I tried to forget the girl and the dreams. I didn’t need the distraction. The only real lead I had was whatever Spud could find.
Now with a wrapped-up finger to add to my already wrapped-up knife wound on my arm, avoiding attention seemed impossible. I went downstairs and nonchalantly poured a bowl of cereal. Alli sat cross-legged on the couch with her own bowl, watching TV.
“Trying out as a mummy?” she asked, spotting the new gauze immediately. There was no getting past her. I tried to give her a sliver of a smile so she wouldn’t think anything was wrong. My acting skills were deteriorating though.
“You look like a mess,” she told me.
“Why thank you, Miss Positivity,” I replied, pouring the milk. “Anything else I need to know about myself?”
“You eat little kid cereal,” she said, stirring hers and taking a bite.
“I prefer my breakfast to have cinnamon, not just raisins and flakes,” I retorted and began to shovel food in. This proved to be a bit more difficult than usual with gauze wrapped around my finger, but I managed.
“Any more dreams?” Alli asked without warning, and at first I had trouble swallowing down the food in my mouth. I debated not telling her, but I knew she’d see right through that.
“Yeah, maybe,” I told her without commitment to elaborate.
“And you said I need a therapist,” she said, grinning. She shook her head.
“Same stuff as last time?” she asked. I did a small nod-and-shrug combination.
“Somewhat,” I said. “Running again, at least. But this time there was a girl.”
I knew that would set Alli off. I heard her legs scratching across the couch cushions as she pulled them under her, turning to face me, completely ignoring whatever was on the TV now. I grinned because I couldn’t help it.
“A real girl?” Alli said, sounding out a fake gasp. “She must have been coming to kill you.”
“Can’t I be around a girl and you not think she has ulterior motives?” I protested. Alli shook her head. She had a point. I bit into my food with a sense of vengeance.
“No,” I told Alli. “She was actually running with me. Are you a dream expert now?”
Alli gave me an unamused look. “Well everyone knows dreams reflect what you obsess over in real life.” She shrugged. “Creeper.”
I certainly wasn’t about to tell her that the girl who’d been in my dream had been dead for nearly a week. So I sniffed at her and washed my bowl out, and left.
I started on foot in the direction of Spud’s house. His was only a short distance from mine, a left on the corner of Hogan Lane then a few blocks of sidewalk, the streets still lonely due to the weekend’s late-sleepers. He lived in one of Arleta’s rare two-story places, painted dark blue with fake white shutters. In contrast to my mom’s small and progressively dying garden, his mother’s covered about half of their front yard, with nearly-bursting tomatoes and an assortment of vegetables. His parents were invested in being energy efficient: skylights and solar panels cut into a roof of temperature-reflective metal. Spud’s truck was parked across the street, a distance he’d probably been hoping would get him indoors undetected the night before. I envied him having parents who slept like rocks.
I knocked softly on the front door. He was there in seconds.
“You’re up early,” I said.
“I don’t know if I even slept last night,” he returned, but he didn’t look entirely defeated and that gave me hope. He led me upstairs through upholstered couches and traffic-flattened orange carpet, a finger to his lips as we passed the rooms shared by his seven siblings, then his parents’ door, then his grandmother’s door, and finally to his.
Spud’s bedroom was even more of a wreck than my own. Instead of camera equipment, though, his was packed to every wall with parts of computers and old video game consoles. If any collector were to creep about—if they could, seeing as there were very few places to step—they would have been greeted by countless old Ataris, Segas in color and monochrome Game Boys, and tons of other gaming systems and circuit boards I couldn’t identify. In the corner was an old arcade system with a busted screen, the sides advertising a fighting game whose image was defaced in marker and pen from years of abuse by teenagers. For a moment, I wasn’t watching where I was going and nearly tripped over a pizza box that had wires coming out of it.
“Careful!” Spud warned in a whisper. He produced a folding chair from against the wall and slid things aside with his foot until there was a space for it. I sat next to him in front of a computer monitor—it was one screen in a row of eight, the others dormant.
“So,” he began, “I don’t have the news I was hoping for. But I do have something good.”
He clicked on a window he’d lowered, bringing up a web browser with at least twenty tabs open. He shuffled through them until he found the site we’d discovered the night before. It appeared different when it wasn’t on the tiny screen of my phone, but still bore its scant decoration and barely-understandable pieces of text. He clicked a link and brought up the login screen that had denied us before.
“I couldn’t break through it after all,” he said. “They’ve got some federal-banking level encryption in there—the stuff governments use. Nothing I have can smash through it. I even tried—” he paused, seeing my blank expression, and sighed. “Never mind, you won’t understand it. But basically, we’re not getting in.”
“I thought you had good news,” I said.
He held up a finger to silence me. “I couldn’t get in, but you also asked me to find out who’s running the site,” he continued. “It’s this guy here.”
He pointed to a line that appeared in dark gray beneath the post titles. I hadn’t noticed it before because my screen had been so small. In tiny letters it said “POSTED BY: THE EXPOSITOR”.
“That’s not much help,” I said with a hint of dissatisfaction. Again, Spud waved his finger.
“Take a hint from this site,” he said gruffly. He pointed to the words at the top of the website. “Only. Those. Who. Listen. Shall. Hear. What. Is. True. It’s telling you to shut up.”
“You’re way too smug to have not cracked anything,” I said, lifting an eyebrow. He nodded. He enjoyed feeling like a genius.
“I couldn’t get through the passwords, and I couldn’t find out who owned the site—all the domain ownership information was private. But I found something while digging in the pages.”
He scrolled to the bottom, clicking a link to go back a page of posts. He did this again, three more times, until he reached blogs that had been posted two months before we’d visited. He stopped the scrollbar halfway down the page, showing the beginning of a post titled INERTIAL PROPULSION, and a photograph before the thin paragraph of text.
“Some of these posts,” Spud said, “have a picture uploaded and embedded into the top of the article. Since they show up before it cuts off and forces the login, I can actually see some of these pictures. Look really close.”
I leaned in toward the screen. The photograph was plain, simply a snapshot of a piece of paper with words typed on it, the stationary sitting unfolded on a desk against a blue wall. I couldn’t read the words because the picture was too small to see the miniature typeface.
“I don’t understand what it is,” I told Spud.
“It’s one of the letters,” Spud said excitedly. “Look, this guy—the Expositor—he keeps mentioning up and down this site that he’s getting letters from someone called Anon. That’s his informant. Someone who knows about all this secret government stuff and keeps mailing the blogger info about it.”