Arcane Wisdome

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  Arcane Wisdome

  Lucy Wisdome has a secret.

  In the three years since her mother died, Lucy has tried to live a normal high school life while struggling to keep her mother’s memory alive. When she stumbles upon her mother’s book collection in the attic, she is unprepared for what she finds: books on magic, the occult, and numerology – things her mother never mentioned to her. And the more Lucy reads, the more she discovers that what she never believed possible is now very real. When the group of outcast computer hackers she belongs to finds themselves targeted by something far beyond their abilities, Lucy must confront her own fears and a powerful unknown enemy - or risk losing everything she has left.

  Arcane Wisdome

  Copyright © 2014 Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  Published by Avalerion Books, Inc.

  Cover design by James Abel

  All Rights Reserved

  First e-book edition September 2014

  This ebook is for your personal device only. No part may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincident

  For

  Pat LoBrutto

  Arcane Wisdome

  by

  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  Prologue

  Lucy knew she wasn’t supposed to be going through her mother’s things, but she couldn’t help it: this was one of the few ways she could still feel close to her. Remembering her, reading her letters, looking at the books she had collected, all of them made her mother seem less dead.

  She took a stack at random from the top of the smaller box and riffled through the pages before she stacked them. These were mostly novels: Lord Jim, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Far Pavilions, Practical Demon Keeping. This was so much better than practicing the flute. Ever since her mother had been killed, Lucy could feel parts of her memory slipping away, and she couldn’t bear to have that happen, not yet, not while she still missed her so much.

  She opened another box and began to pull out books, stacking them carefully on the attic floor: In Search of Human Origins, Folklore of the Peoples of Siberia, The History of Witchcraft in Europe, The Birth of the Gods: early human agrarian societies and the development of religion. The next title stopped her: Serpent Wisdom. It creeped her out just to look at it. Her mother had died of a snakebite. She moved the book out of the way of the others and refused to look at it, not wanting to think about that terrible day four years ago.

  The last volume in the box looked really old — older than the other books by maybe a hundred years. The title had worn off the front, so Lucy opened it and noticed it was printed on strange paper, thicker than anything she’d seen outside of an art-supply store.

  She turned the pages slowly. A Witch’s Hornbook the title proclaimed in spikey letters. Spells, Philtres, Rites, Curses, and Sendings. Lucy stared, reading the page over and over again, and she heard her mother’s voice in her memory: “Every age makes its own wisdom, Lucy;” she had often told her. A couple days before she died, she had said, “Knowledge and wisdom aren’t the same thing. The trick is to learn one without losing the other." Her voice was so distinct, so present that she held the book more tightly, seeking to hold onto her mother. She began to thumb through the heavy pages, noticing that there were notes in the margins in her mother’s handwriting. So her mother had actually studied the text. That realization made the book more precious still.

  Lucy bit the insides of her cheeks to keep from crying, then, methodically she put the books back in the box she had opened — all but A Witch’s Hornbook, which she wrapped in her sweater, carried downstairs to her bedroom, and hid under her night-stand.

  1

  The sign over the garage door said Gothic Geeks in luminous black paint. Lucy Wisdome hesitated before knocking, hoping that Bruce Paxton wouldn’t be one of the Geeks working the four computers this drizzly late-winter afternoon. Of the seven Gothic Geeks, only Bruce creeped her out; she didn’t like the way he talked to her, or the way he looked at her. She didn’t like the way he kept trying to get next to her. She suspected he was probably the reason why she hesitated to become a Gothic Geek officially — Bruce Paxton, and her own ambivalence about how tech was being used by the Geeks, who liked to indulge in all kinds of Internet shenanigans, which upset most of the Geeks’ families — and which might have been their plan in doing it.

  Lucy took a quick breath. The Geeks were interesting, she realized not just because of what they could do, but because her stepmother disapproved of them; maybe she was more like them than she thought. “Tom?" she called out as she hit the door with the flat of her hand.

  “Who’s there?" Tom answered, sounding a bit distracted. “That you, Lucy?”

  “Can I come in?”

  In answer the garage door clanked upward, revealing what the Geeks called their lab: four computers — three laptops and a desktop, along with assorted clusters of electronic equipment crowned by two server towers and a thirty-six inch flat-screen monitor — , all arrayed on two long tables under three clusters of energy-efficient light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling: Aside from Tom Foster, whose garage it was, the Gothic Geeks were making themselves at home: Gweneth Cavanaugh was seated at one of the machines, Curtis Ng at another. Spencer Ryan and Niki Martinu were engrossed in issues of Wired World and Tech!; on their notebooks, not one of them looked up at Lucy. Only Bruce Paxton and Aaron Jarvis were missing. Lucy felt a surge of relief; Bruce made her skin crawl.

  “Coffee?" Tom, like all the rest of them, was dressed in black — a long-sleeved black turtleneck and black jeans to compliment his black nail polish and eyeliner; he had a stud through his left eyebrow.

  Spencer wore a long black jacket and black mascara, and had bleached his brown hair white; his clothes were black and dark brown, like a shadow; something about him seemed angry. There were tattoos on his wrists that looked like barbed wire.

  Niki wore no make-up and her black sweater was beautifully hand-made; she had silver rings on every finger and silver stars in her pierced ears. Niki was the only one of the Geeks who hadn’t been born in America — her family had come from Romania when Niki was two.

  Gweneth had black eyeliner and purple eye shadow that made her light-blue eyes look even more pale than they were, dark-red lipstick, her hair was dyed black and glistened like obsidian, and she wore a tight, black, spangled, lon
g-sleeved tee-shirt with black cut-off shorts with black-lace appliqué down the out-seams. She was the president of the Chess Club, and she and Lucy were in the same group of lockers for gym.

  Curtis wore a navy-blue hoodie and Levis; his hair was tied back in a kind of martial-arts ponytail.

  Lucy felt a little out of place, as she felt out of place almost everywhere, for although she wore the requisite black jeans, her shirt was orange silk with a wrap front, and she had on a hot-pink raincoat; her shoulder-length hair was a natural strawberry blonde, just now a bit bedraggled from the rain. The Geeks were misfits, but so was she — it was just a different kind of misfit. “Hey,” she said to everyone in general.

  “Coffee?" Tom repeated as he pressed the button to close the door and motioned Lucy to come forward to avoid being hit. He carried a number of personal electronic devices in his pocket, as well as a Huntley headset clipped to his ear and the frames of his glasses. “It’s all we’ve got.”

  “Sure. With a little milk, no sugar,” said Lucy. It was what she always drank while she hung out with the Geeks, though her stepmother was dead against her drinking coffee at all.

  Tom took Lucy’s mug off the shelf and went to the coffeepot. As he poured, he said, “We’re hacking into the Recreation Center’s computer today. Curtis is in the lead; he’s almost in.”

  “Why?" Lucy asked.

  “Because we can,” said Curtis, not taking his eyes from the screen. “It’s a trial run. We want to see if we can cover our tracks."

  “It’ll be fun." Tom handed her the mug.

  “Yeah,” said Gweneth, trying not to giggle. “We can mess up their email and their calendar, send files they won’t know what to do with, and they’ll go force four trying to figure out who did it." She tossed her head, her short black hair falling like a wing over her right eye. “They don’t know squat about computers at the Rec.”

  “Give us a month and we’ll be able to hack into something really important and screw it up big-time, and get clear without anyone being able to trace us." Curtis grinned wolfishly.

  Niki laughed softly. “No risk, no glory.”

  Lucy held the mug in her hands, wishing she could think of something to say. She liked the Geeks better than most of the kids in the sophomore class at Cosmo Bender High School, but she had some doubts about them as well. Their ideas of fun didn’t always seem all that entertaining to Lucy — they looked hazardous, even foolish, and possibly illegal — though she would never admit it. “What do you want to hack?”

  Tom’s eyes got bright. “One of the government’s computers. They’re real challenges.”

  “Maybe a bank.” Spencer suggested.

  “They like to think they have real security,” Niki said with a contemptuous laugh.

  “Or maybe something international. A multi-national corporation, maybe,” Curtis said with a glint of a smile. “That would be way sweet.”

  The rest of the Geeks agreed.

  Tom took his seat in front of the second laptop. “You want to see what I’m working on?" he asked Lucy.

  “Why not?" She went and stood behind him, staring at the screen. “Okay, I give up — what is it?”

  “I’m developing a kind of Double-Dutch virus. Spencer’s been checking out some of the other viruses of the last few years, to see what the competition is. We can show up that stunt that Wildworld started last month. This would double up on syllables in all kinds of words. Only single-letter words would be safe. Precocity would become prerecococicitity." Tom chuckled. “If we can spread it everywhere, we’ll be famous.”

  “You could go to jail if it works and they catch you,” Lucy warned.

  “If they catch us, it didn’t work,” said Curtis with a sly smile.

  “Hey, Lucy, we’re careful,” said Tom.

  “Glitch-kisser,” muttered Spencer.

  “Luddite,” Tom said with relish, not caring that it was an insult. “You just don’t trust machines.”

  “I trust them to do what they are designed to do, whether it’s a good idea or a bad one." This was what Lucy worried about where the Gothic Geeks were concerned — that their plans would succeed too well and they’d wind up in a mess of legal trouble, a consideration that didn’t seem to bother any of them. “Hackers, including the best of them, eventually get caught.”

  “Not if we cover our tracks,” Curtis insisted, swinging around and waggling spooky-fingers next to his eyes. “Magic. Poof! Gone.”

  “You hope,” said Niki in that flat way she had of giving negative opinions. “Otherwise you’ll be poof! Gone.”

  “If we do it right, we can get in and get out and no one will twig to,” Tom declared, his fingers clicking on the keyboard.

  There was another knock at the door, and a loud voice announced. “It’s Aaron. Bruce is with me."

  Lucy winced. The last person she wanted to see was Bruce Paxton. He was so ... so uber-weird. He reminded her of Gollum, except for his voice.

  The door clattered open, revealing Aaron Jarvis in his long, black, Aussie duster, a dark-blue t-shirt, and charcoal-gray cargo-pants. Beside him, Bruce in a black trench coat and black combat boots looked like a costume instead of clothes; there was a fake-diamond in his earlobe and his glasses were framed in scintillating reflective plastic. The two mumbled a greeting and nodded truculently. The Geeks exchange minimal greetings as Aaron headed for the coffee pot and Bruce sidled toward Lucy.

  “Didn’t think you’d be here today. Isn’t the band practicing?” he murmured, not quite touching her arm.

  “How’s it coming?" Aaron asked as he filled his mug with coffee. “We’re gonna need another pot in a little while." He glanced in Niki’s direction. “You aren’t busy, are you?”

  “You know where the can is — make it yourself,” said Niki, and scrolled onto the latest edition of Alternative Press.

  “She’s a radical,” Aaron approved, and sauntered off to start another pot; he winked at Niki but she paid no attention.

  “Doesn’t the concert band need its first flute?" Bruce continued, leaning nearer to Lucy.

  Much as she didn’t want to talk to Bruce, she said, “Practice starts at four. I have a little time." Suddenly band practice, which until Bruce arrived had seemed silly and boring, became the most welcome part of her day, an excuse to get away from Bruce and his persistent attempts to gain her attention. She drank down the last of her coffee and went to the industrial sink to rinse it out, a courtesy she almost never did at home.

  “You gonna come back later? Not today, but maybe tomorrow?" Tom asked, not getting up from his work. “We got a couple of new games to try out. Titanfall and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.”

  Bruce gave her a look he thought was sexy. “We also got The LEGO Movie Videogame. That’s probably more your kind of game. Girls like it.”

  Niki made a disgusted grunt. “Chauvinist.”

  “Will you be back?" Tom asked again.

  “I don’t know. Tomorrow’s possible, I guess, or the next day. I’m supposed to be home by six tonight." She didn’t bother to keep the resentment out of her voice. “It’s my night to help Melinda with making dinner." She said her stepmother’s name as if it tasted bad.

  “Give it a lapse,” Curtis recommended, not looking away from his work. “You can be late tonight, can’t you?”

  “I guess you’ll be here when you can get here, then?" Tom said, sounding a bit distracted as he stared at his screen.

  “I’ll try to make it when I can,” said Lucy, frowning as a unsolved puzzle in her thoughts poked at her. “But I think I’ve got some kind of appointment in the afternoon tomorrow. I know there’s something on the calendar.”

  “What kind of appointment?" Bruce asked at his most insinuating.

  “I can’t remember,” she said. “Maybe dentist,” she said, because she knew it wasn’t — her dad and stepmother had found another therapist for her.

  “Ick,” said Niki.

  “Well, come over when you ca
n,” Tom said. “Spencer, let her out, will you?”

  Spencer got out of his chair and hit the button to activate the garage door. He stepped back as the door began its noisy rise. “Want me to close it, too?”

  “Yeah,” said Tom.

  Lucy ducked under the edge of the door and into the rain, which had grown heavier in the last twenty minutes. She heard the clank as the door changed directions and began to drop. “Bye,” she called.

  “Tomorrow,” Tom answered, still distracted.

  2

  “How was band practice?" Melinda Wisdome asked Lucy as she came into the kitchen. She said nothing about Lucy being fifteen minutes late, or about the way Lucy flung down her backpack and flute-case on the breakfast table, as if to rid herself of unpleasant burdens.

  “Pretty good." She hated giving any information to her stepmother. Melinda was just too understanding, too reasonable, and it drove Lucy completely ozwonk. It was all she could do to keep from yelling.

  “Well, if you’ll wash your hands and get the big bowl down from the top of the fridge, you can start making the salad." She herself was busy rolling chicken breasts in some kind of mix of herbs. A sauté pan sat on the stove, smelling of ginger and garlic and cooking oil. “Lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, walnuts, scallions, and bell peppers are — ”

  “— in the veggie drawer, I know." She went to the sink to wash her hands.

  Melinda had changed out of her working clothes into jeans and a sweatshirt but she couldn’t hide her trim figure or her pretty face. Her brown hair was short and expertly streaked, her teeth shone white, and her eyes were an incredible blue-green, and even though she was thirty-seven, thanks to regular training, she moved like an athlete. Lucy resented all of her, and followed the instructions she had been given as if she were being punished. She cut the stem-end out of the red bell-pepper and then sliced it into narrow strips, scraping away the seeds as she worked, getting more and more exasperated.