by J. A. Dauber
It worked. At least for the moment I’m clear. So I can get back to figuring all this out….
THREE WEEKS AGO
I was mad. Steam-out-of-the-ears mad. Absolute-silent-treatment mad. You-ruined-whatever-slim-shot-I-had-with-the-love-of-my-life mad. So mad that there was nothing Caroline could possibly do to make it up to me. Which she knew, because when she texted me: What can I possibly do to make it up to you? I wrote back: Nothing, with about five hundred o’s. To make the point even stronger.
But there was one very obvious, dangling thing. Involving a mysterious message.
And this is what happened. After about sixteen hours of radio silence from Caroline, the part of me still furious with her was beginning to listen to the part of me that said that I’d done my share of stupid stuff in our friendship, too. And her admittedly boneheaded move had come out of caring too much, rather than the other way around…. I was pretty miffed, though.
But then she sent me another text, just as school was getting out. And this one I didn’t understand at all.
Not because she was making some deep emotional point or anything. I literally didn’t understand it. Because it wasn’t in English. It was made up of those same weird symbols—well, not exactly the same, but the same kind of symbols—that had been in the library message.
My first thought was that someone had hacked Caroline’s phone. The same someone who’d created the original message. They’d hacked Caroline’s phone, and were trying to mess with me, or put a curse on me, or something.
And then another text popped up: Like I told you. I always text in complete sentences.
Before I had time to respond, she wrote: Come find me. I have answers.
No, I didn’t know her schedule down to the minute like Rebecca’s, but I had a pretty good idea of where she was. It was her free period, which meant she was probably hanging around the music room.
When I got there, she looked at me and smiled.
And then she started speaking in tongues.
I mean, this flow of absolute…gibberish was coming out of her mouth. Seeing the look of utter incomprehension on my face, she laughed out loud.
“Doesn’t ring any bells?” she said.
I just stared at her.
And then she laughed again and said, “Come with me. You’re not the only one who has a dark family secret.”
* * *
I’d never been to Caroline’s house before.
I mean, I’d been to her mom’s house, where she lived with her mom and her mom’s new husband. I’d been there dozens of times. Maybe even hundreds.
But I’d never been to her original house before. The one she lived in before her parents split up, where her dad still lived.
We took an Uber over there, on the account her parents set up for moving between houses until she got her unsupervised driver’s license. It was only about twenty minutes away from my house. Close enough to the ravine that if her dad had looked the right way at just the right time of day, he might have seen Mayhem flying around.
Caroline’s dad had just gotten home from work. He was so happy to see her. It wasn’t her day to visit, I guess. And then he asked if she was staying for dinner, and she said she had to get back to her mom’s, but that she needed something from downstairs, and…
I mean, it wasn’t much of anything. A normal interaction. And she definitely hadn’t intended to hurt him. But she had. I could see it.
And I was jealous of her. To have a dad. Right there. To ignore.
She took me past him and opened the door to the basement and said, “Down here.”
So we went down.
Into what had become Caroline’s dad’s man-cave. A big TV hooked up to an Xbox, old eighties and nineties action-movie posters on the walls, and long wooden shelves running across the walls. On which were standing rows and rows of action figures in their original packaging.
All—and I mean every single one—from one movie franchise.
The truth is, I was never much of a Star Trek fan. I’d watched a few of the movies a long time ago, but that was about it, so it didn’t mean much to me. I certainly hadn’t recognized that the writing on the piece of paper I’d been obsessively poring over was written in Klingon.
But Caroline had. Well, not at first. It had been one of those things that’s on the tip of your tongue, like when you remember one line of a song’s chorus, but you can’t remember anything else about it, like the tune or who sang it. She waited and waited around for inspiration to strike, and finally it did.
“I tried a reverse Google image search, of course,” she said, while I nodded like I had any idea what she was talking about. “First thing. But it didn’t work. You know why?”
“I can honestly say that I do not,” I said.
“Because,” she said, “the message isn’t classic Klingon.”
“It’s not?” I said.
“It’s composed in an obscure Klingon dialect that only appeared in one episode,” she said triumphantly.
“Oh,” I said.
“Do you want to know which episode?” she asked.
I’m not proud of this. But this is when I lost it a little bit. “No, I don’t want to know which episode it was!” I shouted. “I just want to know what it says!”
And then she got defensive, saying she was sorry she was drawing this out, but she’d been spending hours online with various Klingon-to-English dictionaries, in Trek chat rooms, other fan stuff I can’t remember.
She blurted out the message at last, and I didn’t believe her. I made her say it twice.
Apparently the message was just two words. That was it. Two words. Well, the Klingon was longer, for Klingon-related reasons I don’t really understand, but it boiled down to two words in English.
“Trap-door spider,” she said, and her face got this weird expression between a grimace and a grin. I guess it was a ridiculous joke. I mean, what else could it be, right? “I checked it over and over, and that’s what it says. Trap-door spider.”
* * *
Google told us that the trap-door spider was a run-of-the-mill spider, except for the way it hunts its prey. It makes a hiding cave out of silk web and holds the “door” to it shut; then, when a bug gets close enough to set off the “trip wires,” it jumps out of the cave and munches away. Which was gross, and fascinating, and didn’t seem to have any connection to me whatsoever.
Then we fell down a Google black hole scrolling through pictures of spiders—insect Internet is weird—and somewhere in the middle of all those mandibles we realized we had totally forgiven each other. So that was good.
But we had no idea what the message meant, or who could possibly have sent it, or what they were trying to tell us. Which was bad. I couldn’t stop thinking that this superhacker who’d crashed the library’s power grid just to send me a message would find out about Caroline’s browsing history. And would do something stupid-slash-terrible to her.
So we decided to try Caroline’s technique—go home, go about our business, and hope that our unconscious minds would make a connection—and also, study for midterms.
I was going to. Really, I was. I had the unit on the Donation of Pepin and Charlemagne out and everything.
But I think you can guess what happened next.
My phone buzzed. And there was no area code.
For a minute, I thought Mr. Jones was watching me and knew about the spider, and my heart started hammering. Turned out he just wanted me on another job. Or a number of other jobs. More cash in hand.
I told him it wasn’t going to be easy. The governor had deployed the National Guard throughout the Zone. Helicopters and jets were flying overhead, kids at school said they saw drones patrolling our neighborhood. They were wrong—as I knew from the research I’d done before taking up flying around in a big metal suit, serious drones fly t
oo high to be seen by the naked eye—but you get the point. It was going to be a lot harder to go out, commit a massive robbery, and return to home base without anyone noticing.
Plus, although the National Guard and Homeland Security weren’t doing house-to-house searches in the Zone yet, the Bloody Front could commit another series of massacres next week, or tomorrow, and locals would be begging the military to trample all over the Constitution. I didn’t know how intensive those searches would be, and how good they were at finding underground spaces, but I didn’t like the risk.
Of course, he knew all that. He also didn’t care. “I’m trying to save your dad,” he snapped. “I’m doing everything I can. But my resources are stretched beyond capacity, and the money from one armored-car job just isn’t going to cut it.”
I remember thinking he seemed distracted. Maybe Bloody November was getting to him, too. Although that seemed—seems—unlikely. But when I tried to use his distraction to get more information—I asked him about the Zone, since if the Front was around here didn’t that mean my dad was, too?—he lost it. “You want to save your dad?” he practically shouted. “You want to help? Money. That’s what we need. Money.”
And he hung up on me.
So that sucked.
* * *
I guess there was some good news that day, though.
I mean, sort of: Rebecca and Logan broke up.
Or I think they did. Or had. But I definitely walked past a fight between them in the hall. A big one. There was no screaming, and there definitely wasn’t anything physical. Like I said, Logan wasn’t that kind of guy, my nasal trauma notwithstanding. But I was a longtime Rebecca watcher, and I could see the way they were talking and using their hands. It didn’t take a lip-reader to tell it was not a pleasant conversation. And then Logan just…walked away.
Well, limped away. Slowly. Rebecca didn’t move. She just stood there, head pressed against her locker. Not crying, not doing anything, just standing there.
Maybe someone better or braver would have walked over to her. Even taken her in his arms, or, since this is real life, at least asked if she needed a tissue or something. But I’m not that person, so I just stood there, at the edge of her vision, afraid to come close and afraid to move away. Until she looked up and saw me.
I thought she was going to be furious. To scream at me, or tell me to go to hell, or call me a creepy spy or something. But instead, she smiled—I mean, it was a kind-of smile, like there was something she thought was funny, but only kind of—and she said, “Sorry about the podcast.”
I remember giving some sort of vague gesture that tried to suggest that it was no big deal and I didn’t trouble myself with those sorts of things, that, in fact, I wasn’t sure I had actually listened to it, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t also a big fan of her journalism.
I don’t think I pulled it off very well.
She looked at me. Closely. I was absolutely sure I had something between my teeth.
And then she said, “Both of us, Bailey.”
I honestly had no idea in what possible world there was something she thought we had in common.
“Logan,” she said, like I had said what I was thinking out loud. “He’s hurt both of us. It’s not his fault in either case. Which makes it worse. But still…” She laughed. “It’s kind of like we’re in a club. A very exclusive club.”
There have been a lot of times, these last couple of months, where I’ve had the feeling I was in over my head. When I was little, my dad—who loved to play dress-up…I guess it was from his theater days in college—pretended to be a pirate. He would take a page of newspaper, fold it up, and put it on his head while he was yarring and yo-ho-hoing around the kitchen. This was top-notch entertainment for a five-year-old, you have to realize.
Did his whole dress-up-in-costume thing lead to his decision to become Mayhem? To suit up like a comic-book character, rather than, I don’t know, become an arms dealer?
Not the point. The point is that one of my dad’s favorite pirate phrases was Yarr, landlubber, here be uncharted waters! And that was where I had been since finding the suit, and definitely where I was right then. In uncharted waters.
This rammed through my head at, like, light speed, and for once, I came up with a good thing to say, an actual clever comment. “Maybe the club should have meetings,” is what I said. The second it came out of my mouth I wanted to stab myself repeatedly in the tongue because it was not clever at all. It was stupid, stupid, stupid.
But I guess it wasn’t so stupid, because Rebecca smiled at me—a no-doubt-about-it, genuine, actual smile, even if it was a little quivery around the edges—and said, “Maybe.”
And then she walked off, leaving me standing there confused and—at the same time—deliriously happy and excited.
For all of about fifteen seconds. And then I remembered how much everything else in my life, and I mean everything else, sucked.
I was totally stuck.
Whatever this trap-door spider thing was, it wasn’t helping me get any closer to my dad. Which meant I had to keep trying to get information out of Mr. Jones—at least until I figured out something better. Which meant doing what he wanted, for now. And trying to figure out how to get him to trust me more, so maybe—maybe—he’d open up a little.
As far as I could tell, there was only one thing I had on him. One crack in his armor, so to speak.
It was that he seemed oddly over-invested in my love life.
So I used that.
When he called me back the next night, he was snapping and grumbling again, but as soon as I told him I wanted to get him the money he needed and make a grand gesture to ask out Rebecca, you could practically hear him rubbing his hands over the phone. “I know your father would want you to have some happiness,” he said, which made me want to vomit, cry, and strangle him all at once. What would really have given me happiness would have been for him to just tell me what he knew about the Bloody Front. But I had to play by his rules. Follow his timetable. At least for now.
I told him about my idea for Rebecca, and he rejected it right away. I couldn’t just hit a big jewelry store, he said. Oh, no. Could I even imagine how difficult it would be for him to turn the diamonds into the cash he needed on short notice? I had to go back to the banks. Plus that way I could blend the jewel theft in with the rest, making the heist one dot in a pattern of misdirection.
Which meant a crime spree. During midterms.
You remember when Mayhem was everywhere, all over the country, causing havoc? Yeah. Sorry. I really threw myself into it because, I guess, I was beginning to get the sinking feeling that college wasn’t going to be an option. Thanks to my grades, but also…because there wasn’t going to be a normal way out of this.
At that point, that was just background thought. Now it’s definite.
And then, this one Friday. Another day, another federal offense. This one was going to be what Mr. Jones called a shock and awe operation, where the job wasn’t just to get the cash, but to make a big noise and mess in the process. I never understood why some jobs were supposed to be quick and relatively quiet and some the opposite—at least, then I didn’t; now I have my suspicions—but the thing was, Mr. Jones said meaningfully as we were planning the day’s criminal activity, the bank he was sending me to was located in New York City. Right on Fifth Avenue.
“So what?” I said.
“You’ll see,” he said. “Just make sure you budget a little extra time toward the end for…sightseeing. You’ll thank me. I promise.” Fine. Whatever.
I’d never been to New York before. It looked terribly ugly from the air flying in, gigantic buildings and narrow streets with no sense of harmony or personality. Maybe it was different down below. I wasn’t going to have time to find out, though—I had about an hour to do this, turn around, and get home. Otherwise I’d miss my History midterm, which wo
uld lead to a serious message home and almost certainly a serious interrogation from my mom. And in my current state of mind, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to handle that.
I landed right in front of the bank. It was always fun to watch the tar and concrete of the street crack when my boots hit the ground. It was like an announcement: Here cometh a badass. I liked it a lot less when people ran screaming out of the way. But increasingly they didn’t. I guess the word had gotten out that Mayhem wasn’t in the business of attacking civilians as long as they stayed out of the way, so it was more of a move hurriedly to the side than a run screaming.
And just before I tore the doors off their hinges—classic old-school Dad move, sort of an homage—I looked around and realized, for the first time, that I was just a few steps away from Tiffany’s.
Home, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, to lots and lots of diamond jewelry.
* * *
I was in and out of the bank’s safe in ten minutes. Being New York, and Fifth Avenue, it was a bigger safe and a heavier door, but that just meant a slightly larger drain on the power cells as I ripped it off. I prided myself generally on not causing too much property damage—no reason for everyone to suffer more than they needed—but given the shock and awe instructions, I made more of a mess than usual. Punched some holes that would probably cost a lot to clean up, and rearranged some heavy and valuable furniture in very surprising and, if I do say so myself, creative positions.
Then I walked down the street to Tiffany’s. I was briefly thrown by the fact that the Mayhem suit didn’t fit through the surprisingly narrow revolving front door. Instead, I jumped three stories straight up and crashed through one of the windows.
There were a lot of shoppers crowded around the display cases. I flipped on the internal megaphone, complete with the voice distorter, and said, “EVERYONE, PLEASE MOVE AWAY FROM THE CASES. I DON’T WANT YOU TO GET HURT BY THE GLASS. ALSO IF I COULD SPEAK TO A SENIOR MANAGER I WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATIVE.”