I think about Steph’s suggestion, that I treat this like a game of Twenty Questions. What do I know at this point? Glenys is locked in a shed, and it’s not one of the sheds at her house. I think about how many other members of the Abiding Remnant have sheds outside, right near Lake Sadie. I start to ask if Glenys is in a shed in Lake Sadie. But if the answer is no, I barely know anything more than I knew before.
I ask instead if Glenys is in Minnesota and then put my phone down to paint while I wait for an answer. Thing Two comes in to check my drop cloths and pour the paint into a tray for me. The tape’s all still where Steph and I put it yesterday.
At least I still got my question, even though I asked the Things about the stump remover. We’re not supposed to ask, with quests. We’re not even really supposed to wonder. But now I’m thinking about my quest on Friday, too, and Steph asking what those pictures were for. I’m wondering about the hammer, about the fact that I was specifically instructed to steal the hammer.
I’m not supposed to be thinking this way. I’m supposed to trust the Elder, Brother Daniel, Brother Malachi, and the Remnant.
But a thought keeps working its way into my mind: that if Glenys is being punished because her parents and my mother realized that we were a couple, how did they find out? We were always so careful. But the Elder might have had someone watching us when we thought we were alone. He probably knew my secret.
And maybe my mother asked.
She didn’t know about Glenys and me, but she knew I was hiding something; she said she could tell. My grandmother told her to leave me alone, it was normal for a growing girl to have a few secrets, but my mother would whisper to me at bedtime that hiding things from her was ungodly and unwise and unhealthy and that sooner or later, she’d find out what it was.
So maybe she asked the Elder what my secret was.
Of course, I had a lot of secrets, and the Elder might have just as easily said, “Nell is hiding the fact that she learned absolutely nothing from that correspondence trigonometry course she received an A in.” Or “Nell is hiding a copy of The Golden Compass behind the chest freezer in the basement.” If he’d wanted.
I’m feeling sick to my stomach, thinking about this. My mother didn’t leave me on purpose, I tell myself again, but I don’t know anymore if I believe it.
I check for an answer when I’m done painting the walls, and there isn’t one. I take the roller and paint tray to the kitchen to clean them (shoving the mountain of dishes out of the way) and turn my paint-spattered shirt inside out and put it down the laundry chute and then I go check again.
No.
No. That’s my answer. Glenys is not in Minnesota. So she’s not in Lake Sadie. I feel a hint of relief that I didn’t ask the first question I thought of, followed by a rush of despair as I think about how many states there are to go.
But a new mission appears, moments later. I’m already thinking about which state I’ll ask about next as I read it.
You live with sinners. Punish them. You are the vengeance of God.
I’m momentarily shocked.
The app adds, Righteous anger is permitted. Be creative.
15
• CheshireCat •
Nell seems so convinced she’ll find the answer to Glenys’s disappearance through the Catacombs site. And if the Elder is the other AI, maybe she’s right? Maybe it knows and will tell her? Or maybe it’s toying with her. I can’t tell. I decide to dig into the Catacombs site for a closer look at the inside.
Both the Catacombs social media site and the Mischief Elves use encryption I can’t easily hack, but the easiest way into a secure system has always been social engineering—tricking a gullible human into giving you the information you need to get in. I start assembling what I’ll need for a convincing spearphishing attempt—“Dear (name), We’ve had a security breach and are asking everyone to change their password. Please click here to log in to your account at the Catacombs”—but I’m making my list using the registration information in people’s email, and it turns out a bunch of people have emailed their passwords to themselves so they wouldn’t forget them.
There are four Catacombs users that mailed passwords to themselves who have exactly the sort of accounts I’m looking for: long-term users who were active for a while but haven’t been online recently.
While I’m at it, I take a look for Mischief Elves users like this as well, so I can examine the two sites side by side. It wasn’t the Catacombs that initially made Steph suspicious—it was the Invisible Castle app. I should take a look at that, too.
The Invisible Castle has an elaborate aesthetic design, built from photographs taken by users and submitted as part of assignments. I recognize corners of the world here and there, including a glorious image of a purple door that I’m fairly certain is from a house in Minneapolis and a glimpse of a castle that I think is currently being run as a bed-and-breakfast in Ireland. I’m so taken by this use of user data that I’m tempted to start redesigning aspects of CatNet, but that seems like a distraction I probably shouldn’t devote processing power to right this moment.
The Catacombs does have a similar organization to the Invisible Castle, but with less adornment. I start going through as methodically as I think I can get away with without attracting unwanted attention. Here’s what I want to know: If Glenys was taken somewhere run by her church, can I locate it and work backward the way I did with the boarding schools? Maybe successfully this time?
They have groups called Tribulation Teams that are geographically based and have in-person meetings. And they’re all over, which is less helpful than I’d like: there are dozens of houses scattered just across Minneapolis and Saint Paul, used to host things like that exercise class Steph went to with Nell. I set those aside for now and focus on references to central locations that aren’t in cities.
Yes: there are various large compounds, and I find references to a summer encampment event held at something called the Fatherhold in Wisconsin. But there’s no address—in fact, people seem pretty convinced the Fatherhold isn’t found on maps—and no directions. There are pictures taken at the event, though. I download the photos and compare them to satellite imagery.
It’s the shoreline of the lake that tips me off. The Fatherhold is outside a very small town nearly due east from Minneapolis. The Catacombs users are correct that it isn’t exactly on the map—the road in isn’t marked as a road, but you can see it clearly on the satellite image.
If Glenys’s family took her here, they almost certainly passed through Wausau, Wisconsin, on the way there. I run through every cloud-storage bit of video I have access to, and I find it: Glenys’s family’s car. I don’t know for sure that Glenys made the trip, or that they left her there, or even that they went all the way to the Fatherhold, but I do know that one of the cars her family owns passed through Wausau, Wisconsin, on January 2.
I don’t think I can contact Nell directly—I should go through Steph—but I do take a look at what Nell is up to. She took a walk in the morning and took some pictures, including a picture of a box of hammers that she deleted a few minutes later, and a picture of a box filled with packages of stump remover.
Stump remover.
I just saw something about stump remover. It wasn’t on the Catacombs, though; it was in one of my Clowders. I shift my focus: it was Firestar talking about how the post-cake project was going to be homemade sparklers. Marvin asked how you make homemade sparklers, and Firestar described a recipe that included stump remover.
“Where did you get the stump remover?” I ask Firestar.
“Someone at school handed it out, along with the instructions. The same person who had the helium for the glitter party.”
I don’t want to snoop on Nell, not any more than I already have, so I snoop on a couple of strangers instead, some in Minneapolis and some in Boston, near where Firestar lives, and a few other places, and this is what I find:
The Catacombs are sending people out to buy—or steal
—stump remover and leave it in caches. Those caches are then picked up by someone from the Mischief Elves, who then distributes the potassium nitrate to teenagers with instructions for making them into fireworks. Other members of the Catacombs are being sent to buy or steal plant fertilizers, bottles of kerosene, mercerized cotton, sacks of sugar … a long list of items that are harmless enough in isolation but can be cooked or assembled into explosives.
They’re also sending people out to buy or steal hammers, axes, sledgehammers, and crowbars. Those are also being picked up and stored in people’s basements and garages.
A little more checking leaves me fairly sure Nell stole a hammer on her walk today.
This seems bad. I send Firestar a private message expressing my worries—including the fact that I believe the supplies are being provided by a group that definitely does not care about Firestar’s safety and well-being. Firestar seems unimpressed by my safety concerns, but their attention is caught by the possibility that the stump remover was supplied by fundamentalist extremists—so I think I’ve convinced them not to try out the sparklers recipe in their basement while their parents are out of the house.
I would desperately like to talk this over with Steph, but she’s on her date with Rachel, and Rachel always asks her to turn off my app, and I don’t want to bother them if it’s not an absolute emergency. But I hear from Steph late on Saturday afternoon with a new concern.
I took another look at that picture from Friday at the Midtown Exchange, she says in a text right after she turns on RideAlong. Look in the background. I think that’s Rajiv.
Face-matching technology is imperfect. And he’s quite a bit older than in the pictures from over a decade ago. But I am 80 percent sure that Steph is correct. Which means Rajiv is in Minneapolis, hanging out in the same place where the Catacombs sent Nell. Coincidence?
And even if it is a coincidence, does Rajiv’s presence put Steph in danger?
I take the new picture and set out to track him down.
16
• Steph •
On Monday, I take the bus to school for the first time by myself. It’s the city bus, not a school bus, and the trip goes fine. Nell is still being dropped off. She looks downcast and worried, so I greet her by holding out the printout of the satellite image CheshireCat sent me. “My hacker friend thinks they might know where she is.”
Nell’s head snaps up. “Where?” she asks.
“They’re not 100 percent certain,” I say, and lay the piece of paper on a table where we can both look at it. “There’s this place in eastern Wisconsin that has a house and some land. It’s kind of off the grid. The Catacombs holds events there—”
“Yes,” Nell says, her lips tightening. “I’ve been to summer camp there.”
“Glenys’s parents’ car passed through Wausau on January second. My friend doesn’t know for certain that they went all the way to this place, but they headed in that direction around the time Glenys disappeared.”
Nell stares down at the printout desperately. “Does your friend have the address of the camp? I mean, I’ve been there, but I don’t know how to get there.”
“Coordinates.” I tap the corner of the page, and Nell gets out her phone and looks them up, then zooms out to the nearest town, Seton, which appears to consist of a gas station and a convenience store, and then out again to find the nearest city of any size, which is Wausau, fifty miles away. Seton is so small my mother wouldn’t have tried to move us there.
Nell switches to her browser and silently looks up bus fares. There’s a bus from Minneapolis to Wausau, but nothing that runs beyond that. The drive time from Minneapolis to Seton is four hours.
“Have you ever used one of the self-driving taxis?” she asks me.
“Not by myself,” I say.
“I’m just wondering if I could use one to get there. And back. If I had the money, somehow.”
“It would depend on whether there’s good data network coverage in Seton.”
We both look down at the printout, which shows heavy forest all around the compound.
“Could you get help from your father?” I ask.
“He’s not very happy with me at the moment,” she says.
“Why? What happened?”
Nell folds her hands delicately and says, “On Saturday, one of my quests from the Catacombs was to punish my family for being sinners. I figured I might as well punish them for doing something that annoyed me, so on Saturday night, I hid all the dirty dishes behind a bush in the backyard.”
“You hid the dishes?”
“Yes. My father thought it was Thing Three, Thing Three thought it was Thing Two, there was a big fight, it was a mess.”
“But your father’s angry at you?”
“Well, they did eventually figure out it was me, I think. They washed everything, but they think something got carried off by a raccoon; they’re short a dinner plate now.”
“Was that the sort of punishment the Catacombs was expecting you to dish out?”
“Probably not,” she says. “Because they didn’t grant me another question.”
We get rounded up for our morning classes, and I spend my chemistry class thinking about what the Catacombs did want from Nell when they gave her that assignment. I don’t like the possibilities that come to mind. It occurs to me as I’m washing the glassware from the chemistry lab that Hide all the undone dishes would actually be a great Invisible Castle sort of assignment, and it’s weird that on one hand it seems like a funny prank if you’re calling yourself a Mischief Elf while doing it, and really sinister if you are punishing a sinner. Is that just because Nell told me that the Catacombs didn’t seem to like this as a punishment? Or am I a hypocrite? I go to the bathroom before lunch so I can text without Nell peering over my shoulder and text the story to Rachel.
I hear back from her while I’m washing my hands. Punishing slobs for being slobs is one thing. Punishing SINNERS, well, that’s me! Or you! Or Nell! There’s a pause, and then she adds, Punishing slobs could also be us. Or at least me. I mean, let’s be honest about that.
I go get my lunch and sit down with Nell. “Do you know how to drive?” she asks me. “Didn’t you say you know how?”
“I know how to drive, but I haven’t taken driver’s ed and I don’t actually have a permit,” I say. “Didn’t you mention you could test for a license?”
“My practice log was in my mother’s purse when she disappeared. And she’s supposed to sign it before I take the test.”
“Tell me more about the camp,” I say. “Who runs it?”
“Brother Daniel and Brother Malachi. The idea is that it’ll be a safe haven for us when the Antichrist takes over.”
“But it’s also a summer camp?” I unfold the printout again. “Did it have sheds?”
“Oh, it definitely had sheds,” Nell says. “Right by the main house. Which is here.” She taps the largest building. “There’s this path leading into the woods with cabins…” She runs her finger along a gap in the trees. “You can’t see them in this picture, but there are little cabins. The parents and the little kids slept in those. The teenagers all camped out down the hill, near the lake. Girls over here, boys over there.” She taps a clearing. “If I’m right, this is the spot at the top of the hill where Glenys and I hid from the terrorists.”
“Hid from who?” I am not sure if I misheard or if she means some different version of the word terrorist.
“They were fake terrorists,” she says, which answers one question while raising many more.
“You can’t tell me you hid from fake terrorists without telling me the rest of the story,” I say.
“Mm.” Nell bites her lip, but she’s got this faint look of satisfaction on her face, and after a second, she goes on. “I was sharing a tent with Glenys and two other girls. I was lying awake listening to the frogs when I heard someone coming, so I wasn’t startled out of a sound sleep when he started yelling, and I recognized one of the voices, so I knew
right away it had to be fake.”
“What were they yelling?”
“Oh, ‘Get out of the tents,’ first of all, ‘Wake up,’ ‘We’re here for the Christians’—the whole idea was that this was supposed to be practice for the Tribulation? Since I knew it was fake, I assumed at first that everyone knew it was fake, but then I realized Glenys was shaking. They were making the prettiest girl kneel and demanding she renounce Jesus, so I whispered to Glenys that we should grab our shoes and escape while they were distracted. And we slipped our feet into our shoes and just sort of melted into the woods behind us as quietly as we could.”
“That’s brilliant,” I say. “I mean, if it had actually been terrorists, that would have been the smartest thing you could possibly do.”
“Well, yes,” Nell says. “And then we just hid out until morning. I mean, we heard voices calling us, but as long as it was dark, we couldn’t know for certain that people hadn’t been suborned into calling for us. Eventually, we went back down.”
“Were they angry?”
“There was a great deal of shouting,” Nell said, “but mostly it wasn’t at us, because no one could argue that escaping the forces of the Antichrist wasn’t the best possible choice under the circumstances they’d wanted us to believe we were in.”
Nell is smiling fondly to herself as she finishes the story. I have never been to summer camp—it’s on the long list of normal things I haven’t done—but I’m pretty sure normal summer camps are more about the campfires and sing-alongs and less about fake terrorist attacks. Nell looks up and meets my eyes, and her smile slips, like she saw all those thoughts on my face.
“I’ve never been to camp,” I say.
“If you had, it probably wouldn’t have been like this,” she says.
“Was Glenys your girlfriend when all that happened?”
“By morning, yes.” Her smile returns, but her brow is furrowed.
Chaos on CatNet Page 9