The crisis averted, Dinah turned her attention to the new tributary of data. It was as if an undiscovered roadway had been revealed to her, but this one felt different. She felt like she was on the receiving end of another hub like the one she controlled.
She sent a tiny flow of digits of her own origin backward to see what would happen. When they were successfully sent, she understood the new stream went two ways. She sent more, this time using zeros and ones as a simple binary cipher, pushing them against the nonsense data load being dumped in her direction. Her numbers would become letters, her letters words, to anyone paying enough attention.
“Am receiving,” she said via her base-two digits. “You hear me?”
At first, she heard nothing back. Maybe the new stream was just another part of the computer network. How boring. Then, in an identical cipher, she received a reply.
“I figured you’d fail.”
“Rosalyn?”
“Yes.”
“You’re in with me! Here! Part of my network.”
“No, you were linked to mine.”
“Let me see where you are.”
Rosalyn let Dinah in. This was essentially a diagnostic trick Dinah had performed with her own nodes, being able to see into their space. There was little to do there except acknowledge that they were alive and their brains were handling the data sent to them. It felt like reaching across a dark room and taking someone’s hand. Rosalyn took hers and pulled her over.
“Nice place you got here.”
With a thought, she examined Rosalyn’s workspace. She had eight nodes much like her own. An identical stream of data passed through, and Rosalyn, too, was handling the load with no problem. Somehow Rosalyn was able to convey that she was as bored with this as Dinah was.
She’s as smart as I am.
“We’re together,” Dinah said. She wanted to hug her, but the impulse had no way of expressing itself.
“So it seems.”
Then Rosalyn let go of her and something changed. A pressure hit Dinah and snapped her back into her own workspace. An instant later all of Rosalyn’s data came thundering through their connection. Double the torrent was now crashing in.
“What are you doing?” Dinah asked. “Stop it!”
But Rosalyn didn’t stop. Again, Dinah was drowning. Her nodes were already at capacity. She had nowhere to push the numbers. She screamed, and the world went dark.
Dr. M disconnected her. The lights in the room felt painful. She thought the edges of a headache were beginning.
“Rosalyn, she…she…”
“Yes, yes. She’s part of the network. I’m afraid we didn’t fare well with the new connection. Was it too much? Did one of your nodes act up? Is Rosalyn incompatible with you?”
She raised a hand for him to shut up. “No. She just surprised me is all. And they’re not nodes. They’re people you have drugged.” She felt a flush of guilt saying that, as she had starting thinking of them as nodes, too, as pieces to be understood to solve the problem of the network. The numbers went to them. If they worked as intended, she could put them out of her mind.
She forced herself to sit up. Big mistake. Her stomach turned, and she almost puked. The room swam. Still, she swung her feet down from the exam table and placed them on the floor. Dr. M took an arm as she toppled.
“Perhaps we’re a bit dizzy from the exertion. Get back on the bed.”
She gripped his arm, felt a strange delight when he winced. “No. Take me to Rosalyn.”
“Your brother won’t allow it.”
“Tell him to do it, or I quit.”
25. Before: Nineveh
The safe made a particularly obstinate click whenever Dinah got the wrong combo.
She cleared the dial to the left so she could try the next number. She was reaching the end of the assumed sequence with the mechanical wiggle room of plus or minus two. Maybe she had been off by a number somewhere. Maybe she hadn’t cleared it well enough in one or more attempts.
Click. Still locked.
“What the hell,” she whispered. She was almost out of numbers to try. She had been at this for hours, since shadowing the doctor and watching him leave his office after his last late-night appointment. Now, in the wee hours of the morning, she could spend all the time she needed. If the correct combination was ninety-nine, ninety-nine, fourteen, she would scream.
Should have started in reverse.
Her next combo was eighty-seven, ninety-six, fourteen. She ever so carefully turned the dial to the zero line. Click. The door didn’t open.
This was her second session with the floor safe in Dr. Mephisto’s office, and her knees, back, and neck were sore. She was beginning to conclude that the loose dial was working against her, that the mechanism itself was faulty, and that her method of guesswork was based on a fallacy. Did Dr. M have to try multiple times to get the safe open even when knowing the combination?
Next would be ninety, ninety-six, fourteen.
Someone with hard-soled shoes walked past the door. For a moment she thought she was caught, that the safecracking sting was about to apprehend its perp. She tensed up, but whoever was out there kept moving.
She fiddled aimlessly with the dial, not knowing what to do. Only a few numbers left, and what then? She would need another approach.
She took a deep breath.
What did she know about Dr. Mephisto? Very little. She knew his appearance, his taste in other faculty members, what he smelled like in the evening when a day’s worth of nervous sweat started to permeate through his white coat. None of this helped. But what about during session? He consulted his notebook. A lot. Which meant his memory wasn’t his strongest attribute.
She looked around the room. The rest of the office appeared as it always did—uninteresting and clean. Dr. M was tidy, and he always put things back in the same place.
Or does he?
She thought back to when she had last seen the office. Had anything changed since she had last been there for a session?
She closed her eyes.
The numbers wouldn’t lie; they were her friends. She assigned a number to everything she had ever seen inside the room. The numbers lined up. So did every item in the room. Then she made another mental image of what she was seeing at that moment and did the same trick. Some of these things were not like the others. His chair wasn’t pushed in perfectly. It never was, but it was further out than before. A small detail, but she guessed that Dr. M wasn’t deliberate about its placement. He sometimes left a pen or a stylus on his desk right next to a black ceramic cup full of even more pens. But today he must have put his stylus away. She lifted the cup and checked underneath for a clue. Nothing there. She put it back with the handle pointing toward the door and slightly to the right as it had been before.
She considered the bookcase. Two hundred and forty-nine books in no particular order. But one mustard-colored spine stood out, as it was pushed further back than it had been last time. A tiny detail, but as she focused on the book and reviewed its previous positions over the months she had been coming there, she knew it was one of the few books that had moved. She grabbed it. The History of Go: The Fourth Cultivated Art, the hard cover read. The gold lettering was faded, and there was no dust cover.
She opened it and didn’t see any marks or handwriting. The book felt stiff, as if it hadn’t been read much or had been handled with the greatest care. She flipped through the pages. None were dinged or earmarked. But the book had definitely been moved. She held it by the cover with the pages downward and shook. A slip of paper floated to the floor.
“Stupid,” she said, admonishing herself.
The paper had the numbers thirty-eight, seventy-six, and five written on it in Dr. M’s scratchy penmanship. If Addis and her gang had searched the bookcases, they hadn’t been very thorough. And they had been wrong about the last number. The paper didn’t look aged, though, so it was possible the combination was at least occasionally changed. She put the paper and bo
ok back exactly as they had been.
On her one thousand and eighth attempt, the safe clicked open. She swung the door open as quietly as possible. She was half expecting to find something glowing inside, or treasure, or a map, or a portal that led to some forbidden Dr. Mephistoland where wayward children who didn’t take their medicine became his slaves in some infernal salt mine replete with bullwhip-wielding ogre overseers.
There was also the chance that the safe would be empty, a practical joke played by the other kids who already knew the combination. Maybe Dr. M would be in on it, and they would all be sitting around in the teacher lounge sipping brandy-spiked hot cocoa and laughing about what a fool she was.
A plastic swipe key sat on top of a small rubber-banded stack of papers. There was a handgun of some kind in a nylon holster and a golden stopwatch that had an engraving of a carriage and some gems set into the watch face. Under the handgun she found a plastic case with foam lining. Inside was a silver rod with multiple injector tips and no label to identify what it might be loaded with. She looked at all the contents and wondered what would make for a good trophy.
Nothing taken would go unnoticed, even to someone as befuddled as Dr. M. She put everything back in the way she found it and closed the safe. She locked the door and reset the dial to its normal position.
She needed a moment to think. Proof of success would be nice, but she also had an aversion to being caught. She retreated from the office with the knowledge that she could return and plunder the safe whenever she wanted…unless Dr. M changed the combo.
26. Odd Combinations
Dr. M came to Dinah’s cell that evening. She hadn’t intended to sleep so early, but after having been mentally pummeled by Rosalyn inside the network, as soon as she put her head down on her cot she had slipped away.
He knocked, opened the door, and waited for her to wake up.
“Did you talk to my brother about seeing Rosalyn?”
“A brief visit is allowed.”
Although wobbly, she refused his help in walking down the cold corridor back to the White Room. A nurse was carrying an armload of dirty sheets from the room with green lights where the nodes lay. She stuffed them into a laundry cart. A second nurse carried out a pair of plastic bags filled with urine. The smell of cleaning chemicals burned Dinah’s nose.
Dr. M came in through another door and almost ran into her. Behind him was an exam bed and computer equipment identical to what they hooked Dinah up to. Rosalyn sat on a stool with a steaming bowl of soup in her hands. She looked exhausted and gave Dr. M a weary look.
“Leave us alone,” Dinah said.
“Your brother wouldn’t approve. I have to watch you.”
“Get out of here.” She pointed toward the hallway
Dr. M flinched as if he thought she was going to strike him. Then he walked to the far side of the lab.
“Look at you, Miss Bossy,” Rosalyn said. She stirred her bowl slowly.
“Doctor M is just used to following orders.”
Dinah waited on Rosalyn, but her stepsister didn’t say anything. They both watched the steam from the soup rise.
“How is it you can do what I can do?” Dinah asked.
Rosalyn smirked. “You think you’re so special. That everyone’s dumber than you.”
“It’s not true. I don’t think that.”
Another long pause followed.
“I got to see Karl,” Dinah said. “He’s here, and he’s okay. They’re holding him in a cell. Having him repair things, by the look of it.”
Rosalyn nodded. With her spoon, she played with a loose tangle of noodles.
“Another woman from the valley is here, too. She helped me escape. The hunters were killing everyone. She’ll help us once we can figure out what’s going on here, and then we can put a stop to it.”
Rosalyn looked up, her eyes peering through her limp, dark hair.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Dinah said. “With everything that happened. The house burned. You were taken. And Uma…”
“I’m glad she’s dead,” Rosalyn said.
Dinah was stunned. “What?”
“You heard me. I hated her. And I hate Karl.” Her mouth twisted into a joyless smile. “And you’re the worst.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because living there wasn’t bad until you showed up. Then Uma changed. She was hard on me before, but it got worse when you arrived. You became Miss Sparkling Sunshine with your headaches and smiles. She gave you my room and my bed when you got sick the first time, and you got to keep them. Uma let you get away with everything.”
“That’s not fair. It’s also not true. She was hard on both of us. But she also loved us. Loved you. She cared for you and fed you and gave you a home.”
“I don’t care.”
Dinah shook her head. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Perhaps Rosalyn was worn out from working inside the network. Maybe it had affected her in some unknown way. “Look, I’m going to do whatever I can to get you out of here. We’re going to escape. I don’t know if we can trust Karl completely, but we can trust Redmon. I just need more time to figure out what my brother is up to. I need your help to do that, both inside the network and out.”
“And go where? Escape up into the woods to live on bugs? With you? I’d rather be down here. I’d rather be dead.”
“Rosalyn, we’re prisoners here. We’ll get sick and die in this place. It’s what happens. That’s why I left. If we can figure out a way to stop my brother and the hunters from hurting anyone else, we have a place to go. Redmon and the other valley people are heading north. But stay in Nineveh? These people are murderers and don’t care about you, except for how you fit into their machine. Same with me. My brother is the sick heart of this place. There’s something wrong with everyone here.”
“So that’s where you get it from.”
“Will you help me?”
Rosalyn brought a spoonful of soup to her mouth and slurped. She made a face. “God, this tastes like goat pee.” She pitched the bowl away with a crash, the soup splashing onto the floor. This got Dr. M’s attention. He started their way, but Dinah put up a hand in his direction, and he stopped.
“I’m not your friend,” Rosalyn said.
“I can live with that.” Dinah went to hug her. To her surprise, Rosalyn let her. “Maybe we’re not friends. But at least we can pretend to be sisters. And only you would know what goat pee tastes like.”
***
Rosalyn opened Dinah’s cell door late the next evening following a grueling day plugged in to the network. The workload flow had been doubled and uneven, with both Rosalyn’s and Dinah’s feeds needing to be constantly shifted between the two of them. Dinah wanted to sleep once she was disconnected and brought back to her cell, but instead she forced herself to finish the cold half-eaten bowl of oatmeal-like substance left over from breakfast and the entire bowl of noodle soup Dr. Hel brought for supper. She did some stretches and push-ups and jumped up and down off her stool to wake up her muscles.
The soup soured her stomach. Uma would spend hours preparing a good soup base, boiling vegetable scraps and roasted bones from anything they had recently eaten. After a half day’s boil, the solids would be removed and fresh-cut veggies, herbs, and leftover meat would be added an hour before eating. It always smelled wonderful and tasted even better. Maybe Rosalyn was right. Maybe Nineveh had a goat in the kitchen pissing into the soup mix.
“It’s delicious,” Dinah had told Dr. Hel.
“Are we doing this?” Rosalyn asked. She had a pair of tiny rods with bent tips in her hand. Dinah didn’t remember Karl or Uma teaching them lock picking. Unfortunately, the redoubt had a number of doors with electronic access only. Rosalyn’s picks wouldn’t work on those.
“It’s late enough, rare for anyone to come around,” Dinah said.
“I don’t know what you hope to accomplish.”
Dinah led them into the hallway, and they headed in the
opposite direction of the White Room, turning down a corridor that she thought would lead them to one of the less-traveled auxiliary stairwells. But she needed to explore this level first, to show Rosalyn who Ruben really was.
They came to an intersection that Dinah didn’t remember. For a moment, she was confused. The layout felt different, as if the walls had been moved. Even the sounds had changed. The churning, rattling hums felt louder, as if they were now moving through the guts of a furnace made of rapidly cooling iron. The smells of cleaning chemicals came on as strong as ever.
“Which way?” Rosalyn hissed.
They turned right and tried the first door on the right, but it didn’t open. Per the revised map in Dinah’s mind, this should have been a neighboring suite of rooms next to the White Room and the attached labs.
“These doors need a security card,” Dinah said. “Or a big magnet.”
Rosalyn gave her a smug look. From a pocket, she produced a key card.
“I found one in the lab in a drawer.”
Dinah took it. It had Dr. Hel’s name on it, printed in black sticker-letters. So where was her teacher now if she didn’t need her card? Were there extras circulating about? With a swipe, the lock clicked, and she pushed the door open.
The reek of human waste struck her like a slap to the face. And no wonder. A laundry cart full of soiled sheets waited for them on the other side of the door. Some lazy nurse had jammed it inside what was already a packed room. Dinah pushed past the cart. The room was cluttered with medical machines, stands for bedside medicine bags, and collapsed beds, all of it shoved in haphazardly. She saw three other doors. One, in her estimation, connected back to the room with green lights where the rest of the participants of her brother’s network slept.
Dinah needed to see them again, to look at their faces, to remind herself that they were people and not just receptacles for data or auxiliary processors for whatever her own brain couldn’t handle when she was plugged in. Rosalyn needed to see them again too, and entering through the main lab would be too risky.
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