Tears were streaming down my face now, dripping onto the desk. She hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know, or at least suspect. But her words had solidified things for me. I wouldn’t run. I couldn’t run. Not after what these people had done to my parents. To Beck. To millions of other people.
“Rory?” North’s voice was muffled through the headphones. I pulled them from my ears, letting them drop onto the desk. “What did she say?”
I just shook my head.
“Is she really on our side?”
“More than that,” I said, hoarse from the tears. “Everything she’s done, she’s done for me. She promised my mom she’d keep me safe.” I pulled the pendant from the laptop and handed it to North. “Can you put the recording on your phone? I want to listen to it again later.”
He nodded. “Of course.” He sat on the edge of Ivan’s desk. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I wiped away my tears. “I want to talk about how we can take those bastards down.”
“Okay, you said you saw a Gnosis server room in your simulation,” North said. “What’d it look like?
I described it in as much detail as I could.
“And what about security?”
“Numerical password and a voice recognition mic.”
“Voice recognition. Yikes. How’d you get through in the simulation?”
“I was her. Tarsus. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but her voice got me through the door.”
North chewed on his lip. “You said she’d be at your initiation, right? If we could get to the room undetected, would she let us in?”
The hope that had all but vanished came surging back. “You have a plan,” I said, leaping to my feet and slamming my knees against the underside of the desk in the process.
“Well, technically it’s your plan,” North replied, the corners of his mouth turning up just a little. “I’m just a sucker for a challenge. Plus, the timing is just too perfect. It feels like a gift.”
“What do you mean?”
“The utility companies are shutting off the power grid tomorrow afternoon to protect the transformers from the solar storm. Gnosis claims its systems are grid-independent, so its taking its servers off the grid at midnight tonight.”
“Why?”
“So they’ll keep running during the blackout, I guess. The utilities are saying that power could be out for twenty-four hours.”
“God forbid that people be without Lux for that long,” I said sarcastically.
“The good news for us is that the entire Gnosis system will be offline tonight from midnight to two a.m. eastern for maintenance.”
“Including Lux,” I said. I felt my pulse pick up.
North nodded. “Which means if we can get this done while the servers are down, we might be able to do it undetected.”
“But won’t people be in the server room during that time? Like, working or whatever?”
“I doubt it,” North replied. “It’s freezing in server rooms, and super loud. And it’s not like Gnosis employees need to be in the room to access the servers anyway—they can get in through the company’s internal network.”
My heart was racing now. “Oh my gosh. We could really pull this off.”
“There’s still a lot to figure out,” North cautioned. “Assuming Tarsus can get us past security, we’d still have to find the terminal, and then I’d have to—”
“The terminal. What is that?”
“The entry point for the system. A machine with a keyboard and a screen. It’s how you—”
I cut him off again. “I saw it. Three screens, a glass desk that looked like a giant touchpad. It was surrounded in copper mesh.”
“Okay, so we found the terminal,” North said. “But we still don’t know how tight the security is on the machine itself. And we won’t know until we get in there.”
“Not we,” I corrected. “I. I’m doing this alone.”
“Like hell you are,” North scoffed. “First of all, there’s no way you could pull this off without me. What we’re talking about is a figure-it-out-once-I’m-in-there kind of thing. I couldn’t tell you how to do this even if I wanted to. Not until I see it. Second, I love you way too much to let you walk into that place alone.”
With a sharp pang, I realized this might be my last chance to say it back. Though I was forcing myself to ignore it, I couldn’t shake the awareness of just how dangerous this plan of ours really was. “I love you too,” I said softly. “But how will we possibly get you in there?”
“Liam always brings you in, right? In a hooded robe?” North shrugged. “I’ll be Liam.”
“If they catch you—”
“They won’t catch me. And so what if they do? You said there’s the serpent, an owl, and a fox, right? With Tarsus on our side, it’s three against two.”
The knot in my stomach loosened a little. North’s confidence was contagious.
“The only question is, how do we take Liam out of commission for a couple of hours?” North asked.
“We roofie him,” I said without hesitation. “It’ll incapacitate him without killing him, and it’ll screw with his memories.”
“Oh, okay. I’ll just grab the bottle of date-rape pills I have in my medicine cabinet.”
“Not pills,” I corrected. “Has to be injectable. There’s no way we can guarantee that he’ll drink whatever we put it in.”
North gave me an incredulous look. “You’re actually serious?”
“What? It’s what the society uses. And it’ll do exactly what we need it to do.”
North tugged at his Mohawk. “I know we don’t have time to get into this right now, but, holy crap, Rory, this shit is seriously messed up.”
“You’re right. Not the time. We have to go buy roofies.”
“Where, at Walgreens? I’m sure we’ll find them right next to the Advil.”
I crossed my arms, irritated by the sarcasm. “You’re a guy with a Mohawk and tattoos. Don’t you know people?”
“People with Rohypnol?”
“So you don’t know anyone who can get it?”
He started to shake his head but seemed to think of something. “One of my clients is a pharmacist in Greenfield. I could probably get a prescription sleeping serum from him. Something potent but legal. I can message him from my apartment.”
“We need to fill Hershey in anyway,” I said, grabbing the laptop and headphones.
We thanked Ivan and hurried out. After a quick stop at Paradiso to tell Kate that North wouldn’t be coming back to work, we headed up to North’s apartment with coffee and one of every pastry in the café’s glass case.
“Hershey?” I called out when we stepped inside. But the living room was quiet.
“She’s with mystery boy,” North said. “She came by this morning for her bag. She said she was gonna stay at his place for a few days.” His place. So he definitely didn’t live on campus. Or with his parents.
I gnawed on the inside of my bottom lip. My boyfriend didn’t go to Theden or live with his parents. That didn’t make him a psycho killer. Hershey had been hooking up with this guy, whoever he was, for a while. He wasn’t a stranger. And she was Hershey. She could take care of herself.