“Don’t think that I’m—” Audrey’s voice trailed off as we both entered the computer lab. It looked like an enormous truck from Slate’s headquarters had driven to Emptor Academy, discovered that they had the wrong address, and decided rather than hauling it away they’d leave it for the school administration to sort out. Everything in the room was sleekly modern; red furniture provided the only pop of color to offset the chromatic gray displays. The stylized Slate logo of a book with a claw emerging from the pages extending across the room.
“I’m in heaven,” Audrey finished. “Do you think anyone would notice if I moved in? I wouldn’t take up too much space. I’d stay right here.” She trailed her fingers lightly across a keyboard. “Hello my precious. Aren’t you a sight for sleep-deprived eyes.”
“I promise, I’ll get you coffee.” I handed her Frederick St. James’s most prized possession. “Now what can you tell me about this?”
She studied it carefully, flipping it over a couple times. “It appears to be a Slate.”
I stared at her. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“Without coffee? Yes. That’s all I’ve got.”
I rolled my eyes, resigning myself to a quick trip to the cafeteria while she stared lovingly at the equipment at her fingertips. I was startled when the door swung open and I found myself looking straight into Nasir’s dark brown eyes. Right behind him, like a particularly unwelcome thundercloud, stood Sebastian.
My hands automatically flew up to block their entry. “No. No way. This is a hostility-free space, which means you need to turn around and—”
“Save your breath,” Sebastian’s mouth quirked in amusement at his own unintentional reminder of our time together in the girls’ locker room. “I already tried to talk him out of this.”
“Tried and failed, apparently,” I muttered, darkly. “Figures it would be the one time I actually agree with you.”
Nasir ignored us, circumventing me with all the smoothness of a professional basketball player moving into position to take his shot.
“Hey Audrey. It’s good to see you.”
She smiled back politely but her posture was rigid, her hands clenched into fists, probably so that she wouldn’t twirl the ring she always wore on her right index finger.
“Yeah, uh . . . you, too.”
The awkwardness was so thick it was palpable, and it tasted sharp and bitter on my tongue. It was all my fault. Not their breakup, of course. I fully intended to blame Mr. Nasir “Lightfingers” Rashad for that one, but this confrontation? This was because of me.
Well, technically it was because of Sebastian’s grandfather, but blaming a dead guy felt disrespectful. As if I were using his death to provide a convenient scapegoat. I couldn’t leave the blame on a dead man’s doorstep, when I’d been the one who’d begged Audrey for help. Which meant it was also my responsibility to make this incredibly uncomfortable situation for Audrey a little easier to handle.
Even if it meant admitting something aloud that I’d much rather forget.
“Sebastian kissed me in the girls’ locker room.”
That did the trick.
Chapter 27
“Does Ben know about this?”
Those were the last words I expected from Audrey, since they had nothing to do with the truth-bomb I’d just dropped. It was like clicking a link for details on the latest celebrity divorce and getting a survey about Chihuahua sweaters instead.
“Sebastian announced it when we were talking on the phone.”
Audrey whistled slowly. “Holy crap. He’s going to freak out. You are never going to hear the end of this.”
Yeah, that hadn’t escaped me, but it was nowhere close to the biggest problem in my life. Which was kind of funny since a few days ago my first kiss would’ve been huge news.
Now I wanted everyone to forget I’d mentioned it.
Nasir pitched his voice an octave lower in a halfway decent imitation of his friend. “Don’t hand her the Slate, Nasir. There’s no telling what she might try to do with it.” He shook his head. “I should have known this would happen. Hell, I did know. I just thought what with everything else going on, you would have opted against making out with your best lead, Sebastian.”
“Best lead?” Audrey repeated. “For what?”
“To find Sebastian’s grandpa,” Nasir glanced from Audrey to me before all of our eyes were inevitably drawn to the boy at the heart of the chaos. “That’s why we’re all here, right?”
Audrey stared at her ex-boyfriend as if he’d suggested they move in together and get married. “What are you talking about? Why would I be here at”—she consulted her watch—“two in the morning—without coffee, I might add—to find a dead man? In what alternate reality does that make sense?”
Nasir looked genuinely surprised by the question. “He’s not dead. This is another one of his training exercises. Sebastian’s grandpa comes up with the best challenges. Last year we had to take a trip to Hungary in order to steal—”
“Nothing of value,” Sebastian said, shooting Nasir a dirty look.
“Right. So this year it’s a coed challenge.” Nasir shrugged. “He probably wanted to test our focus with a distraction.”
Audrey folded her arms and glared. “A distraction. It’s not like girls could possibly be of any real use. Oh no, we’re just here for decoration.” She unzipped her backpack and held it outstretched to Nasir. “I guess you should do the hacking then. We wouldn’t want my ovaries making a mess of it.”
“Hey, I’m not the bad guy here!”
“Oh really? Do the ‘good guys’ usually go around stealing other people’s phones? I must have missed that memo. Did you hear that, Em? Turns out chivalry isn’t dead. It’s delinquent.”
It was so stupid. The squabbling. The arguing over stuff that didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
And yet I felt my blood pressure skyrocket when Sebastian leaned over to me and whispered, “This is your fault.”
I made no attempt to hide my skepticism. “Want to run that logic by me?”
“If you’d kept your mouth shut about the locker room, they wouldn’t be squabbling right now.”
I rolled my eyes. “Right. Of course. We’re the reason it’s a bad idea for Nasir and Audrey to be in the same room together.” I leaned heavy on the sarcasm.
Audrey spoke right over my side conversation with Sebastian. “I don’t care. I don’t care about Sebastian’s grandpa or a scavenger hunt or any of it.” The finality in those last three words made it pretty damn clear that Nasir fell into that last category. “I’m here for Emmy. So if you don’t mind,” she waved the Slate in her hands, “business calls.”
Nasir nodded, but instead of leaving the room, he silently settled in front of one of the computers. After one last moment of hesitation, Audrey pulled out a flash drive and sank into a nearby seat. Sebastian and I both jockeyed for a clear view of the screen, which ended abruptly when my elbow connected with his abs and I flinched away.
He didn’t spare me a glance. Instead, he turned to Audrey. “What are you planning to do?”
“We have to figure out the password before we can get to the good stuff.”
“What a brilliant deduction,” Sebastian’s tone dripped with condescension.
“Right, well unless you happen to know the six-character sequence your grandpa used?” She paused, as if to give him an opportunity to fill in the blanks. “No? Okay, then. We do it my way and run the dictionary.”
“How does that work?”
Audrey’s gaze never wavered from the screen. “Most people don’t choose random letters or numbers for their passwords. They want something simple that they can remember when they’re tired or stressed or sleep deprived.” She typed some lines of code that I would never be able to follow. “Where was I?”
“Something simple,” I supplied.
“Right. So they pick their dog’s name or their favorite color or their high school mascot, and then they
use that same password for everything from their bank account to their Netflix subscription. That’s why your friends are always the easiest people to hack.”
Nasir stared at her incredulously. “How is that any different from palming a wallet or a phone?”
“It’s not,” Audrey said bluntly. “That’s why I don’t hack my friends.”
“But the rest of the world is fair game, right?” Nasir pressed.
“Look, I can either work or we can sit around having a fascinating philosophical discussion, but I can’t do both at once.”
“Work,” Sebastian and I said simultaneously.
“That’s what I thought.” Audrey paused and then picked up the Slate. “Here’s a fun fact: Most people use password as their password.” She snorted in contempt. “And yet they pride themselves on their creativity.”
“‘Password’ won’t fit. Too many letters.” Nasir pointed out.
Audrey’s fierce look of determination never wavered. “It does if you take a few vowels out of it.”
Everyone watched as she wrote P-S-S-W-R-D and pressed Enter.
Invalid password.
Audrey shrugged. “Or not. Alright, back to the original plan. There are over fifteen thousand six-letter words in the English language. So right now it’s a numbers game.”
“You want to try typing in fifteen thousand passwords? That’ll take—”
“Forever?” Audrey nodded. “Hacking isn’t for the faint of heart or the limited of time. The good news is that I won’t test them manually.” She gazed lovingly at the laptop in front of her. “This baby is going to do it for me.” In one swift move Audrey plugged in the Slate and then went back to typing commands. “Okay,” she punctuated her words with a flurry of keystrokes. “Let’s. Try. This. Now.”
Invalid password.
Invalid password.
Invalid password.
The whole screen instantly blackened.
It didn’t power down, there was no flash of a logo before it went lights out. One second it looked fine and the next it was as dead as, for lack of a better metaphor, Sebastian’s grandfather.
“What the hell did you do to it?” Sebastian’s voice was low, but no less menacing for the lack of volume. If anything, the quiet restraint increased the anxiety churning in my stomach.
“Nothing!” Audrey’s gaze remained glued on the screen in front of her. “I ran the program! It should have been fine!”
Sebastian reached out and jerked the cord connecting the Slate to the computer, disconnecting the device completely.
“Hey! That’s not a good id—” Audrey’s mouth fell open as the Slate sprang to life as if nothing had happened.
“You were saying?” Sebastian said coldly.
“That you should never yank out a piece of equipment!”
Sebastian didn’t look even remotely chastised. “It worked.”
“This time,” Audrey muttered. “Next time you won’t be so lucky.”
Nasir glanced from his ex-girlfriend to his best friend before he apparently thought better of speaking and kept his mouth shut.
“What now?” I asked.
“Now I have to modify the program,” Audrey chewed on her bottom lip. “This Slate definitely has anti-hacking software on it.”
“No, really?” Sebastian snapped. “What was your first clue?”
Audrey glared at him. “I’m happy to trade jobs with you at any time. Just say the word and I’ll act all miserable and mysterious while you do the hacking. Let’s see how well you work with someone second-guessing your every move.”
“Oh, are you hacking? Here I thought you were destroying everything you touch.”
I felt like a preschool teacher forced to play referee. “Guys! We’re all on the same team here.”
Audrey laughed. “No, we’re not. I’m on your team, Emmy. Just because the two of you swapped spit doesn’t mean I have to like him. You should know that better than anyone.”
My face flushed red. I knew exactly how it felt to make forced small talk with my mom’s latest loser boyfriend because she expected me to be pleasant. Nice. Sweet. Meanwhile the guy at the other end of the table could belch, scratch his stomach, or ignore me entirely. I hated putting my best friend in a similar situation, but we couldn’t afford to waste time bickering with Sebastian.
Not when our current situation put the emphasis on dead in deadline.
“Let’s just call a truce, okay? One day. Not even a full day. We just need to set aside our personal feelings for the next three or four hours. That way we all get what we want: answers.”
“Okay, Emmy. It’s official. You have got to join the debate team!”
I whirled around to see a familiar face peeking through the doorway. Kayla’s sparkly pink tank top quickly brightened the room. She smiled widely at everyone.
Audrey’s attention snapped from the computer to me. “Debate team? Since when have you been interested in debate?”
“Well, I definitely don’t feel like arguing with you right now,” I hissed. “We’re on the same team, remember? Same. Team.”
I didn’t have a whole lot of faith that repeating the mantra would make Audrey any happier with the situation, so I focused on the newcomer instead.
“How did you find me here, Kayla?”
“Sebastian texted me. He said that we were pulling an all-nighter. Why? Is this supposed to be a secret?” Kayla bounced the rest of the way inside. “Are you guys doing something illegal?” She didn’t look particularly uncomfortable with the thought; if anything, she grew more eager. “Wait, are you guys deporting somebody? Just because you don’t like pop music doesn’t mean—”
“Nobody is getting deported.” I couldn’t resist adding, “Not unless the authorities catch up with Nasir and Sebastian for whatever it was they did in Hungary.”
“Nothing happened in Hungary,” Sebastian growled at the exact same time Nasir said, “They won’t.”
Audrey tuned all of us out as she concentrated on the screen, lost in an endless sea of code. I wondered if my eyes took on that slightly unfocused sheen when I was writing a romance novel. And if there was any point in asking her to explain what any of the jumble meant.
“I could try to run it with a time delay,” she mused aloud, more to herself than the rest of us. “That might be enough to trick the Slate into seeing them as individual attempts instead of a brute force attack.”
“And risk frying it again? No. No way.” Sebastian shoved the Slate into his pocket as if that were enough to end the discussion. Or maybe it was simply so that his hands would be free to knock any prying fingers away if one of us tried to reclaim it.
“Got a better idea, Sebastian?” Audrey snapped.
Goosebumps broke out on my arms, and I looked up to find Sebastian focused entirely on me.
“Yeah, I do.” He took a firm hold on my shoulder blades and propelled me into a red chair, which must have been ergonomically designed to perfection. Even with Sebastard St. James looming over me, I couldn’t help thinking that it’d make a great spot to read a romance.
“Emmy knows the password. He gave it to her. He must have mentioned it. She just hasn’t identified it yet.” Sebastian reached into my bag and pulled out my notebook and pen. “You’re going to make yourself useful by writing down everything that he said to you. Then we’ll circle all the six-letter words.”
“I didn’t catch many six-letter words from your grandpa, but I’ve got a whole bunch of four-letter ones for you, Sebastian,” I said, snatching the notebook away from him.
“Don’t talk. Write.”
I scowled, first at Sebastian and then at the blank page, before accepting the inevitable and replaying that awful moment in my mind. A task that would’ve been a lot less painful with some background music instead of all the squabbling that served as my soundtrack.
“Try ‘Oswald.’”
Sebastian sat upright and focused with an intensity that flustered me.
“He
mentioned Oswald? What exactly did he say?”
“Just that he did a shitty job.”
His entire posture instantly changed, relaxed. “He says that a lot.”
Nasir laughed. “Remember when the three of us went to Texas and he—”
“Took us sightseeing.” Sebastian finished for him. “Do you remember the part where I said I’d kick your ass if you ever mentioned it again?”
Nasir shook his head, but he seemed more amused than unnerved. “That’s what keeps landing you in therapy, man. You’re supposed to use your words to express your feelings, not to make idle threats.”
His grim smile wasn’t amused, but something must have happened between the two boys to forge their friendship—maybe in Hungary, or Houston, or right here at Emptor Academy—because Sebastian didn’t glare at Nasir. Instead, he pulled out the Slate and typed in, O-S-W-A-L-D.
Everyone, including a very confused Kayla, waited in tense silence.
Invalid password.
“This is hopeless. It could be anything. You get that right? Your grandpa gave his Slate to me, which means he’s crazy enough to pick a random string of numbers.” My brain felt like it had been clamped in a vise. I snatched the Slate from Sebastian and headed for the door.
He followed right behind me. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“To get my best friend her freaking coffee!”
I wanted to run away. The overused muscles in my legs began tightening, tensing, bracing themselves for the hard impact of the cobblestones beneath my sneakers. Except running wouldn’t accomplish anything. Speed didn’t make a damn bit of difference on a hamster wheel.
Zipping my hoodie up higher against the early morning chill, I kept my gaze locked on the cafeteria.
“Emmy, hold up.”
Oh, hell no.
I refused to adjust my stride. If I sped up it would look like I was running away. Poor little Emmy Danvers can’t hold her own with Sebastian St. James. Can’t manage much of anything. Can’t last more than a handful of hours before falling apart.
Dial Em for Murder Page 19