Don't Look Now Read Online Free PDF Page A

Amanda said, clearly miffed. “Wouldn’t want to get in your way.”
    “You’re not,” Peter said defensively. “I just hate people reading over my shoulder.”
    “You never used to,” Amanda grumbled as she flopped back down on his bed.
    Peter rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. Even though they’d broken up months ago, Amanda still had a knack for making him feel like a bad boyfriend. He bit back a retort and focused on his keyboard.
    Still there? Noa typed.
    Yeah, Peter wrote back hurriedly. Sorry. Canyon is a go.
    Gr8, thx. 2 days?
    2 days. He hesitated, then added, b safe.
    But she’d already logged off.
    Repressing an inexplicable sense of loss, Peter closed the laptop. It felt like more than a virtual link had been severed. Even though they never stayed online for more than a few minutes, it helped him feel connected to her and what they were doing. Which was important, because sometimes Peter felt like he was watching a kid who looked and sounded like him living his life on the other side of a pane of glass.
    He’d first met Noa in person four months ago. Before that, she’d been an occasional participant in the hacktivist group /ALLIANCE/ that he’d established to punish internet bullies, child and animal abusers, and anyone else who took advantage of the weak and powerless.
    Through a fluke of fate, the two of them had stumbled across P&D’s secret research project, Project Persephone. The goal was to find a cure for PEMA, a disease that afflicted tens of thousands of teenagers. Peter’s own brother had died from it; it was always fatal. And sure, a cure would be great—but kidnapping former foster kids and treating them like lab rats wasn’t the way to go about finding one. Noa had been one of P&D’s test subjects, until she escaped. Luckily, they hadn’t infected her with PEMA. But she hadn’t emerged unscathed, either.
    And even though the two of them had managed to lure the FBI to a lab filled with victims of those experiments—in pieces—none of it had come to light. Which meant that someone powerful enough to call off the FBI was involved.
    And that scared the hell out of him.
    “So she has a hostage now,” Amanda commented. Peter turned to find her flipping through a back issue of World Soccer Magazine .
    “I wouldn’t call it that,” Peter said with a frown.
    “No? What would you call it, then?” she challenged, eyeing him.
    Peter shrugged. “She just wants to get some information. The last few labs they raided, the kids inside were already dead. She wants to know why.”
    “And she thinks this guy will actually tell her?” Amanda snorted. “What’s Noa going to do, torture him?”
    “Of course not,” Peter said, although privately he wondered. While he’d been going through the motions of being a normal high school senior, Noa had been living on the streets again, facing off against armed thugs in raids on top- secret labs. Maybe nonviolent retaliation just wasn’t viable for her anymore.
    Peter couldn’t repress the sense that his life was unbearably dull in comparison.
    Which was why he’d risked infiltrating that server room. Hopefully it was already funneling mass amounts of information to him via a remote server in Hungary.
    Somewhere in there he was hoping to find concrete proof of what Pike & Dolan was up to, including locations of all their secret labs, names of kids they were targeting, and what their experiments actually entailed. Maybe he’d even discover why Noa had developed such weird symptoms after they gave her an extra thymus.
    He should have told her about the packet sniffer. If she’d known he was close to accessing all that information, she might not have taken a prisoner.
    The fact that she’d put her group in more danger, especially when it could have been avoided, just added to his discomfort.
    “Well, I think she’s wasting her time,” Amanda declared.
    Peter shifted uncomfortably. If Amanda hadn’t been the one to initiate their