A few minutes pass while we get our technology hooked together. Let’s go, I finally chat. I’m starting at the Bureau.
As I worm my way through codes and security protocols, I manage to forget about all the other confusing things I’ve been dealing with. One thing quiets my mind this way: Jamming.
Thirty minutes later, my fingers ache and my cybernetics need to be rewetted. My shoulders twinge with stiffness, and I lean back to stretch them out. When I hunch forward again, I try a last-ditch effort to get around the barrier keeping me from the security cameras in the Bureau.
My hunch was right, and we’d discovered that the Time Bureau is so much more than a research facility. A jail? Heath had chatted, and I’d shrugged. He’d frowned, but said he’d definitely let his Privatize contact know.
The feed I’ve been trying to access suddenly brightens my screen, and Heath and I both sigh with relief.
On the Link screen, Cooper sleeps on a sad-looking cot. He looks well enough, though his hair has been shaved to the scalp and he’s wearing a gray uniform. The signature in the corner reads Subterranean 4, Cell 21D.
Got what you need? I chat to Heath, and it sounds loud inside my own head. We’d quit chatting a while ago.
Take us out, he says and I begin the process of stitching the code back together.
Once Heath slithers out the window, I stare at the floating Link screen, gathering my courage. It’s easy to sneak into a system. Falsify an IP address. Assume an alternate identity. I love playing the Black Hat, because no one knows who I am, not really. I can do anything, say anything, go anywhere. If I get caught, I’m in serious trouble, but so far, I’ve been able to stay ahead of Dad and his nosy Hoods. I don’t know how much longer I’ll have this luxury, especially if I keep using the Black Hat identity.
But if I go downstairs and sneak into Dad’s rooms, there will be no question as to who did it. Monroe’s warning to be hella careful bounces around in my brain. But he’ll have the door open tonight. I swallow hard and pull a black hoodie over my undershirt. I fold the flatpanel into the front pocket of my sweatshirt and follow Heath out the window.
The porch creaks when I swing my body over the railing and land in a crouched position. I figure Dad will expect me to enter through the hall, as I’ve never seen any guards standing watch near the porch.
Keeping my hood up, I peer into the window well. The top outline of the steel doorframe gleams in the moonlight, and the black door stretches down into the darkness.
Clutching one hand over my flatpanel and the other on the lip of the metal window enclosure, I balance with my legs dangling into the open well. I have no way to know what waits at the bottom, though the drop can only be about ten feet.
Come find out, come find out weaves through the trees. This house has harbored secrets for long enough. As the Black Hat, I find hidden things and expose them. I’m doing the same now. I just wish my heart would stop trying to flee. It beats hard, sending tremors through my chest.
I push with my free hand and suck in a shout as I fall. My feet crash against gravel a split second before my knees do. I catch myself with one hand, and that smarts too. I stifle the curses that spring to mind. I check my palm and knees to make sure they’re not bleeding. The last thing I need is a DNA trail.
Once I’m sure I’ll leave no evidence, I straighten to face the door. It shines like oil, sleek and viscous. The supposed smoothness is misleading, and it reminds me of the conversation I had with Cascade about the folds of time. Just like that has hiccups and bumps, this door is an intricate network of tiny squares. Each one is designed to catch a speeding bullet and prevent penetration. The black seams are electricity absorbers, and they run from side to side and top to bottom.
It sports no doorknob. It seamlessly blends into the brick of the house, one centimeter black and the next gray stone. I run my fingers along the edge of the door, surprised when the image of a window flickers to life.
I suck in a breath as I fondle the fraying electronics that have kept this door a secret for so long. I pull my hand back, and the window image blinks out to show the door behind it.
I suction my flatpanel to the door. My panel beeps, indicating that a siren will sound unless the passcode is entered in the next twenty seconds. I tap the screen, my fingers flying through programs to find the one I need to crack this door. “Come on, come on,” I mutter.
With four seconds to spare, I deactivate the alarm. A snick bounces off the walls of the window well, and the door hisses as it lifts into the solid rock above. I curse and jump for my flatpanel, which is still attached to the door. The hydraulics are too fast, and my panel disappears.
I feel naked without it. If there’s another electronic issue, I won’t be able to advance. I can’t worry about it now. This bullet-proof contraption is like an elevator door. It starts to slide down before I’ve moved, but as soon as I step into its descending path, it slinks back up.
Once inside, I press my back into the wall, my throat tight and a trench opening inside my stomach. Directly in front of me, the hall stretches toward the kitchen. A blue glow comes from the new security hub located above the garage entrance. I sidestep to my left to block the view, effectively concealing myself in Dad’s compound.
The room where I’d found the notebook waits a few paces away; the door is ajar—just like Monroe promised—and the faint light of the moon emanates through the crack. Without my flatpanel and with Monroe’s status set to “asleep,” I realize there are no protections now.
The door swings easily on the hinges. I hold the knob to prevent the catch from clicking. My eyes have already adjusted to the dark, which only makes the gasp come faster to my lips.
The room has been emptied.
Just two days ago, heap upon heap littered the ground. Stacks of paper. Piles of clothing. Boxes with strange glowing lights.
Now, the moonlight gleams off a nearly black hardwood unlike any in the rest of the house. In the dark and quiet, the air feels charged. I hold my palm in front of me and use the blue light from my Receiver to start exploring the perimeter of the room.
The counter along the wall feels cold to my touch. There’s no dust, no grime, nothing. I wonder how many guards and how many hours it took to clean out this room. I wonder where all the stuff went. I wonder what Dad was trying to hide.
I trail my fingers along the wall as I make the circuit until I arrive in the corner where I know the stairs are. I find the button—not glowing with that pink light—and press it. The floor vanishes with the smooth sound of high-quality hydraulics and the introduction of cooler air.
I kneel down and peer into a deeper darkness than I’ve ever seen. This level of black feels like it should take on substance, like I can rake my fingers through it and find them soiled when I extract them.
The light from my Receiver glints off shiny edges, highlighting the corners of stairs. I look over my shoulder, fully expecting someone to be there to corroborate my theory. There’s no one, and this isn’t a theory. It’s a fact.
Stairs. Going down. Despite the basement-less blueprints, this house has a basement. “This house has a secret,” I say, gaining strength from the sound of my voice in the emptiness.
Inhaling deeply, I take the first step into darkness.
Price
THE LIGHTS AUTOMATICALLY BRIGHTEN as I descend. LEDs shine from the sides of the stairs, from the floor along the walls in the room I arrive in, and from underneath the cabinets. There are no lights in the ceiling, and the way the shadows claw upward instead of down unsettles me.
Silver carpets the floor, but whether it’s metal or paint, I can’t tell. A waist-high counter borders the room, with cabinets above. I pad across the room and open one, finding it empty.
The corner holds a round table with matching chairs, and the counter on the end has two barstools. This looks like a hip place to hang out, if there was food and drinks and maybe some low music.
This room feels lived in. Comfortabl
e, with its low lighting and soothing colors. A leather couch takes up the end of the room behind the stairs, and I imagine Dad sitting there, discussing tactics with his guards, or business with his more wealthy clients. This room would definitely provide the anonymity they’d require. The bullet-proof door makes the perfect getaway exit.
A tremor shakes my hands. They’re itching to find something, but the cabinets are empty. The counter bears a series of trays, maybe two dozen, each labeled with a four-digit number. The farthest on the left bears the number 1983, but they don’t progress in increments that make sense. The next one says 1997. Then back to 1985. Then 2013, and 2025, and 2048, and—
My attention is ripped from the trays by a crackling noise and an electronic voice that bleeds from the walls.
I spin, my heart hammering double-time in my chest. I find it hard to swallow, but I don’t see anyone descending the stairs. I track the sound to a built-in Link station in the corner above the couch. It flashes with green and white lights.
Messages scroll across the screen, followed by a voice that repeats the words in a hella creepy monotone.
The oxygen in the room evaporates as I read the message.
Black Hat location pinpointed to the Bayberry Heights area.
That’s my neighborhood. They can’t be that close. Can they? What if Hoods show up on my front porch tomorrow? Or in an hour?
I need to plan and complete another jam and log the location somewhere else. I’ll check my forums as soon as I get back upstairs. That seems very far away, like maybe I’ll never escape this basement. The layers of paint and sheetrock and insulation and wood between me and my bedroom three stories above feels impossibly thick, like this basement is another world entirely.
The screen quiets, the words disappear into darkness. I return to the trays. I’m not entirely sure what they are, but I take the pages from the first tray and lay them out on the table.
None of the numbers are in chronological order. Some are separated by a dash, some by a diagonal slash, some have letters in between all the numbers. There are a few names, but I can’t tell if they’re people or cities or something else entirely.
The need to get out of the basement seethes under my skin, so I take snaps of the nonsensical information with my cybernetics and carefully replace the papers.
I repeat this process with a few more trays, noting that some of them hold only a single report, while others have many. I’ll sort through them later. Right now, I feel like if I don’t get out of this basement soon, I never will.
I don’t know how to open the bullet-proof door without my flatpanel, so I leave Dad’s forbidden section of the house by hurrying down the hall into the kitchen—I’ll have to hack into the security hub and erase this footage. I dart through the garage and across the backyard. After dropping into the window well, I find my flatpanel stuck to the door, right where I left it.
If possible, being outside in the open feels more suffocating that being buried inside my house stuffed with secrets. The wind moans. Tree branches slap each other. Over the fence, my neighbor cheers at something in his immersion fantasy realm.
Every sound reminds me that I could be caught at any moment. The quivering of my insides begs me to get back to the safety of my room. I run on my toes, my breath burning through my lungs. My muscles scream with tension as I scale the rain gutter and climb through my window.
“There you are,” a man says, causing me to fall forward onto my hands and knees. I yelp until I’m able to focus on the hologram of Newt—not my father.
I sit up, pressing my hand to my chest. “You scared me.”
“Sorry,” he says. “Doing something illegal?”
“Maybe,” I say.
“According to my scanners, you need to do something more.”
I close my eyes and lean my head against the wall. “What do you mean?”
He holds up a flatpanel and reads from it. “Black Hat location pinpointed to the Bayberry Heights area.” He looks at me. “I’m assuming that’s bad for you.”
“It is.” I sigh as I get to my feet. “I need to erase the security hub feed first.” I sit at my Link station and hack into my father’s security feed. I look like a scared rabbit, scampering down the hall with terror written on my face. I successfully clip the flick so I’m not in it, and sit back, exhausted.
“Price?”
I startle at the sound of Cascade’s voice. My eyes fly open, and I glance around like Newt will be hiding in my closet or under my bed. Of course he’s not, but I can’t help the adrenaline pumping through my system at the thought of him getting caught hologramming on my Link.
“Hey,” I say, my voice too high and my nerves vibrating. “What time is it?”
“Late,” she says. “Or early.” She smiles, a timid movement of her lips. “Heath said you’d probably still be up.”
“I’m still up,” I say, relaxing into my desk chair and taking in Cascade’s mussed hair and makeup-less face. She looks as natural as I’ve ever seen her; she looks like the girl I hoped she’d be under all her coded alterations. Her f-pat is dormant, and her smile is hesitant, nervous. Looking at her now, I realize that this is the girl I like so much.
I don’t smile and I don’t lean forward. She hailed me. I’ll wait to see what she has to say.
“I have a lot to explain,” she starts. “But I hate talking over the Link, even through the hologram. You want….” She looks away, and for once I feel like I have some measure of control in our relationship.
She takes a deep breath before speaking again. “You want to come over? We can, you know.” She gestures to the space around her, but I can’t see anything. She’s always hella careful about her surroundings when hologramming, and neither one of us will say anything over the Link that could tip anyone off.
“I know?” I ask, but I’ve already decided. When an incredibly beautiful girl invites you to her house in the dead of night, you go. I’d like to ask her about the rift, and see what kind of equipment she has, and find out what color the walls are in her bedroom.
“I have snacks,” she says like I need another reason to come over.
“Twenty minutes,” I say. I don’t need that long to get to her subdivision, but I need twice that long to figure out what questions I’m going to lead with.
She smiles as she dips her chin to her chest. In the next instant, the Link screen goes blank. I stare through it to the surface of my desk, slightly disbelieving. I inhale as I stuff my feet back into my shoes and slip out the window.
A different worry eats at me on the way to Cas’s. Surely she’s linked-in by now. She’d have seen her own pic—the one that shows her as a twelve-year-old. I vow to bring up where—or when—she’s from right away, get it out in the open. I can’t stand the secrets. There are just too many, from my dad, from the house. I can’t stomach having them between Cas and I too.
I find her waiting on her front steps, a low warbling coming from her mouth. I haven’t heard her sing this song before, and she cuts it off as soon as she sees me. I say nothing as she leads me into her house, upstairs, and past a couple of bedrooms—one with the door closed and one empty—and into hers.
The walls shine purple in her bedroom, and upon realizing where I am, my hands sweat. Flashing lights and humming screens fill two tables that have been pushed end to end. They take up an entire wall. Her bed—I glance away real fast—is pushed against another wall, and there are clothes everywhere. I’d worried needlessly about the cleanliness of my room.
Every spare space is littered with jamming equipment, and I want to activate the recording capabilities on my cybernetics and show Newt everything she has. I don’t. That would require an explanation, and I’d prefer Cascade do most of the talking tonight.
“Have you been linked-in?” I ask as she scoops a load of clothes off a second chair, dislodging a gadget that falls with a devastating clunk.
“Yeah,” she says, unconcerned about both the conversation and the d
estruction of her gadgetry. Newt would’ve sworn and cradled the piece of metal like a baby. Cascade doesn’t even look at it.
“Seen yourself?”
“Yeah.” She pushes the chair toward me, won’t look me in the face, and turns toward the tables.
“Cascade,” I say, but her name carries so much more. “Where did you come from?”
“The past,” she says plainly, her back to me. I don’t encroach on her space, thinking I’ll be able to handle her confessions better if I can’t see her lying eyes. She’s wearing a tank and a tiny pair of shorts, her pajamas I’m guessing. She doesn’t ask me why I’m fully dressed at three a.m.
“I came through the rift at your house. That’s how I knew it was there.” She sits down, still unable to look at me. “I’ve been walking for a few years,” she adds.
“Define a few.”
“Since my grandfather got sick.”
“I’m sorry about your grandfather,” I say. “Why isn’t he in the assisted living facility?”
“Not old enough,” she says, shrugging. She’s trying to hide it, but I can tell she loves her grandfather, that she’s made sacrifices for him. I have a strong urge to cross the room and gather her into my arms.
“Cascade,” I say, finally stepping toward her. She looks up at me as I approach. “I’m sorry.”
She stands to meet me, allows me to wrap her into my embrace. She’s tight, but it only takes a second for her to relax. “What do you know about Cooper Stonesman?” I struggle to keep my voice even, and not only because I have to ask her hard questions.
“He’s a walker too. But only a temp,” she says into my chest. “He’s picked up more jobs recently, since their dad lost his employment contract.”
“What do you do for my dad?” I lower my head to see her better, trying to hide the simmering emotions coursing through me.
“I think you already know that.” Cascade’s voice barely floats between us.
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