Paradise Lost Boxed Set

by R. E. Vance

  “Yeah, kid,” I said in a tone that was as dejected and sad as I felt. No point in lying to her. “They’re hunting the wrong kind of …” I paused. My mind, which had been rolling over everything that was happening, snagged on something. Others of all walks of life were being brought down … the only thing that bound them together? They were friends with children who lived in homes that were being protected by Memnock Securities. Friends and—

  I looked up. “Conner, do you still have the case files?”

  “Yeah, but we’ve been over them a bunch of times. There’s nothing there.”

  “OK, but what about the security specs. Do you have those?”

  Conner pulled them out of a backpack sitting on the floor space between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s seat and handed the file to me.

  I flipped through them, searching, until … “Son of a bitch,” I muttered out loud.

  Sinbad blushed bright red. She pointed at me, hand over her mouth. “He said a …” She mouthed “dirty word.”

  “A canine mother?” Penemue said. “What’s wrong with taking about female dogs and their offspring? It seems like a perfectly acceptable word to me.”

  I eyed the angel. “It is, in the right context. Which wasn’t how I used it.” I gave the little warrior pirate a consolatory head nod. “I’m sorry, Sinbad. Seems that Uncle Jean here has a potty mouth.”

  Sinbad blushed again, but whether it was because she was unused to being apologized to or because I used the word potty, I honestly couldn’t tell you.

  “Conner,” I said, handing the specs back to him as he drove. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it before, but all this time I think we’ve been looking at the kidnappings backward. We thought that it was these Occultist freaks hacking into Memnock Securities and finding vulnerable children to kidnap, right? But what are the odds that all of these kids have Other friends and were being guarded by Memnock Securities?”

  “I dunno,” Conner said. “Pretty slim?”

  “Perhaps,” Penemue said. “But given the sheer number of Others and the tolerant levels of children, I don’t find it that surprising.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But still … let’s assume that the average, intolerant parent wouldn’t want their children to have an Other friend. So these kids would have to have kept their friendships secret. With the exception of Mable’s kids, and Aau, all these kids did exactly that. They had secret friends.”

  “So?” Conner said. “All that tells me is that these Others were predators, grooming the kids. Doesn’t exactly help their case.”

  “Empty Hell, Conner,” Penemue said. “The average Other is not like that. Especially not pixies, hill trolls and monsters-under-your-bed. Those are particularly peaceful creatures who would never harm a child.”

  “Sure … I didn’t mean it like that.” Conner gave the angel an apologetic nod in the rear-view.

  “Right,” I said. “We know that most of them are innocent. And yet all of their kids were kidnapped. How did the Occultists find them?”

  “The Memnock Securities hacks.”

  “Exactly. Read those specs—one of the first selling points is the detection of Others. Those kids were kidnapped because they knew Others. The Occultists not only disabled the system to take the children, they also used the system to find kids with Other friends so they could set them up down the line. Thousands of homes use those security systems—but only forty-seven kidnappings, all with Others friends in the background. Memnock Securities’ specs would tell them exactly that. In other words, this is the very definition of ‘two birds, one computer-hacked stone.’ We need to get into Memnock Securities and see what their systems see to figure out how the Occultists are vetting their victims.”

  “But Mr. Cain said his systems weren’t tampered with—remember the interrogation room? We even had Penemue over there do his lie-detector thing on him. He was telling the truth. His systems weren’t hacked.”

  “No,” I said, pointing at Penemue. “He said he did not believe his systems were tampered with.”

  Penemue nodded.

  “So?” Conner asked.

  “So, knowing something and believing something are completely different things. And based on everything that’s going on—the kidnapped kids, Michael at the Tree, Miral with Colel Cab—that’s just too many people going against their beliefs for me to, well, believe. I’m starting to believe that someone is hacking their beliefs. In other words … the Big Bad out there is making them believe in things that they normally would never believe.”

  Sinbad’s innocent eyes drooped down, and I could see she was thinking about her Sarah. Penemue and Conner had taken my theory in silence, but Sinbad’s eyes glossed over with tears and her lower lip began to quiver. She let out a mournful groan that only children confronted with the realization that Santa isn’t real or that Spot isn’t going to come home from the vet can make. “No,” she said, a tear finally escaping. “Do you mean Sarah wouldn’t normally believe in me?” The words came out hard and unsteady and as soon as she got out her greatest fear, she broke down into sobs.

  Penemue scooped her up in his oversized arms and cradled her. In a tone brimming with infinite empathy, he said, “Oh, no, my dear. Sarah very much believes in you. It is the monsters—the ShouldNotBes—that are born of manipulated belief. You, my dear warrior pirate, are something else entirely. You are her hero. Now and forever. She believes in you despite being forced to believe in monsters.”

  Sinbad rubbed her face against the twice-fallen angel’s tweed vest, darkening the brown-green crossed pattern with her tears. “Promise?” she quivered.

  “Promise.”

  She wiped away more tears and balled her two little hands into fists of unforgiving steel. “Then we have to get her back and right away so she stops making those darn ShouldNotBes.”

  “Amen,” Penemue said.

  “Amen,” I echoed.

  “That’s all fine and dandy,” Conner said, “but what’s the plan?”

  “Memnock Securities. They’re the key.”

  “You think Mr. Cain is a part of this?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But then again, they could be manipulating him just like the others. Either way, we have to get in there and back trace the Occultists’ hack or uncover his involvement.”

  “And how do we do that? It’s not like we can hack into their systems. We’d need—”

  “IT Support,” I interrupted, looking at the little black-and-white TV, on which a helicopter took an aerial shot of a certain prison. “I don’t know much about computers, but I do know this: they are at their most vulnerable at their core. We need to get into the prison and hack into their systems.”

  “And how do you plan on doing that?”

  “Oh,” I said, “I have an in.”

  NOW—

  Now I was standing over a very unconscious Billy, his limp body duct taped to his swivel chair in the FishBowl. Marty sat on his lap. The poor kid had no idea that when his new boss decided to visit him in the middle of the night, it wasn’t for a surprise performance review.

  Universal Serial Buses and Picklocks

  As part of my preparation on what I was now calling Assault on The Garden: Operation WeedKiller, I had called Brian and given him the lowdown on what I had in mind. He whistled and said that hacking into Memnock Securities was way above his pay grade. Even when Astarte moaned that she’d reward him by making his wildest dreams seem tame in comparison to what she had in mind, the little guy gulped but stood his ground. An external hack simply was not possible.

  An internal hack, however … that was another story altogether, he said. He gave me instructions on how to set up a USB flash drive hack—which amounted to buying one, downloading some files he sent me and plugging it in: the very definition of plug and play. I’d seen enough movies to know exactly what he was talking about, and whereas I wasn’t nearly as cool as Tom Cruise in just about every Mission: Impossible movie, I was a bit taller than him
(not a difficult feat), so that had to compensate for something.

  But as I crawled around the FishBowl looking for a USB port to plug the damn thing into, I was beginning to realize that Memnock Securities had also seen Mission: Impossible (when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all) and, fearing a Tom Cruise impersonator breaking into their facilities, got rid of all their ports. There was nowhere to plug or friggin’ play.

  Best laid plans of mice and men and all that jazz. I was going to have to improvise.

  Luckily I had planned for just that. I had done my research on this place and knew that Mable the pixie would be here. But Ms. Reynolds, the Other changeling who wanted nothing more than to live among the humans in peace, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise. You see, both pixies and changelings are fae. But whereas pixies are the fun, frolicking kind, changelings are not. They are born and bred to be warriors, and their specialty?

  Infiltration.

  Think of them as sleeper agents that specialize in sabotage. Legend has it that fae would kidnap children (often human, but Others were on the menu, too), and replace them with a changeling. This imposter would pretend to be your child, metamorphosing themselves every now and then to give the impression of a child growing. Then, when the timing’s right—BAM!—the changeling would be activated to cause whatever chaos they were there to cause.

  Despite her pedigree, Ms. Reynolds was a kind, sweet lady—not that it mattered. All humankind knew was that a changeling lived among them, their children were disappearing and she ran a daycare, of all things.

  It wasn’t fair to her—or any changeling or Other that rejected their pedigree. Everyone got a second chance to be something else in this GoneGod world. It was probably the only consolation prize we got when the gods left and threw our worlds into chaos.

  I needed Ms. Reynolds to know that was not how I thought of her, so when I reached out to take her empty hand, mine was not. In it was a simple holly leaf that I’d originally intended to give to Mable. But given what holly leaves represent to the fae’s warrior class, Ms. Reynolds was a far better choice. To the average guard in this place, the leaf would pass as nothing important, merely—given it was a holly leaf—something related to presents or goodwill or any other benevolent crap humans think of when looking at a Christmas wreath. But to the fae, the holly leaf carried a very specific message: Prepare for war.

  Think of it as the fairies’ opposite to the olive branch. Ms. Reynolds would see that leaf and know that I was planning something. And if that something happened to take the form of letting go all the Others so they could send the guards on a wild goose chase? So be it.

  Leaning over the unconscious guard, I muddled my way through all the commands on the console, I managed to replicate the drill that Billy had created just hours before.

  The alarm set off and I watched numerous guards get ready. They didn’t move very fast, probably dismissing this as another drill. I sent them to the opposite end of the island and as soon as I was sure that all got the message, I turned off the security apparatus to the lighthouse and did a few more annoying things to keep them distracted as I made my way to the stairwell.

  If everything went according to plan, I’d have at least twenty minutes to investigate. Give or take.

  I turned to implement phase two—just as Bear came in, presumably to help Billy coordinate the team. He looked from Billy’s passed-out body to me, and then, without a moment’s hesitation, grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the wall.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Bear growled.

  I tried to speak through his choke hold, but all that came out was a groan, presumably from a very red face. Bear eased his grip, which meant that his choke hold was downgraded from vice to noose. I lifted up my hand and looked at my watch: twenty past midnight. Then I held up a finger and said through a tight throat, “Just wait one minute.”

  “Wait? Wait for—” he started before his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he passed out on the ground, releasing me from his death grip.

  “For Marty’s lick,” I said, rubbing my throat, “to take effect.” In his haste to take me down, he hadn’t seen Marty coiled beside Billy’s body.

  I patted Bear on the head. “Good boy. You’ll wake up sometime next week, and then we can go foraging for berries and fishing for salmon.” Bear’s unconscious body groaned as he settled into his poisonous sleep. “I’ve been wanting to say that to you all evening,” I said, stepping over his body.

  “OK, Marty,” I said. “Keep them busy.”

  Marty hissed and hit the key board with his nose. Another alarm sounded on the south side of the prison and confused guards turned around and headed toward the new noise.

  And then I did one last thing that I was sure would keep the guards busy all night: I opened the Others’ cells.

  All of them.

  ↔

  I made my way over to the stairwell and hid behind the open steel door. I figured Mr. Cain would be leaving his quarters to assist the first ever alarm at The Garden that wasn’t a drill, and I wanted to be there when it happened. One minute passed, then two—and sure enough, Mr. Cain came running out of the tower. I waited until he was out of sight, then silently closed the heavy steel door.

  I quickly moved to the locked trapdoor and, huddling at the digital padlock on the ground, I did what any good cat burglar would do when encountering a half-inch of solid steel: I ignored it. I didn’t have a tool sharp enough to get through that lock—and as for liquid nitrogen or a blow torch, I was pretty sure that only worked in the movies.

  Besides, it didn’t matter. When trying to get through a locked door, regular or trap-, you never went for the the lock itself. You found the more vulnerable part of the door: the hinges.

  The hinges were made of five-inch-long, half-inch-thick pivot rods, both sides welded shut to hold them in. But the pivot rods inside the hinges were loose—they had to be, otherwise there’d be no hinge on which they could pivot.

  I tapped my chest twice and Tink came out. I pointed at the hinges and told her to do her thing—which in this case was to take a tiny vial of olive oil and pour it all around the caps. Thick human fingers would never be able to reach those places, but tiny fairy hands are another story, and she managed to get the lubricant in all the right places fairly quickly.

  Then I handed her a rock-sculpting chisel that was roughly the same length as her body. The fairy carried it like it was made of Styrofoam—damn, ounce-for-ounce, Tink was strong—and dug the chisel into the weak point where the metal met the pivot rod. Then we both pulled. And pushed. Shimmied and dug. It took a solid three minutes of muscle-straining effort, but we managed to pull off the cap. Then Tink poured more olive oil lubricant into the space in the newly made, small hole. We needed to get the pivot rods out of the hinge joints. Once those rods were out, we could pull the door open. Another three minutes—three minutes I didn’t have—and we finally popped the pivot rod out. We did the exact same thing on the other hinge, and with a pop! we managed to get the damn metal trapdoor open.

  I gestured for Tink to get back into my chest and made my way downstairs, only pausing for a second to look at my Memnock watch. The guards were still running around on Marty’s wild goose chase, but now there was another element in play. The Others, under Ms. Reynolds’ command, were causing havoc. I watched as the changeling tripped a lone guard into the troll’s cell, who tied the guard up using vines. Mable distracted two guards, sending them on another chase, while the krampuses subdued a guard with solid whacks of their tails.

  OK, so that was under control. I started downstairs again, checking Mickey as I did so. His arms moved at a completely normal speed.

  I ran down the metal stairs, cringing every time my shoes caused a particularly loud clang, until I made it to the bottom where an open door waited for me. I walked through and into a large, empty metal room with nothing in it but dust accumulated from what looked like years of neglect.

  “
What the frig, Tink?” I muttered under my breath. “There’s nothing here.”

  My footsteps chimed with each step I took into the metal room, but there was something wrong with the sound. My steps should have echoed in the empty chamber, sound bouncing off metal before hitting more metal unobstructed. Instead, my footsteps echoed like I was in a large cavern or cave.

  Before I could figure out what was happening, my watch buzzed and Mr. Cain’s face popped up on the screen. “Jean,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “What you hired me to do,” I said. “Testing for vulnerabilities and making sure you and your team aren’t violating anyone’s living rights.”

  “In an abandoned basement.”

  “A locked basement beneath The Garden.”

  “What is so strange about that? The Garden was built above an old prison. It makes perfect sense that there would be a basement level. You would know that if you read the island’s schematics. And before you ask—it is locked because it’s dangerous down there. Load of good that padlock did against the likes of you.”

  I looked around me—as far as I could tell I was in an empty room that did not lead to any abandoned prison. But before I could say or ask anything, Mr. Cain jumped in, apparently keen to put all my doubts to rest. “The section you are in was originally designed to be a storage unit. Hasn’t been used in years. You’re basically walking on rust. Access to the old prison was closed off by a sheet of metal welded to the far wall. Check out the edges … you’ll see what I mean.”

  I walked over to wall opposite the stairwell and touched the edge where the far wall and the adjacent walls met. The edge was rough and upon close examination I could see that someone had, indeed, welded a piece of sheet metal there. “OK,” I said. “So you don’t want anyone in the old prison. Still, this seems like overkill. Why all the precaution?”