CHAPTER 9
MISHA CONSTANCE
MISHA’S FIRST THOUGHT WHEN SHE AWOKE WAS THAT SHE HAD not intended to kill her father, but she really had no choice in the matter at the time.
Now she was just trying to make things right. To reconcile before her Day of Judgment, as her mother would say.
She made a list of things she would do with her father if he were to come back alive:
Hug him so he could hug her back real tight.
Kiss him on the cheek.
Ask him to go in the basement with her so they could write code.
Tell him about the bad things Mama had done.
She remembered part of the night on which she shot him about four weeks ago. She had been with him in the car. He had told her that a man had asked to meet with him about the code she had written. She knew that her father had previously given someone at Cefiro the code, and the man had said there was something wrong with it. Apparently, the code wasn’t working as they had expected it to. Of course it wasn’t. She had built trapdoors into the system so that if they didn’t pay her father, then they would have to ask her to fix it.
That day, Misha and her father were already out at the computer store in downtown Wilmington, near the riverfront, buying a new server with more power and storage. It was nighttime, and they were walking on the river walk toward the dark end, near a warehouse under construction. She remembered that her father held her hand and that his palm was sweating. While Misha had a hard time understanding emotions, she could tell he was nervous.
Two big men wearing suits asked them to come into an empty building near the river. She was not completely surprised by their presence. It was dark inside and smelled musty, like when she used to go to her grandmother’s house in Sampson County. She could hear water dripping in the background. The floor was concrete. One of the men started yelling at her father to give him the flash drive with the code. He used the “F” word, which her father had told her to never use.
Then she saw her father reach for his pistol, which she hadn’t known he was carrying. That wasn’t part of anyone’s plan, she didn’t think, certainly not hers. She instinctively reached out to hold on to him, maybe even grab the pistol. She felt the pistol in her hands. Remembering the weight of it surprised her again now.
But that was all she remembered. She kept searching her brain, looking in all the filing cabinets up there, but she couldn’t pull anything out. She just couldn’t remember. It was like someone had moved that filing cabinet. It was the first time Misha was aware of that she had tried to recall something but had not been able to. She usually had the opposite problem; she remembered too much. She remembered everything. But this time was different. Her next memory was of the following morning, waking up in her bed, with her mother stroking her hair, saying sweet things to her. Even though she didn’t want to hear them from her.
Now she had to reconcile.
She quit thinking about that night and started thinking about what she needed to do to get out of this eco-pod.
Katniss Everdeen would try to escape.
Temple Grandin would tell her to use her special gifts to think her way through the problems.
Henry Cavendish would tell her that there was a scientific solution to what she needed to know.
Daddy would tell her that he loved her.
All of them motivated her to act.
She had been paying close enough attention to the man dressed in black who had delivered her food that she knew the code to unlock the Plexiglas cockpit of her pod. Her special glasses helped her with that, too. All she had to do was hit a button on the stem, and the glasses would replay the beeping noises she heard when the man punched in the code. It was not that she couldn’t remember it—she could—but she realized that this was a different environment. More stress, but stress that she had anticipated and tried to think through as she had developed her plan to kill her father and then infiltrate the Cefiro compound.
It was nighttime already, and she was ready to explore. She wasn’t sure, but she believed it had been a full day since the shooting at the school. She looked at her shaking hands as she remembered the tense moments yesterday. Today she was noticing that every now and then her hands shook, which was different from the way she would move them to block out the sensory overload. These were tremors, which she didn’t understand. Also, she had a headache. It was a dull, throbbing pain in her temples, which her glasses didn’t seem to be stopping.
Waiting until it was completely dark, she used her hair clip to remove the screws to the control panel, which someone had deactivated. The article she had read in National Geographic showed a scientist working in her eco-pod, with the display unit in front of her lit up with clear instructions on how to set the temperature, open the capsule cockpit canopy, and even browse the Web.
But someone had turned off the control panel, so she couldn’t do any of that. They still had to run power to the pod, or she would suffocate or burn up from the heat. Pretending she was that scientist and improvising as much as she could—as much as code writing had taught her—she used the hair-clip fastener to loosen the screws and the faceplate to the control panel. It wasn’t perfect and took some time, but it got the job done, as her father would always say. After carefully removing the panel, she recognized all the circuitry and wiring. By listening to the beeps and watching the finger movement of the guard whenever he opened her pod, she had learned that the code was two, three, three, four, seven, six. She played it back in her glasses just to be sure, the heads-up display confirming what she had heard by showing a series of light green LED numbers in her left lens. She quickly realized that the code numerically spelled Cefiro on a phone keypad.
She found this to be an amateur move on their part. Having spent almost two years exploring the Dark Web, she was not a normal hacker. Her ability to see inside the computer and understand the code had also made her feel empowered. She felt the same way now.
She was solving a problem, one of her favorite things to do.
She found the wire that controlled the power to the panel inside the pod and crossed it with the wire that controlled the power to the entire pod. It was like undoing the kid locks on a car. Suddenly the panel lit up, flickered a couple of times, and then showed steady numbers, such as the inside and outside temperatures. It was seventy-four degrees inside, which was comfortable with the blanket. She preferred it cool. Her father would always open his bedroom window in the winter to let a sliver of cold air in so that it would brush her cheek like an angel’s kiss.
The first order of business was to put the camera on automatic loop so that whoever monitored the pod would still see her. She found the wire to the small camera eye and crossed it with the wire to the memory chip where her first twenty-four hours were stored. In case someone was looking at her at this very moment, she kept her thumb over the camera to prevent anyone from seeing what she was doing. Once she had the loop going, she got to business on the keypad.
As Misha looked at the control panel, which was hanging loose in her hand, she entered the code and listened as the seal on the pod broke with a hiss. The Plexiglas canopy lifted about six inches. She pushed against it with her hand, and it rose with hydraulic pistons, offering slight resistance.
Outside the pod was a number keypad that the man in the black jumpsuit had used. Now she did as he had, entering the code and watching the canopy shut and lock with a click. She stared at the lit instrument panel for at least two or three minutes, until it automatically dimmed. She looked up and noticed the camouflage netting that was over her pod. She guessed it was to keep anyone from seeing it from the sky. It also provided some shade during the day.
She still had on her blue dress but had taken off her black shoes. She was barefoot. Misha was used to running around barefoot near her house in New Hanover County and had pretty tough feet. Her father would always tell her that you could tell a good summer by how tough your feet were the day before school started. The truth of it was that her feet were always pretty tough. Just because she was quiet and “autistic” didn’t mean she couldn’t play and have fun. She had a slide and a swing set in the backyard, and she never wore her shoes out there, which drove her mother crazy. She and her father would laugh about it, and Misha thought her mother did, too, just not in front of her.
She turned around, and to her right was a bunch of mounds that looked like grave sites. They looked creepy, so she walked in the other direction. The sand and dirt were loose beneath her feet. Occasionally, she stepped on a few sand burrs, which hurt, but thankfully, her feet were tough enough, and she was quick enough to pull them out. After walking about the length of her backyard at home, she turned around and really couldn’t see the eco-pod. It was mixed in with all the other mounds, and the camouflage did its job.
She looked in each direction. To her left was a big warehouse, twice the distance of the forty-yard dash she had to run in elementary school. To her right was a fence about three times the distance of the forty-yard dash. The fence had wire at the top, which reflected the moonlight. The wire looked sharp, like the kind she had seen on TV shows that might have a prison scene. Turning her back to the pod, she saw a building in the distance, separated by a fence that was farther away than she could really calculate. She figured she should walk toward the closest building—the one that was two forty-yard dashes away—and count her steps, in case she couldn’t find the pod in the dark. That was exactly what she did.
She was relieved to find a path that was next to the building after sixty-seven steps, counting just the times her right foot hit the ground. She walked 112 steps using the same method of counting until she hit the corner of the building.
That was when all the spotlights came on.
Maybe she had activated remote-controlled floodlights like the ones her father had installed at the house after he got the job at Cefiro. Or maybe there was some other trigger for the lights. The maps she had seen inside the Cefiro database didn’t indicate where the security lights were, at least not the maps that she had seen. Maybe the lights came on just like lamps sometimes did in houses to make burglars think someone was home.
There was no light shining directly on her, so she remained where she was. Her feet were fine standing on the packed dirt around the building, but then she wondered whether a guard walking around in the daylight tomorrow would be able to see her footprints. There were probably not too many people with feet her size walking around here barefoot. She didn’t want to give up her secret that she was able to sneak out of the pod.
Misha remained perfectly still and observed. She saw two deer frozen in a powerful light beam probably 150 steps away. She wondered how they had gotten inside the fence, and concluded that there must be a gate somewhere. She saw millions of bugs flying around the floodlights, which were evenly spaced along the top of the building and shone outward at a forty-five-degree angle. One of them was shining on the mounds, and she thought she could see a faint glint off the canopy of her pod. She hoped there wasn’t a camera looking from the roof. Bats were diving in and out of the light like military jets she had seen in the movies.
She was in a real pickle, as her mother would always say. But she wasn’t worried. Obviously, they needed to keep her alive and healthy, or they wouldn’t have given her such a good place to stay, with a refrigerator stocked full of water and cheese sticks. She did what she did best, though, and that was listen and learn. Her mind raced with information, processing everything. Her glasses helped, too, but she took them off for a minute so she could let her “gift” help her absorb her environment. It was a risk, she knew. The glasses helped her filter, but she wanted to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel where she was.
She heard a million crickets chirping, the call of birds everywhere, the bang of some machinery inside the building, the hissing of the floodlights, the sound of water rolling—not rushing, but rolling—and footsteps.
The footsteps were far away, but she heard them. One of the gifts of autism was that her senses were finely tuned to receive significantly more sensory input than those without her “problem” could receive at once. While her facial expressions might not communicate to someone that she was hearing them or recognizing something, her mind had probably already catalogued that information and was on to the next thing a regular person hadn’t even heard yet.
The footsteps made a slight rhythmic crunching far on the other side of the building. She guessed that it was a guard checking out what had made the lights turn on. She put her glasses back on and secured the strap tight to the back of her head. She fumbled for a second with the band but got it secure again. While she could still see, hear, feel, taste, and touch, the glasses suppressed some of that and helped her stay within her own comfortable environment.
A short distance off the path she saw a stand of tall grass, like at the beach. She walked over, pulled a bunch of it out, and made a broom of sorts by holding the stalks in her hand and using the seed portion at the top to wipe over her footprints. She crawled on all fours and did this all the way back to where she had started. It seemed like lost time, but better safe than sorry, as Ms. Promise sometimes said.
She was satisfied that she had covered her tracks and learned a good lesson at the same time. Avoiding the path, she walked to the corner of the building at about the time the lights went out. She couldn’t see as well, so she stopped and waited until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She heard an owl at the top of one of the trees on the other side of the fence. She had read every book she could about different types of owls, and she was betting it was a great horned owl, which was the most common in North Carolina. It would have a wingspan almost as tall as she was, over four feet, which meant it could probably swoop down and grab her with its sharp claws. She kept her head down.
She turned the corner and walked until she saw a door on the side of the building. She still had her grass-stalk broom in her hand, so she walked across the dirt path and looked in the mesh window. It was dark inside, and she couldn’t see much. She did notice there was a keypad next to the door so she entered the Cefiro number sequence that she had memorized.
It worked.
She heard a snick, like a dead bolt sliding, and reached up and turned the doorknob. She pushed the door inward and stepped onto a concrete stairwell. She left her grass broom inside, by the door, for when she finished exploring the building.
Misha was safe from the owl now, and she felt her breathing slow for a moment, but it began to race again at the thought that she had gained access to the building. She climbed the stairwell and opened another door. There she stepped onto a metal grate that was elevated above a giant factory floor down below. There were a few lights on, so she could see some cars and small airplanes. She recognized the cars as Cefiro’s and guessed that this was where they tested models, like she had seen in those crash test dummy commercials.
Holding the round metal railing, she looked through the top and bottom rails, leaning as far forward as possible. She saw some office doors and heard one of them open and then close.
Misha froze as she saw a man in a black jumpsuit walk into the middle of the warehouse, which was about the size of a football field and at least five stories up. He walked to the far side of the building, opened a container like the ones she had seen on big ships when her father would take her to the port. The man disappeared for a minute, so Misha walked around to the other side to get a better angle. It might have been stupid to do so, but she was curious.
The metal catwalk went all the way around the inside of the building. As long as no one came up here, she was fine. Glad that she was not wearing shoes and that her feet were tough—the metal had edges on it—she got to a position where she could see inside the container. The man was opening wooden crates that looked big enough to hold about fifty apples. Her father had taken her to the mountains one time, and they had picked apples and had put them in a wooden crate about the same size as these. She remembered they had picked fifty and she had helped her father carry the crate back to where he paid for them, though she thought he had done most of the lifting.
Misha couldn’t determine what was in the crates. The doctor had said she had excellent eyesight, and what she saw was little brown things about the size of the bats that were flying around outside. These items might have been shaped like them, too, but she couldn’t tell. Maybe they were car or airplane parts.
Though she didn’t think that Cefiro was in the airplane business.
She took a minute to study her surroundings and saw a door just like the one she had come through on the opposite side of the building. It had a toolbox next to it, like someone had been working and then had just stopped. Its lid was open.
That was when she noticed a man step through the door she had come through on the other side of the building. She didn’t think he noticed her, but she waited until he started walking, and then moved quietly to the opposite door—the one near the tool box—on her hands and knees. The metal cut into her, since her hands and knees weren’t as tough as her feet. She wasn’t bleeding yet, but it hurt.
She reached the door, squatted, looked in the toolbox, grabbed a screwdriver, and turned the doorknob. She made herself skinny and slid through the small crack she had created. As the door clicked shut, she heard two men shouting.
After racing down a concrete stairwell, she opened the door to the outside and realized she was on the complete opposite side of the building from her pod. Misha also remembered she had left her grass broom in the building. They would just have to wonder about that. She jumped from the concrete stoop to the field, avoiding the dirt path around the building. Figuring it would be quicker for her to run making right turns, she bolted to her right.
In her periphery she noticed the moon shining off a river and wondered if it was the Cape Fear River, which was not far from her house, exactly twenty-two miles. Her parents had taken her canoeing down the Cape Fear one time. They had seen all different kinds of wildlife, birds and fish especially.
The sand burrs dug into her feet and hurt with every step. Her heart was thumping and racing, and the wind whirled around her glasses, making her eyes water, as she heard the door slam about the time she turned the corner. She had about three forty-yard dashes to do before she turned the next corner. Then she would have to find her pod, knowing that she had counted from the other direction. She held the metal part of the screwdriver in her fist, because her mother had taught her how to carry scissors, and she figured she was best off doing the same thing here.
She had heard footsteps behind her after the door slammed, but now they stopped. She turned the next corner, nearly out of breath. Some of the grasses were almost as tall as she was, and Misha thought of herself as a ghost running through the field. She had always been fast, and she didn’t believe she had ever run faster. Her heart was racing like a motor revving.
Blessedly, she saw the mounds and recognized that she was in the vicinity of her pod. She slowed down so she didn’t make any mistakes. She was curious about the other mounds. Were other children being held here, too?
But she didn’t have time to look, because she heard the footsteps again. This time they were on both sides of the building. They weren’t walking, and they weren’t running, at least not as fast as her. That gave her some time.
She found her pod by recognizing the camouflage netting. The other mounds didn’t seem to have that and made her wonder if they had put her pod here so it would blend in with whatever the mounds were. Kneeling next to the pod, she entered the code, using the weak moonlight for visibility.
Nothing happened.
She quickly entered the code again. Once her father had made her the glasses, not only had her sensory overload dampened, but all the emotions and frustrations associated with not being able to control the overload had lessened also. So, of late, she didn’t get scared easily.
But she was now, because on the second try, nothing happened again. Her hands were shaking badly. Her head ached. She could smell the musty river. Despite her glasses, all of Misha’s senses were on fire. She knew she had to control them. She had to get back in the pod. She stood up and looked to make sure there wasn’t another pod. There wasn’t. Then she realized that she had been rushing and, with her shaky hands, might have entered the wrong number. The keypads usually had a minimum reset time before she could try again.
She did her best to wait a full thirty seconds. She didn’t think she did, but whatever time she waited worked. She heard the snick, and the pod canopy opened. She made herself skinny again, slid in, punched the number on the inside pad, heard the canopy lock, disengaged her makeshift wiring, and put the display unit back where it belonged.
She could hear the footsteps outside of the pod now, which meant they were close.
Misha turned one of the screws using the screwdriver she had found on the metal catwalk. It would have to be good enough, because she saw a shadow moving toward her.
She rocked slowly and tried to stop, but she couldn’t. Her body was on fire, and the glasses weren’t doing what they needed to do. She shut her eyes, but that made everything worse. All the images from the building were flying through her mind like bats in a cave. She wanted to bang her head against the Plexiglas to make everything stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.
She opened her eyes, kept rocking, thought of her father. His gentle smile. “Settle down, baby girl,” he would say to her right now. “Settle down.” He used to tell Misha that all the time, and she would get frustrated because he couldn’t understand why she couldn’t settle down. Settle down. Settle down. Settle down.
She looked through her glasses and focused. She saw the shadow. It was just one shadow, instead of hundreds of images of the same shadow, so that was good. The eco-pod smelled of new stuff, like a new car. She remembered when her mother had bought a new car and she’d ridden in it. Everything had smelled like new plastic. The glasses had helped her there, too. The smell was not overpowering. She could hear every footstep as if it was super loud, but the glasses’ stem was filtering that sound. She fought her urge to flail and took comfort in her father’s invention. Her father. Her dead father.
She wondered what Katniss Everdeen would do.
Misha pulled the covers over herself and held the flat-head screwdriver in her balled-up fist. For the moment, it was her weapon.
If the man opened her pod and tried to come in, she would use it. She would take off her glasses and let loose on him.