As the days went on Lee began to feel that she was becoming less a boarder and more a part of the family. Will revealed that he was saving to go to a culinary academy and that his five-year plan was to open a restaurant that Allison would design. Tomi wanted to save money and someday return to his hometown, where living was cheap and he could afford to paint full time. Tomi kept weird hours. She’d wake up from her spot on the couch and find him slipping out or coming back in at all times of the night. She always pretended to be asleep. One day she asked him where he went at night.
“You want to come with me sometime?”
“You haven’t told me what you do.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “Maybe one of these nights I will take you.” He left it at that.
Even Derrick could be charming when he wanted to be, especially when he was talking about his own dreams: he wanted to start his own data security business and make a lot of money. When she asked him what he would do with a lot of money, he told her he would take care of his autistic younger brother, whom his parents had stuck in a group home. Lee thought she might cry, until he started laughing at her gullibility.
Lee couldn’t figure Derrick out at all. Most days he treated her like a stray cat who’d wandered into the apartment, but every now and then, when the others were gone, he’d open up and actually be a human being. One night he came home late from a party and Lee was still up, reading one of Tomi’s science fiction novels on the couch.
He was dressed in a thin but expensive-looking leather jacket with a white V-neck beneath and wore thick eye shadow and dark lipstick that had smudged across his face. His freshly dyed hair was blue-black and messy. He took two beers from the fridge and offered her one without her asking. She didn’t want a beer, but he had never offered her anything before, so she took it.
He slumped down in a chair and pulled it up close to the couch, putting his feet up on it and arranging himself into a position that seemed at once studied and louche.
“Good party?” she asked.
Derrick leaned his head back and talked to the ceiling. “The DJ was spinning all retro jungle bullshit, but the teenyboppers like it.” He looked at Lee and smiled. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“You go to school in the city?” he asked, looking away now, as though it was a casual question and not the interrogation it felt like. He had been trying clumsily to siphon information about her past from her since she’d arrived.
Lee thought carefully about how to answer. “I was homeschooled,” she said.
“Your parents some kind of religious nuts?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Well, you didn’t miss much. I hated high school.”
“How come?”
Derrick smirked wistfully. “Nobody can take a joke. I got expelled my senior year and never looked back.”
“For what?”
“For hacking into the school’s network and changing all the links to live webcam porn. They could never prove it was me, but they found a way to expel me anyway. Best thing that ever could have happened to me. I used it as a calling card to join a hacker crew after that. That’s how I met Tomi.”
“He was part of that crew?”
“No, he was a lone operator. But we both happened to be hacking into the same system at the same time. It’s like if you were spelunking some network of hidden caves way out in the middle of Buttfuck, Nowhere, and just happened to run into some dude. You bond.”
“So you took to each other right away, huh?”
“We hated each other at first. Each of us tried to sabotage the other at every turn. But it was just good-natured rivalry. So we decided to meet IRL and teamed up. We started our own crew not too long after. We figured out we both love the same things about hacking—the social engineering, the personal risk, the codes of ethics. And the cryptography. That’s where Tomi and I really found our common ground.”
Derrick stared at her, in a way that began to feel uncomfortable. She thought about the object she had found and the code on it.
“But then he got into that goofy urbex shit, and the hacking world pretty much passed him by. That world moves fast. He’s pretty much nothing but a script kiddie these days.” Derrick looked down at his beer and puckered his lips. “Anyway,” he said, finishing it, “you want to come to bed with me?” He asked it as if he were asking if she wanted to share a smoke.
“That’s okay,” Lee said, amused but trying not to let the smile go to her face. “I think I’ll go to sleep.”
“Suit yourself.” Derrick left his bottle on the table and disappeared down the hall. She could hear the clicking lock of his door.
Lee went back to the novel. It was a book about a man who was hired to investigate another man, unaware that the man he was investigating was himself. Only the man being investigated knew that the man doing the investigation was himself. Lee was on the last chapter when a large card slipped out from behind the back cover. At first she thought it was a postcard, until she picked it up. It was a Société Anonyme invite. Just like the one that the man had given to her and Edie at the café, over a year ago.
• • •
She confronted Tomi the next day, removing the card from the book and dropping it onto his laptop keyboard as he sat hunched into the screen. Tomi stopped typing, picked up the card, and squinted at it. If he was taken off guard, he didn’t look it.
“What’s this?” he said.
“You told me you’d never been to one of these things before you met me.”
He turned the card over, then handed it back to her. “I hadn’t.”
“This is your book, right? I took it from your bookshelf.”
“I was telling the truth. But I don’t see why it matters. What would the difference be?”
“The difference would be . . .” Lee realized she couldn’t tell him why it made a difference without telling him about the Crystal Castle and the Station Master. Or her missing friend Edie. Or Claire. The Thrumm kids. Her escape from Juvie. And she wasn’t ready to do that. Not until she knew she could trust him. “The difference would be that you lied to me. Why?”
“I told you a friend gave me the ticket.”
“So?”
“So that friend was Derrick. He borrowed that book a while back. He must have left it in there. You want me to ask him about it?”
“Forget it,” Lee said, feeling foolish. “I’m going out for a walk.”
It was midafternoon, and Lee kept her hoodie up. As she walked she began to think about Derrick in ways that she hadn’t bothered to before. Derrick always locked his door, both when he was in the room and when he’d leave, and she wondered what kind of person did that. He was hiding something, but was he part of all this? She wondered if there was a way to get into his room.
When Lee returned, the house was empty. She was tired from a night of no sleep, but when she tried to take a nap, it wouldn’t come. She couldn’t get the idea out of her head that this wasn’t just a coincidence. That Derrick was in with the S.A. in some way, or at the very least knew more than he was letting on.
She called out a few times to make sure the house was empty, and knocked on all the doors. She knocked on Derrick’s the loudest. When Lee was a young girl, her father kept an old locked chest in the back of the closet. She used to obsess over what could be in it, until one day when she was home alone she figured out how to pick the lock with a paper clip. There wasn’t much in the chest, just a lot of photographs and some things that seemed to be from a past life, and she was disappointed when this mystery was solved, but she liked that she had been able to figure out how to get past the lock, and every now and then she’d pick it again just for fun.
The deadbolt on Derrick’s door was not some old chest lock, and it was not going to give way to a few jiggles from a paper clip, no matter how much Lee t
ried. She tried a nail file and a hair clip, too, but soon realized that, despite her previous success, she knew nothing about locks. The door remained closed.
• • •
For a good while none of them asked her outright about where she came from, about her past or her family. They were obviously curious, but she was cagey enough that they must have decided collectively to leave it alone. But when Allison offered to help Lee with the dishes one night, Lee knew something was up—Allison never offered help with the dishes. And Allison didn’t waste any time. “You know we have no problem with your staying here. You stay as long as you need to. But we’re all wondering, you know . . .”
“Yeah?” Lee made a big show of scraping off a bit of pasta barnacled to a plate.
“What’s your story?”
She scrubbed harder at the now-invisible spot of food. “My story is I ran away from home a few months ago.”
Allison nodded, as if this was the answer she was expecting. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen, now. But I was seventeen when I left home, and not finished with high school. I’m an adult now, free to do what I want, so it’s not like you’re harboring a real runaway or anything. I just can’t go home.”
Allison had stopped even the pretense of washing dishes and now leaned against the refrigerator, looking not at Lee but at Lee’s reflection in the window over the sink. “Where were you staying before this?”
Lee knew she couldn’t tell Allison about any of it, but Edie once told her that to get away with a lie, you mix it with truth. “I was sleeping in an abandoned van. In a junkyard.”
“Seriously?”
Lee smiled. “Here is better.”
“Yeah, I mean, of course . . . can I ask you, what . . . I mean, why . . .”
“Why I left home?”
“Yeah.”
“You won’t tell anyone?”
“Steel vault, remember?”
Lee just said, “My mom’s boyfriend,” and Allison let her leave it at that.
• • •
That night Lee felt a hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake. She rolled over to see Tomi squatting down, his face right up in hers. “What’s going on?” she said.
“Get dressed.”
“Now? What time is it?”
“A little after two.”
Lee sat up and reached for her jeans. “Where are we going?”
He just handed her a dark hoodie and shouldered a backpack. “You said you wanted to come with me sometime. Now’s the time.”
She hadn’t said anything of the sort, but she pulled on the hoodie and followed him out the door.
They rode bicycles through the city, Lee just trying to keep up, all her tiredness gone, invigorated by the cool wind. Tomi stopped suddenly, veering his bike onto the sidewalk and dropping it behind a hedge. The street was well lit, and an enormous stone wall, maybe thirty feet high, ran the entire block, paralleled by the hedge, which spanned its length. Lee followed.
Tomi walked along the inside of the hedge, his eyes to the ground, until he stopped, bent down, and took a short metal tool from his pack. He squatted, and Lee watched him use the tool to unscrew a bolt in a grate at his feet. He inserted his fingers in the grate and lifted.
A concrete tube with a rebar ladder went straight down into darkness. Tomi pulled a headlamp from his back and strapped it on, then handed one to her. He went down first. Lee put on her headlamp and followed. About twenty feet down the ladder deposited her onto the floor of a square concrete tunnel.
A ways down they found another rebar ladder and climbed up, emerging onto a patchy yard. It was hard to tell in the moonlight, but the wall seemed to contain within it nearly an entire city block. Across the yard she could barely make out the top of a smokestack, and below it a long, low building. “Wait here,” he said. “I’m going to go take a leak.”
She watched him walk off to the wall. Why did guys always need something to pee against? Lee turned back to the structure, curious what it was, and headed toward it. The building was old, made of the same stone as the walls, and there was an enormous, gaping doorway at its center. The doors were wide open. Before she knew it, Lee was walking down a long hall. When it got too dark to see, she turned on her headlamp again. Along both sides were cells, with wood-slatted doors set into tracks. The place had to be an old prison. Lee shined her light into one of the cells, then walked in. The walls were peeling gray plaster, and a rusted iron bed frame sat in one corner. It smelled damp and old, and she imagined what these walls had absorbed over so many years: the fear and anger and loneliness of decades of prisoners. Lee could hear Tomi calling to her in the distance and turned toward his voice, but then she tripped over something and was hurled headfirst into a wall. Her headlamp saved her forehead, but the lens cracked, sending her into total darkness.
Lee felt a moment of weightlessness, the ground gone beneath her feet. She reminded herself to breathe, then felt around until she could make out the door to the cell. Back in the hallway, she could still hear Tomi’s voice, but it was growing more distant. Which way had she come from? She could no longer remember. She tried to follow the direction of the voice, but it was hard to tell where it was coming from.
As she inched her way down the hallway, fear began to take hold. She should have hit the doorway by now. She couldn’t see any light or hear anything but her own breathing. Her breaths grew shallower until they stopped bringing air in at all. She put out her hand to find the wall, but there was no wall. She stumbled, hands out, but there was nothing in front of her and she fell, skidding to the ground and feeling the cool flash of a scraped knee. Her palms burned. She got onto her hands and knees and crawled, ignoring the pain, needing the ground, the only solid thing to cling to. Then something sharp bit into her knee and she collapsed there on the concrete floor.
She could wait here until morning, lying on her side and holding herself. Or she could get it the fuck together. Lee got up onto her feet. She thought back to the time she was four and her father was looking after her while her mother was working a graveyard shift. Late at night he had woken her to go to the store with him, and he had left her in the car, telling her, “Be right back.” She had waited there for what felt like an hour but could have been minutes, slouched low in her seat and watching rats move in and out of the park that bordered the parking lot, before she let herself out of the car. Lee went into the convenience store, but her father wasn’t there. When she came out, she followed sounds from the park, then stood in the middle of the grass watching her father hugging another man against a tree. Both men had their backs to her, and Lee could hear her father whispering something into the man’s ear. When she got back to the car, she found that she had locked herself out of it. As she walked back home she remembered wishing he had shared secrets with her, too. It was an unfamiliar route, and yet she had hummed a made-up song and found her way back without thinking about it. When she let herself in, her father was home waiting for her. He was wild-eyed, pacing, and he had hugged her so tightly she thought he would squeeze the air out of her as he promised never to leave her alone again.
As she remembered again the sensation of walking home by herself that night, she slowly became aware of something happening. Her surroundings, even in the dark, were becoming clear. She was not in a hallway but in a room. The room was circular. She could not see this, but nevertheless she knew it to be true. Lee took a step, then three, then turned. There was a wall in front of her, maybe four feet away. She could sense it. She took two steps, put her hand out, and felt it. Lee backed away and turned. She walked forward again. She could feel a hallway to her left. She kept walking. Another hallway. Lee made a circuit of the room, and by the end she could see it in her head: a circular room with a series of hallways leading into it, like spokes into a wheel hub. She circled the room again and counted. Nine of them. Incredibly, she knew which of them was th
e hallway she had come through, and she also knew in which direction the grate was and even in which direction the apartment was.
Lee spun herself around in circles for thirty seconds, then stopped. She was a little dizzy, but she still knew the direction of the hall she’d come through and the direction of the grate. She knew that the room was empty except for something solid about six feet to her left. She walked in that direction and felt around. Her hands touched something made of wood and glass, a display case of some kind.
Lee started walking. She picked a direction and went down one of the other hallways, slowly at first, afraid of bumping into something, then picking up speed, faster and faster until she was running full tilt through the dark. A blob of light took shape at the end, and she ran toward it. When she emerged back out into the yard, she was laughing. She looked down at herself. Her jeans were torn and her knee was scraped raw, bleeding into her shoes. She saw then that something had caught against the bottom of her sneakers and torn the canvas nearly straight through. She pulled off her shoes and tossed them one at a time across the yard. Standing there in the dark space, barefoot in the grass, Lee was happier than she could remember ever being.
She found Tomi ten minutes later, by his flashlight. He was so angry with her he said nothing the whole way back, but Lee didn’t care. She had discovered another world.
• • •
Over the next few days, Lee wanted to ask Tomi everything about this hobby of his. She’d heard about people who explored abandoned places, but nothing about it had appealed to her in the abstract. Now she wanted to do another one, as soon as possible. Lee couldn’t explain the feeling of freedom and power she’d had, knowing her way in the dark, but she knew she wanted to experience it again. She was on her way out of the apartment, intending to surprise Tomi with a sandwich at his studio, hoping to convince him to take her again, when she heard voices in the stairwell below. Lee backed away and listened.
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