Blue Ticks

Twelve: Midnight Request

The house was quiet by ten.

Mom had gone to bed early, which was both a relief and the specific kind of sad I'd stopped letting myself sit with for too long. Leo's light was off. The only sound was the hum of the refrigerator and the wind pushing against the windows like it had somewhere better to be.

I was at my desk with my laptop open, editing yearbook photos I wasn't actually editing.

The Blue Tick dashboard was open in a separate tab.

Three new requests had come in since I got home. I'd processed two of them already, straightforward stuff. A junior wanting to anonymously apologize to a girl he'd embarrassed at a party. A senior needing a message dropped in a teacher's suggestion box before the end of the week. Easy. Clean. The kind of work that let me sleep at night.

The third one I kept coming back to.

New Request – $120

Sender: Ghost91

Target: Nate Calloway

Message: Proof attached. He lied to Coach Ramirez about his whereabouts the night of the Riverside game. Someone got hurt because of it. Kai Rivera cannot know this came from anyone connected to the team. Deliver it so it looks like it came from nowhere.

One hundred and twenty dollars.

I pushed back from the desk and stared at the ceiling.

Nate Calloway. Number fourteen. Left wing, slightly dropped shoulder, laughs too loud at his own jokes in the hallway. Kai's best friend since they were basically children. I knew all of this the way I knew everything about the hockey team, quietly, from behind a lens, information absorbed without permission or intention.

Someone wanted me to blow up that friendship.

Or at the very least, light the fuse and walk away.

I got up and went to the kitchen for water. Stood at the sink in the dark, looking out at the backyard where Leo's old bike was still chained to the fence even though he hadn't ridden it since September. Mom kept saying she'd move it inside before the snow got bad. She hadn't gotten around to it.

One hundred and twenty dollars was this week's grocery run and Leo's school trip fee that had been sitting unpaid on the counter for two weeks.

I went back to my desk.

Pulled up Ghost91's message again.

I typed my standard intake response. Before acceptance: is the attached material factual documentation or fabricated?

The reply came in less than five minutes.

Factual. Timestamped screenshots. He told the coach he was at a team dinner. He wasn't. A freshman got hurt in the parking lot that night and Nate was supposed to be the designated senior on call. He left. I just need it delivered clean so it can't be traced back to me.

I read it twice.

A freshman got hurt.

I sat with that for a moment. The request wasn't just gossip or jealousy or someone trying to cause drama because they were bored. There was something real underneath it. Something that had apparently gone unaddressed.

That didn't make it simple. It made it harder.

I thought about Kai in the darkroom two days ago, his hand around mine, telling me about his dad's debt with that careful, practiced steadiness he used when something was actually costing him. It's a lot. The way he said it like an admission he hadn't planned on making.

I thought about how he'd looked when he mentioned Nate's name before, easy and fond the way you talk about someone who's just always been there.

I closed the laptop.

Opened it again.

Accepted the request.

The confirmation screen blinked green. Payment received. I stared at it until the green blurred.

You're a service, I reminded myself. You don't decide what people do with the information. You deliver. That's all.

It was the same thing I always told myself. It had always been enough before.

I pulled up the attached file. Screenshots, like Ghost91 said. Timestamped. A group chat log showing Nate telling someone he was skipping the team dinner, a location pin dropped somewhere across town, a news article about a freshman named Drew Halston who'd been jumped in the senior parking lot that same night and ended up with a broken wrist and a concussion.

My stomach turned over slowly.

I closed the file.

The wind hit the window again. Outside, Leo's bike sat in the cold.

My phone buzzed on the desk. A text, not the app.

Kai: Okay, random question. Do you think people can change or do you think they're just always going to be who they are deep down?

I stared at it for a long moment.

He did this sometimes, the 11pm questions that came out of nowhere and managed to land directly on whatever I was already thinking about. It was inconvenient. It was one of my favorite things about him, which made it worse.

I typed back. I think people can change. I think most of them just don't want to do what it costs.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Kai: Yeah, that track.

Then: goodnight Voss

Goodnight Rivera.

I set the phone down and looked at the ceiling again. The acceptance confirmation was still open on my laptop, green and blinking and done.

Kai trusted Nate the way you trust someone who's been in your corner since before you knew corners existed. Whatever Ghost91's file contained, once I delivered it, that trust was going to crack. Maybe shatter. And Kai would have no idea I was the one who handed someone the hammer.

I shut the laptop.

In the morning I would figure out the delivery logistics. A drop like this needed to be clean, no locker, nothing physical that could be traced back to handwriting or paper stock. Anonymous email routed through a secondary account, maybe. Something that looked like it came from a concerned nobody.

Tonight I was just going to lie in the dark and not think about the look on Kai's face when I told him I had no idea who Blue Ticks was.

I was almost convinced I could pull it off.

Almost.