WAKING UP DOESN’T feel like waking up at all. It’s more like emerging. Like stepping through a doorway that leads back into my own body. I open my eyes and find my bedroom waiting for me. The sun is still burning hot and bright behind the curtains, and David Cassidy is smiling down at me from his poster on the wall. My limbs are cold and stiff, my back hurts, my head is thudding, my eyes burn. I’m on the floor, spread out across the purple area rug my mom thought would look nice in here but is actually atrocious.
How long was I out?
I reach up slowly, gingerly, and use the bed to haul myself up off the floor. There’s no way I was asleep for less than twelve hours. I ache all over—in my joints, in my muscles—as if I’ve been unconscious for days. Who knows; maybe I have.
A digital clock on the nightstand says otherwise. According to that, I’ve only been out for fifteen minutes. Was any of what I saw real? I get goose bumps thinking about the man in the gas mask, tearing out of the bathroom in room 6 at the Banshee Palace and … what? What happened after that?
I don’t remember, and my head feels light trying to think about it. In small, careful steps, I turn around, meaning to go downstairs for some water. But I catch my reflection in the white wicker vanity on the opposite side of the room. On the mirror, scribbled in lipstick I hardly ever use, are words I’m sure I didn’t write:
DON’T LET THE BEDBUGS BITE
It scares me at first, staring at the message. My heart rate kicks back up, and a fresh batch of tears stings my eyes. But then I’m just angry. Furious that I was right there, that she was right there, her hands in mine, and he took me away from her. Whoever he is. The thing that Mrs. Rapaport was trying to warn me about, probably.
I don’t even look back at the bed, because if I do, I know all I’ll see are those hundreds of thousand-leggers creeping over the blankets, their tiny legs going scritch-scratch over each other. Instead, I yank a dirty bath towel out of my laundry hamper, stomp over to the vanity, and scrub the lipstick words into a scarlet smear. Then I keep scrubbing, pushing against the mirror, making more of a mess than anything, but I don’t care. My reflection gets lost under gobs of red and streaks of pink, and none of it is coming off. But at least the words are gone.
Kimberly’s still there, though, her pallid face watching me every time I blink. Her shoulders lifting and falling helplessly. I don’t know.
I’m crying now. Sobbing. Angry and afraid and alone. With my hand still wrapped in the towel, I punch the mirror. Just once, but hard. A spiderweb of cracks appears with my fist at its center. My face splits in half, hidden by a blood-colored veil. I don’t even recognize who that person is. I’ve never seen her before in my life, and I’m not quite sure if she’s good or bad.
The computer is under me, the plastic casing dotted with teardrops that are still leaking off my chin. I wipe my face and stand back, hyperaware of how quiet the house is and how loud the Commodore sounds, some piece whirring inside it. Humming, like a low, distant whistle. It bites at my nerves, makes my ears itch. It makes me think of my father, and in one last furious movement, I bend down, wrap the orange extension cord around my hand once, and yank as hard as I can.
The cord pulls taut against the corner of my bedroom doorframe and snags. I grab it with both hands and tug, desperate to make that tinny moan go silent. The line catches again, this time with a deep thunk from down the hall. I lean back, putting all my weight into it. I realize that I’m screaming, the idea that I could just unplug the computer’s power cable from the extension cord only just now occurring to me.
Then the cord finally gives, and I fall backward on the floor. There’s a wooden crunch from down the hall, and the orange rope of the extension cord goes slack. My room is blessedly silent. My heart is smacking against the inside of my chest. My lungs and throat ache, still tender.
I feel a little more like myself, though. A little less like I’m being invaded.
I get up and follow the orange length of extension cord, winding across the floor like a route on a road map. It takes me to my door, then traces a path down the hall to Dad’s office. The secret lair, I think. Except it might not be so secret anymore, because the bottom corner of the door is bent outward, veined with cracks. There’s something wedged between the door and the frame, pushing it into an awkward angle, creating a gap.
Without taking my eyes off the door, I take a few deep breaths, then call out to the house. “Mom? Dad?”
No answer. Everyone’s still gone.
I move down the hall. Every creak of the floor makes me nervous.
Closer to Dad’s office door, I realize the thing that’s forcing the door apart is the surge protector, with the extension cord barely still plugged in to it. The prongs on the plug are bent sideways. I must have been pulling harder than I thought. Enough to crack the door, wedge it open just enough for me to slide numb, shaking fingers into the gap and …
I don’t even know what I’m going to do before I’m doing it. I plant a foot against the wall, slide my fingers as high up on the inside of the door as I can, and just like with the cord, I pull.
Our house, as far as I know, was very expensive. Mom and Dad had it built when they first moved to Windale years ago, and for as long as I can remember, Dad’s been complaining about how cheap the materials they used are. Flimsy is the word he likes to use. The doors are no exception. Once, when Sophia was a toddler, she went running full force into her bedroom door and nearly broke all the way through it. There was a vaguely Sophia-shaped crater in the wood for weeks until Dad could have it replaced. I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t have wanted the door to his secret lair made out of tougher stuff. Maybe it’s because he trusted us to trust him.
I don’t think I do anymore.
The door splinters even further along the bottom, but the locking mechanism is still caught firm in the jamb. It knocks against it with every pull, reminding me of the Banshee Palace, room 6.
But the door is peeling away, slowly widening that gap into a hole. My arms are shaking I’m pulling so hard. The surge protector is set free and falls to the floor, and I’m worried if I lose my grip, the door will flip back, seal the gap, and I’ll lose my chance.
Chance at what? What am I even doing?
Then something gives within the hollow space of the door. The tension releases, and I stumble back into the opposite wall, showered in splinters, holding chunks of wood in my hands.
I glance down the hall, toward the stairs, fully expecting to see my dad coming up them. But the house is still eerily silent, still empty except for me.
In front of me, there’s a hole in Dad’s office door about the width of a textbook and maybe six inches tall. It’s not very big, but it’s a foot or so above the bottom of the door. Before I can talk myself out of doing anything stupid (because I’ve already made a bunch of stupid choices at this point), I drop to my knees in front of the door and slip my hand into the hole. It’s just wide enough for me to get most of my arm in. I can reach up. I can feel the lock on the inside of the door. It’s the only room in the house that needs a key, and Dad’s the only one who has it.
I have to pat around to find the knob. When I do, the lock turns easily, and the door opens when I twist the knob.
As I pull my arm back through the hole, something on the inside of my elbow catches on the ragged edges of the wood—the pill thing that Hollis injected into me at the WMC. When I put my hand over it, the tiny knot feels firm, tight beneath my skin. It also feels slightly warm to the touch. Weird.
Fumbling around for the light switch, I realize that I’ve never been inside my dad’s office before. It’s foreign territory, built smack in the middle of my own home. I finally hit the lights, and a single fluorescent bar clicks to life on the ceiling.
The room is as boring as a county records office. No windows, a single hulking metal desk in the center of the floor, a few bulky filing cabinets. The walls are bare; the carpet is flat and stiff. On a shelf behind the desk are a few pieces of technology I don’t recognize and some that I do. Like a massive tape recorder that must have been cutting edge in the sixties or seventies, with huge reels that remind me of the gaping lenses on the gas mask the man was wearing in my nightmare. Or whatever it was.
On the desk is the only thing that looks like it belongs in this decade: a computer. A Macintosh IIcx, to be exact. It’s a $6,000 computer, brand-new. And there are two wires coming off it and curling around the desk. One is the power cord, which is plugged directly into the wall instead of the surge protector. There are a few other plugs dangling off the shelf nearby that look like they might have been plugged into the protector at one point but aren’t anymore. I wonder if Dad had to unplug all his stuff just to get my Commodore powered on Friday morning. It doesn’t look like everything would have reached, even with the extra-long extension cord he used. He thought my technological education was more important than whatever work he was doing in here?
The other wire connected to the Macintosh looks thinner than the power cable. I follow it behind the desk to the wall, where it’s snapped into a phone jack. A phone jack?
I check the door, standing open and destroyed, and remind myself for the hundredth time that there’s nobody else here, then I sink into the desk chair. The keyboard’s in front of me. I hit the ENTER key, and the monitor comes to life with a mild click. The base of the computer beneath it is amazingly quiet—I can hear a small fan whirring inside, but it’s nothing compared to the Commodore. A soft, breezy shushing sound is all it is, like rain.
The monitor brings up a screen that I don’t recognize. It’s not built into the computer’s operating system. At least, not as far as I know—it seems too outdated. The flat green cursor at the top left corner moves, materializing words as it scrolls: welcome. login? y or n.
Along the bottom of the screen, I notice another string of letters: RLDS-TCI-001.5.
I have no clue what RLDS stands for, but I’m almost positive that TCI means TerraCorp Industries. Dad’s tapped in to the computer network at TerraCorp from home via the phone lines.
I press the Y key with a shaky finger, and the screen changes.
id?
I close my eyes and try to picture Dad’s ID badge, dangling from his lab coat. A picture of him with a goofy grin, the TerraCorp logo, his name. I don’t remember anything else. No specific numbers or letters. I take a chance and type a single word: GUTIERREZ.
The screen changes again.
password?
The cursor blinks at me, daring me to try. But this is where all those computer coding books I’ve been reading come in handy. For a moment, I forget that I broke into my dad’s office and am now snooping in a government-run computer system. I forget to be afraid. My fingers move across the keyboard in swift strikes, typing a few lines of code instead of a password. The code redirects me to another part of the system, “behind” the login screen. In my mind, I’m flipping back a silky curtain, revealing the mechanisms of some great machine.
I have no idea what Dad’s password is. I could guess, but if the system is advanced enough, it’ll lock me out if I get it wrong too many times. Or the computer will self-destruct. I don’t need to know the password, though, because the system already has it saved for me. It’s embedded in the code so that it can recognize the password correctly when Dad types it in. The keyboard clacks as I navigate lines of data on the screen. I get swept up in the fact that I actually know how to do this, that everything I’ve been working on to get into MIT is paying off.
Then again, the whole reason I wanted to go to MIT in the first place was because of my dad, and it’s his system I’m hacking into right now, his secrets that I’m trying to dig up. What does that mean for my future?
The password turns out to be an arbitrary string of gibberish—numbers, letters, symbols. I memorize it, circle back to the original login screen. When I hit ENTER this time, the screen gives me a message: ACCESS GRANTED. WELCOME, DR. GUTIERREZ.