“Did I know at the time what your father was going to turn into? No. Maybe I should have. Probably I should have.” Mom pokes through the folder. There are more pictures of her with Xochitl. “So the thing you have to understand is, college was the first time in my life I ever had friends.”
I think about all the years we spent moving constantly, before I found CatNet and my Clowder, and don’t say anything.
“I didn’t fit in, growing up. I never understood how other kids made friends so effortlessly. I did understand math, which definitely didn’t help me fit in, but did help me get into a good college for nerd kids, where suddenly, for the first time in my life, I found my people. It was like magic. Xochitl and Rajiv were my best friends.” She lays out more photos: Xochitl dancing in a mirrored studio, Michael napping under a tree, hands—Rajiv’s, I’m pretty sure—gently patting dirt around a flower in a pot. “I had a job offer back in my hometown, but that would have meant leaving my friends behind. Michael, or maybe Xochitl, suggested we strike out on our own, and that’s how we decided to start Homeric Software.”
“Was the universal decryption key the business plan?”
“Oh, no, that would have been ridiculous. We did risk analysis and penetration testing—basically, people would hire us to try to break into their systems, and if we could, we’d let them know how we did it. It was fun, and we were all very good at it. The decryption key was related research, of course.”
I stare at the picture of the hands with the flower, trying to decide what to say, or what to ask. “My father was dangerous. Xochitl, you’re still friends with. Do you think you’d still be friends with Rajiv if, you know…”
“If he hadn’t either died or faked his death?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm. No.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“I honestly don’t know.” My mother looks up, her expression weary. “When I got the universal decryption key working, your father wanted to use it for power. To make ourselves fantastically rich, for starters, but his goal was power. Xochitl had assumed that the plan was to sell it to the government. Rajiv said the rest of us were thinking small. He had a grand vision.”
“Of what?”
“Oh, you know. Fully automated luxury space communism. A world with no poverty, no pollution, no war. But to get there would require revolution, the complete demolition of the old order. Xochitl said he was talking about setting fire to everything so he could plant flowers in the ashes, and this decryption key might help him burn everything down, but it wasn’t going to do a damn thing to rebuild. Anyway, that’s when I encrypted the code so that no one else could use it. I wanted time to think about what to do.”
“When you were kidnapped, did you believe it was Rajiv?”
“Yes. Partly because he seemed so sure that the ends would justify the means, and so the idea that he’d try to force the key out of me seemed plausible. But more than that—Rajiv did suggest kidnapping me to Michael. Michael recorded the conversation—he gave it to the police. Rajiv said it like a joke. But he said a lot of things like a joke.”
“But it definitely wasn’t Rajiv who kidnapped you?”
“Michael slipped up. Mentioned something I knew I hadn’t told the police. That’s how I knew he was involved. I don’t actually know that Rajiv wasn’t involved, but then he disappeared, and a week later they pulled his car out of the Pacific. I knew Michael had kidnapped me, I thought he’d had Rajiv killed, so I ran, and you know the rest, I think.”
“What did you think you were going to do with the decryption key?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Mom says softly. “Which was stupid, I can say now. Really, really stupid.” She clears her throat and adds, “Like that quote from Jurassic Park, I was so preoccupied with whether I could, I didn’t think about whether I should, although at least in my case it wasn’t a genetically engineered T. rex.”
“You should do that instead next time,” I say. “Dinosaurs are cool.”
* * *
The next day, I’m watching out the front window when Rachel pulls up in her car, and I run out to meet her, give her a hug, and then we run back into the house because it’s about ten degrees below zero and also windy, and I ran outside in my socks.
Rachel checks out the apartment.
“When you come in summer, there’s a park really nearby,” I say. “It has a lake and I think it might be a really nice place to have a picnic. But not when it’s like this.”
“Yeah, it’s not a great day for a picnic,” Rachel says. “Have you found anything interesting yet? That you could show me?”
I start to say no, but then realize I do know of one cool place we could go—the Midtown Exchange. Rachel has a car, so we don’t even have to walk in the bitter cold or ask my mother for a ride.
And, I mean, I can keep my eyes open for Rajiv.
“How’s your mom?” Rachel asks once we’re back in her car. “I was sort of expecting to see her. Is she trying to give us privacy?”
“I think she’s just still sleeping,” I say. I heard her moving around at some point in the night, long after I’d gone to sleep; I woke up because Apricot jumped off my bed and went to see what she was up to.
“Does she do this a lot?”
“She’s always kept really weird hours.” The only time I’ve ever seen my mother sleep consistently at a normal time, it involved medication. Therapy is helping her, but it hasn’t fixed her sleep yet.
As we reach Lake Street, Rachel gasps and slams on her brakes. “Does that building have a rocket ship on the front?”
The rocket ship building turns out to be a science fiction bookstore, so crammed full of used books they’ve spilled off the shelves and into crates that are stacked on the floor. “Bryony’s got to see this,” Rachel mutters when she finds an entire shelf of used Fast Girls Detective Agency graphic novels.
We eventually tear ourselves away from the bookstore and walk the rest of the way to the Midtown Exchange for lunch. As we go in, the Invisible Castle app pings me. “What’s that?” Rachel asks, peering over my shoulder.
“It’s a game,” I say. “Kind of a game, kind of a social media site. It gives me points for things. Right now, I can get points if I talk a white person into eating vindaloo curry.”
“I’m white,” Rachel says. “You want me to eat it?”
“It’ll make you cry,” I say.
“Try me,” she says, so, hey, okay. Fine. I mark that off as done and buy myself a bubble tea and a sambusa while Rachel buys herself some vindaloo. She winds up stealing my bubble tea and neither of us finishes the vindaloo. It’s actually delicious, what I can taste of it around the incredible burning in my mouth.
“Mischief Elves, huh?” Rachel says after buying some ice cream, and downloads the app as well.
“I should tell you,” I say, and then hesitate—I don’t want Rachel to think I’m paranoid. “The app is intrusive, and I don’t know if I trust them with my data.”
“You’re running it, though,” Rachel says.
“Yeah,” I say.
She shrugs. “If it freaks me out, I’ll delete it.”
I check to see what my new mission is. Write a short poem (it can be a haiku, limerick, sonnet, sestina, or villanelle) and leave it on the windshield of a stranger’s car out in the lot. It’s supposed to be on a theme, which I can pick off a list: Dramatic weather is incoming, Explosions are fun, Trousers are overrated, Rain of frogs. Rachel thinks this is hilarious, even more so when the app gives her a similar mission but with artwork. She rips a couple of pages out of the back of her sketch pad and lends me a pen.
“Rhyming poetry is hard,” I say.
“Limericks aren’t that hard.”
I write:
There once was a lady from France
Who didn’t much like to wear pants
But today was so cold
That in blankets she rolled
And made herself homemade
“What rhymes with pants, and means pants, but isn’t the word pants?”
“Rants fits the rhyme,” Rachel says. “Maybe she could rant about the weather. Or grants. She could get an arts grant for her improvised trousers.”
Instead, I switch to haiku.
Cotton, denim, stretch
Cloaking my legs like a shroud
Trousers are a scam.
Giggling, we leave our notes on cars, taking quick pictures to confirm to the app that we’ve done it, then run back to Rachel’s car.
It’s almost time for Rachel to head home. I kiss her good-bye, inhaling the scent of her hair and skin, my fingers laced with hers. She tastes a little like bubble tea and vindaloo.
“Do you think you could get your mother to drive you down some week?” she asks.
“Maybe,” I say. “I’ll ask about next weekend.”
“Send me a picture of this Nell person,” she adds, and then I get out of her car and go inside so she can drive back to New Coburg.
13
• Clowder •
Firestar: What’s up everybody I AM BAKING.
Hermione: Like pie or something, right? This isn’t some new euphemism for drug use?
Firestar: CAKE. Layer cake. One of the layers fell apart when it came out of the pan so it’s going to be shorter than I was planning. However: I also need to dispose of a layer of broken cake.
CheshireCat: Does broken cake taste any different from regular cake?
Hermione: No. Cake is cake.
Firestar: Hermy is objectively wrong. Cake tastes better when it’s pretty. But cake ALSO tastes better when you’re eating it on the sly and you can put your broken cake in a bowl and eat it in the TV room with a bowl of icing on the side.
Boom Storm: My favorite cake is the kind that’s decorated with frosting roses.
Hermione: The frosting roses always taste weird and bitter to me. Like they’re made from some sort of icing that’s good sculptural material but not actually great as food.
Boom Storm: Blasphemy!
{LittleBrownBat is here}
Firestar: HI LBBBBB. CHECK OUT THE PICTURE OF MY CAKE.
LittleBrownBat: Ooh. Are those raspberries?
Firestar: YES
{Marvin is here}
Marvin: Is it possible to still die of hypothermia after you’ve come inside where it’s warm? Asking for a friend.
Hermione: If you’re lying on a cold floor, you should probably get up.
Marvin: I am wrapped in an electric blanket.
CheshireCat: If you’re capable of typing and wrapped in an electric blanket, you should recover.
Marvin: NEVER WINTER CAMPING AGAIN
Hermione: I thought it didn’t get that cold in North Carolina
Marvin: Yeah SO DID I.
On the plus side, the raid was fun. We had multiple reenactor groups scattered around the campsite.
Hermione: LARPing groups
Marvin: Whatever. Anyway, supposedly all the excitement was going to be in the morning but INSTEAD two of the people at my campsite wanted to go raid one of the other groups so we sneaked up on them through the woods at 2 a.m.
Hermione: How’d that go?
Marvin: I clobbered two of them with my boffer and then some of them got me with a bucket of water.
Hermione: Do I want to know what “boffer” is a euphemism for?
Marvin: It’s a big fake foam sword. Well, the foam is real. You make it out of PVC pipe, a pool noodle, and duct tape.
The water was also real, unfortunately.
Hermione: That actually sounds pretty epic except for the water.
Marvin: I TOLD you that dihydrogen monoxide was nothing to mess around with!
14
• Nell •
I sleep late on Saturday, but the house is silent and dark when I get up. There are still dishes in the sink, and after I eat half a toasted bagel, I peer at the stack of cups and bowls, wondering if it will make things less tense if I just wash them, or if it’s someone’s turn and everyone else will be cross that this specific someone didn’t do the dishes. I end up washing just the items I used and putting them in the drying rack. After a minute, I also dry them off and put them back where I found them. When I’m done, it looks like I was never even here.
It’s almost nine. How are they all still asleep? My mother and grandparents never sleep this late.
I check my phone, and there’s a message from the Catacombs offering me another quest. I click Yes without so much as reading the details, then follow a set of instructions to put on a loose sweater with easily accessible pockets and then dress for a walk outside.
I hesitate when the next set of instructions is to walk to a hardware store four blocks away. Should I leave a note, in case someone wakes up and wonders where I am? I close my bedroom door instead. If they even get up, they’ll assume I’m sleeping.
It’s a bright, frigid Minnesota day, and my face aches from the cold when I get to the hardware store. I smile at the old man behind the counter; he nods without really looking at me.
I step out of sight in an aisle and check for the next set of instructions.
Shoplift a tool. You may choose any of the following: hammer, crowbar, sledgehammer, ax. Take the biggest you can remove without being caught. Check first for mirrors that let the employee watch what you’re doing. If you can see him in the mirror, he can see you. Don’t get caught.
Oh. Okay. I’ve never stolen anything before, and my hands are shaking as I put my phone back in my pocket. This must be why I needed the big pockets, I guess. I look around for a mirror, and there is one, but the store phone rings and the employee is distracted. I pick a hammer off the rack, turn my back so the mirror won’t show what I’m up to, then stuff it awkwardly under my coat. It’s not exactly in my pocket, but the pocket is holding it in place under my coat.
Is he going to be suspicious when I walk out without buying anything? I didn’t bring money, because my instructions didn’t say to bring money. I stride brusquely to the front of the store, and when he puts his hand over the phone receiver and says, “Can I help you find anything?” I shrug apologetically and say, “My dad just wanted me to check if you had any snowblowers left in stock. I’ll tell him you do!”
He nods distractedly, and I’m out on the street, the hammer in my pocket, my heart pounding in my chest. I walk halfway down the block, then check my phone for the next instruction.
It’s a photo of a box that’s been left out on the alley one block over. Leave the tool you chose in this box.
The box is easy enough to find. There’s four other hammers, an ax, and a sledgehammer inside, almost everything brand-new with the tags still on. I add my hammer and then take a picture so the app knows I’ve done it.
Now go home. Delete the photo. Tell no one.
I take the next alley toward my father’s house. I’ve never lived somewhere with alleys before; they’re like a second street that runs behind the houses, with trash bins and garages and all the other unattractive stuff people like to keep out of sight. The next block down, I see another box like the one I left my hammer in. Curious, I check inside; instead of hammers, it’s bottle after bottle of stump remover.
Well, okay. I was told to tell no one about the hammers, but no one’s told me I can’t talk about the box full of stump remover, so maybe I’ll ask someone if they know what they might be for and that’ll give me some clues about the hammers? I take a picture, and don’t delete this one.
I walk the rest of the way home, thinking about how this sort of thing was probably the reason why Brother Daniel always said I had the devil in me. “That one wants to know the exact rules so she can wiggle under them,” he said to my mother not long after we first joined the Remnant. My face heats as I remember the look on my mother’s face after he said that. The disgust. She knew he was right. Wanting to stay out of trouble is not the same as wanting to be good.
I’d kind of given up on being good, though. Two churche
s ago? Three? Anyway, I’d realized ages ago that I was never going to be good the way girls were supposed to be good. I could put a smile on my face, but I didn’t ever feel the joy inside I was supposed to have. Mostly, I just felt anxious. So the best I could really hope for was to stay out of trouble. And in the end, I hadn’t even managed that. I just got Glenys in trouble with me.
Thing One and Thing Two are both up when I come back in the house. Thing One comes out to the living room as I’m hanging up my coat and looks at me in surprise. “Where’d you go?” she asks.
“Just for a morning walk, ma’am,” I say.
“Do you want some coffee? I just made a pot.”
“Yes, please.”
She pours me a cup and lets me add my own milk and sugar. I put in enough to make it taste like coffee ice cream and sit down at the table. “Do you know why someone might want a whole lot of stump remover?” I ask.
“To remove a whole lot of stumps?” Thing One says.
“In January?”
Thing Two comes in with her own coffee. “Homemade fireworks,” she says. “Stump remover is potassium nitrate. You can use it for homemade fireworks.”
Thing One gives Thing Two a slightly narrow-eyed look. “How’d you know that?”
“Last year, someone wanted an exploding papier-mâché sculpture for a gender-reveal party.”
“You made an exploding gender piñata?”
“They were going to pay so well. I didn’t end up making it because what they wanted was going to be a massive fire hazard and I didn’t trust them to set it off safely. But yeah, I looked into how you’d make something like that explode, and ‘stump remover’ was one of the answers.” Thing Two looks at me and says, “By the way, you’ll want to put on the second coat of paint today. Let me know if you want help.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. I wash my cup out and put it away and then go to my bedroom.
On my phone, there’s a message from the Catacombs praising me for a successful mission and granting me a question to the Elder. I was hoping maybe I’d have a text from Steph with more information from her hacker friend, but nothing.
Chaos on CatNet Page 8