Chapter 18: Fresh Start
I walked in and the room was smaller than I expected.
"Oh. Okay. This is... cosy." I looked around. Single bed, desk, wardrobe, window looking out over a courtyard with a tree in the middle. A radiator under the window clicking every few seconds. "It's not huge but I'm the only one in here so that's something. Most people have to share."
"Liam, be grateful," Mum said behind me, coming in with a box. "It's lovely. They're paying for it. You're paying nothing for this room and you've got your own window and your own desk and that's more than a lot of people get." She put the box on the bed and went straight to the window. "And you've got a tree. Look at that."
"Right. Where are your clothes? I'm going to put them away before you shove everything in one drawer and can't find anything for the rest of the year."
"Mum, I can put my own clothes away."
"No you can't. You'll ball everything up in a pile and then ring me in two weeks saying you can't find your good shirt. I'm doing it. Sit down."
I sat on the bed. She opened the wardrobe and started hanging things up, sorting them in some order that only made sense to her. Dad came in with the last box, put it by the desk, and looked around.
He didn't say anything. He checked the wardrobe hinges. Tried the window lock. Turned the desk lamp on and off. Knelt down by the radiator and listened to it click.
"That's not right," he said. "That clicking. Could be air in the system. Could be the valve. You'll want to tell someone about that before winter."
"It's September, Dad."
"September turns into October and October turns into November and by November you'll want that working properly. Trust me." He stood up and wiped his hands on his trousers. "Other than that, it's solid. Good lock on the door. Window shuts properly."
Mum had found my socks. She was pairing them up and putting them in the top drawer in neat rows. I watched her do it and something caught in my throat. She'd done this my whole life. Every drawer, every shelf, every school uniform laid out the night before.
"Mum. You don't have to do all of them. I'll sort the rest."
She didn't look up. "I want to. Just let me do this one last time." Her hands slowed down on the socks but she kept going. "After today you're a grown man who doesn't live in my house anymore. You're going to have to do things yourself. Take care of yourself. Feed yourself. Do your own washing." She folded the last pair and put it in the drawer. "But this is the last time my boy is my boy. So just... let me have this one."
I didn't say anything. I let her do it.
Dad sat in the desk chair and looked out the window. I sat on the bed. The radiator clicked. Mum closed the sock drawer and stood there for a second.
"Right," Dad said. "We should let him get settled."
Mum closed the wardrobe. Her hand stayed on the door. "Already? We've only been here an hour. We could stay a bit longer. Find a cafe. Have a cup of tea."
Dad stood up and put his hand on her shoulder. "Sarah. He needs to find his feet. Meet people. Figure out where everything is." His voice was gentle but steady. "We've got to let him do this. Same as we did with Nathan. Remember? You cried the whole way home and Nathan was fine. And Liam's going to be fine."
Mum's face crumpled. "Nathan was different. Nathan was just down the road. This is Cambridge."
"And he'll be just as fine here as Nathan was there." Dad squeezed her shoulder. "We raised him. We did our best. Now it's his turn."
She looked at him. Then she looked at me. Her eyes were wet.
"You'll eat properly? Not just toast and those horrible energy drinks?"
"I'll eat properly, Mum. And I'll call. Every day for the first week, then every other day. And yes, actual phone calls, not just texts. Deal?"
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Deal."
She hugged me. Long. Tight. She pressed the side of her face against my chest because at some point I'd got taller than her and she still wasn't used to it. I could feel her shaking.
"I'm so proud of you," she said into my shirt.
"I know, Mum."
Dad waited by the door. When she let go he stepped forward. Hand on my shoulder. One squeeze. "Ring if you need anything. And sort that radiator out."
They left. I heard them going down the stairs. Mum's voice getting quieter. Dad's footsteps steady. The front door closed. Then quiet.
I stood in the middle of my room. The wardrobe was full. The desk was set up. Mum's sock arrangement was perfect. And I was alone.
I made a cup of tea in the kitchen down the hall and drank it standing by my window watching a group of students cross the courtyard. They were laughing about something. They looked like they'd been here for years.
I was washing up my mug when someone knocked on my open door.
"Hey. You just moved in?" Bloke about my age, maybe a year older. Brown hair, glasses, hoodie that said CAMBRIDGE MATHS in faded letters.
I dried my hands and held one out. "Just today, yeah. My name's Liam, nice to meet you."
He shook it. "Ethan. I think I'm two doors down from you, I heard someone moving stuff in earlier." He leaned against the doorframe. "You here for maths?"
"First year. I'm guessing you are too, going by the hoodie."
"Second year. So you're a transfer then? Shaw doesn't normally take people mid-cycle. Must have been something special to get her attention."
He said it like he was fishing, not like he already knew. I could have dodged it but he'd find out by Monday anyway.
"I wrote a paper over the summer. Shaw read it and offered me a place."
"Must have been a hell of a paper."
"It was about the Sensitivity Conjecture."
His expression changed. Not a lot, but enough. "The Sensitivity Conjecture. The one that's been open since the nineties. And you solved it."
"I did, yeah. Still can't quite believe it myself if I'm honest."
He was quiet for about three seconds. "Right. I'm going to need to read that. Is it on ArXiv?" I told him it was and he nodded, processing. "There's a formal tonight, by the way. I'll make sure you don't end up sitting with the lawyers."
He disappeared down the corridor. He'd know about the proof by tomorrow morning and I'd either have a friend or a rival. Probably both.
The formal was in a hall that had wooden beams on the ceiling. Long tables with candles. Portraits on the walls. I sat between Ethan and a girl who introduced herself mid-rant.
"If one more person asks me what the difference is between a surgeon and a physician I'm going to lose it. I'm Sophie, by the way. Sorry. I should have led with the name and not the crisis."
"Liam. And I genuinely don't know the difference so you might have to explain it to me at some point. Just not right now because I've only been here six hours and my brain is full."
"Oh God. Another one." But she laughed. "Where are you from? You don't sound like you grew up round here."
"Outside London. Working class. Dad's an electrician, Mum works at a school. First in my family to go to uni, let alone this place. I'm still half expecting someone to check my ID and tell me I'm in the wrong building."
"Midlands," she said, pointing at herself. "Same story. First in my family. I keep waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and tell me there's been a mix-up. We should start a club. First-in-family impostors anonymous."
"I'd join that. We could meet in a building that's older than our entire towns and feel uncomfortable together."
She laughed again.
After dinner I walked back through the courtyard. The air was cold and the tree was a shadow against the sky. I could hear people in other rooms. Music. Laughter. My room was quiet when I closed the door.
I Checked my email. Shaw had sent a reading list and a note about Monday. Three messages from Mum. One from Dad.
I replied to all of them. Then I sat there looking at the screen.
The day was over. And the night was mine.
I'd bought a new laptop two weeks before the move. Told Mum and Dad the university had given me a grant for equipment, which wasn't entirely a lie because they had given me a grant, I'd just spent it on books and used my own money for the laptop. My own money that I'd earned over the summer doing jobs that nobody in this building would ever know about.
Three months. That's how long I'd had between the Cambridge offer and today. Three months of Null growing in the background while Liam packed boxes and said goodbye to people. I'd done twenty-three jobs over the summer. Mostly small stuff, crypto exchanges and penetration tests, but a few bigger ones that pushed me. My wallet was sitting at just over five thousand pounds now. Not life-changing money, but more than I'd ever had. More than Dad earned in two months.
I opened Tor. Set up my VPN, connected through three layers of proxies, unlocked the encrypted partition on my new laptop. Everything configured fresh, clean, untraceable. Cambridge had faster internet than home. Much faster. I'd noticed that the moment I plugged in.
The forum had been busy. New listings, new drama in the general chat about someone who'd botched a job and got traced to a proxy in Romania. Null's profile sitting there. Thirty-two jobs now. Clean record. BlackVault had started sending me jobs directly over the summer, skipping the public listings. I was building a reputation.
I scrolled through the listings. The usual stuff. Small bounties, crypto audits. Then I stopped.
A post from a user called Driftwood. Posted four hours ago. Twelve replies.
10 BTC.
At today's price that was over four thousand pounds. The biggest single bounty I'd ever seen on the forum.
The target was a UK-based data analytics company called Meridian Insights. According to Driftwood, they were scraping personal data from health apps and fitness trackers without proper consent and selling it to insurance companies. Heart rates, sleep patterns, exercise habits, medical information. All packaged and sold to companies who used it to charge sick people more.
I turned on System Insight.
They were bigger than anything I'd hit before. Multiple servers across two data centres. Dev team of at least forty. And their security was actually competent. Firewalls configured properly. Intrusion detection running. Regular patches. Somebody here knew what they were doing.
It took me about ten minutes to find the way in. Not in the servers. Not in the firewall. In the people. One of their developers had a personal GitHub account linked to his work email. On that account, in a repository that wasn't as private as he thought, was a set of API keys for their internal staging environment. The staging environment connected to production through a shared authentication service. And the authentication token didn't expire.
A chain. One link to the next.
"Four grand for this. You'd think they'd make it harder."
But it wasn't going to be quick. Their intrusion detection was good enough that I'd need to move slowly. One wrong move and they'd see me. And unlike the crypto exchanges, these people would actually come looking.
I opened a new terminal. Cracked my knuckles.
"Right. Let's see what you've got."
Their staging environment was a mirror of production. Same data, same structure, less monitoring. I used the API keys, authenticated, and I was in. Customer records, data feeds, analytics dashboards. I started mapping the internal network, tracing connections, finding where the real data lived.
This was going to take a while. Hours, not minutes. I'd need to move through their system like I belonged there, pulling data in small pieces, covering my tracks as I went. One alert and the whole thing was over.
But I had all night. My room was dark. The courtyard was quiet. Somewhere down the hall someone was playing music. On the other side of that wall, people were settling into their first night at Cambridge. Making friends. Worrying about lectures. Normal first-year stuff.
And I was layers deep in a corporate network, stealing data for ten Bitcoin.
First night at Cambridge. What a way to start.