by Lena North
As we ran past the stairs, I heard soft steps and low male voices coming our way, although I couldn’t catch what they said, and they were still a few flights down. Then Wilder climbed out the window leading to the landing at the top of the fire escape. She stopped, and our eyes met again.
“Good luck,” I murmured.
She grinned and blew me a kiss. I smiled as I slid the door at the end of the corridor open and entered the corner office.
I was already on the outside, and in the process of closing the window when I heard Wilder. She must have made some kind of double steps because it really sounded as if two sets of feet were making their way down the metal stairs. Then I jumped from my place on the windowsill to the downpipe at the corner of the house and started making my own way down.
It wasn't difficult, and when I jumped the last bit, I was almost laughing. I'd probably climbed down faster than Wilder’s descent on the stairs. I hesitated a second, thinking that I perhaps should run around the house to check if she was okay, but decided against it. We'd said to meet up at the park, so I turned and started jogging down the back road.
"Nice climbing, Snow," my bird said.
“Thank you,” I replied. “Did you see anything? Is Wilder okay?”
“White girl is already on her bike, one of the men from upstairs followed her, but he stopped. She met men in uniform on the ground. They were angry. She lied and got sent away. The other man upstairs tried to climb from the archive, but the metal tube fell off the wall. He was not moving.”
What?
“He's dead?” I asked.
“Perhaps. Bad man. I don't care.”
Ruthless, but apt. And I didn't care either.
“Is there anyone around here? Can you do a fly-around?”
“Sure.”
I slowed down and walked briskly as I waited for her to let me know.
“One man coming from behind. Black. You should run.”
She sounded calm, but I started sprinting down the road. The package on my back bounced up and down, and the duct tape pulled at my skin, but I kept moving.
“He's running too now,” she said, but I'd already heard him.
“Can you see who it is? Is it the man who shot Nick?”
“Black man. Yes.”
Shit.
I increased my speed and turned away from the park, thinking that leading the guy straight to Wilder would be a bad idea.
“Tell Wilder’s bird that she needs to follow the road north. I will join her at the dead end just before the MacIntyre-bridge.”
“Okay.”
I turned again, jumped over a low fence, and crossed a huge parking lot. It was empty, and it was the riskiest part of my quickly concocted plan because the lot was deserted and if he wanted to shoot me I'd be an easy target. I hoped that he'd keep running and that his aim would be off. He'd missed Nicky's heart from a ten feet distance, so he wasn't a great shot. At least, I hoped he wasn't.
The footsteps followed me across the parking lot, and I swung my head around briefly to see how far behind me he was. I'd need a little time to get up on the freeway, although I assumed he wouldn't be able to follow me because the dead end I aimed for was a true dead end. I'd been there before. At the far end of the road was a tall brick wall and we'd practiced there, Bones, Graw and I, many times. Bones had been the first to learn the trick I was about to perform, then me, and finally Graw, and we'd celebrated together the night he made it, sitting at the top of the wall dangling our legs and drinking a few beers. It had been a good night.
Wilder was on her bike, looking like a shadow in the streetlight up on the freeway, and I shouted to her.
“Start the bike!”
She stared at me but started the engine.
I kept running toward the wall, and when I reached it, I jumped and kept running, mostly on the front of my feet and at the same time, using the speed and my strength to go upward along the wall. I threw my arms over the edge, pushed myself over and got up.
“Go!” I shouted as I jumped up behind Wilder.
She promptly pushed the gas, and we flew out of there. A shot rang out, and I turned to look at the man standing down in the alley.
He had a long black coat, and a black hat with a wide rim shielding his face. His hands were raised, and a pistol glinted in the light that reached him.
Then we were speeding across the bridge, and I couldn't see him anymore.
The roar of the bike was too loud for us to talk, so we communicated via our birds.
“White girl's bird says everyone is on their way to Double H. She asks if you are okay.”
“Tell her I'm good.”
“White girl says you're more than good. Says you're the shit.” She chuckled softly. “Her bird agrees. Says you are crazy, but she means it in a good way.”
“Tell them thanks, and that it just took months of practice.”
“They say you're still the shit.”
I grinned and leaned my head back a little. I rarely rode a bike without protective gear, and never without a helmet, but I liked the wind in my long ponytail and on my face. I felt good.
“Who was the man that fell off the building? Did you recognize him?” I asked, not expecting her to know, but curious if she’d seen anything we could use later.
“Shivers,” she replied calmly, and my whole system froze.
“You're sure?”
“Of course.”
Suddenly a lot of things fell into place, but I couldn't believe it.
“Bird,” I said quietly.
“Snow.”
“Why do you call him black man?”
“Because his soul is black.”
Oh, God.
I knew who wanted to kill me. It hadn’t been Nicky who had been the target after all. It was me the man was after, and I didn't know why, but I knew who it was.
Chapter Twenty-three
I need you both dead
Hawker stood in the center of the group waiting for us when we sped up the lane to the big, sprawling ranch that was Wilder’s inheritance from her grandfather. She did a cheeky turn just in front of her father and parked the bike. I got off and walked straight into Nick’s arms.
“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly.
He knew I was unharmed, but he also knew me very well so he would have seen on my face that I was upset about something.
“I know who shot you,” I breathed into his ear. “I…” I trailed off and restarted, “I just need to –
I stopped talking when I felt a familiar brush in my mind and turned toward my cousin.
“Dante,” I said quietly. “I have some documents that we need to look at.”
He nodded, but a muscle in his jaw clenched. The documents I had taped to my back would contain information about the program Jiminella had been in, and he probably knew the details of what had been done to them, just as I did. It wouldn’t be fun reading the papers.
“Let’s go inside,” Hawker ordered.
He didn’t sound like he was happy with our semi-improvised plan C, and I saw him glance at his daughter but she just raised her brows, and he walked inside.
Nick held me back as the others moved, and I knew what he wanted. I got up on my toes, whispered the name, and watched as his brows lowered.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Do we tell the others?”
“Yeah,” I repeated.
While Nick and Dante carefully pulled the tape off my body, Wilder recounted what had happened. She was completely unapologetic, and when Hawker growled something, she rounded on him.
“Don’t go there, Da. We talked about it as an alternative, but I didn’t think it would be needed. It was. Men were coming up the stairs from the basement, we dealt with it. The documents are here, and so are we.”
“You could have told me,” he muttered.
“Would you have listened?” sh
e countered.
“Of course I would –”
“No you wouldn’t,” she answered her own question. “You would not have listened to the rookie, and you would not have listened to me.”
Ouch. The way he had played us when he sent me to the Island was apparently still a thorn in her side, even though they’d made up and had been talking to each other for weeks.
“I said I was sorry about that,” he snapped.
“No, you didn’t.”
“Uh, he did,” I interrupted their budding fight.
I got that they had things to resolve, but this was not the time to snarl at each other.
“To me,” I clarified when Wilder turned. “Get this shit off me,” I added and pulled at the tape.
The bag fell off, but I’d pulled too hard so it ripped and the papers were falling out. I swiftly pushed them into a pile and put everything on the coffee table.
“I have a few things to say,” I announced. “Can we sit down?”
Then I sat down, pulling Nick down next to me. He was studiously keeping his eyes away from the pile of papers, and since there would be details about him on them, I could understand his reluctance.
“Before you tell everyone, there’s another thing,” he said slowly. “You all know I have sharp eyes?”
He put it as a question, but since we all knew, no one bothered to answer.
“I have a photographic memory too,” he said, adding laconically, “A good one.”
That was a massive understatement, although they didn’t need to know that.
“I can’t read the documents. You can read them out to me, my audio memory is godawful, but I can’t read them.”
“Okay,” Jiminella said immediately.
“Why?” Miller asked.
“We might want to destroy them at some point,” Jiminella said calmly. “If he reads them, they’ll never be gone.”
I felt Nick exhale and their eyes met.
“Yeah,” he said. “Exactly.”
I realized that what we all thought of as a cool talent, and treated a little like a party trick, was also a curse. To remember everything you’d ever seen, in every pixel-sized detail, meant you remembered the bad things too. In every technicolored, pixel-sized detail.
“Okay,” he sighed. “Now tell them, Snow.”
“I know who shot Nick,” I said. “We missed some of the incidents, and assumed it was about Nicky and the research program, but it was never that. It was about me. It’s someone in my group of friends.”
The room was dead silent, and slowly, the others sat down on couches and chairs.
“Bird told me who it was. I'm so stupid. She told me already when Nick was shot, but I didn't understand,” I started, and went on immediately, “They don't use names, you know that, but her descriptions are mostly pretty spot on.” I turned around the room, pointing them out as I spoke, “Hawker, you're eagle-eyes. Wilder, you're white girl and Dante…” I paused to smile at my beautiful cousin, “She calls you gorgeous.” He looked surprised, but Jiminella smiled softly. “Nick is good-guy,” I finished.
“Okay,” Hawker said slowly.
“She said the black man had shot Nick, and he had black clothes, stood in the darkness. I didn’t think about it then, and everything was so horrible, so I forgot. Then on the way up here she told me one of the men in the building tried to climb down the pipe outside the archive. Nick had warned us that there were cracks in the fastenings, so I went to the opposite corner and went down there. He fell, though, because the pipe came loose. She said it was shivers that fell, and that’s what she calls one of our friends. I got it then.”
“I told Shiv about the anchors,” Nick said. “He’s our strongest climber, and I wanted him to check them. Make sure they were safe.”
He sounded angry, and I took hold of his hand.
“He wasn’t hurt when he fell off the building? Could he still chase you?” Wilder asked.
“It wasn’t Shiv who chased me,” I said. “He’s probably dead, or at least that’s what Bird said. It was Cim.”
They all looked confused which I’d expected. They didn’t know my friends, so telling them that it was Cim didn’t mean anything at all to them.
“It makes sense,” Nick said. “Shiv and Cim are close, they joined the group at the same time. Climbed together a lot. Shiv was there when Cim fell off the mountain and hurt his shoulder. He got him to the hospital, helped him with the rehab. They’ve spent a lot of time together.”
“The plane incident…” I said. “Don’t know how, but Cim could have done it. He’s good with mechanical stuff. Fixed our shit all the time.”
“I talked to Joao earlier, babe, he said it was done in Prosper.” Nick swallowed, and his voice was a little hoarse when he went on, “It was sheer luck that part lasted all the way out to the Islands.”
Dante made a sound, but Hawker seemed unruffled and leaned forward.
“What about the car?”
“That wasn't the next thing,” I said.
Then I explained about the instructions I’d gotten from Cim for how to get into the echo cave, and how they had been completely off.
“He sent me into something that could have killed me, easily.”
There were a few angry grunts in the room, but I went on quickly. I had made it unharmed, and all in all, it hadn’t been so bad. I’d been in worse situations.
“Then it was the shooting,” I said. “How did they know we had the papers? He didn’t ask me if I had them. He said to give them to him.”
“One of your friends opened the door for you, he could have –”
“No,” I interrupted. “Graw opened the door, but he had nothing to do with it. He wasn’t at the Uni alone. A couple of our other friends were there too. Shiv was one of them.”
“And Nick’s car could have been tampered with already in Prosper,” Miller said thoughtfully. “Do it right, and the brake fluid leaks slowly.”
“Bird?” I asked. “Did you see anything when we were in the cave, Wilder and I?”
“There were people, four men, watching as you went up. Gone when you went down. No danger. Watching silently.”
I remembered how a few tree trunks had seemed thicker than I expected. Had it been men hiding there and I never realized?
“Many cars on big road. Some stopped. Some went. Didn’t look for black man. Could have been there. Maybe not.”
“Bird says a few men were watching us in the forest, but that they were no danger,” I said.
“Of course,” Mary said calmly. “I probably went to school with a few of them.”
When I turned to her, she smiled sunnily.
“My people up in Thend are good at hiding. They probably wanted to make sure you weren’t doing any harm to what they see as their back yard. And your bird is right. They wouldn’t harm you.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking that she might be right, but she might be wrong. Lurking around in the forest like that seemed unfriendly to me, and I wasn’t convinced that they wouldn’t have harmed us. “Bird says there were cars on the roads. Cim could have been there, she says, but she wasn’t looking for him, so she doesn’t know.”
I made a pause and gathered my thoughts. I knew what I would say next might upset Hawker, but he needed to understand how my group worked.
“Then about tonight,” I started. “They knew we were up to something. I didn't give any details at all, but I was in a group chat with some of them yesterday.” Hawker made a sound so I continued immediately, “I just told them we were having fun and teased them a little because they couldn't come.”
“Who was in the chat?” Olly asked.
“Bones, Graw, Jeebs, Shiv, and Cim.”
“Right,” Kit muttered.
“Tonight I was followed when I was on the ground outside the archive. Someone came running, and Bird told me it was the same man who shot Nicky. She said it was black man. Said shivers fel
l off the building, and I knew. I should have known before, but I didn’t make the connection. She calls Cim black man.”
I looked around the room and shared what she’d said.
“She told me tonight she calls him that because his soul is black.”
There was a long silence, and then Mary got up.
“I’ll make some tea. It’ll be a long night.”
What was it with these people and their fondness for tea?
“I’ll go with you. I want coffee,” I said.
Mac helped us and dug out a huge box of cookies from a cupboard. When we were back in the living room again, I leaned back and sipped my coffee.
“I know it’s Cim because it’s possible considering all that happened, but mostly because my bird says it is him. I just don’t get why. I’ve never had any arguments with him, not once,” I said and twisted my head backward toward Nick. “Have you?”
“No, but I haven’t met him much,” he said thoughtfully. “Almost not at all. He hurt his shoulder, so he hasn’t been with us a lot. He was on one of the other boats the first time I was with you all, and he’s stood guard a few times, but I was with you, doing other things. Chatted some on the net, but never talked to him, so I have absolutely not fought with him on anything.”
“I’ll ask a friend to look into it. She might get a lock on him, find a name, an address even,” Olly said and dug out his phone.
“Really?”
“Yes, Snow. Really,” he snorted. “Everyone thinks they’re so safe on the net, hiding behind nicknames, but you always leave traces. And my friend is good. Beyond good. If he’s left any traces behind, she’ll find them.”
“She?” Wilder asked.
“Or he,” Olly muttered.
I squinted and wondered if I saw a faint blush on my taciturn cousin’s cheeks. Nick suddenly shifted, and I turned.
“Are you in pain?”
“No,” he said, and since I saw soft humor in his eyes I leaned back again.
What the hell was Olly up to with this unknown hacker-girl, hacker-boy... hacker-whatever?
“We’ll figure this out, Snow,” Hawker said slowly. “You can’t talk openly to your group of friends about it, though. I get that you were goofing around in that chat yesterday, and it doesn’t matter. As long as you don’t share any details, you can keep doing shit like that.”
