Survival

'Good,' he said. 'Excellent. It is always best to eat outside, after work.'

'Work?' said Li, cheekily. 'You?'

Paulo smiled at her fondly. 'Ah, yes, I work. Back in Argentina, on our ranch, I go out with the vaqueros-'

'The what?' asked Amber.

'The – how do you say-? The ranch hands? The cowboys, yes?'

'OK,' said Amber. 'Got you.'

'We go to round up the cattle. The ranch is-' Paulo spread his arms wide to show how big his family ranch was. 'We are out for days. At night, we camp. We cook on the fire and the food, it always tastes so good.' He turned to Li. 'You must come to stay. I will take you out camping and cook for you.'

'Been there, done that,' said Li. 'We don't have holidays in the Cheong family – we go on field trips. I've eaten plenty of meals under the stars after a day spent trekking through some wilderness or other.'

'Outdoor meals are best,' agreed Alex, remembering his own, solitary camping trips in the remoter parts of Northumberland. There was nothing better than a freshly-caught rabbit, roasted on a spit over the fire, or a trout slow-baked in the ashes.

'Hmmm. Best outdoor meal I ever had?' said Amber, her eyes dreamy with remembering. 'We'd been out on the yacht – me, Mom and Dad – and we found this little cove. Deserted. We had a barbecue on the beach. Man, that was some evening…' She smiled softly, then her mouth turned down at the corners and her hand went up to touch the twist of gold at her neck. She turned to Hex and a cruel, hard edge came into her voice. 'You're pretty quiet. Anything to share with us? No? I guess the only outdoor eating street-rats do is out of other people's trash-cans.'

The boat rocked as Hex started to move. His fists were clenched and the muscles in his arms stood out like ropes, but then his gaze shifted to the twist of gold around Amber's neck and he stopped halfway to his feet. For a long moment there was silence, then Hex made himself relax back into a sprawl. 'Food doesn't do it for me,' he said. 'Food is fuel, that's all. Something I can slam in a microwave and then eat without getting drips all over my keyboard.'

'A junk-food junkie too,' sneered Amber, but the hard edge had left her voice. The lack of response from Hex had knocked some of the fight out of her.

'So, if food doesn't do it for you, Hex, what does?' asked Li. 'Hacking?'

'Yeah.'

'Why?' asked Paulo, gazing at Hex with genuine puzzlement. 'What is the fascination with this – hacking?'

Hex narrowed his green eyes and considered them for a moment, trying to decide whether it was worth getting into an explanation. 'What the hell,' he sighed, leaning forward. 'Patterns. Puzzles. Codes. You with me? Binary. Morse. Sequences of numbers, or letters, or shapes. They fascinate me. Always have. Cracking them. Figuring them out. Finding what's hidden inside.'

Alex looked down at Hex's hands and saw that the fingers were jumping, keying the air as he spoke.

'When I was a kid, they thought I was slow,' continued Hex. 'They used to take me out for special lessons. They thought I couldn't read. I could, though. Just didn't want to. Once I understood how to do it, I was bored. So I'd sit in lessons, working stuff out in my head, cracking codes, playing with number patterns instead of listening to the teacher. Then I got into computers. A whole new, beautiful code to crack. A whole new language to learn. I was hooked.'

'So you turned into one of those sad, geeky types who sit in front of a screen all day and don't have any friends,' said Amber.

'I have lots of friends,' snapped Hex. 'Real friends. It doesn't matter to us where anyone lives, or how rich they are, or what they look like, or what sex they are. We even choose our own names. That's one of the things I love about hacking. Everyone's equal. You live by your wits.'

'Correction,' said Amber. 'You live by breaking into other people's systems and stealing data – or destroying it for a fee from a competitor. My dad hated idiots like you!'

'You're talking about crackers,'' sighed Hex. 'Hackers don't steal. We break into secure systems just for the challenge. We don't take or destroy anything. We write our own programs and share freeware, instead of buying into second-rate corporate software for dummies. You know,' he added, giving Amber an icy smile, 'the sort of stuff your dad's company churns out.'

'Go on, then,' said Li. 'What's the most difficult system you've ever broken into?'

'I could tell you,' grinned Hex, 'but then I'd have to kill you.'

'And you've never been tempted?' asked Alex. 'You've never gone into a system to get something out of it?'

'Yes,' admitted Hex.

'Ha!' said Amber. 'I knew he was lying.'

Hex ignored her and continued talking to Alex. 'This PE teacher was giving my kid brother a really hard time. Mr Rutter. Except everyone calls him Mr Nutter. My kid brother, he's – not so strong. He can't run very far. Old Nutter kept making him do this cross-country course, week after week. Said it would toughen him up. My brother started skipping school on PE days. He took to wandering around the shopping centre for hours rather than face Nutter again. Then, one day, the police brought him home. He'd been caught walking out of a shop with a tuna sandwich stuffed inside his jacket.'

'Shoplifting is wrong-' began Amber.

'He was hungry!' yelled Hex. 'He'd missed his school dinner. So, I hacked into the school system – and the Local Education Authority system – and Nutter's bank account. Made a few changes. Planted a few time bombs.'

'Such as…?' asked Li.

'Six hundred pairs of running shoes delivered to the school with his name on the order sheet. Last-minute cancellation of his summer holiday. One month's wages donated to Battersea Dogs' Home. Next month he should get his redundancy notice.'

'Amazing!' giggled Li. 'Do the school know who did it?'

'They know,' said Hex. 'They just can't prove anything. They got their own back on me, though.'

'What did they do?' asked Paulo.

'Sent me on this trip,' muttered Hex.

Li burst out laughing.

'What?' scowled Hex.

'The look on your face,' giggled Li. The laughter was infectious. Even Hex was beginning to smile.

'I'm serious,' said Hex. 'I didn't want to be here. They only sent me because they're scared of what I might do next. As if being out here is going to stop me from hacking.' Automatically he reached for his palmtop, then remembered that the pouch at his belt was empty. A spasm of pain crossed his face and he turned to give Amber a hard stare. One by one, the others stopped laughing and there was an awkward silence.

Until Paulo belched.

It was loud, deep and lasted for a very long time.

'Pardon me,' he said, patting his mouth delicately as though he held a napkin in his fingers. Everyone laughed, even Hex. The tension was broken. They settled back in a companionable silence and watched dappled light playing across the hull of the Phoenix . The day was still hot and sticky, but it was cooler next to the water and the counter-stern above their heads sheltered them from the glare of the sun.

The gentle rocking of the boat started to make them sleepy and, one by one, the five members of A-Watch closed their eyes and drifted off to sleep…

FOUR

Alex dreamed he was back home in Northumberland, lying in the hammock his dad had tied between two trees in their back garden. The sun was shining and the hammock swung gently to and fro in the breeze, but something was not right. Alex frowned in his sleep as he felt the sun beating down on his hot face. The hammock started to swing more violently and Alex came awake with a start.