by Dahlia Adler
Rik reapplied his lipstick carefully for our arrival: a matte silver that sheened dragon-yellow when he pressed his lips together. It matched his new hair color perfectly.
I went for dark green. I liked change.
“This doesn’t look like a bank,” Rik said as he climbed the front steps. I shouldered our bag and followed. “It looks like a mansion.”
“Still no signal.” The bank’s logo glowed on my useless tablet. The stone walls rose over us. For a moment, the fungus and rime on the mansion’s exterior seemed to crawl and writhe. I rubbed my eyes and it stopped. Too much air travel sometimes had that effect.
One of the big wooden doors swung wide, and a woman in gray livery blocked our way. “Welcome to The Bank of Usher.” Her eyes were pale gray, and her skin was sallow. She looked like the house, held up by her uniform. A soft blue glow at her collarbone, beneath her collar, told me she was wired to the bank, too.
“We’re here for the challenge,” I began.
The woman blinked at me, paused as if she was waiting for instructions and, after two heartbeats, waved us forward. “All right. The drawing room.”
She tried to take my bag, pulling much harder at the strap than I thought she’d be able to, but I held tight until she let go. Then she led us through a dark hallway hung with old portraits and lit by flickering sconces. “In there.” My ears rang when she slammed the heavy drawing-room door behind us, but we waited, looking around the richly appointed space. Pale green watered silk covered two walls, while the fireplace and windows were backed by more of the stone that made up most of the house. The mullioned windows peered out over the lake, but they were set high in the walls and allowed only a view of the heavy, almost sulfurous clouds.
I walked close to the fireplace and checked my tablet again, out of habit. To my surprise, the connection was strong and the bank’s logo had disappeared. “We’ve got signal.”
A quick scan told me nothing had changed on my tablet that I could see. Still, I felt a chill run across my shoulders and down my arms to my fingertips. The room—the whole house, really—sounded a steady pulse against my ears: probably my heart trying to beat a way out. I shook my hands nervously.
“We couldn’t have you telegraphing the bank’s whereabouts.” A sibilant voice sounded far too close to my ear and I jumped. I realized the man speaking—thin and pale, with a receding hairline—had been standing near the fireplace since we arrived. He’d been studying the hearth, and us, without our noticing. Rik blushed and brushed at his jacket before reaching for his own tablet.
The man continued to speak, his voice low and monotone. “You are welcome to use your devices now, except for sending messages. Not until you succeed at your task. I am Dr. Tarn.” He turned. His eyes glittered with a hint of something more than human behind them.
“You’re hosting an AI,” Rik whispered, a half beat ahead of me. The construct was called a centaur in certain parts of our business. I’d always found the concept more invasive, like mold.
“The bank found a human-AI combination made for excellent security, yes. I helped design it. What a human understands as risk is different from what a computer understands. My eyes contain the uplink. I’m as human as you in most other respects.” Tarn’s monotone didn’t help his presentation. In fact, it made his declaration seem even less human. I snuck a glance at my brother, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
The doctor took his hand from the mantel. “I’ve given instructions that meals be laid here for you on a regular schedule, beginning with tea. You’ll have twenty-four hours to try to break the bank.”
“And after that?” Rik asked.
“After that, you will have failed. The terms of your agreement are quite clear. If you fail, which you will, you’ll be turned over to the authorities or offered an opportunity to work here. If you escape, with whatever euros you can grab, up to the contracted limit, you will have won the challenge.”
Something still didn’t feel right. “You think we can be fooled into complacency by your ‘tea’? We aren’t children.”
“You are, which is somewhat disconcerting,” the doctor said. “But no, I haven’t given you poisoned tea. I cannot do such a thing. This is a technical recertification challenge, not a murder-mystery weekend.” He chuckled to himself. “Each of you fits the parameters required by the bank’s security recertification: top-level expertise in your field, numerous exploits. That there are two participants this year will provide us and the staff some additional amusement and challenges.”
At a knock on the drawing-room door, the doctor waved his hand in the air. A bolt slid back and the door opened. The woman who had greeted us at the door entered, pushing a cart piled high with cakes, teacups, and a teapot in a graying rose cozy.
The dishes on the cart called to Rik and me as if we hadn’t eaten the entire day. Safe to say—aside from coffee and a few snack bars—we hadn’t. The tray held sweet, fondant-covered jam cakes in perfect squares, tiny cream-cheese-and-cucumber sandwiches cut in triangles, and boiled eggs wrapped in sausage, then deep fried.
Our host didn’t move from his place by the fire as we inhaled the food’s rich scents. “I assure you once again that it’s safe. Poisoning you would cancel the recertification.”
This made me feel less comfortable, rather than more.
“It’s cool, we’re fairly noncontagious at this point, too,” Rik joked, then picked up a cake. We’d both had bad flu the week before.
Now the look on the doctor’s face shifted to deep concern. “You are unwell?” He carefully stuck his hands in his pockets. Rik’s eyebrows rose and fell as he took note.
People-hacking was one of Rik’s skills. From the way his fingers twitched, he was delighted to find he had an advantage: He knew one of the doctor’s weaknesses.
As for me, I’d purchased my advantages from mod shops in each city we’d stayed in, looking for new tech. I’d printed a few cameras and lockpicks in Paris 3D vats and kept my best vault-cracking programs up to date. But the best thing I had going for me was what I’d always had: caution and a determination not to fail. Rik and I would have been lost long ago without it.
So I skipped the small talk.
“We are well enough. Your bank holds about ten billion in gold reserves, another twenty in European funds for various investors,” I said. “We’d like to take four billion of that off your hands.”
Tarn shrugged, still looking uncomfortable. The AI gleamed from within the doctor’s eyes. “And we’ll do everything we can to stop you. Questions?”
Rik glanced from me to the doctor. “When do we start?”
I held up a hand. “What happened to the previous challengers?”
“Some of them work here.” The doctor smiled thinly.
The word “some” gave me pause. Some work here. Others had probably been turned over to the authorities. What would Rik and I choose, if we had to? In jail, we’d be separated, most likely. The cold stone walls of Usher didn’t look any more hospitable, but at least we’d be together.
“No one’s won.” Rik stood up, placing his teacup back on the tray with a soft clatter. “We’d be the first.”
“And the last.” The doctor crossed the room to the door. “Anyone cracks my system, the investors flee, the bank collapses. I am highly motivated not to fail.”
Rik looked around the richly appointed room. “You’d lose your cush job. I get it.”
“We’d lose everything. The AI and I work together to keep the house going, protect it from outside elements, and thus the Bank of Usher, too. We are stronger that way. Able to defeat any threat.”
“What if we don’t accept?” Another wave of this-is-the-dumbest-gambit-we’ve-tried washed over me.
“You’ve already accepted by coming through the front door. Consider that moment your job interview, and refusal failure. If you fail, you join the others and work for us.”
“I don’t work for anyone,” Rik countered. “I’d die first.”
I tried to hide my surprise. A crack had opened between us in the car, yes. But now it was one that spanned the distance between “we” and “I.” We were a team. We needed to look like one. But Rik—who’d just said “I” a lot more than I was comfortable with—took a step closer to the doctor.
The doctor backed across the threshold. “As I said, I am unable to kill you or anyone. If someone dies, it is not by my hand. I am capable of turning you over to your former employers, who probably would enjoy that, though.” He paused to let us absorb that, looking at each of us in turn. Then added, “You have twenty-three-and-a-half hours now. Anything you require from the house in that time will be supplied to you. Nothing in your tablets has been tampered with.”
He said that in the same tone with which he’d said “The cakes are safe, I assure you.” As if to prove it to us, he lifted a cake and took a bite. Fondant crumbled across his lapel, turning a soft gray in the light.
After the doctor left, I stared at my brother over the untouched tea. The fireplace crackled weakly.
I reached for the one tablet I was sure was clean, but put it back in the bag. Only for emergencies.
Rik fiddled with an earring. “It’s not so bad. We have loads of time. Let’s not waste it.” He peered from the room out into the hallway where the doctor had disappeared. The sun, setting now, tinted the tiled floor, the paneled walls, and the vases and family heirlooms that lined the walls a sickly yellow. He patted my hand. “I’m going to look around. If they’re as deep in physical assets as it seems, there will be a vault. Just need to crack that and their security and the job’s done. Back soon.”
He set off down the hallway, following the doctor’s path. I watched him go, my surprise keeping me speechless. When we cracked data online, we stuck together, spelling each other. Now Rik was going off on his own, and he hadn’t conferred with me at all before he’d decided on a course of action.
And I didn’t like it.
“Brothers,” I growled under my breath to cover my distress. The house was undoubtedly always listening.
We’d been alone most of our lives, but this was the first time I’d felt truly separated from the only family I’d ever known. I flicked more polish off my nails. My rings glittered in the gaslight, reminding me of the things I’d done, who I was.
A sudden gust from outside pressed against the windows, and I imagined I could smell the mold from outside trying to creep through the cracks. Rising to look through the glass at the house’s stonework, I saw once again how the vegetation seemed to hold the ancient masonry together. In the wind, the fungi rippled slightly.
The shutters rattled then. Not from the wind. A grinding from within the walls, an increasing shadow. I realized the shutters were closing, the bank sealing us in.
By the time the heavy boards finally locked shut over the mullioned glass, cutting off the fading daylight and the bank’s creepy outer walls, I was fully spooked. And my brother hadn’t returned.
The gaslight flickered in the fireplace, casting more shadows. I found the switch to turn it off.
“Loads of time.” I pulled the sack of small tools from the duffel and set it on the chair beside me. I dug around inside until I found a matte black square of plastic, about the size of a credit card.
When I tapped it, the card shook until tiny, thin bat wings unfolded from the flat surface and began to whirl. What was left of the card—a small camera eye, a transmitter, and two tiny pincers—hung beneath the wings. Thin as webs, the black carbon-fiber wings lifted the tiny drone body up above my palm.
I guided it to the fireplace and spoke instructions: “Up. Out.”
Sounding like a real bat working its way up the chimney, the drone obeyed. What it saw appeared on my handheld: more stone, more fungus and mold, thickening the higher the drone went. Finally, it perched on the chimney’s ledge, looking out over the roofline of the Bank of Usher, across the lake, to the hills. Freedom.
But not for us. Not yet.
The chimney was too narrow, the roof too high for an escape.
“Rik,” I whispered. “We need to coordinate plans.” I shivered.
No answer.
This was bad. He’d been gone a while already, and we always checked in to make sure we didn’t hack across each other.
On my tablet, I could see the thick vegetation clearly now. Layers of it, reaching deep inside the roof’s slate tiles. I took over the drone’s commands with a few finger-taps and used its pincers to grab a sample of the stuff, then dropped that back down the chimney.
Before I could command the drone to follow, its camera tilted up to the clouds, catching the glare of pale sunset, then the glowering sky. I pushed another command through from my tablet, but the drone didn’t respond. Its camera shook. Then gray tendrils of mold spread across its lens, covering the visual on my tablet, too. Too soon, the drone’s signal flickered. The mold was devouring it.
I could hear the bit of mold I’d pried loose from the roof falling down the chimney, closer now. Even as the drone’s camera went gray, then dark, the sound shifted from something falling to something scrabbling and crawling.
What had I brought inside the bank? Something that reacted against an attacker, even one from the inside.
The scrabbling slowed but didn’t stop. Its movements within the chimney echoed, and pieces of stone clattered to the hearth.
I backed out of the drawing room, dragging our duffel bag while keeping an eye on the fireplace. Tendrils of mold began to spread across the mantel as I cleared the threshold, stepping quickly.
Right into the doctor’s thin frame.
“What have you done?” Dr. Tarn whispered. “The fungus must stay outside the bank—it protects us but cannot distinguish…” His voice trailed off as he pushed me aside in his rush for the front hall. From a closet concealed in the paneled walls, he withdrew a garment of pale green plastic and a bottle of bleach. “Perhaps there is still time,” he muttered as he slipped into the protective gear. “This is not an acceptable part of the test.”
“You gave us no such boundaries,” I said, swallowing back my fear. The rustling sound had only gotten louder. My small bag of tools was still inside the room. And I recalled the doctor’s words: it cannot distinguish. What? Friend from foe? Stone from flesh? “That stuff is sentient?”
The doctor’s words were muffled by the suit. “It’s a robotic-organic vegetation designed by the bank’s board. Part of the bank’s maintenance system, to maintain integrity. You have no idea what you’ve released.” His eyes glowed as he entered the drawing room and shut the door.
“What we released? We aren’t the ones coating a building in sentient mold,” I said to the closed door. I hated when adults built something and only thought about the possible consequences later.
I paced the hall, not wanting to lose the Wi-Fi signal, which faded the farther I got from the drawing room. With it, I could see Rik’s tablet on our VPN, but my messages wouldn’t go through. He’d gone several floors down and then stopped. Best to wait where he would know to find me, and consider our options. The house creaked in the wind. The gaslights flickered annoyingly. My tablet glowed brighter in the dark.
Dr. Tarn emerged from the drawing room, shutting the door behind him. He carried a small bag. Mine. It was gray now and wrapped in clear plastic. A smell of bleach followed the doctor. Behind him, through the tightening crack in the door, I could see that our untouched tea had turned to what looked like dust on a scoured tray.
“No one may go in there for at least eighteen hours,” the doctor said. “Which is almost all the time you have remaining.”
“How are we supposed to work in these conditions?” I muttered, hoping to distract the man into giving me more information about the mold, or the house. “Sentient mold, terrible Wi-Fi.”
“That’s your problem, not mine,” he said, holding up my tool bag. “I’ll bury this. You’ll want to keep a closer eye on your equipment in the near future.” He looked at me as if
he thought I would make good fertilizer for the vegetation outside.
I started to wonder about Rik, though I could still see his signal.
The clock on my tablet disappeared for a moment. When it reset, it showed a countdown, not the time. Seventeen hours, fifty minutes.
“You said you hadn’t interfered with our systems.”
“I haven’t. You’re on Usher’s Wi-Fi. The bank has converted local time to your remaining time balance.”
That would make keeping track of our challenge easier, but some things more difficult. I checked to make sure the tablet’s internal clock was safe, and it was. But I didn’t trust it. “Where is my brother?”
Tarn smiled. “You mean you’ve lost him already?” He turned away then, and the walls began to laugh.
* * *
During the next hour, I searched the Bank of Usher for my brother. I could hear banging and the occasional shout from below, but the farther I went from the drawing room, the worse the Wi-Fi got. I couldn’t see our network. The thought that he’d been swallowed by the house clouded my mind and froze my fingers into tight curls.
Way too early, we’d failed at every turn. Coming here was a mistake. Thinking we were better than all the hackers before us. We were good. Very good. As long as we stayed off-site. And didn’t wander.
And stayed together.
Here, we were out of our element. Rik had been too bewitched by the prospect of a legendary win. We hadn’t yet broken a single one of the Bank’s security measures.
No. I stopped. I’d broken one. By myself. The vegetation—the sentient mold and fungi designed by the bank’s board to maintain the building’s integrity—was a breach. One I’d caused. Just not a breach in our favor. Even the doctor seemed scared of it.
And now all my picks and sensors were sealed in plastic and about to be buried underground.
And Rik was gone.
Breathe, Mad. You can do this. You don’t give up. I took a deep breath of the mansion’s vile air and swore under my breath.
When I finally took a last step away from the Wi-Fi signal and descended to the basement, the banging grew louder.
