“My mom came home and had to pack up our lives,” says Rose. For a few years they lived in California, where Tui had made friends with other followers, but struggled to get by. When they moved to Barsana Dham, life was better. “We had 15 ‘brothers and sisters’ and 200 acres to run around in,” says Rose. “We had a creek that went through the property; we’d go swim and jump off cliffs all day.” She didn’t leave except to attend the local public school, though in her long skirts and long braids, she’d sometimes get called “devil worshipper” by the other kids. “I didn’t care. I just thought, Screw you; you’re stupid,” she says. “It had been drilled into my head that I was this special snowflake and I’d been put on this earth to find God—the brainwashing started when I was a few months old.”

Things changed dramatically when Rose was 12. One day in Saraswati’s kitchen, he began adjusting her sari and suddenly his hand was all over her breasts. He was a half century older than she. He was considered a divinity. “And I was 100 percent devoted,” she says. “I knew it wasn’t right. But I felt like if I said something, I would go to hell.”

Still, she did tell her mother about the incident. “She said it was grace; it was coming from God,” recalls Rose. (Tui remembers the conversation this way: “I asked [Shyama] was she sure he didn’t accidentally bump her while working the sari and gracing her by his attention? She didn’t respond but was not visibly upset at all. I wish with all my being…a red flag would have gone off.”)

Soon the abuse was a regular, at least weekly, event: “There was lots of fondling, lots of touching,” Rose says. After she was assigned to be his personal servant, “I would be sent into his room, and he would do sexual stuff,” she says. “Sometimes he would show up at my bed at three in the morning. It was terrifying.”

When Rose was 13, Kate Tonnessen, a 14-year-old at the ashram, confided that she was also being molested by the swami. “I was sleeping over with Shyama, and going, ‘Say you were abused,’ ” recalls Tonnessen. “I needed her to back me up.” Rose couldn’t. “I still believed in him,” she says. “I didn’t know anything else.”

“I Had No Idea I Was Hacking”

But the day that Rose connected her Macintosh, she was whisked into a whole new universe of curiosities. “I’d go in and delete a critical file to see what would happen,” she says. “Like, ‘Oh, so it does that.’ And then I’d fix it.” She taught herself binary math, the zeros and ones computers rely upon to function, and eventually found other teens secretly dialing in to chat rooms; they showed her tricks, like how to throw “bombs” to lock people out of certain online areas. “I had no idea I was actually hacking,” she says.

On the Internet, Rose felt safe, even empowered. “I realized there was opportunity outside my shitty environment,” she says, “and that the whole world wasn’t a pile of pain.” One online friend told her about a computer science program at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas. “That’s when the idea of college popped into my head,” she says. She applied, got accepted, and took out student loans to pay tuition. “The guru yelled and berated me about letting her go,” Rose’s mother remembers—but ultimately she supported her daughter’s decision.

Rose was free, finally, from Saraswati. But trying to cope with the outside world, she soon began having panic attacks. “I knew tech was my out,” she says, “the one thing that was going to save my life.” She helped organize game nights, charging $3 per person to play Counter-Strike and Warcraft, raising enough money to take her computer science club to a hacking conference in Las Vegas. The whizzes she met there blew her mind. She learned about “black-hat hackers,” who commit crimes, steal identities, and wreak havoc, but also about “white-hat hackers,” who try to thwart them. And when she heard that Seattle was fast becoming the center of emerging tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and eBay, “I stuffed everything I owned in my car,” she says, “and moved there a week after I graduated from college. ASAP.”