Everything means something. She would have known.
I closed my eyes and turned away.
If they hadn’t changed the nameplate, then they hadn’t changed the code either, and if Eva had set the code, I knew what it would be. I typed in my birthday. A green light blinked and the door hissed open. It was cold inside and sterile smelling, like a giant refrigerator.
I stepped past the threshold and immediately regretted it when an alarm went off. Swearing, I looked around in a rush. White walls, white drafting tables lit from beneath, white shelves filled with what looked like boxes of leather-encased scrolls. One sat open on a table, surrounded by the tools used to preserve it. Across it in lines was a variation on the Sanskrit I had seen before.
Something red blinked in my periphery. I glanced up and spotted the flashing red light of a security camera. They could see me.
“Clever.”
I ran from the room, toward the elevator, and with only a tiny glance at the name plate, hurled myself at the button, but it was already engaged. If there was an elevator, there had to be another way out in case of fire. Running full tilt, I threw open doors. Every room was for storage, except the last. In the blaring scream of the alarm, I heard nothing, but something in me knew that the elevator had opened. I looked back long enough to see several security guards tumbling out of the opening. They spotted me and gave chase, but I was already on my way up. I took the stairs in threes, thanking God for the hours spent on the stair-climber in my bedroom, a piece of equipment I would never have used if not for the feelings of inadequacy Howard had spawned in me.
I reached the ground floor and knew there would most likely be someone waiting there for me, but as I opened the secure door, prepared to kick my way out, I found a body splayed out across the opening, its blue shirt smeared with blood. On the other side of the body, Sam relaxed his fist.
“Now!”
I leapt over the groaning man and, with Sam pushing me from behind, raced toward our parked car. We jumped in and sped away, Sam glancing in his rearview mirror constantly.
It wasn’t until I spotted the diner that I breathed a sigh of relief.
“I’m glad we didn’t take your car.” Sam laughed shakily.
I looked down at my wrist. “Yeah.”
He pulled in and parked. We sat in the truck silently.
“Did you find anything?”
I glanced over at him; he was gripping the steering wheel, staring into space. “Only what looked like some kind of viewing room, like a museum or something. Hermetically sealed.”
He nodded and swallowed. “You know, you suck as a ninja.”
“Shut up, Special Forces.”
We got out of the car and looked at each other over the roof, grinning like cats who’d dined on canary. It seemed like Sam thrived in battle and had been missing the rush.
“Hey, I kept up my part, distraction and cavalry.”
“Yeah yeah.” I waited for him at the back door while he pulled out our copies.
“What do we tell Arthur?” he asked, his face finally returning to a semi-normal serious state.
I smiled. “Trust me.”
At the top of the stairs, I flexed my fingers and squeezed my fist before opening the door.
Beyond it sat a person, though that was not my first guess. It had its graffiti-tagged back to me and a shock of blue hair sticking up from a black hoody. It was sitting cross-legged, facing the bookshelf that now housed Eva’s canon, seemingly involved in some meditation. I stepped inside and looked around for Arthur, but the person on the floor was the only one there.
“Um, who . . .?” I began.
“Am I?” The young man rolled backward and looked up at me from the ground. He had playful brown eyes that sparkled, several facial piercings, and a winning grin. “People call me Jinx.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Why do they call you that?” We said at the same time.
As I frowned, his pleasure grew. “You owe me a coke.”
My mouth fell open.
“What the hell?” We chorused.
“That’s another one.” He laughed and pointed up at me with a black-polished nail peeking out from fingerless gloves embossed with a skeleton pattern. There was a vaguely French accent to his voice.
Bemused and stubborn, I pinched my lips shut, determined not to speak until I had figured how he knew what I was about to say. He couldn’t have heard me, because as I examined him in silence, I realized he was wearing headphones turned up to full volume; incessant house music buzzed in the air around his head. Then it hit me.
Duh.
“Yeah, you got me,” he mumbled and rolled upward. Like an acrobat, he jumped to his feet and presented me with a gloved hand. He was almost a head shorter than me and couldn’t have been more than fifteen, but looks were oft times, very, very deceiving. He was one of them and whatever allowed him to know what I was about to say was his ability.
I put together a phrase and fully intended to say it.
He rolled his eyes. “There’s no reason to be mean.”
I blinked. “Then what . . .”
“Lily!” He shouted, a little louder than necessary, probably due to the music. He wiggled his fingers in midair insistently, as if trying to convince me that he was a friend. “I’m like Eva. I’m Art’s friend.”
So he was the “punk” Eva’s neighbors told the police about.
I looked at his hand and reached for it, but it dropped as he set eager eyes on my wrist.
“Wicked accessory!” he shouted. “Does it hurt?”
I made to answer, but he interrupted.
“Sucks, man! I woulda at least hit ’em up for some painkillers!”
I prepared to say something about how it really hadn’t hurt at all since the first time. I couldn’t complain.
He waved my comments aside. “But it’s like the only perk, right?!”
With a smile that was determined to be polite, I stared at him. He looked back at me in friendly anticipation. The moment stretched, until finally I couldn’t stand it. I opened my mouth.
“I’m here to look at your sister’s books,” he yelled.
Suddenly, I knew why Arthur was gone. Conversations with this kid were decidedly one-sided.
He shrugged guiltily. “I know, I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. I’m trying really hard, I swear, but imagine how you’d feel if you had to hear everything twice!”
I’d probably . . .
“Yeah! The headphones make it easier! That way I can at least ignore the audio stuff and stick to the mental!”
What a horrible . . . I attempted to think.
“Totally!” He pushed his fingers between tousled blue spikes and pulled them toward the ceiling in an expression of exasperation. “I don’t get it! I mean, why should I get this lame-ass power, when spoon-fed people like you get to see the future and shit?” he complained loudly.
Spoon . . .
“I mean infected.” He pointed at himself proudly. “I didn’t get infected! I infected me!”
I’m not talking . . .
He reached up and pulled out the earphones. “Sorry” he whispered. “Force of habit with people who don’t get it. I’ll be good if you do.”
I walked over to the sofa and sat down, trying to figure out how much I had to think about saying before he could complete the thought.
“How . . .?” I got out.
“That much,” he said with another grin and retook his seat on the floor.
Befuddled, I shook my head. How had a kid so young infected himself? For that matter, how had Eva done it? I had supposed it happened by being friends with Ursula’s warped concept of Zen, but even though Jinx seemed the type to hang out at Club Trishna, he looked like he wouldn’t have made it past the door. So what was it that had burrowed inside their respective brains and forced them across the river?
I formed the question and he answered it with another rolling of his eyes. “Hell to the No. I don’
t do black and somber. I’m one hundred percent computer games and action figures.”
Laughing, I thought about it.
“I’m not an Arhat. I’m a mathematician,” he answered as he pulled a red book from the shelf and opened it. “Math’s as much a ‘killing word’ as Zen, man.”
I blinked.
“Sorry, obscure Dune reference,” he mumbled, flipping through pages as if he’d discovered the next Superman comic. “I meant that I studied math. Really studied it, not like those posers who get degrees and then bitchfag out by working for Intell or the cocksucking NSA. If I wanted to blow shit up, I could do it in my garage and claim all the arch-villain cred myself. Screw those asswipes.”
I found I couldn’t help but laugh as the words came to me.
He glanced up. “Seriously. One day I think I’ve got Unified Field Theory cold and the next day it’s twice as much bullshit. I mean, I love it, don’t get me wrong. It’s way spooky in the right setting, but most of the time, it’s just fucking annoying.”
He began rocking back and forth like a kid on a sugar high, scanning the pages with a few darting looks.
You must drink . . .
“So true.” He set the book down and pulled out another. “There’s this whole diatribe against addictive substances in Buddhism, right? They think that part of the reason people can’t get enlightenment is because they cling to desires like that. If they’re right, I didn’t make it, because I love the damn stuff so fucking much.” His words sped up until I wondered if I might have to be a psychic just to understand him. “I mean I drink like fifteen cups of coffee a day, like five cans of Redbull, and if I meet new people who are cool, like a six pack of coke a day, right? I’m a speed freak. So you know I always figured it was impatience that was my trishna you know? I mean why else would I . . .”
I made to interrupt, but was shut down.
“Yeah. It’s okay though, because whenever I get pulled over on my motorcycle, I can always say to the cop ‘Yeah, five miles over,’ before he opens his donut-hole.”
Fine with giving my swollen throat a break, I tried to stop smiling, but the boy was amusing to a fault, and as long as he was there to help, I couldn’t be happier.
So . . .
“I’m here to find the code, if there is one.” He pulled another red book out and lay the three side by side, shaking his head. “But this is just words. Is it like this all the way through?”
It was coming much more easily to me. I closed my eyes and squeezed my fist.
He made a humming noise. “Okay, okay. Have you looked through all of these?”
I squeezed again.
“Are there any numbers in any of them, in any of the other books?”
With what was a mental shout, I sat up and pointed at the green books.
He snatched one from the shelf, opened it, and after a few moments, I heard a happy whoop.
“I know what this is. It’s gotta be! Fucking awesome!”
I leaned forward in interest. Without looking up, he slid his fingers down the columns of numbers. “It’s the legend to the cyclic permutation! Fucking wicked shit from World War Two!”
He looked up at my confusion. “They used it to carry messages, because it’s a one-time use code! It’s unbreakable without the key!” He set the book down in response to another unspoken half-question and pointed to the first column, which to me looked like nothing more than a weight measurement.
125 lbs, October 22, 2008.
“Four numbers,” he said, “one twenty-five, ten, twenty-two, and two thousand eight. Now cut ‘em in half, so the four numbers are in two separate columns.”
I kept nodding even after he’d already gone on.
“The first two,” he pointed, “one twenty-five and ten. Does ten divide evenly into one twenty-five?”
I don’t know why I even bothered.
“No. The nearest number into which ten can divide is one hundred twenty!” He smiled up at me expectantly.
I’m not a . . .
“Sorry,” he pre-plied. “So that means that in order to get a number that can be divided by ten, we have to subtract five from one twenty-five.”
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a notepad and a pen that looked like a syringe filled with blood. I eyed it.
“I know, right, totally cool. Get ‘em from the clinic, free like condoms but without the weird looks.” He glanced up at me. “Well, different weird looks, but who cares, at least they don’t wonder about my sexual activities.” He turned back to the pad and wrote something down, then presented it to me as if looking for a golden star.
125≡5mod10
I stared at it and probably would have been happier if it was Sanskrit.
He shook his head, harassed. “Mortals,” he grumbled, until I thought something at him and he blushed. “Oh yeah, sorry. Anyway, so this gives us a number, see. We take that number, five, and count down on the first page in the red books five rows, then we take the second number, four, and count that many words into the row. Bam, first word of our message from Eva.”
Stunned, I looked at the many volumes. This will take . . .
Jinx heaved a sigh, “Yeah, totally. I’m gonna need to take them . . .”
But Arthur had appeared in the doorway and had a pensive look on his face.
Jinx rolled backward again and stared up at Arthur like a child in his playroom. “You’re shitting me.”
Arthur crossed his arms.
“But the equipment I need is like super heavy and it’s already all set up back home!”
Arthur turned away.
“Damn, Art, so not cool,” Jinx complained, until Arthur tossed a look back at him and the boy perked up. “You mean it, right?” he shouted, smiling broadly.
“Of course,” Arthur replied, his voice drowned out by Jinx’s simultaneous mimicry.
Leaping to his feet and dancing in a happy circle, he pointed at Arthur and laughed. “Now Sam’s gotta, cuz you owe me!”
Wha . . .?
“Espresso! Nectar of the Gods,” he yelped and before I could think about saying anything, had disappeared out the door.
Arthur and I exchanged a look, and unable to stop myself, I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe.
“Where . . . on earth . . . did you . . . find him?” I wheezed.
Arthur shrugged. “He found me.”
“What is he, like twelve?”
He raised a finely arched eyebrow. “Two hundred, I think.”
“No . . . way.”
Chapter 18
I opened my eyes. I was lying on the couch. I sat bolt upright and looked at my wrist. It was freshly bandaged and I had not done it. My vision-quest was a success. At my feet, Jinx sat, five books out and open, at a loss without my excellent foreknowledge of the journals.
Our eyes met and I formed the thought.
In instantaneous awe, he pulled out his headphones. “Tight.”
I rolled off the sofa and reached for the green legend. Opening it, I set it down and turned to the first page of the first red book. Then I reached into his jacket pocket without any kind of greeting and retrieved his pen and paper. Hurriedly, I scrawled the formula he’d shown me and triumphantly dropped the syringe before it could creep me out even more.
He looked at the formula, grinning, then looked up at me in wonder. “Cyclic permutation code! Fucking sweet!”
Arthur’s not . . .
“Fuck, are you serious?” he whined.
I didn’t even have to nod.
“God damn it!” He got up and looked at me. “Espresso? Yes!”
He turned around and jogged to the door, but at the threshold, waved. “Nice meeting you . . . again, I guess.”
I bowed, because we both knew what it meant to experience things twice, but to his ten second sneak peek, I was a prophet.
“I owe you two cokes,” we both said.
“Three,” he specified gratefully, and disappeared.
Still pleased w
ith myself, I turned and found Arthur standing in the hallway holding the beanbag chair. My smile faded.
“You passed out in the Records Office.”
“On purpose,” I clarified and pointed at the happy face. “What’s that doing here?”
“Jinx needs it. I’m not sure what it meant, but when he saw it in the bed of the pickup truck, he shouted something about ‘watching the watchmen’ and demanded to keep it,” he said quietly and put it on the floor. “Since you were going to throw it away, I assumed it would be fine. Is it?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I got the reference to the graphic novel, but knew that Arthur never would. “I didn’t think about it before, but since he’s such a comic fan, it’ll probably go well with his action figures.”
“So you met. Where did he go?”
“Home, to get his computer, and yeah we met.” I held up my hands, seeking recognition. “In my head.”
Calm as ever, Arthur blinked. “You can control it?”
I dropped my arms in frustration. “Yes! I used it! I am the ultimate spirit ninja!” I plopped myself down on the sofa, my chin tilted up in smugness that drew an expression from him that seemed both a frown and a smile at once. “I've also had some sort of realization.”
“Oh?”
“I think I can do what Ursula did.”
His head came up and around so quickly, I thought he'd heard some hypersonic noise I hadn't, but the look on his face was not worried, it was peaceful, as if he'd been waiting for me to say that.
“I see. How can you be sure?”
“Sam told me his life story.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Proof enough. Sam never speaks of his past, even to me. You were not hard on him?”
“No. I'm totally trained in how to be a super-hero,” I pledged with a nod, “not a righteously vengeful bitch. You have taught me well.”
“Taking pride in your flaw only reinforces it.” He didn’t have to say what came next. The pain in my wrist said it all.
“I learned something,” I sulked. “Given my dearth of accomplishments in life, can’t we just be pleased?”
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