Our teacher spent the rest of the class period going over the various mistakes my classmates had made in their sims. I didn’t hear a word of it. I just stared at my pendant.
Had she left that copy of my mom’s transcript under my pillow? Had she written Dr. Hildebrand’s name in North’s book? I heard the voice loud and clear then, not a boom like before, but more of an echo. Two words, resounding in my head.
Trust her.
31
GRATEFUL I WAS IN SNEAKERS, I ran from Hamilton Hall toward Paradiso, the upsilon pendant banging against my collarbone, and I hopped the fence at the cemetery. As I sprinted across the grass, I cast a quick glance around to make sure I was alone. When my eyes landed on the statue of the archangel, I stopped in my tracks. His arm was pointed at the entrance to the cemetery, which made sense now that I’d seen the illustration in Paradise Lost. He was expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden. But I was certain that his arm had been pointed at the sky the night the Few summoned me to the angel’s wing.
I jogged over to it. It was almost imperceptible, but there was a slit in the stone at his left shoulder joint, as if his arm were a lever. I gripped his wrist and pushed up. His arm didn’t budge. I gritted my teeth and pushed again, squatting my legs for leverage. His arm inched upward, and as it did, I heard a rumble to my left. Stone sliding on stone.
It was coming from the mausoleum.
I dashed over to the building and let myself in. I knew even before I lifted the coffin’s lid what I’d done. I’d opened the entrance to the tomb.
The coffin’s marble bottom had retracted a few inches to reveal spiral stairs descending into pitch-black. I peered over the coffin’s edge, trying to make out the bottom, but I couldn’t see farther than ten feet down.
With a start I straightened back up. What if I’d set off a silent alarm? Not to mention that I’d left the mausoleum door open in broad daylight. I slammed the coffin lid shut and left the mausoleum as quickly as I’d come in, stopping only to yank the angel’s arm back down before sprinting toward the fence.
Kate was behind the register when I came barreling through the café’s door. “Hey, Rory,” she called. “North’s not here.”
“What do you mean he’s not here?” I demanded. “He has to be here.”
Kate eyed me. “Are you okay?”
“I just need to see North,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”
She shook her head. “But his break’s over in five minutes. You want me to make you something while you w—”
“No, thanks,” I said, and dashed out.
Relief washed over me when I saw him through the glass door of Ivan’s repair shop. North had his laptop open on the counter, and Ivan was tinkering with something in North’s palm. I yanked open the door, sending the bell clanging. North jerked up, his fingers clamping down on whatever was in his hand. He quickly shut his laptop, too.
“Rory,” he said when he saw me, relaxing a little, but his brow was now furrowed in concern. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to see what’s on my necklace,” I said hurriedly. “I think she put something on it. I think that’s why she took it.”
Ivan was already unlocking his loaner cabinet.
“What’s in your hand?” I asked North. His fingers were still tight around it.
He hesitated and glanced at Ivan. The old man nodded. “It’s ready to go.”
North opened his hand. The dove locket I’d seen in the shop’s glass cabinet the first night we’d hung out was lying in his palm. Even more exquisite up close. The gold was etched with intricate detail, the wing raised slightly from the surface. “I bought it for you,” North said, glancing sideways at Ivan. “To replace your necklace.” He faltered. “I mean. I know nothing could replace it, but I thought—”
“I love it,” I said, sweeping my hair up with my hands. “Will you put it on for me? And take the other one off so we can get the file?”
Feeling North’s fingers skim the nape of my neck made the tiny hairs beneath them stand on end. How I wished we could just be two regular teenagers who didn’t have a biotech conspiracy to take down.
The dove locket fell about an inch above the pendant, wedging itself in the space between my clavicles. “What’s inside?” I asked suddenly, remembering that it was a locket. The hinge was along the top, so I slid my nail between the dove’s beak, the obvious place to snap it open.
“It doesn’t open,” North said quickly. He unclasped the upsilon necklace and caught it with his hand.
“Isn’t it a locket?”
“Whoever owned it before you sealed it shut,” Ivan explained.
I slid the back of my hand under the delicate bird, lifting it so I could see it better. I remembered the dove’s eye being a turquoise gemstone, but I must’ve been mistaken, because it was black, not blue, and reflective, like mirrored glass.
“Well, I love it,” I said, turning around to smile at North. “Thank you.”
He beamed. “You’re welcome.” He released the USB plug on my pendant and stuck it into the port of Ivan’s laptop. “How’d you get this back?” he asked.
“Dr. Tarsus,” I said. “She gave it back to me this morning. It sounds crazy, but I think maybe she’s been trying to help me all along.”
“Help you do what?” North asked.
“I don’t know. But this morning in practicum she showed me the inside of the tomb and let me use her credentials to get into what I think is a Gnosis server room. That’s what’s beneath the reservoir.”
North said something in reply, but I was too preoccupied with the two files that had popped up on my screen to hear it. One was a JPEG, the other was an audio file, seven minutes and forty-five seconds in length. I lifted my eyes and met Ivan’s. “Do you have some earbuds I could borrow?” It wasn’t that I didn’t want North to hear it, or Ivan for that matter—I just wanted to listen to it once through first.
“Of course,” the old man replied. He went back to the loaner cabinet and retrieved a pair of vintage headphones, the kind you wore over your ears. “If you’d like some privacy, you can listen to it in my office in the back,” he said kindly, and gestured for me to come around the counter. He pointed to a door just behind the fabric curtain that separated the front of the store from the back.
“Thanks,” I said, casting my eyes back to North as I lifted the laptop off the counter. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”
The office was cramped but clean. There was an old transistor radio on the desk, propped up against the wall. It was on, set to what sounded like a news channel. The volume was too low to make out the words. I caught the phrase “solar flare” and turned it up. It was the tail end of a news story.
“. . . wind would hurl a burst of electromagnetic radiation in our direction,” the reporter was saying. “Traveling at speeds upward of eight million miles an hour, this cloud of solar plasma and magnetic field would slam into the Earth’s atmosphere in less than a day, posing significant risk to our power grid.”
A solar storm. It was the kind of thing the old Beck would’ve gone nuts over. But the new Beck probably wouldn’t see it at all. Lux would make sure of it. Weather events were on his threat list, after all.
The thought snapped me back to the present moment. I clicked to open the JPEG first.
A black-and-white photo opened onscreen. It was a yearbook picture, an action shot from the sports page. A basketball player in a Theden jersey was launching a three-point shot with four seconds left on the clock. The crowd was on its feet in the bleachers behind him. I saw my mother’s face almost immediately, her mouth open in a happy yell, hugging the girl beside her. A girl with an Afro whose inky black eyes hadn’t changed in seventeen years.