Chapter 33
Freya
This feeling was strangely familiar. I’d done this before. Floated loose of my body, staying somewhere far outside myself, for self-preservation. It was a coping mechanism from the bad old days in the basement with Uncle Orren and Aunt Jean.
But I’d never had to perform complex intellectual activities in that state.
I barely felt the hot, ticklish streams of my own blood, running down my face and onto my sweater. Some splattered onto my hands and make the keyboard sticky.
Concentrate, Masters. Think. I had one pass at this. One. No second chances.
I entered the address of SmokeScreen on the darkweb, and the first dialog box popped up on a black screen, no explanations, no directions.
I tried to clear space in my mind for the first of the eight passwords.
I had a good capacity to visualize, but I’d never tested it under conditions like these.
The last line of the poem, backward. I created a visual image for reference.
Huge letters, as big as buildings, on a mountaintop.
The last line was “Nothing gold can stay.”
So it would be .yatsnacdloggnihtoN. Got it. I fixed that image firmly in my mind. Imagined the hilltop at night. Imagined the letters illuminated, blazing with colored lights. As I entered the first letter, I just mentally switched the lights off in that letter, and let it go dark.
I began, slowly and carefully, to enter a string of numbers and symbols after it. Random filler. A clever way to buy time and look busy and compliant.
I hoped it would give the Drakes more time to find me.
I’d chomped down on my tooth sensor convulsively the whole time I was in the trunk of the car.
I still was biting it, probably in vain.
I doubted the RF signal could escape from this place.
They’d brought me down here with a hood over my head, but I had definitely gone down, down, down, three flights at least. This grotty old cinder-block room had the look and smell and mold level of an industrial sub-basement.
I couldn’t look at Jed. He looked terrible. His eyes swollen shut, his lips split and bloody, his nose clearly broken for the umpteenth time. God knows what they had done to the rest of him.
Nicole hovered over my shoulders, trying to follow what I was typing. She held up her phone, filming me as I enter the numbers.
After about ten minutes, she made a suspicious sound. “Really? You committed that much code to memory? Two possibilities here, bitch. Either you’re bullshitting us, or you’re one of those robot freak savant types. Which is it?”
“It’s sort of more the second thing, but…oh, shit. Oops, that was an q, not an a. When you threaten me, I get flustered. Sorry.” I backed up, fixed it, and proceeded to insert a bunch of random numbers afterward.
“Yeah, she’s definitely fucking with us.” Boer was hanging over my other shoulder now, too, squinting at the characters filling the screen. “I better get the hacksaw. I think she needs a nudge, don’t you, Nicole?”
“I think that for once, Wex, you may be right,” she said.
Oh fuck. I had to throw those bastards some meat. Right the fuck now.
I narrowed my focus to a laser point, and entered the rest of the letters I had left in that line all at once, dloggnihtoN, followed by about twenty random numbers and symbols.
I took a deep breath, my finger hovering over “enter.” Please, God. Please, let me not have fucked it up and transposed something with my icy, trembling fingers.
I entered. Waited. The beach ball twirled. I held my breath…every muscle in my body rigid…and a fresh dialogue box appeared, inviting me to enter another password.
“What the fuck is this?” Boer demanded.
I shot an apologetic glance over my shoulder at him. “There are eight of them.”
“This will take for-fucking-ever,” Boer growled.
I turned back to the screen, and found that knife, shoved up under my eyeball again. “You do understand what happens if you disappoint us, right?” Nicole said.
I looked down the foreshortened blade that filled my field of vision. It was ice cold against my skin, the point stinging the skin under my eye. “I think I have a clue,” I said. “Shall I proceed?”
She gave me a menacing stare. “Don’t show me attitude, bitch,” she said. “I have all the power here, and I will take it out of you, and him, in blood. And I will enjoy the fuck out of it.” She pressed the knife harder under my eye. It burned. Breaking skin.
“Is that a yes to me proceeding?”
She really wanted me to cringe and grovel, and it would have been the smart thing to indulge her, but I just didn’t have the energy for it. Not while also holding all this information suspended in my mind. I just simply couldn’t do it.
Onward. The penultimate line of the poem was “So dawn comes down to day.” I plugged it into the huge letters-on-the-hill image in my mind. .yadotnwodseognwadoS
This time, having established for them that I wasn’t completely full of shit, I took the liberty of entering even more garbage numbers and symbols between each letter.
Pages of them. Ethan said the first password would ping him the location of the computer, so hopefully, he knew where I was now.
Who knows, he might already be able to turn on the microphone and listen to us.
My task was to use this data entry job to stall, stall, stall.
Which was exactly what it was designed for. My brilliant brothers.
I hoped the Drakes were able to follow the signal from my tooth sensor. But whatever. That was outside my control at this point. I had to focus on the task at hand.
“So what is this place, anyway?” I made my voice high-pitched, so it sounded like anxious babbling.
“This can’t be a private home, not with a concrete sub-basement.
We must’ve gone down, what, three flights of stairs?
Where are we? Is this a power station, or a bunker?
Some industrial structure? Maybe a factory, or a—”
“How about you shut the fuck up and concentrate on your code, bitch?”
The knife pressed beneath my eye, and I yelped as it broke the skin again. A thread of blood trickled down my cheek and dropped off my jaw.
“Yeah, yeah, got it,” I said, my voice strangled. “Don’t cut me. Please. I need my eyes for this, okay?”
“No,” Nicole said coolly. “You need one eye, bitch. Zip it, and get to work.”
So I did. First, a bunch of numbers. Then a single letter from the poem. More numbers. Another single letter. Still more numbers and symbols. Lines and lines and lines of them. Then another letter. Doling them out like breadcrumbs in the forest.
No matter what happened to me and Jed, Ethan needed to know as much as I knew, at least. This nightmare had to serve some purpose. For Shane.
“Please,” I said. “Just tell me the name of the client who stole Shane from you.”
“We’re not telling you shit, Masters.” Boer whacked me in the side of the head, making my hands jitter on the keyboard.
Which meant I had to go back, backspacing all the way to the last letter I’d entered.
When the stars in my head stop spinning, the third dialog box was ready.
I entered the period. It was getting harder to hold the image steady in my head for constant reference. It flickered, wavered, distorted.
No. Stay tough, girl. Five more passwords to go. Keep your shit together, for Shane. For Jed. For Holly. For Ethan.
The next line to enter backward was “So Eden sank to grief,” so I inserted it into my mental image.
,feirgotknasnedEoS. I lit up the letters in my head, trying to keep the image steady, and started entering garbage numbers and symbols slowly.
Hurry, Ethan. Hurry, Drakes. I can’t keep doing this.
I can’t go on with this. I’m going to crack.
So many moving parts. But Ethan knew where we were. My only job was to keep Boer and Nicole too busy to cut Jed to pieces. Hah. No pressure.
I hit “enter” on the third password. Held my breath again. Another dialog box.
The fourth line from the bottom was “Then leaf subsides to leaf.” That would be .faelotsedisbusfaelnehT. I inserted those onto my hilltop image. Lit them up.
Jed appeared to be unconscious. He hung there, plastic cuffs suspended from a looped chain hanging from the ceiling. His feet touched the ground but he wasn’t standing on them. The cuffs had dug so deeply blood ran down his arms.
Look away. Concentrate. More numbers, more symbols. More, more, more. I entered them grimly, until I heard Boer start to make ugly, impatient muttering noises.
I finished that one, hit “enter.” It worked. Four more to go.
The next phrase was, “But only so an hour.” I inserted .ruohnaosylnotuB’ into my mental construct. Only three to go after this. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I had to slow down.
I started entering the fifth string of letters. I must have been at that one for twenty-five minutes of solid typing before I hit “enter.” Three more to go.
And if I got to the end, and nothing happened? Then what? Oh God, then what?
“Her early leaf’s a flower”…wait. Hold on. Did this line have a comma at the end, or a semicolon? On top of the rest of this horrific shitshow, I now had to make a life or death call over something as trivial as punctuation. Fuck my life.
I gritted my teeth, and decided if it were a comma, I would not have hesitated. I stopped because some part of me remembered something different. I voted for the semicolon. Betting my lover’s body parts on it. ;rewolfas’fealylreareH.
I took even longer with this one. My stomach roiling with doubt. I typed in the final H and about twenty lines of random garbage after.
I exhaled, and hit “Enter.” Tears slid down my face, mixing with the blood.
Yes. The dialog box appeared, for the second to last line.
Now for “Her hardest hue to hold.” Which would be .dlohoteuhtsedrahreH.