by J. A. Dauber
“Ask her already. I’ll be in touch,” he said over his shoulder.
I was left frustrated, still in the dark about my dad, and more committed than ever to getting into his files. Somehow.
I needed time to think. I told my mom my nose was still hurting and stayed home from school the next day, hoping Caroline would come over. Caroline wanted to know everything about what had happened, of course—the news had reported the armored car robbery, that Mayhem was involved and back to his old tricks, but, of course, they didn’t have the first-person details. She sent me what I guess she felt was a safe text, in case Mr. Jones was indeed spying on us:
?
Those Mysterians again.
I responded that I wasn’t feeling well and was going to stay home from school, but she could come over, and she texted back: Only one of us has a get-out-of-jail-free card.
And then a second later: I am so sorry. Was that insensitive? I feel like it may have been insensitive.
I texted her back several emojis, which, when you put them all together, gave the impression of general all-goodedness.
We will talk soon, she said.
So then I spent the next eight hours staring at the lab computer.
Maybe Dad had left some sort of clue, the way he’d left the passwords upstairs. Something to give me some hint of what to do next.
And believe it or not, I found it.
And I was pretty sure Mr. Jones didn’t know it existed. Even though Mr. Jones could monitor every keystroke, every command that I entered…I couldn’t imagine him finding this. Because it wasn’t on the computer; it was on the computer.
On top of it, that is. Another tiny piece of paper rolled up, this one wedged into that small area between the computer screen and the monitor covering. So tightly that it was almost invisible. I mean, I had missed it all this time.
On it, typed in small, neat letters, was the name of a website, together with a long password.
Now all I wanted to do was plug it into my phone immediately and see what happened. But with Mr. Jones monitoring the Internet traffic in and out of my house—by now I was positive of that—that was a bad idea. I knew I needed to wait.
And the next day provided a perfect opportunity.
It was class field trip.
* * *
All right, it wasn’t officially called that, since we’re not in elementary school. It was a day of community service to look good on our college applications. Not that college was the first thing on anyone’s mind with what was going on. But I think the administration wanted to try to do something to get school spirit back up on the heels of the “Friday Night Fright,” as people called the Bloody Front’s attack on Logan.
They gave us different options for where we could go. Which was agonizing for me, because Logan was coming, and he wanted to do cleanup in the town square—there was some discussion about building a memorial there to the victims of the Front—and Rebecca was, of course, going with him. And I, of course, would usually go wherever Rebecca did. But I knew I had more important things to do, so I chose the group assigned to help reorganize the stacks in the town library.
The town library, with its public, and anonymous, Internet connections.
I figured it was possible Mr. Jones had downloaded my school schedule, patched into town security camera footage to see where I was going, and started monitoring Internet traffic in and out of all the library computers. But I hoped that level of monomania and paranoia was a bit much even for him. Wishful thinking, maybe, but I didn’t have a ton of ideas, and the two things I was pretty sure of were that my dad was running out of time and that Mr. Jones’s promises to save him seemed sketchier and sketchier. This whole thing had to be resolved, and soon.
As you can see from my current situation, nothing worked out the way I’d hoped.
But this was the best I could think of at the time. And maybe that website from the piece of paper would give me some good ideas, even some answers. Maybe it was a clue as to how my dad had disappeared. Whatever it was, I knew I had to check it out.
I told Caroline about it on the minibus on the way over, and she agreed. “How can I help?” she asked.
And I remember saying to her that we’d figure it out as we went along.
Honestly. That’s where we were in all this. Just kids, figuring it out as we went along. Or trying to…
Anyway. Our job was to help the librarians cull the books. Any book that hadn’t been checked out in the last seven years was going to get chucked. I avoided the librarian’s hopeful look when he said we could take them home if we wanted, and his crushed expression when none of us took him up on it.
The computers were in a small room off the main entrance, but most of the shelves were downstairs, so I had to be creative.
I’d been to this library with my mom and dad a lot as a kid. They both did theater in college—I think I said that before—and they were really into volunteer storytime. Their favorite was the Frog and Toad series. I remember sitting there in a circle with the other little kids, listening to my dad speaking in a deep grumpy toad voice and my mom ribbiting all over the place and thinking: Those are my parents. None of you have parents like that.
Which I guess, given what I’ve learned, is technically true. Just not the way I expected.
I didn’t stop going to the library after Dad disappeared. As a matter of fact, it became a kind of virtual babysitter. My mom never believed any of those stories about bad guys hanging around the library waiting to prey on kids, so she just dropped me off and assumed I’d spend my time in the children’s section. Which I did not. Too many memories. But that meant that I got to know the rest of the library pretty well over the years. Including the old back stairs.
They were kind of dark and spooky, but they led back up to the main floor—and right to a side entrance to the computer room. Technically, the door was fire-alarmed, but I remembered from pushing it once or twice as a kid that the alarm never went off. I was hoping that was still true. It certainly didn’t look like they’d spent a lot of money on renovations over the years. Worst case, I’d run back down the stairs and think up something else.
It was still true.
Meanwhile, Caroline stayed near the chaperone, keeping an eye out. We’d agreed that she’d text me if he came back upstairs. If he found me on one of the computers instead of doing my job, well, it was going to be a problem.
I’d learned a lot from Mr. Jones about keeping my line of sight open, so I needed a computer facing the main door. After an awkward conversation with an old lady that involved taking advantage of her computer ignorance—I told her my homework was saved on that computer and I couldn’t get it any other way—she agreed to switch.
This wasn’t the worst thing I’ve done as a supervillain, by far, but it’s one of the things I feel the worst about. Isn’t that nuts?
I sat down, and then my phone buzzed. Caroline:
He is on the move. I am going to try to distract him with a question about the Dewey decimal system. But you may not have much time.
Like there wasn’t enough stress.
I typed the address into the browser. Twice, because the first time I was so nervous I got it wrong. I thought maybe I had the second time, too, because all that came up was a black screen and a blinking cursor. That seemed ominous. But it became clear what to do and I started to type in the password, when my phone buzzed again:
It was impossible to stop him, Caroline said. He is heading in your direction. Get out of there.
But I couldn’t. Not now.
Because before he arrived, something happened.
When I finished typing in the password, the computer shut itself down.
Along with all the other computers.
Along with all the electricity in the building.
It was daylight and the library h
as a lot of windows, so it wasn’t like it was frightening, at first. There were some groans and moans, like when they’re showing a movie at assembly and the projector stops working. Until people remembered the Bloody Front, and it got less funny. I think that must have been when the chaperone turned back, to call for advice or something. He never showed up, that’s all I know.
Which is good, because the printer next to me was chattering away. Printing. Despite the fact that every other electrical item in the library was currently shut down.
Before any of the assorted senior citizens or homeless people could react, I ran over to the printer, snatched the piece of paper it had spat out, then busted my butt to make it back downstairs with the other students and stagger around and pretend to look terrified. They were shouting about how it was another Bloody Front attack and of course I couldn’t tell them not to worry without raising all sorts of questions, so I just clambered up the main steps with them, the folded piece of paper burning a hole in my clenched fist.
Caroline fell in beside me and whispered, “Was that…was that you?”
“I think so,” I whispered back. “I’m not sure. Yes.”
And then she pointed to my fist, like we were playing one of those kids’ games where you had the marble in one of your hands or something. I opened my hand, and we looked at the printout, with its strange jumble of hieroglyphics or cuneiform or whatnot. And slowly—it was almost solemn, like it was a religious rite or something—she took out her phone, and took a picture of it
What if I hadn’t let her do that? Or had tried to bluff, told her that I hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary? That it was just a glitch on the grid, nothing to do with me. She might have called BS, shouted, been angry—but I could have lived with that.
But I didn’t. I didn’t even consider it. We were in it together.
And I guess everything else happened after that.
* * *
So I had this piece of paper, with what was meant to be an important message.
If only I could figure out what it meant.
I spent the next day obsessively focusing on it. Nothing came to mind—nothing intelligent, anyway. Even though I knew it was a bad idea, I started looking at the paper everywhere: in the bathroom, in the halls, even in class. It attracted attention, but I didn’t care. I held it up to a mirror to see if it made more sense that way. It didn’t. I held a candle up to it to see if some sort of secret message came out. No luck there, either. But it had to have some meaning.
Caroline was out of ideas, too. We were mostly working on it separately—we couldn’t talk on the phone or text about it, and midterms were coming up fast. She had to do some studying: she was actually trying to keep up her GPA. Unlike me.
Nonetheless, I got an intentionally cryptic text the very next night: I have a theory. I will tell you more anon. (We were doing our Shakespeare unit in English at the time.) Nothing else.
I spent the night running through the wildest possibilities. I even wondered, for a minute, if it was some sort of magic spell, and typing in the password was like the final incantation, and the blackout had let a demon loose upon the world…but that was just fantasy. This was real life. The Bloody Front was demon enough for anyone.
Especially since it’d begun picking up steam. It was hitting softer and softer targets harder and harder. Every day for a week, a different target. The carnage was…well, you know. We all do. Hospital, library, shopping mall…. People have been calling it Bloody November.
But there won’t be anything like it again. Not from them. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
The one silver lining, if you could call it that, was that the Front were limiting their targets geographically. And so the authorities were able to draw a big circle around a zone of increased interest. Or, depending on your perspective, of sheer blinding terror. We were inside the circle—and after the Friday Night Fright we were definitely under the microscope—but so were other places, since the government didn’t think the Front would call down that kind of attention close to their headquarters.
High-schoolers had their own methods for dealing with Bloody November. Crying and nail-biting were popular. One freshman became famous for sleeping eighteen hours a day, just to get away from reality. Someone who was handling it pretty well, believe it or not, was Caroline. In a way that only she could have done.
Basically, she and the mp3s set up right outside the school’s front steps, doing a kind of DIY karaoke concert for an hour after school every day. Anyone who wanted to play or sing whatever song would make them feel better, they could, and Caroline and her band buddies would try to follow along. They were decent musicians, so they did all right.
I know this sounds stupid. But here’s the thing. Everybody feels better when they have a backing band and no judgment. And even with high school being high school, Bloody November was kind of making the whole place into a judgment-free—or, maybe more realistically, a judgment-not-so-much—zone. A lot of people played, or sang, or both. Logan, as it turned out, did a goofy and yet also strangely soulful performance of “Free Bird,” and there were these three sophomores who insisted on singing “Gettin’ Jiggy with It” every day.
Maybe it shouldn’t have been too big a surprise, then, that Rebecca asked Caroline to be her guest on that week’s podcast.
My stomach churned when I heard the news. I mean, I was happy for her in theory, but in practice there were huge, gaping dangers involved.
It’s not like I was expecting her to say something along the lines of, Oh, yes, well, I do have some interesting news to share, Rebecca—it turns out my best friend owns a gigantic supervillain robot suit! But I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been hints or overtones. Which, if anyone from the various federal agencies that were still nosing around the school happened to be listening, could have called attention to me. Or to Dad. Unlikely, but it was the school’s quasi-official podcast. So maybe?
It turned out that that wasn’t what I had to worry about.
I have the podcast on my phone, of course. Let me see, here’s the part where my stomach tried to bust out through the roof of my mouth. It came about twelve minutes in. I’m pretty sure almost no one else was listening. I’m grateful for that, at least. Okay, here goes. For the record.
…And so, Caroline, besides the mp3s helping the school get through Bloody November, you’re also playing winter formal.
That’s right, Rebecca. We’re the opening act. We’ve been rehearsing a lot, and we’re pretty happy with our sound.
And you still have three weeks to go.
That’s right. So by the time we get onstage, we’ll be totally tight.
Well, I’m sure all our listeners are looking forward to it. Tell me, how do you pick your set list?
Some of the songs, actually, came from the school-steps concerts. And I think we’re going to have some guest stars onstage, from the sophomore and junior classes—
That sounds like fun—
And of course Laraine and Melissa had some suggestions.
Your bandmates.
My bandmates, right. But the ones I like the most—
Here there’s a little pause. Like she’s wondering if she should go ahead. And then she does.
—the ones I like the most, some of them were songs Bailey introduced me to.
I’ve played this podcast at least forty times. But of course there’s no video, so I have no idea what the expression was on Rebecca’s face when she said:
Bailey?
Caroline is in full attack mode, zero to sixty.
Yes. Bailey. Maybe you remember his name. Your boyfriend broke his nose for looking at you the wrong way.
Why Rebecca didn’t edit this part out, this whole part, I still don’t know. She could have. Easily.
Or maybe she couldn’t. Maybe it would have felt like…chickening out. Not facing up to the feelings of gu
ilt she had. Maybe she wanted to put it on the record.
Which is something I can relate to.
That’s not—Logan—
He still gets headaches, you know? He still stays home from school. Two months later, his nose still hurts. Every day. All because he cares about someone who doesn’t know his name.
There’s another long pause. And then there’s no mistaking Rebecca’s tone. Cold. Icy cold. The tone of someone putting an end to something that had never actually begun.
I know his name.
There’s more after that, but that’s all that mattered.
NOW. FRIDAY. 10:03 P.M.
I’ve been here too long already. I’m going to have to move.
Here we go.
Well, that went better than I’d feared. I’m standing up, which means the power’s working. I’d never be able to get the suit off the ground using my own muscles.
So let’s see. Three-step plan.
Step one: Set the delayed-action grenades for fifteen seconds.
Step two: Wait fourteen and a half seconds.
Step three: Jump straight up right in the middle of the boom.
The idea is that it’ll confuse them. Make them think the building collapsed on itself because of the gas and flames. Get them to waste their time combing through the wreckage while I’m miles away.
I’m not saying it’s the world’s best plan. But it’s definitely a lot better than staying here and waiting for them to come in and get me.
Okay, grenades armed and countdown started.
I’ll be back. Right after this boom.
Or, I guess, I won’t.
Did it. Still alive. And in the air.
My ears are ringing. Well, no, not really. The suit’s acoustic sensors modulate and dampen, like very fancy noise-canceling headphones. But I definitely have the impression of LOUD.
