“Of course.” His face softens. “But you’re part of this struggle too. Believe in the light, but don’t forget to believe in yourself.” He swishes his glass of half-melted ice, then crushes a yawn with his fist. “It’s late.”
She can’t sleep. Not after what’s happened. Not while her sister is gone. A few hours ago Lela went off on some errand she wouldn’t disclose, saying only that she had questions that needed answering. But she’d be back, she promised, before dawn. When Cheryl said, “I’ll wait up for you,” Lela said, “Don’t do that.” But she will. She doesn’t dare fall sleep, as though shutting her eyes will snuff her sister out.
“If you’re going to bed, can I use your computer?” she says to Juniper. She has appointments stacked up all next week at the social services agency where she works. Those cases will now have to be relegated to someone else, because there’s no way in hell she’s leaving her daughter’s side after what’s happened.
“You should sleep. I’ll let you use my laptop in the morning.”
She snatches his glass and tips it back, the cubes knocking against her teeth, the meltwater at once chilling her mouth and burning it with the residue of whisky. “I’m sorry I threw the Bible at you.” She picks it up off the floor and neatens its pages and slides it back on the shelf. “Please, can I use your computer?”
“Fine, fine, fine.” He rubs his eyes tiredly and splits open his laptop and logs his password and stands from his chair and motions to it. “I’m going to go pass out now.” He pauses in the doorway. “There’s a pretty hefty firewall on there, so your browsing might be limited.”
“I just need to email.”
“Should be fine, then. But if it isn’t, don’t wake me up.”
He leaves her there—closing the door behind him—and she is overcome by loneliness. A part of her is maddened by him, and another part of her wants to follow him into bed. It’s been years since she had sex, and she doesn’t particularly miss it—it always felt compulsory and unclean to her. But on this, the most fucked-up day of her life, she can’t help but ache for the comfort of having someone beside her, a warm body that feels like a pillow and defense. She wants him, she wants God, she wants her sister. Someone, anyone, to offset the emptiness inside her.
She opens up the browser and logs in to her email and sees the twenty or so new messages in her inbox. Some from clients, some from friends, others spam. She fires off several missives to clients and her fellow case managers, informing them she’ll be out of the office this coming week due to an unexpected illness in the family. She thanks them for understanding and apologizes for the trouble and reminds them that someone will have to make the home visit to Donna, one of her elderly shut-ins. She writes “Sorry” five times. She knows she says the word too often, but in this case it feels warranted.
The clock reads 3:00 a.m. She’s in a daze at this point, only half-awake, her peripheral vision fogged up and her balance wobbly. So she isn’t thinking clearly when the laptop chimes and another email pops into view. She doesn’t recognize the sender—[email protected]—but she opens it anyway because of the subject line,YOUR SISTER’S FAULT. There is nothing in the body of the message except an attachment, a .wmv file that loads into a media player.
At first she doesn’t understand what she sees—the picture appears smeared with black grit—but then something comes into focus. A sign. The Weary Traveler. The shelter they’re staying at now. The lamp beside the door glows orange. A few moths flit beside it, battering the glass. A hand emerges then, a hand that belongs to whoever controls the camera, black-gloved. It reaches into the open-bottomed square of glass and twists the bulb until it darkens. The hand drops to the doorknob. A gentle twist. Locked. The camera continues around the side of the building, down an alley, until it comes to a lighted window. In the dining room, Hannah lies on a table. The group of them huddle around her. The woman, Sarin, leans in as if to give mouth-to-mouth. Hannah’s body tenses and Cheryl screams and reaches for her, while Juniper holds her back. Here the video goes dark. She checks the feed and sees that it hasn’t paused but ended.
She doesn’t realize that she opened more than a video when she clicked on the attachment. Within the program another was hidden. An .exe application. The computer hums as the Trojan sets to work, disengaging the firewall and eating its way through the hard drive. It does not limit itself to these files, but streams through the Ethernet cable that plugs into the walls and in a manner of seconds overrides the larger system. The mainframe forfeits control.
Before she has finished the video—its time signature thirty seconds—the security system disengages. Next to the front entry, the red light on the alarm blinks, blinks, blinks, and then goes dark. A moment later the locks disengage, all over the building, their combined shuck sounding like a giant pistol hammer cocked. This includes the lower levels, the space beneath the basement that houses Cheston.
That’s when the computer screen goes dark, as if snuffed by a hard wind. “What the . . .” she says, and strikes the keyboard repeatedly.
A script appears, lit red, running swiftly from the top to the bottom of the screen and scrolling down. She leans in to try to make sense of it. Her body stiffens and her mouth slackens and her eyes reflect the code as if it is her own blood circuitry.
What happens next is out of her control. She is separate from herself. She belongs to the worm that possesses her and now the shelter. She does not know that she opens the desk drawer and wraps her fingers around a long-bladed letter opener shaped like a serpent. She does not know that she rises from the chair and walks slowly from the office and into Juniper’s chambers. She does not know that she stands over him in the dark. She does not know that he murmurs awake and reaches for her as if expecting a naked body. She does not know that she knifes him again and again and again until he goes still. She does not know that she descends one set of stairs, and then another, and then another, beyond the basement, to the room below. She does not know that she frees the man named Cheston from his constraints or that he pets her hair and nibbles her ear and says, “Thank you,” before snapping her neck.
Chapter 18
WHEN LELA CALLED DANIEL, he said, “I tried to leave you three voicemails to see how you were doing, but your phone is full,” and she said, “It’s been full for years. I can’t figure out how to delete them,” and he sputtered out an “Oh,” and a “dear,” and an “I see,” before saying that he had some answers and she ought to meet him in the Rare Book Room at Powell’s tomorrow morning, first thing.
“Tonight,” she said.
“Tonight?” A huffing pause. “You can’t be—but I’m already home. I’m in my pajamas, if you must know.”
“I thought you slept in a jacket and tie.”
“What? Why would I do that? I don’t under—”