The Anonymous Algorithm
A Novel

About this book:

Sixteen-year-old Paige Vance runs Westbridge Whispers—the school’s anonymous confession account—with surgical precision: strip the metadata, filter the cruelty, protect the source. But when a submission lands in her queue at 12:47 a.m. accusing her own father, the beloved English teacher, of abusing a student—and includes a photo that looks damningly real—her careful architecture of secrets collapses. The sender knows she’s the Oracle. They’ve given her twenty-four hours to publish the ruinous lie, or they’ll expose Paige’s identity and the “proof” themselves.

Armed with code she wrote herself and a digital trail that leads through Tor nodes, spoofed headers, and a hidden image payload, Paige has one night to reverse-engineer a blackmailer who knows her system better than she does. Every suspect— the quiet Linux prodigy, the rich girl she rejected, the student with a grudge—has the technical skill and a motive. But as the countdown bleeds into the school day, Paige realizes the most dangerous variable isn’t the hacker. It’s the possibility that the photograph isn’t a fake.

A taut, tech-sharp YA thriller where the firewall between truth and catastrophe is only as strong as the girl holding the line.