“Please, please, please come,” Lina begs, her lower lip out imploringly. “We need you. Just one meeting, okay? Please! It’s super fun! I promise!”

    I huff in exasperation. “Do you know how much homework we have today? No way. And I don’t even like anime.”

    “Which is why you need to at least try it!”

    “No. Now go. I have to go to Calc.”

    “I’ll pay you.”

    I freeze right in the middle of the hallway. Several annoyed passerby throw me looks as they shove past me.

    I don’t care. Lina has just uttered the “P” word.

    “Pay me?” I whisper.

    She nods, a triumphant look in her eyes. “Yes. Pay you.”

    “Why the hell do you want me to go to Anime club that badly?” Honestly, though, I could see why Lina was so anxious for me to come. “Anime Club” at Brookhaven High automatically equates with “Reject Club”. And that was when people were being nice.

Seriously, though, the moment you stepped into classroom B391, location of the Anime Club’s biweekly meetings, you were automatically branded a loser. I’m not infatuated with my reputation, but I do not need that. People think I’m weird enough anyway.

    But now that money’s involved-

    “We just need you to, uh, hack into an... anime website thing for us.” Lina shrugs, flashing me a sheepish smile. “It’s kinda, uh, like, down, and there are new anime stuff- episodes, I mean- on it.”

    “If you’re going to make me hack through the school’s blocking system so you can watch , I’m out.”

    She throws me a resentful look. “Shut up. Are you coming or not?”

    I sigh. “10 minutes. And no more.”

    “Thank you!” Lina trills, and gives me a quick hug before rushing down the hall to her next class.

    That lying . She didn’t tell me what she was really getting me into.

    I get to B391 after school and am greeted by a medley of the most questionable people in the school. Marcus Johnson, Annabelle Lim, Preet Chopra, and, of course, Lina. I’ve never met Marcus or Annabelle in person, but their reputations precede them. Rumor has it that Annabelle is so nice that she makes you feel really guilty and therefore contemplate the purpose of your existence.

And Marcus? 5 people in the entire school have heard him talk.

On the other hand, I’ve had the unfortunate experience of sharing a class with Preet. Calling him a “know-it-all” would be flattering him.

They’re all crowded up around a laptop, discussing something in hushed tones.

    “Where’s the money?” I ask as soon as I enter the room.

    “Oh, I thought you were lying when you said you got her to come,” Preet tells Lina in his nasally voice. He yanks up his jeans with left hand, waves with his right. “Nice to see you here.”

    “I have your payment right here,” Lina says, fishing a $20 out of her pocket. “Thank you so much again, Ami.”

    “Whatever.” I stride over to the computer. “What do you need me to do?”

    “Oh.” Lina clicks to another tab. A pitch black screen greets me, the white cursor the only color on the page. A single textbox sits in the middle of the site. There are no words, no instructions, not even a prompt of any kind. “We need to get into this site.”

    I give her a funny look. “Uh, okay. What kind of site is this?”

    Lina exchanges a look with Preet, the kind of look that makes you know that something’s up. “It’s a streaming site,” Preet says in a low voice. “The latest episode of... Digimon is going to be released soon, and this site has it.”

    Whatever. After popping a piece of mint gum in my mouth , I proceed to open up the site’s page source.

But as soon as the screen loads, my jaw drops.

    Encryption. Lines and lines and lines of it. I twist my gum around my tongue, scrolling down the box. This isn’t just basic HTML. Whoever made this website was really looking out for potential hackers.

    I should have just stopped there.

But, like, an idiot, I say, “This might take a while,” and open up the page’s Advanced Options.

I think at some point while I was trying to access the website, I knew this wasn’t some “anime site” that Preet and Lina claimed it was. Maybe it was the way all of them were hanging off my shoulder for 40 minutes straight, staring at the screen with bated breath. Maybe it was all the effort I had to put in wading through the stringent security measures and traps that the website creators had placed.

But I can’t deny that I wasn’t having a little bit of fun. I lost track of time. 10 minutes turned into 20 minutes, which soon faded into 40 minutes.  

By the time I finally find a backdoor into the website and paste an extensive tagline into the textbox to log in, it is almost completely dark outside, with only a few tendrils of sunlight snaking across the sky.

“I did it,” I say hoarsely, my voice cutting across the silence in the room.

Annabelle shoots up from her spot on the floor, where she had been restlessly tossing a ball up and down. “Holy , you actually did it?”

I nod mutely. Marcus strides over to me and claps me on the back. When I look up at him, he gives me a single nod of approval. A smile tugs at my lips.

“Ami, you are my ing queen,” Lina breathes, throwing herself on me in a huge hug. “Thank you so much.”  

“So, let me take a look at this anime site,” I say, but Lina jerks me back from the laptop.

“No. Really. You’ll judge us.”

“No, I won’t,” I say, eyeing her. Her friends look extremely uncomfortable, all of them stuck at some phases of protest. “Let’s see what this is.” And before she can say anything else, I click “Enter”.

Bold white letters fill the top of the screen. 4F- CA, USA, they spell.

"What's this?" I ask. "4F? Where's the Digimon?"

"You can go now," Marcus says in his low, deep voice. I ignore him and stare at the site. A deep red circle with 4 yellow slashes gradually fades onto the screen. A few moments later, a light blue map of the United States, dotted with a handful of orange circles, appears on the home page.

"Wow, that's cool," I note, ducking out of Marcus' reach. "Ooh, what's this page for?" I click on a link at the top of the screen that reads, Status Updates.

"Oh my god, Ami, stop!" Annabelle shrieks. Preet attempts to tackle me. Sadly for him, he collapses to the floor after I merely sidestep him.

"Hmm, let's see," I laugh, reading off from the page. "10.28.14. Group Red successfully obtained package from the border. Net amount estimated to be $16 million. Ooh, expensive!"

I click the "Next" button while ducking under Lina's outstretched arms. "10.5.14. Threat of discovery eradicated. Click to see proof." I raise my eyebrows. "Okay, let's click-,"

I drop the laptop.

"Oh my god," I utter. My knees hit the ground in shock. "Oh my- what is this?!"

A high-resolution image of a mutilated corpse is on the screen. Blood oozes out from various gashes across its face. Its left side is completely decapitated. The front portion of its body has been ripped open, but no organs are visible inside: only bare cavities.

Wordlessly, Lina strides over to the laptop. She picks it up and tosses it on the table without looking at the screen.

"You shouldn't have done that," she says quietly.

"What is happening? What are you guys doing?" I whisper. My throat feels like it is burning. "Who was that?"

"Nothing," Preet replies tonelessly. "It's just a clip from a movie-,"

"Cut the BS. Tell me."

Annabelle shakes her head. "No."

I turn my furious gaze on her. "If you don't tell me, I will make sure the school administration knows exactly what site you accessed. I will hack into it again just to show them. I will get the police involved. I swear."

Marcus coldly apprehends me from the corner. Lina exchanges a nervous glance with Annabelle and Preet.

Finally, she speaks, "That website belongs to a gang. The 4 Flames."

"You guys made me hack into a gang website? Without my consent? Really?"

"Well of course we couldn't tell you!" Lina snaps. "I didn't know you would go completely crazy and start browsing the site-,"

"I spent an hour breaking in!" I exclaim. "How could I not peek around a little? I wanted to see who made this encryption-,"

"Great. Now you know."

"What kind of a gang has a website anyway? And why are you guys hacking in?"

"The 4 Flames isn't your typical gang." Annabelle sighs. "They were founded in South Korea, during the 1997 financial crisis, and expanded to the US due to their high success. The level of technology and resources they possess is really scary, actually-,"

"So let me guess." I cross my arms. "You get a school project about these 4 Flames guys and you think it'll be cool to hack their homepage to get more info. Nothing looks better on a bibliography than a primary source, huh?"

Immediately, I realize I said something I shouldn't have. Judging by the way the temperature in the room seems to drop 20 degrees, I just crossed a line. Preet and Lina glare at me, while Annabelle uncomfortably looks over at Marcus.

"They killed my brother," Marcus utters, standing up. "He was attending college in L.A. He got mixed up in some stuff. The man who killed him was from a smaller gang. When we traced back the chain of command, we discovered that he reported to the 4 Flames. I want revenge."

There is absolute silence. Oh my god. Me and my big mouth. My face reddens. "I'm sorry. I didn't-,"

"Forget it." Marcus shakes his head. "You helped us by cracking into their website. We can take it from here."

"Please don't speak about this to anyone else," Lina urges me.

I nod rapidly. "Of course. I won't. Well, good luck, guys. But please don’t get me involved in this again."

After awkwardly retrieving my backpack, I head out the door. It is completely dark outside now. Who would’ve known that one of my own classmates would be hiding a secret like that? 4 Flames? Gangs? And what do they even plan to do with this gang website anyway? They're a bunch of 16 and 17 year olds. Did they even think this through?

A strange noise echoes from the end of a hallway. I shiver. It’s cold. I should’ve brought a jacket-

Suddenly, it hits me like a ton of bricks.

“Oh my god,” I gasp, turning around and sprinting back to room B391. “, , !” I hurl myself through the door. Lina, Annabelle, Marcus, and Preet are gathered around the laptop. When they see me, they look up in surprise.

“Wha-,” Annabelle begins to say, but I yank the laptop from her and click back to the 4 Flames’ homepage- back to the map of the United States with the orange dots.

“Just as I thought,” I mutter, and curse under my breath.

“What are you doing?” Preet whines in his nasally voice. “You said you’d leave-,”

    I cut him off. “Our location is being recorded. Look.” I point to the map on the homepage. One of the blinking orange dots is positioned in Northern California, close to the Pacific Ocean.

    Exactly on Brookhaven.

Where we are right now.

"They know we hacked their website," I whisper.