Jessie was annoyed.

She'd been trying to figure out the entry protocols for the GC's digital archives for a while, and she was close, but there were seven—seven!—different layers of information, each with different passwords and security checks, and no mention of Paragons at all in any of the two she was supposed to have access to.

The word didn't pop up in either of the next two layers, either. It was past suspicious. Jessie was absolutely sure that if she could just breach the next layer or two, she'd find evidence of Paragons. And at this point, it was personal. Three days she'd spent on this, any time she wasn't in class or working. Three. Days.

She'd never had this much trouble getting somewhere she shouldn't be. At least not digitally.

It wasn't even that each individual layer was particularly well protected. When she'd phished up a password for the third layer, she'd had her pick of literally anyone who was a full-time Governing Council employee. It had been simple. Even with her beginner's knowledge of running a scam, she'd had a half-dozen usernames and passwords within a few hours.

The next layer had been trickier, but not too much trickier. It had required her to gain remote access to a computer, activate a webcam, and capture a facial image of the head of the GC's Mesa training center. Jessie didn't want to pick one too close to her. The more distance she had, the better off she'd be. It'd taken a day before she got a clean image, had a friend 3-D render it, and walked through the fourth layer's handshaking with no trouble.

The fifth layer had taken almost two days, and she still wasn't in. And worse, she wasn't confident that she could get in.

Jessie frowned. It was a thumbprint-accessed system, and to get in, she needed a print from a member of the Governing Council itself. She'd been digitally stalking Councilwoman Myers for a few days, waiting for an opportunity, but the woman was crafty, and Jessie, for all that she was good at this, was both fifteen and a busy girl.

She knew she'd missed opportunities, but it wasn't her fault.

Even her friends—the ones Kade didn't know about, who could do this stuff—had only been able to offer advice.

Her phone beeped, and she powered her laptop on and quickly navigated to the ghost program she'd set up. Then she grinned ferally.

"Gotcha."

It took almost twenty more minutes to set up the emulated desktop, spoof a fingerprint scanner, and quadruple-check that the Governing Council wouldn't be able to track it. Even then, she wasn't sure she was right, so she waited. And waited.

Kade came home from training, drenched in sweat. They climbed into a bus and rode to the hospital. Jessie blinked back tears as needles punched into her hips, knees, shoulders, elbows, wrists, and ankles, filling her veins with icy-cold liquid that burned and fizzed inside her. Then she endured an hour of a muscular nurse pushing and shoving on her arms and legs before riding the bus back home.

Then she set a silent, vibrating alarm on her phone.

When Kade had been asleep and one AM rolled around, it went off next to Jessie's ear, and she woke up. The laptop was all set up; she quickly logged in, sent in the stolen fingerprint, and stared at her new Level Six clearance. As far as she could tell, she hadn't triggered any alarms.

"I'm in," she whispered. Then she started digging through the real Governing Council archives. The ones only the seven council members—and interestingly enough, five other accounts—had access to. "Let's see where you're hiding."

Instead of seeing, though, Jessie walked right into another password.

"God dammit!"

Jessie claimed she was sick. I'd seen enough of her attempts to avoid school to know when she was lying, but sometimes, the days after injections were rough. It wasn't the same kind of swollen soreness that made it impossible for her to walk, but it was painful to drain the medication and anti-inflammatories from her body.

But I knew she was lying about that, too. Her eyes looked exhausted, which was correct, but the usual pain on a bad day wasn't there, and she was moving just fine.

"Okay, Jessie. You're up to something, but I'm going to let it slide. Just answer three questions, and I'll let you stay home. Deal?"

"Deal," Jessie said. Her entire demeanor changed almost instantly.

"First, why did you think lying to me would work?"

I stared at my sister until, eventually, she folded. "I used to lie about school all the time with Dad, and so did you. I figured it'd be the best way to get out of class today."

"Okay, that didn't work at all. Try something different next time. Second, what were you doing up all night? Your keyboard's a lot louder than I'd expect it to be at two in the morning."

Jessie went quiet. Then she shrugged. "I was breaking into the Governing Council's top secret archives. They're hiding something about Paragons, and I need to know what it is. It's important for you, so let me do it, please."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously. You just told me not to lie."

I closed my eyes and rubbed them with my palms. "Fine. And third, if I leave you here all day, do you promise not to leave? Ellen and I found an E-Rank portal with a claimant looking for help, and we're going to get them through it and try to rank up a little. Then, after that, we're hitting up the Peoria center. Ellen's got spells to learn."

"Yeah, yeah. I'll stay home all day. I won't even invite Stephen over after he gets out of class."

"Are you at that point in your relationship already?" I raised an eyebrow. "You're a little young."

"Maybe." Jessie blushed a little. "He's pretty cool, and he likes me a lot."

"Okay. Just talk to me if it does get that far, okay?" That conversation would be…awkward…to say the least, but even though I liked Stephen, too, I needed to make sure Jessie was safe. If it meant having an embarrassing birds-and-bees talk, then so be it.

"Okay, yeah no, we're not there yet, Kade. I was just seeing what you'd say." Jessie was bright red as she pushed me toward the door. "Get out there, you've got a portal to clear, and I've got research to dig into."

It had taken all night, but Jessie had defeated the second password by asking a friend to keylog Councilwoman Myers's computer in reverse. It had also cost her half of the money she'd been putting away for a desktop to make it happen, but reverse-keylogging was way, way beyond what she could handle. If it hadn't been for her online friends, she wouldn't have been able to break in at all.

The digital world felt so much more real to Jessie.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She wasn't exactly graceful—she was a fifteen-year-old hacker using what she'd learned from her online friends to break into all sorts of places she shouldn't be able to. She was pretty sure she could trust the guy who'd gotten her the finger scanner spoof, and more or less sure that the phishing attack she'd started the process with was untraceable, but not one hundred percent. Maybe she'd made a mistake. She wasn't exactly a professional, after all.

But unlike meatspace, her body barely had to move to navigate Phoenix's limited internet. That left her with a lot less pain to deal with. And that alone made her journey into the GC's system worth it.

And there were a lot of other perks, too. The Governing Council was keeping a lot of secrets, and the first one she discovered wasn't actually the Paragons. It was the identity of the five other non-GC accounts that had access to the sixth tier of information.

The guild leaders.

The Portal Tyrants, Iron Falcons, Roadrunners, Coyotes, and Guardsmen all had access to the same secrets she did now. They all had access, for example, to the entire archived history of the Carlsbad portal break, the Wickenberg water portal, and even the Memorial portal. She could look over voting records for every major decision the GC had made in the last ten years—and not only that, but she had access to most of their communications with Phoenix's civilian government.

And so did the guilds. If that got out, that one piece of information would reshape how people thought of the Governing Council. According to popular knowledge, they ran the portal side of Phoenix and, to a lesser extent, Tucson and Carlsbad Fortress. But this…this showed, for sure, that they controlled the city's government, too.

Jessie thought about screencapping everything she was looking at, but…no. She had no idea how long it'd be before the passwords changed and locked her out again, and she needed to find information on the Paragons.

That was the priority. Help her brother. Then dig up dirt on the Governing Council and the guilds.

She typed in 'Paragons' and started to search.

Paragons:

The Paragons are monsters that live within portal worlds, generally in addition to the world's boss, but just as often taking the place of it. They are connected to a specific Law, and usually represent that Law in a physical sense. In addition to their connection to a Law, Paragons are considered both sentient and sapient. They are aware of the system and, in many regards, act like system-awakened beings.

Information about Paragons is limited due to concerns about their power levels. A Paragon's presence in a portal, while rare, can move the portal world's difficulty up by the equivalent of one rank, as their Law can be infectious to other monsters and seems to override the system's rules.

Other Information:

Known Paragons

Risk Assessment: Paragon Presence on Earth

Webcrawler Theta

Paragon Tracking and Hunting Protocols

Jessie stared at the information—and how it was formatted. Everything else she'd skimmed through had been uploaded as PDFs, screenshots of articles, or clips of videos. This read like a Wiki article. A very short Wiki article. Clearly, the inner council didn't want to mess around with access to information once they were logged in. The links were extra tasty.

She clicked on the second one.

Risk Assessment: Paragon Presence on Earth:

Of the several hundred known Paragons, only two are known to have transferred from their portal worlds to Earth.

The Stonelord (Rank-A) entered via an A-Rank portal near Florence, Italy during its third portal surge. It was defeated near the Serriola Pass by a group of A and S-Rank delvers, and its portal break was shut down shortly after by the same team. However, it devastated Florence's defenses in the short time it was free, causing heavy loss of life. The Stonelord has been encountered in three additional portals since its defeat in Italy.

The Archqueen of Madness is presently entrenched deep within the Amazon Rainforest. Its incredibly high rank (S) has prevented teams from being able to kill it. However, its lack of mobility has prevented it from becoming a major threat to any of the cities in the area, and its portal has been closed behind it. The local delver organizations enforce an exclusion zone for thirty miles in each direction.

There is some speculation that an SS-Rank Paragon exists inside the Carlsbad portal break, but this is unconfirmed due to no teams surviving entry into the caves.

In both confirmed cases, portals with similar, but lower-powered, Paragons appeared near the initial portal breaks for several weeks.

That was wild. There were active Paragons on Earth! And not only that, but they were being hidden from everyone. The Governing Council—and the other governments all across Earth—were actively conspiring to hide a threat that could wipe them off the map, and they had no real plan to fight against them. Did they?

Jessie quickly clicked the next link of interest. While she was curious which Paragons were out there, and how the Governing Council was suppressing information on them so thoroughly, what she really cared about was how to find them.

Paragon Tracking and Hunting Protocols:

While there is no foolproof way to tell whether a Paragon exists in a portal world, and every portal in the Phoenix area would be too time-consuming to check, there are several key elements that may signal a Paragon's presence.

First, Paragon portals take much longer to break than standard portals. We believe this is because the Paragon monster itself siphons off the portal's energy, delaying its critical mass event and break. The longer a portal lasts over twelve hours, the more likely it hosts a Paragon.

Second, Paragon portals' coloring takes on a metallic tint—cobalt blue, copper green, and a gold that's often confused for S-Rank portals' coloring. Notably, this trend does not affect S-Rank portals, although all S-Rank portals should be treated as massive emergencies by default.

Third, Paragon portals have never been trap portals. This doesn't allow for an active search, but it does allow those in trap portals to rest easy that their situation won't get worse.

Teams with potential to hunt Paragons should be recruited only after confirming that they have the Governing Council's best interests in mind, are loyal, and are prepared to face off against some of the most powerful monsters at each rank. A hunting team consists of a dedicated GC rep, a well-balanced team of delvers, and a GC oversight specialist and security expert working in tandem.

Download Paragon Tracking Protocols

Jessie didn't bother pressing download. She took a quick screencap and logged off. The reality of what she was doing was that she didn't have infinite time in the GC's database, and every second she spent inside was another opportunity for the anti-security programs she'd borrowed from a friend in Tucson to fail. If that happened, a download would be the same as an arrow pointing right at her.

Instead, she took a picture of the screenshot with her phone, then deleted the image from her laptop. Then she stared at the bits of information she'd found.

It was perfect.

"Gotcha," she whispered.

I got home from the portal a little later than I'd expected. Despite taking the E-Rank portal at the equivalent of a dead sprint—Ellen and I were both strong enough to keep fighting even after the two E-Rankers with us were exhausted—it had been a real beast of a portal. Not in terms of difficulty, but the sheer size of it would have worn down a full E-Rank group in a hurry.

It had been a Lithic portal, and the boss had been a gigantic boulder. Not a stone elemental or one of the fencers I'd faced off against in my last Lithic portal, and definitely not the Magmatic Octopod. Just a boulder that rolled at us over and over, crushing everything in its ponderous path. The hardest part of the fight had been figuring out how to hurt it; it was solid stone all the way through. Eventually, one of the E-Rankers cracked its shell, and Ellen was able to wedge the crack open with Orbs of Darkness and her new spell, Shadow Wedge.

After that, it had only taken a few seconds to end it, and the E-Rankers had come away with some equipment, while Ellen and I had gotten the core and a few items to sell.

Ellen had stuff to do, so I took the bus home, walked through the door, and collapsed into the armchair. The portal hadn't been challenging so much as tedious, and I desperately wanted a nap. But I didn't get one.

Instead, Jessie emerged from her room. She looked exhausted, but she was upright. She sat down on the couch, spread out to cover the entire thing, and smiled. "I know something you don't know."

"What?" I asked.

"I know that the Governing Council is working with the guilds to hide the existence of Paragon monsters, and that the Paragon monsters have an innate connection to Laws. And I know how to predict where a Paragon might appear in a portal. It's not foolproof, but it's more accurate than anything else we've got. And I know—"

"Slow down, Jessie," I said. "You're saying that we were right? Paragons are my Law solution? And that you can hunt them down for me?"

That changed everything. Instead of digging and hoping, I could be actively looking for the Laws I needed. Not tonight—I needed the rest, and I wanted Jeff's team backing me when we went after the Paragon monsters—but tomorrow? Tomorrow, we'd be on the hunt.

"I mean, it's not one hundred percent accurate. It's got some weaknesses, and I'm speculating about something, but I think if we start our hunt near Downtown, where the S-Rank portal spat you out, we're more likely to find what you need. And, as luck would have it, I'm a GC rep, so I can make sure you get the portals you want. Which means…" Jessie smiled widely, "that the Governing Council authorizes you to hunt the Paragons."

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