The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three)

by Baum, Spencer

  “Don’t say that! What a horrid thing to say about somebody’s child.”

  “He will die before the sun comes up unless we help him.”

  Celeste looked across the room at the people in cages. Their skin was gray and thick. Their bodies were hunched over. They were hardly people at all.

  “No,” she said. “Whatever you are thinking, the answer is no.”

  “I only wish to treat your son,” Falkon said. “I want to see him get better.”

  “Don’t connect these abominations to my son. I reject everything you’re doing here!”

  Falkon turned her face with his hand so she was looking right at him. “You know, I am not accustomed to asking for what I want. Usually, I look people in the eye and I tell them.”

  “You know that doesn’t work on me,” she said.

  “Yes, you are quite difficult to control. You do what you want to do. You listen to nothing I say.”

  “Because that’s our deal, Falkon! I am here to save my son!”

  “And I have been quite patient while you have tried. But it’s over now. Robin will die tonight unless I choose to save him. Your project is finished. But if you continue working for me, we can save your son. I can keep him alive while you figure out how to move my research to the next step. Our purposes will remain aligned. We will hold death at bay while we figure out how to give your son a long and happy life.”

  “I’ve had enough of this,” she said. She tried to stand, but a monstrous contraction threw her back into the wheelchair. She waited for it to pass, then, speaking quietly, she said, “I’m having a baby tonight. We can talk more tomorrow.”

  “Indeed we can,” Falkon said. He held his hand up and snapped his fingers. A few seconds later, one of his servants appeared.

  “Take my friend to the hospital,” Falkon commanded.

  “No, not yet,” Celeste said. “I want to see Robin first.”

  Falkon ignored her. As the servant pushed her one way down the hall, he walked the other.

  Celeste was in labor for four hours. During that time, Falkon went into her home and stole her son. Robin was minutes away from death when Falkon injected him with a serum that transformed him into a monster. By the time Nicky was born, her older brother had a gray face, yellow eyes, and a thirst for blood.

  The memory was too intense for Nicky to look at. She pulled herself away from the glass. She was back in the darkness of her prison cell, a creature that had once been her mother standing on the other side.

  “It’s too much,” Nicky whispered. “I can’t see any more. It’s too painful.”

  Looking right at Nicky’s eyes, her mother raised her hands up, and balled them into fists. She brought both hands down on the glass at once. Nicky jumped back and shrieked. A crack formed in the glass.

  “No, no, no,” Nicky said. “Please don’t do this.”

  The fists came down again. An alarm was sounding outside her prison cell. Flashing lights and a buzzing noise. The other ferals were going crazy. And the crack widened.

  In the dream, Nicky was outside when her mother broke the glass. In the dream, she would already be running. But here, she had nowhere to go. Trapped in a concrete prison, with a feral vampire about to come in.

  Her mother punched the glass again and the crack spiderwebbed in all directions.

  “No,” Nicky sobbed. “Mom, please. Not like this!”

  The feral vampire punched the glass again, and this time it shattered. Shards flew in all directions and the entire sheet cascaded to the ground like a water fall. Nicky screamed. She was back against the corner. Her mother was coming inside.

  There was no avoiding it now. She had lived this scene so many times she knew how it worked. No matter what she tried, her mother would catch her, bite into her neck, and spread her sickness.

  It happened quickly. The feral vampire that had once been Celeste Allen leaped to the back of the cell, landing inches away from Nicky, who crouched in the corner and awaited her fate.

  Her mother’s teeth never bit into her neck. The icy cold sickness never spilled into her blood. Instead, a hand touched her cheek. Nicky opened her eyes. She saw her mother standing over her. Her mother was looking at her with love in those yellow eyes, and was caressing her cheek.

  Nicky reached out and embraced the creature. She squeezed it tight, and in that moment, she let go of all the pain she had buried in her five-year-old mind. She opened her mind to all of who she was, allowing the memories of a deeply troubled and scarred little girl to join the rest of her, making her whole.

  And she heard her mother’s voice.

  You have to finish, Nicky. You have to finish what I started.

  The vision flashed through her mind so quickly she could hardly see it. A room full of computers. A code that needed to be changed. A job that needed to be finished to set things right.

  I will do it, Mom. But I don’t know how.

  Now more memory came pouring in. A user name. A password. A code to open the door. A set of commands. They were flowing into Nicky’s mind from her mother. Everything her mother had once been, the human who was still buried deep inside this feral vampire, it was all being transferred to Nicky. She felt like her mother had been holding onto these memories for just this moment. She wasn’t sharing the memories with Nicky, she was giving them away. Letting them go.

  Like a record scratching to a stop, the memory ended and Nicky was back in the cell, listening to the deafening sounds of an alarm and dozens of screaming vampires. She looked to her mom, whose face had changed. Celeste Allen was no longer in the body of this creature. Nicky was looking at a feral vampire.

  Her mother roared like a lion and the stench of death engulfed Nicky’s face. Then the creature was gone, jumping out of the prison cell and into the hallway, where she roared again.

  “Mom?”

  A horrible sound followed the roar. It was as if the gates of hell had opened and a hundred demons came screaming out. Nicky leaned down and picked up a shard of broken glass from the floor. Holding the glass up like a dagger, she headed for the door.

  Her mother was fighting with someone. Someone fast. Her equal. They were tussling with such speed Nicky couldn’t keep track of it. They were on the ground. Then they were high on the wall. They bounded about on the ceiling. Bodies were thrown and torn and teeth were snarling and the entire hall was filled with rage.

  “No stop!” Nicky yelled. “Please! Don’t hurt her!”

  And then it was silent. She looked across the darkness to see two bodies on the ground, one leaning over the other.

  “It’s too late,” said one of them. It was Falkon. He was crouched on the ground.

  “No,” Nicky whispered.

  “It’s too late! She attacked me! She intended to kill me!”

  He sounded desperate as he yelled the words, like he was sad.

  Nicky stepped closer. She saw the body of a feral vampire on the ground. Falkon was cradling its head in his hands.

  “I wanted to bring her back,” he said. “I wanted to complete my research and bring her back. And now…”

  It was her mother. The vampire that had once been Celeste Amanda Allen was lying dead in Falkon’s arms.

  Chapter 38

  On Monday morning, Jill gathered Annika, Mattie, and Jenny in the senior parking lot.

  “I’ve solved the second Ransom clue,” she said.

  “No way!” said Mattie. “What is it?”

  “It’s the Washington Monument,” Jill said, “and don’t look at me like that. The reason everyone else who went to the Monument found nothing is because they didn’t know where to look. The clue was in the stairs.”

  “There are stairs in the Washington Monument?” said Jenny.

  “Here, have a look,” said Jill, handing over her phone. A picture of the six-hundred-and-fifty-seventh stair was on the screen, with the tile removed and the last clue exposed.

  “An expression of mortal frailty,” Jenny read aloud. “O
h God, this sounds hard already.”

  “Jill will figure it out,” said Annika. “She always does.”

  “Death and new life made manifest, in the throes of agony eternal,” Jenny continued. “Geez, why are the clues so hard this year?”

  “Same drill as last time?” said Annika.

  “Yes,” said Jill. “Now you guys know where to find the second rose. By the end of the day, we need for the whole school to know it.”

  “You know, there really isn’t much time left if you think about it,” said Mattie. “Thanksgiving is only a couple weeks away. If we don’t have the clue solved by then--”

  “We’ll solve it,” said Jill. “You guys have work to do. Hop to it.”

  When she went home that afternoon, she heard a sound that was entirely unfamiliar to her. Her parents were fighting.

  “What do you mean you don’t want to do it?” Walter was yelling. “Since when do we care about what you want?”

  “I’m busy with my own work!” Carolyn screamed. “Leave me alone! I’m onto something here but I need time to figure it out!”

  It sounded like they were upstairs, but not all the way in Carolyn’s study. Jill rolled her eyes, realizing they were probably in her bedroom.

  “What do you mean your own work?” Walter said. “What the hell are you working on?”

  “I said leave me alone!”

  Jill stepped into the bedroom.

  “Is everything alright up here?” she said.

  “Jill, I’m glad you’re here,” said Walter. “Something’s wrong with your mother.” There was a hint of panic in his voice. “Do you know what she’s doing? Why is she working on your laptop?”

  Jill turned to look at her mother, who was crouched over Jill’s desk. At any time, Carolyn could have moved the laptop to her own study. It was interesting to Jill that she had chosen to leave it here.

  “Let me talk to her, Dad,” Jill said. “Why don’t you go downstairs for a bit?”

  “Okay, but tell her we need her on the Gansfeld software. It took me more than a month in Seattle to close that deal, and now she doesn’t want to write the code!”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Jill said. “Please, get out of here.”

  Walter left the room in a huff. Jill closed the door behind him and locked it.

  “Mom?” she said.

  “Just a minute, please. I want to finish this algorithm.”

  Jill walked up to her mother, slowly. The woman was a mess. Her hair was greasy and in tangles. Her eyes were red. Her clothes were wrinkled.

  “How long have you been working on this, Mom?” Jill said.

  Carolyn ignored her and continued typing. Jill sat on the edge of the bed and waited.

  When Carolyn finally turned to her, Jill saw bags under her eyes and cracks on her lips.

  “I had an idea last night,” Carolyn said. “It woke me up. I went for a walk as I thought it through. Can you imagine? I was out for a walk in the middle of the night, thinking.”

  “Yes, I can imagine,” Jill said. She had done the same thing many times herself.

  “I wonder why I never thought to go walking before,” Carolyn said. “It’s such a good way to clear the mind and focus on a problem.”

  “What problem, Mom? What are you doing?”

  “I’ve found the answer we’ve been looking for,” Carolyn said. “A hidden operating system using dual-key encryption.”

  There was a crazed look in Carolyn’s eyes. In all her years of living with this woman she had never seen anything like this. Carolyn Wentworth, whose normal disposition was somewhere between bored and robot, looked like a warrior about to go into battle.

  “You’re talking about Renata’s phone, right?” Jill said.

  “What else would I be talking about?” said Carolyn. “The hard drive has been partitioned in a way that we could only see a fraction of it. The part we can see is what you hacked into. The other part, the much larger part, masks a second operating system.”

  Jill leaned back on the bed.

  “That’s interesting,” Jill said. She felt like she’d just been stumped on a trivia question and now someone was telling her the answer. “How big is this hidden partition?”

  “500 gigabytes,” said Carolyn.

  “Are you serious? On a phone? No wonder why it took so long.”

  “So long to what?”

  “To hack,” said Jill. “When I did the hack in Renata’s crypt, it took forever. It didn’t make any sense to me at the time, but if there’s a hidden 500 gig hard drive on the phone…you said there’s another operating system?”

  “Yes!” Carolyn said. “That operating system you cracked open was just a decoy. The real one sits underneath, encrypted with a dual-key scheme.”

  Jill detected a hint of judgment in Carolyn’s voice, as if Jill should have figured this out already.

  Carolyn brought up a picture on the computer screen. A pie chart showing disk drive space. Used and available, colored red and blue respectively. Carolyn explained to Jill what they were looking at, and why there had to be more computer memory that was hidden to them.

  It was strange, maybe even surreal, to have her mother speaking to her like this. It was like her mother was giving her a lecture on the basics of computer hacking. An angry lecture. As Carolyn went through a full deconstruction of the software on Renata’s phone, she pointed out all of Jill’s mistakes, all the things Jill should have seen, all the sloppiness of her hack.

  It was hard for Jill to listen to, and she found herself on the defensive.

  “We had so little time to do the hack,” she said. “Tarin had to get back to his post. I had to return to the party.”

  “It would have been faster if you had done it right from the beginning,” Carolyn said.

  “It’s easy for you to say. We’re sitting in the safety of my bedroom right now, but I cracked this phone when I was inside Renata’s mansion.”

  “You have to keep a cool head when you’re doing computer work,” said Carolyn. “If you can’t, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

  “I don’t appreciate you speaking to me this way,” said Jill.

  “I’m your mother and I’ll speak to you how I please,” said Carolyn.

  “My mother! You’ve never…I can’t believe you—ah!”

  Jill paced across the room. “I can’t do this right now!” she said. “I can’t talk to you because I don’t even know who you are! What happened up there with Tarin the other night? What did you talk about?”

  “Tarin helped me see the truth of things,” said Carolyn. “I know who I am. I know what your father has done. And I know what I must do. Now, can we please get back to work? I haven’t even shown you the interesting part yet.”

  “But that’s it! Somebody tells you that your husband enslaved you to your own wedding vows, and you’re just ready to get to work! Mom, aren’t you the least bit sad? Don’t you feel confused? Or angry? Aren’t you angry? Because I sure am!”

  Carolyn turned her chair to face Jill and leaned forward.

  “Listen to me, carefully,” she said. “Sadness and anger are a waste of everybody’s time.” She had that look in her eyes again. The crazed soldier about to go off and fight. “You only get so many hours on this earth and it is your responsibility to make the best use of them. We have the opportunity to do something useful right now. Figuring out how to get into Renata’s phone is important. Tarin told me so.”

  “It’s important to him!” Jill said. “It’s important to the Network! But I’m more concerned about you, Mom. I want to know that you’re okay.”

  “I’ve never been better in all my life! Now please quit talking so I can show you what I’ve found!”

  Carolyn shrieked out that last line in a voice that gave Jill goosebumps. This wasn’t at all how she had imagined things would be when her mother was free of her programming. Carolyn Wentworth might have been free of the command to live as her husband’s slave, but she wasn’t free of h
erself. She was so focused on work that even trying to talk to her about something else made her shriek like a crazy person.

  I need to be patient, Jill told herself. She is the victim, not me.

  “Okay, Mom. Show me what you want me to see. I won’t interrupt again.”

  The transformation in Carolyn was instant. Back to her normal voice, she continued her presentation about the hard drive in Renata’s phone.

  “As I was saying, there is a second, hidden operating system that lurks below the surface. That is why we aren’t seeing anything of substance when we spy on Renata. There are two versions of this phone inside the same machine!”

  “One that we can see,” Jill said.

  “Yes, we have full access to the one you hacked. That is the decoy.”

  “And the real phone, the one she uses for all the conversations we really want access to, is hidden away.”

  “Not just hidden,” said Carolyn. “Encrypted. If we are going to crack open this phone so Tarin can see and hear everything Renata is doing with it, we have to crack the encryption code. It’s dual key. Do you know about dual key encryption?”

  Jill gave a gentle nod of her head, trying not to laugh. Asking a hacker in the Network if she knew about dual key encryption was like asking a spider if it knew about silk.

  “The data gets encoded with a string of numbers and letters, and can only be unlocked with a matching string,” Carolyn went on. “I’ve written many programs over the years that seek out and try to break dual encryption strings. Last night I ran all of them on Renata’s phone. I found the encryption string.”

  “You found it already? Then all we have to do is crack it.”

  “It’s not that easy,” said Carolyn. “Let me show you.”

  Carolyn grabbed a piece of paper off the desk and handed it to Jill. A single page that had come out of Jill’s printer, showing a long string of numbers and letters.

  e4c5Nf3d6Bb5+Bd7…

  “Yeah, that definitely looks like an encryption string,” said Jill. “But you could crack this. There’s enough computing power on the servers in the basement--”