by Alice Reeds
And they’d need their own servers. As intriguing of an idea that was, it had to wait for another time, if we’d even get another chance to be at a computer.
“Come on in here,” Dawid said and held open the door for us, the same nondescript one we took to meet with Ivy and Wakaba. Not good. We had to be even more careful now that someone knew we’d seen this entrance.
But Dawid didn’t lead us to the minus one floor. Instead we went farther down to minus three. A new floor, more of the Villa, something we could potentially use to our advantage. Perhaps they also kept their servers hidden on that floor as well? I knew a lot of ways with which to make them regret giving me that kind of information.
“And right here.” He stopped in front of a gray unmarked door, the seventh since we entered the hallway. Part of me expected for us to walk right into some kind of trap, half regretting taking Fiona with me since otherwise I’d be the only one in trouble, but luckily, I had worried for nothing.
The room wasn’t all too big but filled with a few desks, cubicles almost, with big monitors standing on each of them. Only one was powered on.
“Like we agreed, you have an hour. It’s all I could get you,” Dawid explained, looking around the room nervously. I hoped he wasn’t second-guessing his decision and wouldn’t call whoever was above him in the chain of command.
“That’s all the time I’ll need,” I said confidently, meeting his eyes.
He nodded. “The account should be unlocked, and a browser tab is open with my wife’s email.” His words were a bit unsteady, nervous, like he was aware just how wrong it was for him to ask me to do this. With another nod, he turned and left, the door clicking shut after him, leaving the room filled with only the sound of the computer’s ventilation.
Not wasting any time, Fiona and I walked over to the computer and sat down. She pulled a chair over from the next cubicle and watched me. True to Dawid’s words, the tab really was there, and luckily for us, his wife had an account with one of the easier to hack websites. Bad for her, great for me. I cracked my knuckles and dove right in.
“And this is actually something you can do?” Fiona asked quietly.
“How else would I have saved you from failing chemistry, or played with my father’s bank account, or gotten into Kevin’s Instagram account for April Fools?”
“Fair enough,” she said with an amused huff.
It took less than ten minutes to get the password and to log in. One thing that he hadn’t considered was the fact that neither Fiona nor I spoke Polish, and most of the emails in her inbox were in that language. Opening a second tab, I typed in key words into a translation website and then used the results to look through the emails.
Now for the real reason we were here.
“Do you remember your password?” I asked Fiona, my eyes still scanning an email that was basically a block of text in a language that looked impossibly alien to me.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Fiona asked, a bit confused.
“Some people have purposefully complex passwords so people like me can’t do what we’re currently doing, so I thought you might have one you don’t remember.”
“Didn’t consider something like this while coming up with it,” she said. “Sorry to disappoint.”
I smiled and then opened yet another tab before moving aside a little and gesturing for Fiona to go ahead. She looked at me and asked, “What if it doesn’t work?”
“Only way to find out is by trying.”
She typed in her email host website, her address and password, and hit enter. A second later, her inbox opened up before us, with a hundred and fifty unread emails and ten in the spam folder. For someone who claimed to hate people, that was a lot of unanswered emails.
“It all looks just the way I’d left it, besides the unread ones that came in after we left Florida,” she said and scrolled through them. Many were newsletters from stores and events, business inquiries, and the occasional email from her few friends. Looking at the words in the preview, most of them were about how much they missed her, still couldn’t believe she was dead, wished it wasn’t so.
“It’d be so easy to reply,” I said quietly, the temptation smiling beautifully at us. “But we can’t.”
“Too obvious,” Fiona agreed and sighed, leaving all the emails unread. The sadness of knowing they were was still evident on her face and in her eyes. She clicked on the junk mail folder—ten sitting there, two from some prince claiming to be willing to give her millions of dollars, another one offering some lucrative gold business. The last one, though, seemed interesting.
“What’s that one?” I asked and pointed at it. The preview showed random words or letters, numbers, but something about it still caught my attention. The sender used a throwaway address.
“I’ve been getting that shit for years,” she said and opened it. “It’s always the same text, I think, though the sender changes. Always ends up in spam because like what even is this gibberish? Those aren’t even words.”
They certainly weren’t, not English ones, but neither did they look like any language ever would, especially since there were numbers and random capital letters thrown around in the middle. Maybe it really was just gibberish like Fiona said, but perhaps…
“Wait.” I leaned a little closer, though really why, it made no actual difference, and looked at the content as a whole instead of individual nonwords, my mind racing and flipping through a catalog of things in my mind. As much as it looked like nothing, there was a chance it was something.
Taking the mouse from Fiona, I copied the entire text and jumped over to a different tab and a website that could be found only if you knew how. I pasted the text in and then we waited as the program hidden away on that website thought about it and tried to translate it into its true message, if there was one.
Sometimes, when we were kids, Leon would send me secret messages as assignments, to see how my learning was progressing. It always looked so complicated, like writing it all out took far more time than it was worth, at least until he told me how to write those coded messages myself. It wasn’t hard or time-consuming at all.
“What even is this?” Fiona asked, confusion and a hint of awe in her voice.
“A decoding website,” I said plainly. I didn’t know a better way to explain it, at least not one that she’d understand without at least a hint of basic hacking and coding knowledge. “While you spent your time beating people up, I was a hacking nerd.”
“As far as I’m aware, nerds aren’t supposed to look like you.”
“You really thought of me as a walking, talking stereotype, didn’t you?”
“I thought we’d already established that.” She glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “I based my opinion on the person you showed in school. How was I supposed to know you were a nerd then?”
“Disappointed?”
“I mean,” she began before smiling, “not really. I prefer my boyfriends with a brain and intellect instead of brain-dead rich Instagram fuckboys.”
I actually laughed, way too loudly, but it felt nice, real, and a moment later, she began to laugh as well, her smile reaching her eyes and making them shine. Leaning over, I kissed her cheek just as the website finished thinking and spit out a result.
“Dot onion…what kind of website ending is that supposed to be?” Fiona asked.
“Dark web.” I didn’t like that answer, because usually, nothing good ever happened there. Who would send Fiona a coded dark web address, and why?
“Are you serious?”
“I wish I weren’t, but it’s true. You can try to put it in, but it won’t give you any results unless we somehow manage to download Tor in the few minutes we have left and not get caught in the process.”
In all of this I’d forgotten the very big possibility that someone was monitoring all web activities happening at the Villa,
and that someone was very much aware of everything we’d done so far. But, since no one had shown up yet, chances were Dawid had managed to get us some actual privacy, likely for his sake rather than ours.
“Should we try? I mean we’ve come this far…”
It took a little longer than anticipated, leaving us too small a window of time to work with until Dawid would return—I also had to erase all our traces so he wouldn’t know we’d done more than what our deal included. Finally, I pasted in the dot onion address and pressed enter.
“That’s anticlimactic,” I said as the page loaded and showed us nothing but a black screen.
“Maybe it was just a prank? Or one of those viruses that download all your data and shit?”
I leaned back in my chair, disappointed. I’d hoped we’d actually find something useful, that it wasn’t just something random.
Then words began to appear on the screen, blue on black, and my mouth went dry.
PANDA, C’EST TOI?
“This—” My throat caught and I swallowed. “This isn’t possible.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Villa
“What’s it say?” Fiona asked, her words suddenly so distant, as if she were sitting across the room from me instead of less than an arm’s length. “What’s going on?”
My muscles turned unresponsive, my eyes glued to the screen, and my mind turning blank. All I could do was blink and read those words over and over.
I blinked again and again until I could move my arms, my hands, my fingers, enough to type three letters and hit escape.
OUI.
“Yes?” Fiona asked. “Yes, what? Miles, talk to me.”
Panda Panda panda pANDA Panda
“What panda are they talking about?” she pressed.
“There’s only one person who ever called me that, but this is impossible,” I managed to say, my words odd to my ears, as though I was in too much of a shocked state to even recognize my own voice.
Fiona looked at the screen again, and then at me, her eyes begging me to stop and just tell her. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out, forming the right sounds suddenly too hard, a task I couldn’t complete, because saying it out loud would make it more real, even more bizarre.
With the voice of a stranger, I said, “My mother.”
Fiona went silent. At least I knew I wasn’t just imagining it, knew she saw the words as well, even if she couldn’t understand them.
MAMAN?
“So you’re actually able to speak French, or rather type it.”
“Did you think I was a liar?” I said, though I knew she was just trying to lighten the mood. And she wouldn’t be wrong.
“Don’t we all sometimes make ourselves sound that little bit better than we really are?”
“Okay, I’ll give you that. But I really do know it. My mother was French.” Past tense, was, not is. Whoever this was, it couldn’t possibly be her. There was no way.
But what if?
OUI.
Is that so?
COMMENT VOUS APPELEZ-VOUS?
“What did you ask?”
“Their name,” I said just as the answer appeared below my question.
VICTOIRE ELISE ECHO
PEUX-TU ECRIRE EN ANGLAIS?
OF COURSE.
“Didn’t you say she was dead?”
“She is dead.” My eyes stuck to the screen, to my mother’s name, to her every word, unable to comprehend any of it.
“Then who is this? Who else knew she called you that?”
“No one. Not even Leon. It was something we kept between only us, our little secret. She probably also had a name for Leon that I don’t know.”
“If she was the only one, how can this person know it?” Good question. “Ask them for something else only she would know.”
WE DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME. WHY DID YOU CALL ME PANDA?
My lungs stopped working as we waited for her reply, burning, screaming, yearning, my heart ready to climb up my throat and jump out of my mouth. Fiona looked from the screen to me, a worrisome expression on her face, before she turned her eyes back to the words I’d typed. As much as I wanted to cry just thinking of the possibility, I forced myself not to.
Weak. Weak. Embarrassment.
YOU PLAYED WITH FINGERPAINT. I LOOKED AWAY FOR JUST A MOMENT AND IN THE NEXT YOUD CIRCLED YOUR EYES WITH BLACK PAINT. YOU LOOKED SO HAPPY, BUT ALSO SLEEPY, SO I CALLED YOU PANDA. YOU GIGGLED LIKE YOU LIKED IT, SO IT BECAME OUR NAME. ONCE YOU STARTED TO LEARN TO SPEAK, YOU ASKED ME IF I’D TOLD ANYONE. I SAID NO. YOU SMILED, HAPPY THAT YOU HAD SOMETHING NO ONE ELSE HAD, THIS SECRET JUST BETWEEN US.
“It’s true,” I said quietly, the words unsteady.
“So it really is her.” Fiona’s voice caught between wonder and disbelief. I felt both, and a million other things I refused to even as much as think about, let alone allow them to show in my voice or on my face. Then again, after every impossible thing that happened in the past weeks, why was I surprised by anything at all anymore?
IS LEON WITH YOU?
HE’S HERE, SOMEWHERE CLOSE BY
Fiona cursed. “We have four more minutes.”
WE HAVE TO GO.
GO TO LEON AND TELL HIM PAPILLON AND HE’LL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING TO YOU
Papillon. Butterfly? This whole thing was only getting weirder.
It took me up until the very second the door opened, and Dawid walked inside to clean up after us. The reason why we’d come here in the first place was even more trivial now, like something belonging to a different reality. What did we care about his wife’s possible affair when my mother supposedly had crawled out of her grave and wanted me to seek answers from the last person I would trust?
“All done,” I said, and forced a smile I hoped looked friendly instead of menacing. “It wasn’t that easy. Your wife’s a smart one when it comes to passwords, but I managed to do it just as promised.”
Dawid’s shoulders relaxed as I spoke, an unsure smile forming on his face, though his eyes looked worried. I should have hated him and sought out ways to hurt him, but he seemed like a harmless enough guy, okay even, so in a way I was glad I didn’t have bad news for him.
“Was I right?” he asked, his voice matching the look in his eyes.
I shook my head. “No affair, just a now somewhat spoiled anniversary surprise.”
“Dzięki Bogu.” Dawid placed his hands over his heart, the stress melting off his face, and a big grin pulled his lips paper-thin. “Thank you, Oscar. Thank you so much.”
“Better thank me by keeping up your side of our deal.”
“Of course, of course.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. Quickly he typed something in, stepped closer, and turned his phone around.
On the screen was a map. A town name I couldn’t pronounce. The ocean. And a large forest. Wakaba said the truth; we really were in Poland, trapped in a Villa next to a town called Międzyzdroje. What was the point? Why here, of all places? Weren’t the States big enough?
I lowered my head for a polite gesture of thanks. “That’s very enlightening,” I said, though we weren’t that much wiser, our location as foreign as the language the people spoke. “Though I have one more request.”
“That wasn’t part of the deal,” Dawid began, his tone too soft to sound serious or authoritative, as he put away his phone. After a moment he added, “But if it’s something small…”
“All I want to know is where I could possibly find my brother,” I said, the last words tasting like scratchy fur balls on my tongue. “I know the night bell is in half an hour, but this will be quick.”
Whatever it was we’d discovered, whatever telling Leon would do, I doubted any of it would be as quick and simple as saying psych, it’s just a prank, bro. If our mother truly was out there, alive and well, where ha
d she been all these years? And how would Leon be able to explain any of it?
I was getting the creeping suspicion that this, everything happening at the Villa, was the actual simulation, and the real versions of us were actually on some freighter.
With Dawid walking in front of us, we had no way of discussing what we discovered, and Fiona couldn’t ask me how I felt about it. Instead she reached for my hand and squeezed it. The smallest smile played on her lips when I looked at her, silent support I was endlessly grateful for.
Back on the ground floor, Dawid led us down another hallway off to the side from the entrance hall, a smaller one I’d never paid attention to. Everything else, the living rooms and dining hall, were on the opposite side of the Villa. More for us to add to our map.
I waited for Dawid to explain what exactly was here, but he remained quiet, kept on walking, quickly and with a clear destination in mind. Maybe the staff had their rooms here the way we had ours upstairs?
We stopped in front of a door, the light wood lacking any unique features or markings unlike ours that had our names on them. Dawid knocked on the door, three times in quick succession and then took a step back. Time crawled as we waited, my mind emptying as I tried to prepare for whatever would happen next, what new curveballs we’d get hit by this time. I felt like a dog waiting for his next beating despite not having done anything wrong.
“Yes?” Leon asked once he opened the door. His hair was messy and his clothes much more casual than those he wore around the Villa, light gray sweatpants and a black shirt. Too normal. “Dawid, what can I do for you?”
“These two wanted to see you,” Dawid said and motioned toward us. Leon leaned forward and turned his head, his face remaining unchanged, like he was neither surprised nor happy nor annoyed, just indifferent. Our mother, if it really was her, had to have made some kind of mistake. There was no way he would help us or explain anything. This was probably a very bad idea.