My Family, Their Sinister Game

n' t a real agent anymore, not since he' d retired from the FBI five years ago, but he still carried himself like one. He was Sara

s, kids who could write their own ticket to MIT or Stanford, decided to protest a programming competition b

fter Sarah vanished. A group of us, all prodigies who knew what happened to her, were terrified. We s

aning forward. "They understood it was a prank. A very, very sophisticated

or me to say somethi

he stood up in front of the disciplinary board and demanded you all be suspended. Not just suspend

ssible. We wanted to be branded as delinquents, as uncontrollable liabilities. We thought

tening just a little. "You were deliberately trying t

red. "We thought if we weren' t the

t care about a mark on your permanent record. They don' t recruit through official channels. Your little stunt, getting yourselves banned... all it did was take you

right. Our grand plan to save ou

banned, she walked into the server room of the tech company that sponsored the competition and physically smash

efore she did it. "They can' t get me in there," she' d said, her voi

iet life, working at a library. We all thought she was the one who had truly escaped. Our plan had succeeded

d ache. I let myself believe I had outsmarted the monster. I was just Ashley Miller, insurance analyst. I was nobody special. I had successfully dodged the bull

sed email burning in my mind, I knew that shield