The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (41 page)

“But have you
seen
it?
Have you looked carefully for the patterns that might live in the characters?”

“Why don’t you just tell me what
you’ve figured out?”

Carolyn snatched the paper back
from Jill.

“Q, N, K, R, and B are the only
letters that appear in upper case,” Carolyn said, clearly excited at this
discovery. “Letters A through H appear in lower case. Where are the rest of the
letters? Why write a secret code that doesn’t take advantage of the whole
alphabet?”

“I don’t know, Mom.”

“And only numbers one through
eight show up. Where’s nine?”

“Perhaps seven ate him,” Jill
said.

Carolyn looked at her like she
had just said something offensive.

“It’s a joke. Seven, eight…don’t
worry about it.”

“And why don’t two digits ever
appear together?” Carolyn went on. “And why don’t two uppercase letters ever
appear together? The pattern is so clear. Upper case letter, lower case letter,
number. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know, Mom.”

Carolyn threw her head back and
grunted. “Why is this so hard?” she snapped. “What are we missing?”

“Maybe we’re not missing
anything,” said Jill. “Maybe it can’t be solved.”

“
Anything
can be solved.
Somewhere, at some point, somebody thought up the routines that created this
encryption code. We need to think like that somebody. If I wanted to hide an
entire partition of my phone, what would I do?”

Carolyn started rocking back and
forth in her chair. “What would I do? What would I do?” she said.

Jill’s phone buzzed with an incoming
text. It was from Mattie, reminding her it was time to go shop for Annika’s
birthday present.

“I have to go,” Jill said.

“What would I do? What would I
do?” With a sudden movement, Carolyn stopped muttering and looked up at Jill.
“What would you do?”

“Me? Mom, I--”

“Before you leave you must
answer that question,” Carolyn said. “Pretend your phone is divided in two. On
one partition of the hard drive, you’ve created a decoy operating system where
you live out the most boring parts of your life. On another partition, you’ve
hidden the rest of your phone, where you have your most secret, secure
correspondence. You need to create an encryption routine to hide that secret
partition. How would you do it?”

“I’d do exactly what Renata’s
done, Mom. I would create an encryption routine so strong that nobody could
hack it.”

“But how? The encryption code
changes every day in no discernible pattern. None of my codebreaking software
can figure it out. How do they do it?”

“Some random number--”

“No! My software can beat any
random number generator! What they are doing with the code is so unpredictable
my computers can’t figure it out.”

“Then it must be manual,” Jill
said. “Somehow, Renata must be doing something to that phone every day to
manually change the encryption code.”

“Yes, yes, I think you’re right.
I wonder what it is, though. What is she doing?”

“Chew on it for a while, Mom.
I’m going shopping.”

The glass on her prison cell
destroyed, Falkon moved Nicky into one of the guest rooms of his house.

“I trust we won’t have any more
incidents,” Falkon said. “Mr. Jenson is still sleeping soundly, but I would be
happy to change his circumstances should I have any more trouble from you.”

“I had nothing to do with what
happened,” said Nicky. “You know that, don’t you?”

“I do,” said Falkon. “Your
mother…well, I can see now that putting you in a cell directly underneath hers
was a mistake. I was curious to see if you two made a connection. I never would
have foreseen that she could break out of her cell.”

With a double bed, a bathroom, a
window, and a bookcase full of classics, the guest room was quite an upgrade
from Nicky’s prison cell. Not that she would be awake during her stay. As they
entered the room, Nicky saw a member of Falkon’s staff standing in the back, a
syringe in his hand.

“We will do a small dose,”
Falkon said. “You will wake up in a few days. We’ll talk then.”

Nicky lay down in the bed and
stretched her hair back over the pillow.

“Sweet dreams, Nicky,” Falkon
said, then the servant injected her with Addonox and she went straight to
sleep.

The nightmare began immediately.

Nicky, wake up. We’re going
for a car ride.

It was her dad. He looked down
on her with a sweet smile on his face.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“It’s very early,” he said. “So
we have to be extra quiet.”

“Is Mom home?”

“Your mother is still working,
Sweetie. She’ll meet us on the way out.”

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise.”

Her father drove them to the
bottom of the road and turned off the car.

“We’re going to sit here and
wait for your mother. If you want, you could lay down back there and go to
sleep.”

“That’s okay, Dad. I’m not tired
anymore.”

“Alright. Well, your mother
should be here in a few minutes.”

They waited. And waited. A few
minutes stretched into an hour. “You just sit tight, Baby,” her dad said. “I’ll
go up the road and see if she’s coming. I’ll be back soon.”

She watched him hike up the road
and disappear into the woods. A few minutes passed. Then a few minutes more.

Nicky decided to get out of the
car and follow him.

At the top of the road, Nicky
found her dad standing in the middle of the courtyard. He was next to the
sculpture of the silver sphere.

“Nicky, what are you doing
here?” he whispered. “You were supposed to stay in the car.”

“I was bored!” Nicky said. “When
are we leaving?”

“Shhh! You have to be quiet. Go
back to the car.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

“Alright then, stay here, but be
absolutely silent!”

Nicky sighed. She walked up to
the sculpture. With snow on the ground and a bright moon in the sky, there was
enough light in the air to see her reflection. She liked how it warped in the
round surface of the sphere.

Nicky’s mother emerged from the
bottom floor of the brick building where she worked.

“There she is,” her father said.
“Okay, Nicky. Let’s get ready to go.”

Something was wrong. Her mother
was running. She looked winded. When she saw Nicky, a look of panic came over
her face.

“Run, Nicky! Fast as you can!
Run!”

And now the creatures came out.
A dozen of them, gray-faced and snarling and hard to look at.

There was one who was smaller
than the rest. He was the size of a kid. His body was slim. His face was round.

He looked at Nicky. Just half a
second in time, caught forever in her memory. Nicky was looking at Robin Allen,
her big brother.

Falkon Dillinger leaped up from
the shadows below. “Celeste!” he yelled. “What have you done?”

Nicky’s father reached for her
hand. It was time for them to run into the forest. Time for the memory to come
to an end. Nicky grabbed onto her father and disappeared into the woods.

The scene started over again,
but now Nicky saw it through a new set of eyes. She was Celeste Amanda Allen,
going over the escape plan with her husband.

“Wake Nicky up at midnight,” she
said. “Have the car packed and ready to go. Meet me at the bottom of the hill
at twelve-thirty.”

“Do you think Falkon will notice
that we’re leaving?”

“Falkon will have his hands
full.”

Celeste left the house and
headed to the lab.

Five years after Falkon
transformed her son into a feral vampire, Celeste had given up hope of somehow
turning him back. She was certain now that there was no path from vampire back
to human. The evolution only moved in one direction. Robin had ceased being
human. He could either die as a feral vampire, or move up the chain, becoming
an immortal like Falkon.

Celeste and Robin were in
agreement about which path was best for him.

She entered a 6-digit code on a
keypad to open a door to the specimen room. Robin sat quietly in the back of
his cell. When he saw his mother, he approached and put his hands on the glass.

She did the same.

Falkon didn’t know that Celeste
could still communicate with her son. To Falkon, Robin and the others were just
rabid animals. He never considered that a human might still be buried inside.
He never made an effort to look.

It had become a nightly ritual
for Celeste to put her hands on the glass and share her mind with her son. On
this night, she told him he was getting out.

I’m leaving tonight, Robin.
You know what you have to do.

They looked at each other, both
of them understanding what happened next. They had planned for this night
together.

Another door and another 6-digit
code took her to the computer room. More than a hundred machines networked
together, their combined computing power all focused on a single task. The
experiments controlled and recorded by these machines were vast and
complicated, but the sabotage Celeste had planned was simple.

One letter. That’s all she
needed to change. One letter out of a hundred billion.

Over the past five years, while
Celeste had continued her research under Falkon’s watchful eye, she had also
written a back door into the software that ran these computers. She had given
herself access to break deep into the software and do the unthinkable.

She stood at the terminal and
entered a series of commands that gave her access to the genetic sequence
stored on these machines. She waited for the entire sequence to appear on her
screen. Letters pouring out, faster than the eye could make sense of them. Base
pairs of the most complex DNA sequence on earth. The genetic code of a vampire
recorded as letters of the alphabet.

When the entire sequence was
there, she moved the cursor over the last letter on the screen, and changed it
from a T to an S.

Alarms began to sound in the
lab. Experiments that had been running for years were no longer working. In a
matter of seconds, the entire operation ground to a halt.

Celeste left the computer room
and went back to the prison. She stood at the control station in front of the
prisoners, looking through the glass cages. One more six digit code, this one
typed onto a numeric keypad built into the desk. As she pressed the final
digit, the glass doors of every prison cell began to open.

Now she ran. She ran through the
hall on the lower deck, exiting the building at the bottom of the hill.

“Celeste!”

The alarms had drawn Falkon out
of his home. He came bounding down the side of the mountain. He would be on her
in seconds.

“Celeste! What have you done?”

And then Celeste saw her,
standing at the silver sphere, gazing at her own reflection.

Living her mother’s memory,
Nicky was looking at herself through her mother’s eyes.

“Run, Nicky! Fast as you can!
Run!”

Celeste barely got the words out
before Falkon was on top of her, his face overcome with rage.

“What have you done?” he
shouted. “What have you done?”

“I’ve ended it,” she said. “Your
project is finished.”

His fangs bared, the anger in
his eyes out of control, Falkon looked like he might kill her at that moment. But
he didn’t have the chance. With Robin in the lead, a horde of angry monsters
descended on Falkon Dillinger. Celeste got caught in the melee. Fangs and claws
cut into her skin. She fell to the ground. The final vision Nicky saw through
her mother’s eyes was a pack of feral vampires chasing Falkon into the woods.

The vision ended and started
over again at the beginning. Nicky was back at the sphere, looking at her own reflection.

Nicky resigned herself to going
through all of it again.
It will be on an endless loop until I wake up
,
she told herself.
I have to be patient. Eventually, it will end.

In the vision, she turned to see
her mother coming out of the building. She waited for her father to arrive.

“Is this it?” came a familiar
voice from behind her. “Is this the truth you came here to seek?”

She turned away from the sphere
and saw Sergio Alonzo standing in the snow.

“What are you doing here?” she
asked.

“I’ve come to take you home,” he
said. “That is, if you’d like to go.”

“I would love to go home,” Nicky
said. “How do we do it? How do I get out of here?”

“The first step is simple,”
Sergio said. “You have to wake up.”

Nicky opened her eyes. She was
back in Falkon’s guest room, her head on a pillow, her body drenched in sweat.

“Well, that certainly was an
interesting dream.”

She rolled her head toward the
voice, and found Sergio Alonzo standing next to the bed, looking down at her.

“Are you ready to go?” he asked.

The dizziness. The weakness. The
desire to inhale deeply and take in his scent. This was her third encounter
with Sergio Alonzo, but the first where she was glad to see him.

She sat up in bed. Her body
ached with exhaustion.

“Have you found what you were
looking for?” Sergio said.

The question took her back to
the Date Auction, to the moment when Sergio entered her dressing room. She
heard his voice telling her about what he’d seen in her mind.

The scene of your memory is
in the Italian Alps. You are standing in front of a building I know quite well
.

Nicky lifted her legs. They were
numb and moved slowly. Gently, Sergio grabbed onto her ankles and helped her
move to the edge of the bed.

“Why…”

That was all she could get out.
Her throat was dry. Her mind was slow. Her own voice sounded foreign to her
ears.

“Why am I here?” Sergio asked.
“Curiosity, mostly. I was surprised to see a memory of this place in your mind.
How did you ever come to be connected to this dreadful house?”

Nicky edged forward on the bed,
letting her feet touch the floor.

“It’s a long story,” she said.

“I look forward to hearing it
someday. Come. We must move.”

Sergio extended his hand. As
Nicky grabbed onto it, she felt a surge of energy from his touch, giving her
strength to stand.

“We’ll go out the back door,”
Sergio whispered. “This way.”

“Wait,” Nicky said, holding him
in place. “I can’t leave. I made a promise.”

“A promise?”

“To my mother.”

Sergio smiled. “You are such a
mystery,” he said.

“It’s--”

“A long story, I know,” Sergio
said.

“I have to go to the lab.”

Sergio looked at her for a
second, and she felt naked in his gaze.

“Alright then,” he said. “Far be
it from me to make you break your promise. I will come with you.”

“This doesn’t concern you,”
Nicky said. “But you could help Ryan. He needs someone like you. He’s been
commanded to sleep. You could wake him up. We could get--”

“I am not here to help Mr.
Jenson,” Sergio said. “But I am interested to see what Falkon is doing in his
laboratory. If you know how to get in there--”

“I do,” Nicky said. “At least, I
think I do.”

“I enjoy your company, Nicky
Bloom. You are full of surprises. Please, lead the way.”

Nicky closed her eyes and took a
deep breath. Her mother’s voice echoed softly in her mind.

You have to finish, Nicky.
You have to finish what I started.

Nicky looked around her. She
didn’t know the way to the lab, but Celeste did. Celeste had many memories of
walking down this hall.

Nicky moved her own thoughts out
of the way and let the memory take control. She led Sergio down the hall, to
the stairs, down a long corridor, and to a glass door with a numeric keypad on
the wall.

She typed in a 6-digit code and
the door opened.

“You have just made yourself at
home here, haven’t you?” Sergio said.

Nicky ignored him, allowing the
memory to carry her further.

She put her feet on a path her
mother had walked many times.
Across this corridor, down these stairs, the
second door on the left
.

Nicky entered another six-digit
code and opened a door to the prison where Falkon had held her for so long. Or,
using the name her mother had for the place, the specimen room.

Even in total darkness, the
ferals sensed their presence and began screaming from inside their cages.

“What a unique and unusual
place,” Sergio said. He approached the wall of cages. Nicky tried to tune out
the noise and listen to the memory.

Which way do I go Mom? How do
I get to the computer room from here?

She was searching through the
memories when the lights came on. The ferals were furious at the change and
began banging against the walls of their cells. Thinking Sergio had done it,
Nicky turned back to tell him to turn them off again.