The message that accompanied the book was making less and less sense. This looked more like an art project than actual information.
Kaz turned a few more pages until she stopped him with a touch on his wrist.
He flattened out the page. “See something familiar?”
She studied the design. It was a circular sigil with four prongs that swirled from its radius like a tornado. It was simple, but spoke to something powerful … otherworldly.
“Hello?” He snapped his fingers twice. “Earth to Callie—?”
She blinked. “Sorry, I spaced out for a second, there. I don’t recognize it.” The lie had come more naturally than she’d anticipated.
Of course she’d seen it.
It was the design that Jackson had tattooed onto her back.
The sun dipped out of view and cast a shadow down the library’s central aisle. The rows between the stacks glowed from the banker’s lamps.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Calista said, pushing herself away from the nook. “Have you made any progress?”
Kaz sat cross-legged on the floor, laptop resting on his knees. The browser had fifteen open tabs, each pointing to an arcane, outdated website featuring photos of sigils, some with designs that mirrored Jackson’s sketches. The sites were useless. Most had oversized yellow text on black backgrounds, with tutorials about designing your own power symbol to create the law of attraction. He’d just gotten through a poorly-edited blog about unlocking the ‘secret mysticism of magick’ (yes, spelled with a superfluous ‘k’, because if it ends with a k, it means it’s real, according to the author). Whatever Jackson was doodling in this leather-bound book, they seemed to be variations on these nonsensical new age symbols.
Calista returned to the box. She went through the stash once again: money, gun, passport, maps, cards—there had to be something she’d missed the first time around. A trap door? A hidden compartment? Anything. The key to this cipher was somewhere among the contents of his locker, and she was going to figure it out.
“What are you doing?” Kaz asked.
She picked up the box and shook it, gently at first, and then more rapidly.
His eyes widened. “Careful, you maniac!”
“It’s a metal box, Kaz. I’m not going to break it.”
“There’s a gun in there!” He leaped to his feet and reached for the box.
“Don’t be such a baby,” she teased, yanking it out of reach.
“Me? You’re the one playing keep-away.”
He reached out again, and she took a step back. “I’m checking to see if there’s a secret compartment.”
“Can’t you do that without the loaded gun inside?” Kaz lunged to snatch the box from her hands, and she lost her grip. It tumbled and struck the library’s tiled floor with a dull clank and rolled, popping open. The contents spilled out and something slid from the folded map: a three and a half inch yellow plastic square.
Calista furrowed her brow at the discovery. “That looks like the save icon on my desktop.”
Kaz scooped it up. “It’s a floppy disk.”
“Like from the olden days?”
“Yes, the days of yore. Back when people rode dragons and battled marauding orcs.” Kaz chuckled at his own joke.
“Well if the key to the cipher is on that, how are we supposed to access it? It’s not like computers have floppy drives anymore.”
Kaz glanced back at his laptop and then refocused on the disk. “No, not anymore. But the parts are still around.”
“Got any in your garage at home?”
“Unfortunately not. And it’s late on a Saturday—all the pawn shops and used part stores are closed. Most are closed Sundays, too. But the computer lab upstairs might be unlocked.”
“Wait, you want to sneak into the lab?”
“Not so much,” he said, still transfixed on the disk. “But I suddenly need to know what’s on here.”
Calista and Kaz tip-toed through the halls and up the staircase, keeping their eyes open for lingering janitors or members of the chess club; they practiced in the common room on Saturday nights for reasons nobody outside of their tightly-knit clique understood. Calista wondered if students were attending Hawthorne who had even less of a social life than she did.
Once inside the computer lab, Kaz thumbed the light switch, and the fluorescent bulbs at the back of the room flickered and buzzed to life. Calista dropped her knapsack on the nearest table. The lockbox slammed the laminate surface, and it resonated like a shotgun blast.
“Dammit!” Kaz shouted, clutching his chest.
“Sorry,” Calista said, half wincing, half grinning.
“There’s a gun in there!” he reminded her, for what felt like the hundredth time. “Watch where you’re swinging that thing.”
She unzipped her bag and pulled it wide, rustling through the contents. “It’s not like it’s gonna go off by itself. The safety is on … as far as I know.”
He snorted. “That’s reassuring.”
Calista continued to dig, extracting the box, the note, the gun, and finally the yellow plastic disk. “Now you can play with your big floppy,” she said, waving it in Kaz’s direction. She considered pushing the joke further—a little light humor to break the tension—but dismissed the idea. The comedy gold would be left un-mined.
Beyond the columns of desks were riveted steel shelves stacked against the wall, overflowing with monitors and hard drives and tangled cords. It looked like a graveyard for deceased computer junk, but to Kaz, it was a treasure trove. The ancient technology was an eyesore that cluttered the otherwise aesthetically pleasing space, but Mister Sodhi’s computer science class was a clinic in nostalgia as much as it was programming—a throwback to the days when ‘old timers’ like himself had to be as adept at hardware assembly as they were at software design. Before learning Java, Python or C++, you built your own box. Kaz needed no such instructions—he’d been building his own rigs long before his first day of high school.
With nothing more than a tiny screwdriver, Kaz cobbled together a motherboard, some memory, a half-rusted fan, and—after a lengthy search through every box in the lab—a floppy drive. A half-hour later his Frankenstein of a computer was finished. He plugged it into a power bar, attached a monitor and pulled up a pair of rolling chairs. Whatever was concealed on this one-point-forty-four megabyte monstrosity had better be good.
Kaz powered it on without enclosing the side of the tower, and the guts of the unit he’d operated on were exposed—the surgery was complete, but he’d neglected to stitch up his patient. He assured Calista it didn’t matter: he was going to disassemble it a few moments later. A hum rose from the open chassis, and a plume of dust coughed from the fan. The monitor blinked.
He slipped the floppy into the drive and clicked it in place. The fan complained even more obnoxiously than before. And after belching out a few angry beeps, a window appeared on the monitor.
‘Maps.’
Calista bolted upright, heart racing.
Finger poised to left-click, Kaz glanced over his shoulder. “Wait, did you hear that?”
“It was probably a janitor rolling by. Click the stupid folder before I literally explode from the suspense.”
Kaz clicked.
Inside the folder was a lone .jpg; a political map of the world, countries delineated by hairline emerald borders on a graphite background. This map was old—as ancient as the floppy disk they’d pulled it from. Russia was still the U.S.S.R. and stretched far across the map, rudely encroaching on Eastern Europe’s real estate. Czechoslovakia was a single country, and Germany was slashed in half.
Aside from its age, there was one additional difference: it was crisscrossed with bold red lines, arcing and looping like a print ad for an airline. Zooming in on the waypoints revealed their names in a small serifed font: Wiltshire, England; El Giza, Egypt; Uxmal, Mexico; Qin Chuan Plains in China’s Shaanxi Province. The lines bounded from country to country in symmetrical patterns.
Three of the locations were right there in the US of A: a remote region of Texas, Gravenhurst, and what looked perilously close to where they were seated at that very moment—North Valley, Virginia.
Kaz pressed a digit into the screen at the Egyptian waypoint. “These are the pyramids.” He traced the line that leaped to the British Isles, dragging a groove of dust along the monitor. “And I’m pretty sure Wiltshire is the home of Stonehenge.”
“So someone charted the locations of musty old rocks. Why are the lines also linked to the quarantine zone in Arizona? And here?”
The locations had nothing in common. They couldn’t have been military targets, though some speculated a hidden government facility in Arizona had been the actual target of the chemical attack. And North Valley was Langley-adjacent, which would explain its inclusion, but the map was practically carbon dated—from the 80s, or older—decades before the Gravenhurst Incident, and long before North Valley had been transformed into a picturesque community for The Pentagon’s top earners.
“I don’t get it.” Kaz rubbed his face with both hands. “Whatever this map is supposed to be telling us, it’s not doing a very good job.”
Calista dug into the back pocket of her jeans and produced a thumb drive. She clacked it into the half-gutted computer’s sole USB port. “Let’s copy the map and study it at your place. Maybe something will come together.”
“Good idea. Walking around with a gun is bad enough, but I don’t want to find out what happens if we’re caught with a government disk.”
“I could hazard a guess,” a cheerful voice said.
They turned to see Mrs. Walton framed in the doorway, tight-lipped and rigid. She’d slipped in unnoticed, her footsteps drowned out by the computer’s whining fan.
But when she ratcheted back the hammer of the pistol they’d left by the entrance, the sound struck the room like a thunderclap.
“Now this is quite the development.” Walton strolled into the lab and shut the door at her back. “Two of my pupils in possession of an unregistered firearm?”
She shook her head and made a tsk-tsk noise, wagging the snub-nosed barrel like an accusing maternal finger.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” was the first sentence that spilled from Kaz, who had instinctively sprung from his chair.
“It’s not? Well, it looks as if you’re about to spend the evening explaining to the authorities precisely what is going on.”
Calista stood with more caution, careful not to make sudden movements. Although Mrs. Walton wasn’t agitated. She was cool and collected, waving the gun with a casual detachment that bordered on alarming. Calista always assumed she spent her weekends feeding on the life-essence of toddlers to honor her covenant with a demon king—but maybe she spent them at a gun range?
“I know the students think I’m a tyrant of sorts,” their teacher said. “Perhaps even a monster.”
Calista swallowed hard. “The thought never crossed my mind.”
Mrs. Walton explained the situation as if class was in session, and this would all be on a test later. “The faculty was recently warned about illicit activities in North Valley. We’ve been instructed to contact the authorities if anything suspicious came to light.” She tilted the weapon and glanced at the grooves where the serial number had been scraped off. “And this is very illuminating.”
“It’s not ours,” Kaz blurted out.
“Mister Hayashi, I have to say I’m most surprised by your involvement in this enterprise. Selling unregistered firearms? I can only assume you were coerced.”
“It’s not for sale,” Calista said, choosing her words with caution. “If you let us explain, we can—”
“You can what?” Mrs. Walton cut in. “Make an appeal to my emotions? Talk me out of following the rule of law? You are not getting preferential treatment, Miss Scott—not this time.”
Walton took a step down the aisle, closer to the light at the back of the class. She brandished the pistol at her hip like a gunslinger in a Western. Calista had failed to notice a cell in her other hand. Guns are funny like that: if one is in the open, they can’t help but become the focal point of a conversation.
“You’ll thank me for this one day.” Their teacher glanced at her device, thumb tapping the surface. “You’re minors, so whatever sentence you receive will be minimal. You’ll learn from your mistakes. And with any luck, you’ll both have a renewed appreciation for observing the rules.”
“We have money,” Kaz said frantically.
Walton stopped tapping.
“It’s true!” He pointed to the knapsack by the door. “We found it in a box that belonged to Jackson Carter. He hid it in his—”
“Shut up!” Calista shouted. She wanted nothing more than to cuff Kaz across the back of his stupid head, but she was terrified of giving their teacher a reason to fire.
Walton raised her silver eyebrows, creasing her forehead. “I’m listening, Mister Hayashi.”
Was she actually entertaining this? Was she willing to accept a bribe? Or was Walton humoring Kaz, baiting him into a verbal sparring match as if this were one of her lectures?
“It’s close to ten grand,” he pleaded. “Take it and pretend this never happened. Just please don’t call the cops.”
Kaz crossed the room in measured steps, his shivering hands still raised in surrender.
Walton leveled the weapon. She peered down the sight with the practiced ease of a sharpshooter. “That’s far enough.”
He kept moving. Whether it was nerves or his legs moving independently of his brain, Calista didn’t know, but he flatly ignored Walton’s instructions. She stepped forward to meet him. The butt of her gun met his skull with a dry crack, buckling his knees and sapping him of his consciousness.
Calista screamed. At least she thinks she did; her mouth was agape, throat burning, lungs heaving. Scared and confused and horrified, she couldn’t hear her own frenzied cries.
A searing pain clawed at her skin. She was leaning back against the exposed computer tower and must have scratched the tattoo through her bandages, scraping the metal edge of the chassis. But it was more than a scratch—it was a burn. One of the old computer components had ignited her shirt, and the flames were eating away at her flesh.
She screamed again, frantically reaching around her back to pat out the flames. This time she could hear her own voice, clear and resonant.
A shot fired.
Then another.
And then Mrs. Walton was dead.
Calista blinked out a pair of tears that helped to focus her vision in the diffused light. Stretching from behind her were gelatinous tendrils. They were organic but rigid; the quartet of spears suspended her teacher in mid-air, toes dangling six inches off the ground. One pierced Walton’s chest, another speared her abdomen, and two more had impaled her cheek and the hollow of her throat.
Twisting at the waist, Calista saw that the tendrils hadn’t come from behind her—they were part of her, somehow, tethered to her lower back, just off-center and to the left of her spine. Right where Jackson had tattooed her. Her sigil had burst from her skin like a volcanic eruption, millions of inky wet particles loosing themselves from their epidermal confines, solidifying into javelins. And for some reason, they’d decided to pin Mrs. Walton to a whiteboard.
Time stood still while Calista’s heart jack-hammered beneath her breast, threatening to explode. She was halfway surprised it didn’t. She’d questioned her own sanity more than once during the last year, but never suspected she would suffer a complete mental breakdown. Are crazy people aware they’re crazy? Maybe that’s how breakdowns worked: you don’t know you’re experiencing one until you wake up in a drug-induced delirium with your arms strapped to a hospital bed.
The tendrils retracted with a wet pop, letting their victim crumble to the floor. Mrs. Walton fell to her knees, eyes wide as saucers, and in a moment of dark comedy she teetered and face-planted on the tiles. A puddle spread beneath her in every direction.
>
The tendrils returned to Calista’s lower back like a push-button cord retracting into a vacuum cleaner. She gasped when the burning liquid dove into her pores—a splash of wet tar on naked skin. Then it was over. She rubbed her lumbar with the heels of her palms, twisting to look over her shoulder. The burning ceased, giving way to little more than a mild itch.
Kaz stumbled to his feet. He massaged an angry purple welt that blossomed at his temple. Blood streaked his hairline. “You messed up your sweater,” he groaned. He staggered another step, reaching out for a desk. “And is that a tattoo?” He asked if he’d slipped and hit his head, all memory of being pistol-whipped having been knocked from his senses. Then he turned, saw their teacher’s corpse, and began to scream. A lot. And for way too long.
If someone from the chess club hadn’t heard the gunshots, they were definitely going to hear this racket.
Without thinking, Calista scrambled around the room, gathered the gun and lockbox, zipped them into her knapsack, and sprinted towards the staircase. She dragged Kaz by the wrist. By the time they reached the exit a medley of concerned voices were resonating behind them.
They splashed across the courtyard in long strides. Kaz followed in a daze, muttering to himself that this wasn’t really happening. They crossed the street towards Kaz’s car as he fumbled for the keys and clumsily unlocked the door. Calista circled to the passenger side, tossed her bag in the footwell, and slid inside. The leather was cool against her bare skin; the back of her sweater had been burnt away, and she was now making a bold fashion statement wearing long sleeves attached to a loose flowing apron.
The ignition roared, and Kaz stomped the accelerator. He was robotic, driving by muscle memory alone. The Hawthorne Academy shrunk into the distance as a wail of police sirens rang out, followed by faint echoes of screeching rubber.
The North Valley Grimoire Page 7