18. Two Days Until Bonding
Chapter eighteen
Two Days Until Bonding
Carrson
“You’re sure it was the cellar?” Thomson asks the next afternoon. “That’s where Laurel saw someone?”
“That’s what she said.” I yank the joystick to the left, sending Sub-Zero under one of Raiden’s lightning bolts. My fingers move over the buttons, and an uppercut launches Thomson’s character across the screen. “Ha! Got you.”
“You attacked while I was talking.”
“I can do two things at once. Sorry you can’t.”
Raiden pushes himself off the stone floor while Thomson adjusts his glasses with one hand, the other still resting on the controls. “You’ve been using that excuse since we were eleven.”
“And I’ve been beating you since we were eleven.”
“I don’t lose every time.”
“True. Sometimes I let you win.” I grin to show him I’m kidding. Mostly.
The Mortal Kombat II cabinet stands against the far wall of the game room, its black casing nicked near the base from the countless times we moved it around trying to find the perfect spot. We bought it ourselves, which makes it my favorite thing in this house.
Our fathers had been drinking on the back terrace when Thomson and I found the machine for sale in Ashport.
An empty bottle sat between them, and another made its way back and forth across the table while we begged.
Father finally offered us a deal. If we could earn the money ourselves, without touching our accounts or asking anyone in The Order for a handout, we could buy it.
They agreed because neither of them believed we could do it, and because they were far enough into the second bottle to find our determination amusing. Our fathers assumed we would lose interest as soon as we realized wanting something and working for it were two different things.
They underestimated how badly we wanted to tear each other’s spines out on a glowing screen.
Thomson came up with the idea after watching groundskeepers collect golf balls from the pond behind the Ashport Country Club. Hundreds sank into the water every week, especially near the sixth hole, where rich men drank too much and blamed the wind for their terrible swings.
Using aluminum poles, wire mesh, and pieces from an old pool-cleaning system, Thomson built a rake wide enough to drag along the bottom.
I did the dragging.
Three mornings a week, before the first golfers arrived, I waded into water that smelled like fertilizer and dead fish while Thomson directed me from the bank.
We hauled out buckets of balls, cleaned them in the stable washroom, sorted them by brand, and sold the best ones back to club members for half of what the pro shop charged.
By the end of the summer, we had enough money for the console and delivery, with enough left over to replace the joystick after I broke it during our first week.
Our fathers tried to argue that pulling lost property out of a pond didn’t count as legitimate employment.
Thomson produced the contract, complete with both their names scrawled across the bottom.
He’d insisted they put the deal in writing the night they made it, and however much they’d had to drink, they couldn’t deny what they’d promised us.
Now the electronic music repeats while neither of us starts another round.
“What exactly did she see?” he asks.
“A hand gripping the edge of the door and reddish-blond hair before whoever it was pulled the cellar shut.” I lean against the cabinet, replaying Laurel’s description.
She’d tried to dismiss it at first, convinced the shadows or the glass had distorted what she saw, but Laurel doesn’t imagine details like that.
She notices things everyone else overlooks and worries at them until she pulls the truth loose.
“Could it have been Samantha?”
“Samantha was standing beside her.”
“Rebecca?”
“In Washington.”
“That’s what Samantha said.”
I turn my head toward him. “You think she lied?”
“No.” Thomson pushes his glasses higher on his nose. “I think Samantha believes her mother is in Washington. That doesn’t necessarily mean Rebecca was there.”
The possibility sits wrong with me. Rebecca has never struck me as someone who hides in cellars, but I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by people who keep different versions of themselves in separate rooms. Father presents himself as a devoted leader while ordering executions.
Rebecca plays the loving parent while instructing her daughter to seduce me.
Thom spent years developing medicine that can heal others while poisoning his own liver with alcohol.
Really, I shouldn’t be surprised by anything anymore.
“That cellar should be empty,” I say. “The wine is stored under the kitchen, down with the Vault. Father had the cellar entrance sealed years ago. Said it was just a place for the rats to get into the house.”
“Maybe the rats have two legs?”
I reach for the controls and start another match. Thomson chooses Raiden again. He always does. When we were children, he claimed it was because Raiden could teleport. I knew the real reason was the lightning. Thomson always liked anything powered by an invisible current he could control.
“Why would someone go there?” he asks as the match begins.
Thomson’s character disappears in a burst of blue light and reappears behind mine. He attacks before I can turn, knocking my health down by half.
I block his next attack and drive him toward the edge of the screen. “If someone wanted to enter the house without being seen, the cellar would be useful. The doors are hidden from most of the windows, and the hedge blocks the view from the stable.”
On the screen, Raiden collapses under another attack. “Finish him,” demands a deep voice from the game console. I follow the instruction and win the round, but Thomson doesn’t seem to notice.
“We should check it,” he says.
“That was always the plan.” I take my hands off the controls. “I was just waiting so you could pretend it was your idea.”
He steps away from the machine and reaches for the canvas bag beside the couch. “I have two cameras, a through-wall radar sensor, and one of the smaller drones.”
“I love how you bring surveillance equipment to play video games.”
He shrugs like it’s no big deal, then checks his equipment while I look toward the closed game-room door.
Laurel is off with Samantha and Rebecca, who arrived this morning despite supposedly being in Washington yesterday.
They’re getting her ready for the prebonding ball tonight.
She’s safe, or as safe as anyone can be with Father under the same roof and thousands of Order members arriving in town.
Still, I don’t like the idea of someone moving through the house without my knowledge. I like it even less that they were close enough to Laurel for her to see their hand.
I switch off the arcade cabinet, cutting the electronic music in the middle of a note.
“Let’s go,” I say.
The afternoon sunlight is bright enough to make me blink.
Feeling a bit ridiculous, we stick close to the house, moving from shadow to shadow until we’re by the cellar.
The two doors are made from thick planks of wood, gray with age and swollen from years of rain.
A metal latch stretches across the middle, secured by a heavy padlock.
The whole thing looks exactly as it did years ago, the last time I paid it any attention.
“What’ve you got in that bag for the lock?” I ask.
Thomson digs around and comes up with a small black case. Inside, thin metal picks rest in fitted grooves beside a compact lock-pick gun.
“You carry that around?”
“What?” he says, a little defensive. “It’s left over from breaking into Damian’s apartment.”
I turn my back to him and scan the lawn. Workers move in and out of the ballroom carrying flower arrangements, chairs, and boxes of glassware. Farther down the property, white tents have risen between the trees to accommodate the thousands of Order members expected tonight. No one looks our way.
Behind me, metal scrapes softly against metal.
“How long?” I ask.
“Longer if you keep talking.”
I hear a faint series of clicks, then the padlock opens in Thomson’s hand.
He holds it up with a satisfied expression.
I lift the latch. Rust flakes away beneath my fingers, but the hinges move without the groan I expect. The doors open smoothly, almost silently.
Thomson notices too.
“Those were oiled recently,” he says.
A narrow staircase descends into darkness. Cool air rises from below, carrying the faint smell of dirt and stone.
I hand Thomson one of the slim flashlights I shoved into my pocket before we left, then pull out the other. The concrete stairs are chipped along the edges but otherwise unremarkable. I go first, with Thomson right behind me.
“This reminds me of the Vault,” he whispers as we descend. “The rituals we did down there. Our initiation into manhood.”
I look back and find him touching the back of his shoulder, over the place where they branded both of us with the symbol of The Order. A cross with four arms of equal length. My own shoulder aches in sympathy, remembering the hot iron pressed into my skin.
He’s right. The cold air and stale mold are the same as in the Vault, but the metallic trace of iron and blood is missing. Instead, there’s the hint of something chemical here, like plastic mixed with cleaning solution.
We walk for a minute through a narrow hallway. There are industrial-style lights overhead, bare bulbs in plastic cages, but I don’t know how to turn them on, and I wouldn’t even if I did. If there’s someone ahead, I don’t want them to know we’re coming.
The beam of my flashlight moves over concrete walls painted a dull gray. Pipes run along the ceiling, disappearing through openings cut into the stone. We take a sharp turn and stop so abruptly that Thomson nearly walks into me.
Before us is a door.
Not an old one either. The surface is smooth and black, fitted perfectly into the surrounding wall without hinges or a visible handle. Beside it sits a rectangular glass panel with a flat surface. It lights up a faint blue when we approach.
Thomson steps closer. “That’s new.” He runs the flashlight over the frame without touching it. “This isn’t something someone bought at a hardware store and installed over the weekend.”
“No kidding.”
I glance back the way we came. The entrance is far enough behind us that daylight no longer reaches the hallway.
“What’s it doing under Father’s house?”
“Dunno.” He crouches and examines it. “This must be some kind of custom keypad. Not sure what it’s reading. Fingerprints, retinal scans, facial recognition. Probably some combination.”
“Can you open it?”
Thomson takes a compact device from his bag, attaches a narrow probe, and runs it along the underside of the panel.
Lines of code move across the screen before vanishing and beginning again.
He types, quick taps, then looks at the lock with anticipation, but nothing happens.
After several attempts, Thomson sits back on his heels.
“It isn’t connected to the house network. Whoever installed it isolated the system and encrypted everything internally. It’s probably running a rotating code, biometric confirmation, or both. I can’t get inside.”
He removes another device, a black rectangle about twice the thickness of his phone, and presses it against the wall beside the frame.
“What’s that?”
“Through-wall radar. It can detect movement and breathing if anyone is close enough. Kind of like what fishermen use or the traffic control tower at an airport.”
A faint grid appears on the screen. Thomson adjusts the range, then waits while the radar scans whatever lies beyond the steel and concrete. The grid stays blank. No moving dots.
“No one close enough for it to detect,” he says.
“Right now.”
He lowers the radar. “Right now.”
I move closer and place my palm against the steel. The surface is cold enough to leach the warmth from my skin.
“What happens if we cut the power?” I ask.
“The lock probably seals automatically. It may trigger an alarm.”
“Can you break through the wall?”
“With what? My screwdriver?” He glances around. “We’d need heavy equipment and enough time to make a lot of noise.”
“That won’t work with all the guests arriving for the ball.” I put my hands on my hips. “Gotta admit, this is anticlimactic.”
“I know.” Thomson rises, dusting off his knees. “It’s been a while since I couldn’t open something. I forgot how irritating it is.”
I search for a camera, but nothing stands out among the pipes, lights, and seams in the concrete. “You think they’re watching us?”
“I would be. The camera may be built into the scanner. If it is, we won’t find it without taking the whole thing apart.” He reaches into his bag again. “I can still leave one of ours.”
Thomson attaches a camera high on the wall where a pipe meets the ceiling. A motion sensor goes near the floor, hidden behind the edge of the conduit. He connects both to his phone, checks the feed, then slips it into his pocket.
“If anyone comes through this corridor, we’ll know.”
I look at the black door again. The glass panel glows steadily beside it, untouched by everything Thomson tried.
Laurel saw someone enter through the cellar. The oiled hinges prove those outside doors have been used recently, and this is the only place this leads.
Whatever is behind the steel, someone has gone to considerable trouble to keep it hidden.
Thomson zips his bag shut. “Now we wait.”
“You know waiting has never been one of my strengths.”
He clasps my shoulder and steers me back toward the stairs. “Good thing you have a ball to distract you.”