by Debra Driza
Lucas dug his laptop out of the bag and popped it open on the desk, making sure the monitor faced the back wall, away from any curious eyes.
I dropped into a chair while Lucas logged on, examining the rest of the library. I noted the number of people in our section—thirteen; the closest escape routes—emergency exit, far left corner, another one through the librarian offices to the right of the front door, worst-case scenario, picture window, ten feet away; and the furnishings, backpacks, and decorations, all in one swift stream.
Across the way, my gaze froze on a poster of two teen girls, reading on a beach. The sign planted in the sand beside them read PENN’S LANDING.
My mind expanded the landscape of the sign, following the beach to a boardwalk. I saw a man, walking hand in hand with a child. A puff of pink cotton candy waved from her other hand.
No, wait. I felt the warm strength of the man’s hand, tasted the crunch of spun sugar on my tongue.
A hot wave pulsed through my head, and everything dimmed. The next instant, I saw the man throw his head back and howl with laughter, and then that image fizzled, revealing a blur of others that made my stomach churn.
Blissful emptiness as I held the gun steady, aiming at Peyton’s head.
Hunter thrashing against his restraints, his screams muffled by the gag in his mouth.
My finger, releasing the trigger.
And me, feeling nothing . . .
“I just sent a test email to Blythe and it bounced back, so hacking into the police network it is,” Lucas said, glancing up at me.
His words plucked me from my self-inflicted horror. I started, but couldn’t expel any sound through a suddenly dry mouth.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice concerned. “Are your sensors picking something up?”
“No, I . . .” I swallowed, wet my lips. Tried to decide what I should tell him. “It’s just . . . I need to know if Hunter is okay.”
“Right,” Lucas said, nodding. “Not knowing must be hard.”
Hard? Try unbearable.
“Once we do this case-file search, I can try tracking Hunter’s cell phone again,” Lucas offered. “I wasn’t able to turn anything up at the cabin, but maybe things have changed.”
He was just being nice. Odds were we wouldn’t be able to locate Hunter, or even Daniel for that matter. Every cell, every chip, every atom of my body froze when I considered the possibility that Hunter was still in danger. He’d only ended up at Quinn’s through my subterfuge. If anything happened to him . . .
Then again, if Hunter was fine and we located him, would he speak to me again? And even if he did, what would I say? How could he forgive me? During our last interaction, I’d been a monster.
Inside me, despair warred with hope. Together, maybe, we could all make our way back from the brink of darkness.
“Thanks. I appreciate it,” I managed to say, despite the growing lump in my throat.
Lucas nodded and started to click-click-click his way into the police database. As I watched his fingers, saw the code flow across the screen, I once again marveled at his skill. His eyes burned with determination.
In less than ten minutes, he was in.
Case numbers flitted across the screen, and Lucas performed a search.
Sarah Laurent Lusk
Her case number was 4220.
Lucas quickly found the docs associated with her case, numbered one through fifty-four.
Numbers thirty-one and thirty-two were missing. Deleted by an anonymous user. Which might not mean anything at all.
Our heads together, we scanned the existing files, Lucas downloading them onto a flash drive so we could peruse them in a more private location later.
As I read over his shoulder, a phrase in an early report by Edgar Blythe made me freeze.
. . . possibility of arson . . .
Lucas pointed at the line on the screen, making sure I caught it. But I’d already moved on, and a shadow rippled over me. Apparently Blythe had reason to believe this theory. But we weren’t going to find out what that reason was . . . because the evidence that suggested arson was located in the two missing files.
A coincidence? That seemed impossible.
I continued to scan files while the shadow thickened into a storm cloud.
“Evidence tampering. It has to be,” I said to Lucas.
I slumped in my chair. We needed that information, and the fastest way to retrieve it was if I tapped into the database myself and attempted to reconstruct the files internally. But Lucas still hadn’t found a way to fix my security issue, so any internet connection left me vulnerable to detection.
Unless . . .
“This is going to sound like a really weird suggestion,” I whispered.
Lucas raised an eyebrow and for some reason, that simple gesture sent a surge of heat into my cheeks.
“What I mean is, if you hook me up to your laptop, the old-fashioned way—”
“You mean, by using a USB?”
I nodded. “Exactly. Would you be able to mask my IP address then?”
“You want to try to reconstruct the files.” Lucas nodded. “It could work.”
“Well, should we try it?”
“Here, in the library?”
A quick scan revealed a discreet spot for me to hook up to his computer undetected.
Private reading rooms: 4.
Availability: 2.
Reservation required; ID necessary.
“We can sign up for a closed reading room. All you’d need is Tim’s ID,” I said.
Lucas sat there, considering. “Well, once we connect you, your IP address would be difficult—but not impossible—to trace. I removed all the geolocation information from my laptop and obfuscated the routing information, so you’d be protected. But not for long.”
“What are we talking about? Ten minutes?” I asked.
“More like sixty seconds.”
“Wow. So generous,” I mocked, rolling my shoulders back like I was prepping for battle. To most people, sixty seconds wasn’t much time. But in my world, a lot could happen in a fraction of an instant.
The reading room was small, even smaller than my tiny loft at the cabin, and the space was sparsely furnished with a table and two benches. I sat with my back to the door, but the narrow rectangular window in its center had me worried. If we weren’t careful, someone could walk by and catch a young computer scientist linking his laptop into the brain of a teenage android. Not your typical study room shenanigans.
Lucas fed a wire into my finger port beneath the table while I worked on not freaking out and keeping my mind clear of stray thoughts. Wisps of memories threatened to make that difficult, but once I connected to Lucas’s laptop and began the mental merge, I drifted into this semitrance, to a land where strings of undecipherable codes formed a language that not only made sense, but was actually a part of me.
Just like Sarah.
“You’re fully synched and cloaked, Mila,” I heard Lucas say. “Sixty seconds starts . . .” He punched a key on his laptop. “Now.”
It only took me three seconds to hack into the database.
Attempt/reconstruct files? *.*
Search original file locations.
Resolve sequence ID.
In less than five seconds, a flood of information poured in, around, through me, but I held my breath when the search stuttered, disrupting the flow of energy.
File reformatted . . . continue recovery attempt?
My bubble of hope burst as if stabbed by a sharp tack. The files had been reformatted. They were probably worthless now.
Continue.
I answered, even though I didn’t expect anything to come of it. Four long seconds ticked by before I received a response.
Hexadecimal code recovery: 98.2% undecipherable.
Not especially promising. But still . . .
I extracted the recovered bytes, manipulated them, and eased them into shape, which took longer than I’d wanted—at least fift
een more seconds.
In less than thirty seconds, I’d be unmasked. My whereabouts available to whoever chose to look. But I couldn’t stop yet.
A document appeared. Well, only tiny pieces of one. Much of the information was useless—a partial street address for Sarah, a few words about fire containment.
But there was a tiny bit more, and that part made my heart pound.
. . . fire pattern and spread consistent with . . .
With what? An accidental fire? Or arson?
A familiar darkness tore through my body, curling my hands into fists and tightening my jaw. Not only might someone have set the fire that had taken Sarah’s life, but someone might have tried to cover it up. That fit in with Maggie’s story too, about how she felt like the case had been mishandled.
“I got something,” I whispered to Lucas.
“Only fifteen more seconds left, Mila,” he urged.
I scrolled through the files, noting that many of Blythe’s reports were co-signed by a woman. Sonja Lopez. And that, three days after he filed that broken-up report, a new name replaced Edgar Blythe’s on the case. Scott Pacelli.
Something slithered down my spine. Three days. Coincidence? Surely not. “Ten . . .” Lucas whispered, starting the final countdown.
Physical evidence: SL11-25, SL11-26, SL11-27, SL11-28.
The numbers continued up to SL11-40.
“Nine . . .”
I loaded them and got more than I bargained for.
“Eight . . .”
Photographs spilled forth. Images of Sarah’s house, burned to the ground, charred and blackened almost beyond recognition. Descriptions of mangled objects—a melted family portrait. Fingernail scrapings.
Nothing helpful. And nothing about the possibility of an accelerant, which would prove arson for certain.
“Mila, hurry. Five . . .” The pitch of Lucas’s voice deepened.
I double-checked, and then swore. “Three of the physical evidence descriptions are missing,” I whispered.
SL11-27, 11-28, and 11-29. Blank.
Before I could dive back in to try to find them, something wrenched free of my finger. For a panicky second, my mind went blank, as empty as those barren files. Then I noticed Lucas dangling the end of disconnected wire. Thank god he’d disabled the connection. But not before I’d committed every bit of information to my own personal data banks.
“What did you find?” Lucas asked.
I felt the burn of tears behind my eyes. “It’s all pointing to a cover-up. I wish we could go to Blythe and get some more answers.”
Lucas turned back to his laptop. “Let’s just search his name, see what it turns up.”
His fingers flew over the keyboard while I watched the screen. I closed the tip of my finger port, but the sizzle of energy remained in my disrupted skin cells.
He pulled up an article from the local paper on the monitor. The headline revealed yet another dead end. Literally.
DETECTIVE DIES IN HIKING ACCIDENT
Forty-nine-year-old police detective Edgar Blythe’s body was found at the bottom of a valley on a popular hiking trail. The medical examiner found that a head contusion was the likely culprit, the result of slipping on the trail and hitting his head on a rock. A park official reports that the trail, while usually safe, was treacherous after a prolonged rain, rendering it muddy and slippery.
Lucas pointed at the date. Two days after Blythe logged in his report. The day before Scott Pacelli took over the case.
Was Holland behind all of this somehow, taking one innocent life after another in order to hide his true motives and plans? Or were we going down the wrong road, developing a false conspiracy theory? What did we really have except for shards of information and suspicions from an old woman?
Daniel. He’d always believed something had been off about the fire. But Daniel wasn’t reliable—he was grieving over his dead daughter, desperate to find an explanation.
We needed more. Something substantial. A smoking gun. Evidence that would lead us to Holland’s schemes, both then and now.
“There’s more,” Lucas said, pulling up another article. This one detailed how Detective Scott Pacelli had been convicted of drug trafficking in federal court, six months after he’d taken on Sarah’s case. He was currently tucked away in a federal prison. “Looks like we won’t be able to talk to him either.”
I choked down bitterness as another prospective lead slipped through our fingers. But then I realized that maybe it didn’t matter.
Sonja Lopez. The woman who co-signed Blythe’s reports. I shared the name with Lucas, and he tracked down a recent social-media photo and an address nearby. Sonja was an attractive Hispanic woman, probably in her late fifties. Her brown eyes were as bright as her smile in the picture. From the conference room in the background and the cake with “Congratulations” scrawled across the top, I guessed the picture was taken at her retirement party.
“Shall we pay her a visit?” Lucas snapped his laptop closed.
I could have kissed him for being so eager to help me fit this gigantic puzzle together, under such insane circumstances. I settled for a hug instead.
“Thank you,” I mumbled into his shoulder.
At first, his body went rigid. Then Lucas’s arms encircled me. His heart pounded against mine for one-two-three beats before he patted my back and retreated.
“I’m sorry, I should have asked first,” I said, worried that I’d invaded his space and upset him somehow.
“You don’t have to ask first,” he said, his gaze settling somewhere beyond my shoulder. “I’m just . . . not used to that kind of affection, that’s all.”
With a pang, I realized just how much I had to learn about him. He’d let me in to a certain degree—I knew about his family; I’d met his brother; he seemed to want to take down his despicable uncle as much as I did—but clearly there was more beneath the surface. Things he hadn’t revealed to me.
At least not yet.
When we walked down the hallway past the other reading rooms, Lucas gave me a playful shoulder nudge, probably to erase any lingering awkwardness.
“I think our next stop should be a fast-food place,” he said. “I’d hate for my growling stomach to interfere with our investigation.”
“Sure, I could go for a burger and fries,” I said, smiling at him.
“It must be nice, being immune to all the health risks associated with trans fats and high fructose corn syrup.”
“Yup. One of the many wonderful benefits of being made in a lab,” I said, and then winked.
Lucas grinned, and the weirdness vanished. As we made our way toward the lobby, we started talking about how to approach Sonja . . . at least until a bright flash of red behind my eyes made speech and movement impossible.
EIGHT
I couldn’t even draw a breath. Beneath the stammer of my heart, there was a faint, yet totally foreign pulse of energy, growing stronger with every second I stood frozen in the library hallway. The red behind my eyes flashed in time with the pulse, forming a single synchronized beat.
In my mind, I saw pieces of my body disintegrating in an inferno that took out entire city blocks. Bodies of innocent victims splayed across the ground, covered by piles of rubble.
The trigger. It must have activated.
Lucas grabbed my wrist. “Mila? What is it?”
Even if I could speak, I had no idea what to say. If I told him the truth, he’d want to help me get away, and I couldn’t risk that. As the hypnotic pulse spread throughout my body—up to my shoulders and down my arms—I thought about how I could ditch him, calling on my sensors to come up with escape routes.
But instead of responding with options, my mind filled with a strange alert that I’d never seen before.
Incoming message.
Before I could determine the type of message or mode of transmission, another alert appeared.
Download commencing.
Hologram projection in 1 minute.
Advise accessing a secure viewing location.
The pulse now funneled directly into my right hand and created an icy numbness. Then the end of my middle finger began emitting blue light.
The truth dawned on me. The detonation trigger hadn’t been activated. No, something else was happening, but that realization provided small comfort.
Not when I remembered Three, and how her finger looked, right before—
Lucas positioned himself in front of me. “What’s happening?” he whispered, trying not to draw attention.
“Holland.” I clasped my hands together in an effort to hide the evidence.
Lucas squeezed my arms. “He tracked you?”
But there was no time to explain. The clock was ticking and I had to find a hideaway before my cover was blown.
Staff-only rooms: 3.
Human targets detected: 7.
Supply rooms: 5.
Human targets detected: 0.
Supply rooms for the win. There was one on the floor below us, next door to the microfiche area, which probably didn’t see much traffic these days.
“This way,” I said.
Forty-five seconds left until the message was broadcast. We needed to move quickly without looking like two teenage book thieves on the lam. There were people all around us, so we had to balance speed with caution.
We speed-walked toward the nearest stairwell, Lucas limping under the weight of his laptop bag and the worry he must be shouldering, given how little he knew about this latest danger. Once the heavy metal door shut behind us, we bolted down the stairs, Lucas trailing but keeping up the best he could.
With twenty seconds left, we hurried down the hall in search of the supply room. I put my non-numb hand on the doorknob and twisted while my other balled into a fist. The entire thing tingled now, and my finger glowed even brighter. I tried to open the door, but . . .
It was locked.
“Damn it,” I said. I could force it open, but then what if the door wouldn’t stay closed?
Lucas dug into his back pocket and nabbed his wallet, reaching in and pulling out Tim’s credit card. He pushed me aside and jimmied the lock. Once inside, we were safely surrounded by stacks of printer paper and old Xerox machines. Lucas stood by the door, blocking the path in case a librarian suffered a sudden toner emergency.