgrade their firewalls. I also copied files on the town street map and utility poles and gas lines and sewer system and the local power grid, just in case they come in handy someday. I’m going to grab some free GIS software and look into getting some maps and satellite photos and overlays, so maybe we can find some advantages somewhere, sometime.”
Alex’s mom waited until Willow hung up and then asked, “What’s GIS software?”
Alex said, “Geographical Information System software. It’s the stuff that lets you draw maps and plot things on it, so you can figure stuff like what areas are the farthest drive from a hospital. Stuff like that. I don’t know a lot about it, but I know there are some super-expensive GIS programs and some free ones, only the free ones don’t have all the features and gadgets.”
Her mom kept her eyes on the road, but she said, “Alex … honey … Have your dad and I told you how proud we are of you? Of what you’re trying to do?”
Suddenly, Alex found her eyes were filled with tears. “Uh-huh.”
Her mom said, “And you’re smart, too. I wish you could believe that.”
She said, “Mom, I’m not smart. Annie’s smart. Dad is smart. Even you’re smart. You’re getting a Master’s Degree. I’m not even gonna be the valedictorian in my class.”
Her mom said, “Neither was anybody else in the family, honey. You know, I think we failed you. I failed you a hundred times. I never noticed you were having all those problems. I never noticed you had superpowers. I never noticed my baby was in real danger, over and over, for four years, until Danielle Atron nearly killed all of us. And I just let you get steamrollered by Annie’s success.”
Alex knew that wasn’t true. She remembered the time Annie was taking over all the space in their bedroom working on a really important chemistry project, and Alex got so mad she moved out to the shed in the back yard, and her folks were totally on her side, and after things went a bit crazy they even made Annie apologize.
“You’re just as smart as she is, but in different ways. You’ve done so many things Annie couldn’t do. And I don’t tell you that often enough.”
“Annie’s a super genius,” Alex insisted.
Her mom nodded tensely. “At chemistry. But how is she at sports? With other people? At games? Her only extracurriculars on her applications were all science. Science fair, chemistry intern. You’ve done everything. Sports. Photography. Newspaper. Yearbook. Cheerleading. And you have good grades. And your teachers want you to take lots of AP courses next year. And … this. Terawatt. And helping Willow. Your sister and your dad may be big chemistry brains, but you’re the one in the family who’s making the real difference.”
“Mom, you’re making me cry,” Alex whispered.
“I’m making me cry, too.” Her mom pulled off to the side of the road and parked the car. Then her mom gave her a huge hug. “I love you so much. It scares me knowing what you do, but I know you won’t stop, whether I like it or not, so I’m choosing to be there for you.”
Alex hugged her back and said, “It scares me, too. But I think it scares me more, knowing what could happen if I don’t try to save people.”
Interlude IVWillow stared at the computer monitor.
She hadn’t done anything except work on Alex’s problems, ever since Larry Ellison said he’d give her the company name and website and 1-800 number and the rights to the freeware and shareware for fifty K total, if she’d make the PR blast to get the press corps off his neck. She’d already called Mindi and told her she had her old job back with a small raise, but she would get to work out of her home, and she would only have one company officer to deal with. And Mindi had agreed to drive over to the building Monday morning with her husband and pick up what was probably about forty or fifty boxes of giveaway stuff and store it in her basement so she could mail stuff out to people or have stuff ready for the next computer conference.
Willow had even checked with Jerry, but he pointed out she didn’t really need him now and he could do more interesting work staying with the bigger company. After all, Jerry wasn’t a programming guy, he was a marketing guy. When Willow was a timid, nerdy, thirteen-year-old, she really needed a guy who could say ‘yes, Willow you really can do it’ and ‘yes, Willow people really will want this’ and ‘yes, Willow I really can help you market this so people will use it and some of them will even pay you for it out of the goodness of their hearts’. He was the VP in charge of marketing for Red Tree Software, and now he was going to be a higher-up in Oracle’s marketing group. That had to be more fun than pretty much not doing anything anymore as Red Tree’s marketing person.
Ever since then, she had been working away at her computers, hardly even stopping for soda and potty breaks. She had forgotten how much fun it was to be S4l1x680. To outwit everyone else. To be the very best in the world. But she was going to keep it under control. She was going to play it smart, and stay highly protected, and not cause any problems. She had her company back. Her baby. Maybe the only baby she’d ever have, since she hadn’t even had a real date in years, and she was still a virgin. She wasn’t going to screw up and ruin Red Tree Software. Not when it had been so hard on her to lose it.
But she was going to help Alex. Alex wasn’t just one more nice kid that Willow did the meet-and-greet with once or twice a month. Alex was a super-powered hero who was trying to do the right thing.
Willow had checked up on Terawatt and Paradise Valley, just to make sure she wasn’t getting conned. And Terawatt was a real, live superhero. She did nothing but stop robberies the police couldn’t handle. The whole mess with Danielle Atron and GC-161 and the diet foods? It looked like Alex had been fighting a really bad person for years. How old was Alex when she started? Twelve or thirteen? That was even younger than Buffy Summers in those stories Alex told her.
Honestly. Her and Buffy Summers? Maybe that was even harder to believe than the whole ‘alternate universes with other physics’ deal.
So then Willow had tried to track Alex down. That was really easy. And Alex had vanished for five days. ‘Home sick’ according to the computer records of the school. But no doctor visit, no nurse practitioner, no trip to the hospital, no filing with her dad’s HMO, nothing. And the Mack family food bills dropped dramatically for that week. So Alex really could have been out of this dimension, or at least not in Paradise Valley.
Willow had taken the time to obscure Alex’s trail a little bit, just so the next person searching for computer records to point their way to Terawatt would end up looking in the wrong places. It was really surprisingly easy if you understood how relational databases worked, and how computer software did joins.
Then Willow had pulled up the city records, while making it look like the governor’s office was doing it. If anyone checked back through all the fake red tape Willow tossed around, they would find a fancy government task force that wouldn’t admit one way or another whether they tried to get those records.
After that, it was computer searches. Colonel Jonathan Angus ‘Jack’ O’Neill was a hard nut to crack. Just getting through the DoD databases without getting caught was really tricky. Getting more was next to impossible, even for her. Because Jack O’Neill had a lot of blacked-out files and files with large, blacked-out sections. That spelled Special Ops, maybe even Black Ops. A couple of those files were just stubs, sitting there with tripwires attached to alert someone that a hacker was looking for data on Jack O’Neill. But Willow had played this game since she was eleven and a half. She dodged the tripwires and looked for what she could. And there was something really suspicious. A highly decorated colonel with tons of medals and no black marks on his records goes from Spec Ops to retirement and back into the Air Force, only to take what was supposed to be a desk job in something called Hazardous Waste Assessment, Amelioration and Abatement. The HWAAA. Yeah, right. The more she looked, the more she figured the HWAAA was some sort of cover, because there should have been lots of environmental scientists and environmental engineers in something like that, and they had something else. They had medical doctors and biochemists and biophysicists. They had chemists, but in the wrong specializations. And their scientists didn’t work on hazardous waste issues, and didn’t publish journal articles on handling hazardous waste. She didn’t know what the heck Jack O’Neill was doing, but if it was assessing hazardous waste spills, she would go lick Larry Ellison’s bald spot.
Eww. Maybe not that, but something dramatic.
After that, she had searched for the other people Alex couldn’t find. Hermione Granger was already working on a doctorate in ethnography and social policy at Cambridge. Alex was right. This Hermione was smart as heck, just like the other one. Willow just couldn’t find out where Hermione was going to work when she completed her degree in a little over a year, according to emails to and from her major professors.
Then Selina Kyle. That had taken more effort. But never let it be said that S4l1x680 could be stopped. Willow had found Selina Kyle. Only she wasn’t a Kyle anymore, and hadn’t been for a long time. At age nineteen, Selina had married a thirty-something Greek shipping line heir, and was now living la dolce vita on a private island off the coast of Greece. Some sleazebag photographer had managed to sneak close enough to get telephoto shots of Selina cavorting nude on her own private beach with her slightly less photogenic hubby. And Alex was right once more. Selina was maybe the most gorgeous brunette Willow had ever heard of.
Willow was staring at the pictures, and her mouth was dry with fear.
Selina had the looks and shape to make Playboy Playmates and Sports Illustrated swimsuit models go crying back to their plastic surgeons. Selina was so gorgeous that …
Selina was so gorgeous that Willow was sitting there with damp panties. The nice Jewish girl who had never gone all the way with a boy was having sexual thoughts about another girl.
Alex had been right again. Willow had never admitted it to herself, but there was no mistaking this. She was having the hots for another woman. She was gay. Or at least, really bisexual. And Alex had known.
It was one thing to know the ‘green crayon’ story that no one else should know about, but Willow had told herself that there was a remote possibility Jesse had told someone, somewhere. Or maybe Xander had told someone long before he died. But this was impossible to know. No one knew Willow wasn’t het. Even Willow hadn’t known.
Alex had known. Alex had known, because she knew a different Willow. A different Willow who was more like she was than any alternate universe Willow had a right to be.
The ‘travel to another dimension’ story was looking really, really probable, despite everything. And that meant Alex had really risked her life to fight a hellgod and save the whole freaking multiverse. Alex had met an alternate universe Willow. And Alex had said she would be there for Willow if Willow ever came out of the closet.
It was looking like that closet door was falling off its hinges.
Willow stared at the computer monitor …