The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two)

by Baum, Spencer

  He turned onto Forester Lane to find heavy traffic. There was an accident up ahead. Three cars were pulled off the road. One of them was totaled.

  “Alright, this isn’t going fast enough,” Art said, looking at the sea of cars in front of him. “We’re going to be late if we don’t get out of here.”

  He pushed his way into the breakdown lane and floored it, zooming past ten cars and turning the wrong way down Copper Boulevard.

  “Art, this is a one-way,” Nicky said.

  “I know,” said Art. “We’re taking a quick detour.”

  There was clear space in front of him for the rest of the block, so Art punched it, bringing the car up to 55 in only a few seconds. He was less than a hundred feet from Mercy Avenue when a green station wagon with two teenagers turned onto the street right in front of him.

  “Art, look out!” Nicky screamed.

  Squealing tires, honking horns—Art lost track of himself for a bit when it happened. It was as if he wasn’t really there, as if a stranger was pulling the wheel hard left and hard right and Art was watching from afar.

  The car jerked itself back to the center as Art snaked around the back side of the station wagon.

  They were safe. Art pulled into a parking lot to get off the road, tires squealing as brought the car around. The car skidded to a stop and Art came back to the moment. His heart racing, his body pumped full of adrenalin, he felt fully awake for the first time today, maybe for the first time in many days, and without even knowing what he was saying or why, the words, “That was awesome,” came out of his mouth.

  He sensed an immediate shift in Nicky. He could feel her looking at him with displeasure.

  “Sorry about that, but you’ve gotta admit, that was some pretty swank driving on my part,” he said. “And this car…I told my brother nothing beats an Audi for driving in the city. He’s all hung up on Italian cars these days, but his car never would have handled the turn like this one did.”

  Nicky said nothing.

  “And what was with those kids in that car?” Art said. “I swear they were following us. I saw them at the drive through when we got your milkshake.”

  Nicky said nothing.

  “Are you okay?” Art asked.

  With a ferocity he didn’t know she had, Nicky reached out and punched him in the shoulder.

  “Ow,” he said. “What was--”

  “You scared me, Art! Have you forgotten I was in a wreck on Saturday?”

  “No…I…ummm…”

  “Oh forget it,” Nicky said. “Just take me back to school.”

  “Nicky, I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s alright. Let’s just go.”

  But he could hear in her voice that it wasn’t alright. He had screwed up and she was mad at him. They didn’t speak for the rest of the ride. It wasn’t that Art wanted silence—he was actually trying hard to come up with something to say, but he never did. Nothing seemed appropriate. His little bit of hot rodding was totally uncalled for, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Nicky had just spent her entire lunch hour explaining to him how rotten his behavior had been the night before. He messed up then and he messed up now. Whatever chance he might have had with Nicky Bloom was slipping away.

  They pulled into the senior lot right as the second bell was ringing. Art killed the engine and looked to Nicky, hoping for some cue that they could at least say goodbye.

  Without ever looking him in the eye, Nicky leaned in and threw her arms around Art’s neck, giving him a quick, confusing hug.

  “See you around, okay?” she said.

  “Yeah, sure. See you,” he said.

  Then Nicky got out of his car, leaving Art to wonder what just happened. He thought about chasing after her. He imagined a scene where he caught up to her and asked if they were okay and, if not, what he could do to make it up to her.

  But he didn’t get out. He sat in his car, letting Nicky get some distance on him. He knew exactly what he needed to do to make it up to her. Nicky was a girl wearing black. She had taken an interest in Art for his money. She had never promised him a romance. That was something he’d added to the equation. He wanted Nicky to fall for him and choose him as her bond after she won Coronation.

  So far he was doing a lousy job. All Nicky knew of Art at the moment was that he was a drunken, brazen, bad driving, pill-popping loser.

  That would change at the Date Auction. Art was about to inherit a quarter share in one of the most profitable companies in Washington. Whatever Nicky thought of him now, she’d forget about it when he placed the winning bid.

  Chapter 13

  When Jill was a child, her bedroom was a mix of elegance and girlish charm that was appropriate for a daughter from an elite family. A four-poster bed, an antique dresser, pink walls, and framed posters of fairies and unicorns were the décor Jill grew up with.

  After Ryan broke up with her, Jill spent a dark and miserable week in that bedroom. When she came out she decided it all had to go. There’s only so much pretty pink princess crap a girl can take. By winter break of freshman year, Jill had transformed her room from pre-teen girl cave to hardcore work space.

  She turned the pink walls white. She built two workstations that ran the longest sides of the room, one for software, the other for hardware. She got rid of all her posters, and in their place she hung big glass panels on which she could write out her thoughts in dry-erase marker.

  Her king-sized four poster in the center of the room gave way to a metal-frame double mattress pushed off in a corner. Her Victorian-era dresser and vanity went up for auction at Sotheby’s and she replaced them with sleek, Swiss-made furniture that fit in her closet.

  The summer before senior year, when Gia asked her to break into Thorndike’s admissions database and score the open spot for Nicky Bloom, Jill dumped all her old computers and started from scratch, creating her own distributed network in her bedroom with enough processing power to go toe-to-toe with the servers the Network wanted her hacking into. This multi-workstation construction took up half the room and doubled the electric bill at the Wentworth home. It also caught the eye of Jill’s mother, who was so impressed with it that she duplicated the setup in her own office on the third floor.

  There was no doubt in Jill’s mind that the transformation of her bedroom from living space to working space was part of the reason she had gone from mischievous computer snoop to world-class hacker. Her bedroom invited her to do something important every time she stepped inside. It provided her comfort and motivation to carry on when she ran into a particularly thorny problem.

  Like the one she faced now.

  Thirty-six hours had passed since Jill broke into the TPM database and sent all the data to the Network’s servers in Colorado. At the time she sent that data, she was logged into the live stream on her phone, and could see the glorious secret files stored inside.

  She hadn’t seen them ever since. Even though everything looked good when she and Nicky left Art’s house, even though Alvin had told her the data transfer was a success, when she got home and logged in to have a look, all she saw was gobbledygook.

  She called Alvin immediately to ask what was going on.

  “I don’t understand what happened,” Alvin told her. “The data was clean just five minutes ago.”

  “A logic bomb,” Jill said, shaking her head. “I should have seen it. I should have known they’d have something like this.”

  “A logic bomb?”

  “A final piece of security, one that I missed,” Jill said. “There was malicious code hidden in the data that got activated when we removed it from the server.”

  “But I saw it!” Alvin said. “I saw it clear as crystal just a minute ago. Everything was exactly as it should be.”

  “The code hadn’t been activated yet when you were looking,” said Jill. “It would be designed to do a check every few minutes. Some bit of communication direct with the hardware, maybe the system bus, or the processor. The data runs a chec
k to make sure it’s physically stored on the TPM server. If it is, all is well. If it finds that it has been moved off the server, it self-destructs. When you were looking at the data after the transfer, it hadn’t run the check yet. Those few minutes between when it arrived to you and when it performed the automatic check were the only window we had to look at all of it. The data blew itself up.”

  “Did it ever,” Alvin said.

  Jill grew more and more disgusted with every file she opened. Emails that were supposed to be strings of text had transformed themselves into nonsense symbols. Scanned documents of blueprints and wiring diagrams had become jumbled jigsaw puzzles in a million mixed up pixels. More than a terabyte of stolen data, and she couldn’t read a single file. It was 100% corrupted.

  “Now what?” Alvin said.

  “Now we put it back together again,” said Jill.

  As she ended the call with Alvin, she created a new file that she named, “All the King’s Horses,” and she got to work trying to figure out how to reconstruct this Humpty Dumpty of data.

  Six hours later, the sun coming up outside and the data still a mess, Jill decided that school could wait ‘til tomorrow, and committed herself to a full day in front of her computer screen.

  When the maid knocked on her door and asked her if she wanted breakfast, Jill shouted that she was sick and was not to be disturbed today. When her father, who was suddenly interested in Jill and her opinions, tried to come in and continue the conversation they started the night before, she told him to buzz off.

  She covered the walls in dry-erase algorithms, attacking the problem from a hundred different angles. The key with a logic bomb was to find the exact path of its destruction so it could be reworked in reverse. In Jill’s mind, the broken pieces of data were two ends of a zipper, and her job was to write the program that could slide down the middle and pull it back together.

  She was so deep in her work that she paid no mind to her phone, which buzzed all day long with incoming texts. She was oblivious to the passage of time, unaware of what her clock said or where the sun was in the sky. When the doorbell rang she didn’t hear it. When the maid invited a guest inside and said, “Jill’s upstairs in her bedroom,” she didn’t notice it. It was only when someone rapped hard on Jill’s door that she shook herself loose from her trance.

  She turned in time to see Annika throw the door open and barge into the bedroom.

  “W’oh, what is all this stuff?” Annika said, picking up a loose motherboard and turning it over in her hands.

  “Oh, hey. What are you doing here?” Jill said as she raced to close all the programs she had open on her screen.

  “Just coming to check on you,” Annika said. “You weren’t at school and you didn’t respond to any of my texts.”

  Jill picked up her phone. She had texts from Nicky, Mattie, the attendance office at Thorndike, her father, and Annika.

  “I’m sorry,” Jill said. “I haven’t been myself today. Looks like you really wanted to talk to me.”

  “Of course I did,” Annika said. She closed the door to Jill’s bedroom, letting it latch shut quietly. “You and I haven’t spoken much since the party.”

  Jill tried to shift her focus to Annika, but was having trouble. She had been so intent on her work that she had ignored all the signals from her body to take a rest. Now, as she pushed the programming work to the background, her body’s needs were making themselves known in a big way. She felt tired and weak.

  “I didn’t mean to be so out of touch,” Jill said. “I’ve been--”

  “You’ve been working on something,” said Annika. “I can tell. You look like you haven’t left this room in days. Was it related to…you know?”

  “To Shannon?” Jill said.

  Annika moved in closer, her face full of excitement at hearing her girlfriend’s name. As much as Jill wanted to get back to her data problem, it was clear that Annika wouldn’t leave her alone until she got some news on Shannon Evans.

  “Come here, let me show you something,” Jill said.

  She opened a new window on her computer, navigated deep into the file structure, and opened a program called Clean Street Pings.

  “This is a program that tracks hits on the IP address Shannon’s been emailing you from,” Jill said.

  “So this is what you’ve been doing all day,” Annika said in an approving tone.

  “Yes,” Jill lied.

  Clean Street Pings was a program Jill wrote for the Network more than a year ago. But it was a good cover for what she had really been doing all day.

  “Remember I told you that the immortals probably knew about Shannon already?” Jill said.

  “Oh yes. It’s all I’ve been able to think about.”

  “Well here is the actual evidence,” Jill said, pointing to some lines of text on the screen. “See those lines with the star next to them?”

  “Yes, what is all this stuff? It looks like a list of dates.”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” said Jill. “Dates and times when there was activity on Shannon’s IP address. Most of the activities are things Shannon initiated herself, like getting on her email or surfing the Net. But the ones with stars next to them came from outside. That’s where Clean Street went in and had a look at what Shannon was up to.”

  “Clean Street?”

  “It’s a piece of software my mom wrote for the immortals,” said Jill. “It’s what they use to spy on people.”

  “Holy shit, Jill. Is that how you’re able to find out all this stuff? Because your mom wrote the software?”

  “More or less,” said Jill. “But keep that to yourself if you please. I don’t have to tell you that what I’m doing right now would get us both killed if--”

  “Yeah, yeah, I understand. Just tell me if Shannon is safe.”

  “Well, when I look at this, I see good news and bad news.”

  “Bad news first,” Annika said.

  “The bad news is that the data pings on Shannon’s IP were all initiated at the administrator level.”

  “In English, please.”

  “Daciana took a personal interest in Shannon and her family. She’s not having an underling do the spying. She’s doing it herself. Or maybe I should say, she was.”

  “She was?”

  “That’s the good news,” Jill said. “The data pings were happening daily all summer long, but then they just stopped. Neither Daciana nor anyone else has had a look at Shannon’s data feed since July.”

  “What does that mean?” Annika asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s curious, isn’t it?”

  “Are you sure they’ve stopped looking? Maybe they’re doing it in a different way now, one that you can’t see.”

  “Not they,” Jill said. “She. The fact that the pings are from an administrator address means Daciana, and Daciana only, was looking. Whatever Shannon’s folks are up to, Daciana doesn’t want anyone else to know.”

  Annika took a step back from the computer. “This is making my eyes crossed,” she said. “How do you do this all day?”

  “It’s my thing, I guess.”

  “Now what do we do? It kind of makes me nervous that Daciana was looking at Shannon and she just quit.”

  “She may have decided there was nothing to see,” said Jill.

  “What about my email address?” Annika said. “The other night in the limo you told me they probably were watching me too, you know, since Shannon and I were in touch.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Jill said. “Let’s take a look.”

  Jill went to the file she’d created on Annika and Shannon’s secret email conversations. The screen opened to a familiar email about Annika’s summer trip to Cozumel, with all the names changed to aliases from the movie Crimson Sunrise.

  “So you just went in and read all of this?” Annika said. “I should be angry at you for invading my privacy, you know.”

  “You should be dead,” said Jill.

  “Good point.”


  Jill found the IP address Annika had been using. She pasted it into the computer’s memory then went back to Clean Street Pings. She brought up a listing of activity on Annika’s IP address.

  “Wow,” Jill said.

  “Wow what? Tell me what it means!”

  “It’s the same as Shannon’s,” said Jill. “Daciana has been spying on you, but she quit in July. So weird. I think you guys must have gotten boring to her.”

  “That, or your program isn’t seeing everything.”

  “It’s seeing everything,” said Jill. “I’m certain of it. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll set up an alert to watch for any new activity on your IP and Shannon’s. If Daciana or anyone else decides to come back and look some more, I’ll get a text message so I know right away it’s happened.”

  “Shannon and I can just talk about anything until then?” said Annika. “Maybe I should go to Brazil right now while no one’s looking. Maybe I should buy my plane ticket and go be with her.”

  “You should wait,” said Jill, thinking of how disastrous it would be for Nicky’s Coronation campaign if Annika up and left. “Something has led Daciana to think you and Shannon aren’t saying anything of interest. But if you disappear…”

  “Right, I see what you’re saying. If I disappear I’ll draw their attention again.”

  Jill opened a new program on her computer and began typing.

  “I’m going to set up a secure line between you and Shannon,” she said. “Let me see your phone.”

  “You can just…do that?” Annika said, pulling her phone from her handbag and giving it to Jill.

  “It’s all about Clean Street,” Jill said. “The immortals use that software for everything. Learn how to fool Clean Street and you’ve learned how to fool the immortals.”

  Knowing that the computer code might as well be Swahili to Annika’s eyes, Jill let her sit and watch as she extended the Marsh Hawk Protocol to Annika and Shannon’s phones. It was a simple operation, one Jill performed every time someone new was allowed into the Network. It was the same coding that allowed her to speak freely on the phone with Nicky, Gia, Alvin, and everyone else. It was a form of encryption that made the phone invisible to all the spying eyes floating in the ether.