“I back everything up every ten minutes, so it’s not a huge deal if it’s fried. I’d just prefer not to spend another ten grand on a machine if I don’t have to.”
“These computers cost ten thousand dollars?”
“They didn’t originally. But nobody makes computers with hard drives anymore. Everything is on the cloud. I have to have mine custom built by some guys who used to work for Apple, before they went under.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ve still got twenty-five minutes. You okay if we swing by the shop and drop this off on the way to the station?”
I could see Noelle behind the counter, so I went in with North to thank her for letting me borrow the dress. There was an older man with her this time. Her grandfather, I assumed. He smiled when he saw North come in with his laptop.
“Zapped another one?” the old man asked.
“I’m hoping it just needs the Ivan touch,” North said, setting the laptop down on the counter.
The old man’s eyes wandered to me. “Who’s this?” he asked.
“I’m Rory,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”
The man reached across the counter and lifted my pendant. “I haven’t seen one of these in years,” he said. “Where’d you get it?”
“It was my mother’s,” I told him.
“What do you keep on it?”
I looked down at my pendant, confused. “What do I keep on my necklace?”
He pinched my pendant between his finger and thumb and pushed his thumb up. The face of the pendant slid up and a little port popped out. “It’s a thumb drive,” the old man said. “You didn’t know?”
“I don’t even know what a thumb drive is,” I said, still staring at my pendant.
“It’s a little hard drive.” North sounded as awed as I felt.
“So that means—”
North finished my sentence. “There’s something on there.”
26
IT WAS LUCK that North’s laptop froze exactly when it did. First because it brought us to the shop while Ivan was there, but second because it meant that we got Ivan’s clunky loaner laptop that, while heavy and slow, had something North’s nine machines did not: a USB port.
Then again I didn’t believe in luck. Not anymore. I’d asked the Doubt to help me, and it had. I’d bristled and balked when Hershey suggested that listening to the voice made life easier, but she’d been right after all. It was the back and forth, the wavering between reason and faith, that was difficult. Once I’d decided to trust that still small voice in my head, the stormy sea inside me got calm.
“Unsurprisingly, the files are encrypted,” North said, typing furiously, the laptop balancing on his knees. We’d made it to the station less than a minute before our train was supposed to depart and had sprinted to the platform.
“Can you open them?”
“I don’t know yet.” He was chewing on his lip, his eyebrows knitted together in thought.
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the train window and watched the blur of brightly colored leaves, waiting.
The thick of trees gave way to a high double fence, like something you’d see around a prison. There were little metal plaques at regular intervals. CAUTION: ELECTRIC FENCE.
“Hey, what’s back there?” I asked North. Just then a guard station and gated driveway came into view. Beyond it, I could see a great expanse of water. “Oh,” I said, answering my own question. “It’s the reservoir. But why is there an electric fence and an armed guard?”
“To protect the water supply, I guess.” North was still chewing on his lip, staring at his computer screen. “Damn, if your mom wrote this encryption, she was good.”
I smiled. Despite his frustration, this was high praise.
I looked back out the window. We were in front of the reservoir’s entrance now, so I was no longer seeing the stone sign at an angle. ENFIELD RESERVOIR, it read. There was a carving next to the words. A tree sprouting out of a pair of hands. The tree looked just like the one on my Theden pin.
I pulled out my Gemini and went to Panopticon. The entry for the Enfield Reservoir was surprisingly paltry.
The Enfield Reservoir is an inland body of water created by the Enfield Dam on the Connecticut River just east of Theden, Massachusetts. At capacity, the reservoir holds two million cubic meters of water. It is the only privately owned water source in Massachusetts. Before the Enfield Dam was built, the land where the reservoir now sits was home to the Enfield Quarry, a quarter-mile deep, quarter-mile wide pyrite mine made famous when it collapsed in the late 1980s, trapping twelve miners inside. In 1998, the Theden Initiative purchased the quarry in order to build the dam that created the reservoir.
The Theden Initiative. I’d never heard of it, but the tree logo made me think it was affiliated with my school. I clicked the link.
The Theden Intiative, founded in 1805, is the private entity that manages the roughly two-billion-dollar endowment of Theden Academy. The company’s other assets include extensive land holdings in western Massachusetts, the Enfield Reservoir, and a controlling stake in Gnosis, Inc.
It took a second for it all to register. The entity that ran Theden’s endowment owned a controlling stake in Gnosis? How did I not know that? It explained quite a bit, actually. The Gnosis gadgets all over campus. Dr. Tarsus’s position on the Gnosis board. The fact that our practicum simulations worked a lot like Lux. The water reservoir was more puzzling. It was just so random.
Something was bugging me. I went back to the reservoir’s page.
At capacity, the reservoir holds two million cubic meters of water.
There had to be billions of cubic meters in a cubic mile. I couldn’t do the math in my head, but that quarry’s capacity had to have been way more than two million cubic meters. So why didn’t they make the reservoir bigger?
I clicked over to the page for the Enfield Quarry and skimmed it, looking for clues, but there weren’t any. My eyes hung on the passage about the mine’s collapse.
For eight days, rescue workers communicated with the twelve trapped miners via a six-inch borehole drilled through nearly a quarter mile of rock. Relief supplies were sent down in narrow, rocket-shaped parcels called “doves,” which were lowered through the small tunnel in the rock. All twelve miners were eventually evacuated by a rope pulley system through an eighteen-inch rescue shaft adjacent to the room where the miners were trapped. After the accident, the mine was shut down.
I clicked out of Panopticon and lay my head back on the headrest, thinking of those twelve miners. I couldn’t imagine what they must’ve gone through, being trapped beneath the earth. I must’ve fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew North was shaking my shoulder, telling me we’d reached our stop.
Dr. Hildebrand’s office was in William James Hall on Harvard’s campus. I felt like an impostor walking through Harvard Yard, but it’s not like there was anyone checking student IDs at the campus gates. We found the building easily.
“So the plan is to act like you accept her diagnosis, right?” North whispered as we took the elevator to her sixth-floor office. “Like you assume those entries are real?”