It had been a few years since Jisoo ran away from home, but even still she sometimes found herself missing the small place she and her mother once shared. She ran away when she was seventeen when she couldn’t stand how bad her mother’s gambling problem became. She had spent everything they had, including money Jisoo earned working on her own. It was rough after Jisoo’s father left them all those years ago and Jisoo couldn’t see it getting any better so she left. The choice was hard, but being here, with these people made her feel better.

Everyone here was like her, they understood her, they wanted to make a difference like her. Third Eye was a hacktivist group that operated mostly in Seoul, but Jisoo knew of other bases around the rest of South Korea, though she herself had never been to one. The group was supposed to be entirely focused on taking away power from corrupt CEOs and Crime Lords, but eventually Jisoo could see changes. More secrets were being kept and less and less dirty cops or government officials keen to take shortcuts were being taken down by them, instead more and more of them got away with a big enough pay off to the group and that wasn’t what Jisoo signed up for.

She wanted to make a difference, something real, but that wouldn’t ever happen this way. This way, criminals never got the justice they deserved, but instead got to walk free after paying off some college kids. It felt like her once driven and almost heroic hacktivist group had begun to feed into the vicious cycle they once wanted to end. None of it was right and Jisoo wouldn’t stand for it. So, she left Third Eye a couple of weeks later, taking a nice severance package of 1.2 million dollars in stolen money.

Much of that she gave to charity, her way of giving back what Third Eye had begun helping to take and using the rest to buy herself a nice apartment in the city and a really nice computer set up to go along with it.

From her new home office, so to speak, Jisoo began to try and restart her crusade, this time making sure to do it right. However, each day was more difficult than the last in terms of her finding everything she needed to find a target, let alone take them down. Jisoo was good with hacking and technology, maybe even better than anyone else she’d ever come across, but without a network of people helping to gather information and spread it like a wildfire, her crusade suddenly felt more like an unachieveable fever dream than a once attainable reality.

Even now, she sat in a cafe, looking down at the pages of a book, not reading the words as she listened to the conversation the manager had with a customer. “Of course I have it.” the customer said. “I’ll have some guys bring the boxes around back and you can collect from there.”

"Around back? What if-”

"The boxes are discrete, anyone around will believe you’re just loading groceries onto the truck.”

The manager of the cafe pulled out his second phone that Jisoo assumed was used for these types of transactions only and held the power button. Jisoo, gently set the book she was holding down and pulled out her laptop from her bag, immediately typing so she could tap into the manager’s phone before he turned it off again as he often did the moment he was done using it.

Jisoo was typing as fast as she could, knowing she didn’t have much time before the manager sent out the coordinates of the next drop off site. She heard the men thank each other, saw the manager turn away out of the corner of her eye, but within a split second she was in. Everything sent to that phone would now be sent to computer as well.

Jisoo smiled triumphantly to herself and sipped at her now mostly cold coffee.

~

It was the next night that her computer began beeping, alerting her of an incoming call to the manager’s phone from a blocked number. Jisoo waited for the manager to answer, listening intently as she traced the blocked caller’s location. “I’m dropping off the shipment at the east docks tonight at 2.” Jisoo recognized the voice to be the manager's.

There was a hum from the other line and Jisoo silently began panicking for her computer algorithm to get a hit on the trace before the two hung up. “Should I meet you for the next collection?” The managed asked, some hint of what Jisoo could only associate with fear laced in his words.

When the man on the other line spoke, his voice was distorted and frankly terrifying if Jisoo was anyone to judge. “You come to me. You know my location Mr. Lee.”

"Of course, I will be there as soon as the drop off has gone over.”

There was another hum and Jisoo shut her eyes, waiting for the telltale click of the line ending and the ping of her computer finding a location. Jisoo bit her bottom lip as the manager spoke up once more. “And sir, I believe tonight will have to be our last transaction.”

"I’m sorry?” the distorted voice questioned.

"The last items you sold me were in less than a preferable condition and I believe I may have found a better offer, unless you can impress me tonight I will have to terminate our relationship.”

Jisoo heard the pinging sound and she practically leaped from her chair to the computer. Her fingers moved naturally along the keyboard, she’d don this millions of times before and now was no different. It took only a few seconds for Jisoo to confidently pin the location the two would be meeting later that evening. Jisoo wrote the address of the building on her wrist as she grabbed the few things she thought she might need.

Jisoo had been tracking these two for the past two weeks, since she overheard the wife talking about her husband being involved in some sort of activities late at night. When Jisoo decided to check it out she figured the man was cheating on his wife, but after checking his bank account she discovered that over the past six months he’d been ranking in between one and two thousand extra dollars a month in a secret offshore account. Jisoo had tried, but she couldn’t track down how the money was being wired into the account or from where or even who was sending the money because it had all been done on public computers all over Seoul much to her dismay.

Jisoo got her first real lead when she noticed a man who would come into the cafe, slip the manager an envelope and leave without ordering anything. It was odd, so much so that Jisoo paid extra attention to the once a week interactions until she discovered, by “accidentally” knocking the file off the counter while the manager wasn’t looking, they were exchanging coordinates for various locations for “drop offs”. Jisoo had suspected drugs before, but this was just enough proof to get the ball rolling until now.

All Jisoo had to do was catch the two men in the act, take and leak a few photo’s of both of them and they would be brought down from there. Jisoo thought she could even potentially trace where exactly the drugs were from and hopefully bring whoever was supplying the stuff down in the process. It was a delicate situation, one that proved to be harder ever since she left Third Eye behind. However, this time she had a feeling that she was onto something and that if she just kept following the clues and sticking to her plan, she’d achieve her goals.

Jisoo arrived at the location before anyone of her suspected perps by maybe an hour or so. She waited in the front seat of her vehicle, twisting some licorice around her finger as she ate the candy. She was getting tired and bored while waiting and more importantly, she was almost out of candy. It was almost 4:30 in the morning and Jisoo knew how long it took to drive from the east docks to here and she didn’t think a drug deal could take longer than an hour and a half at most, especially since they should be rushed to get here at a reasonable time. Though, when Jisoo thought about it, anytime past 3:25 was entirely unreasonable anyway.

It was just then that Jisoo noticed the shadows of some people moving around. She lowered herself in her seat as to remain somewhat inconspicuous with the shadows of the night. She watched as the manager and the customer from the past few weeks both appeared behind a large truck. Jisoo looked around, sat up a bit to get a better look, but all she could see were the two men. Jisoo hadn’t imagined a drug deal to go this way, if movies taught her anything it was that there were always armies of men with really big guns stationed all around meetings likes this.

She ignored the thought that maybe something here was off and held her camera up, just above her steering wheel and snapped a few photos of the men shaking hands, looking around and unloading some boxes. She looked at the pictures, pleased with the quality of them and took a deep breath as she jumped out of her car, her camera dangling around her neck. She climbed up a nearby ladder to the top of a shipping container so she could get a better view of what was going on below. She made sure to stay out of the light as she held her camera up. Jisoo prayed for the manager of the cafe to quietly open the boxes to check his merchandise, something Jisoo noticed he always did upon receiving a delivery for the cafe or whenever a package was delivered to his home.

She silently thanked her two weeks of basically stalking the man for paying off when he knelt down and used a pocket knife to rip the tape from one of the boxes. Jisoo instantly snapped a few pictures the moment the man began opening the thing, carefully looking inside. He seemed pleased with the contents as he reached into the box and pulled something from inside.