She added that last part because a car was driving past. Lynne and I both immediately lurched inward, almost clunking heads.
“But I don’t know Russian!” Lynne protested quietly. Both of us had our cheeks pressed against the vinyl seats, our hair covering our faces.
“You’ll have to pretend,” I said grimly.
“Tell me what to say!” Lynne pleaded.
“Shh,” I said.
In the front Rona was giving Jacques directions in Crythian. Their voices were muffled and, I realized, Rona’s accent was bad. But I could mostly follow their conversation.
“We’ll go to Sophia’s apartment,” Rona said. “We can hide there and get the girl to translate.”
“And then you’ll help me?” Jacques said quietly.
“Of course,” Rona said impatiently. “I’ll fix you right up. After you carry through on your end of the bargain.”
I didn’t want to think about whatever it was that Jacques had agreed to do. I already had enough suspicions. As Jacques pulled away from the curb I started quickly telling Lynne exactly what to say about my father’s forged notes.
“How am I supposed to remember all that?” Lynne protested.
“Well it’d be natural if you stumbled some,” I said. “Just remember to ask for the computer first.”
Lynne was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “I feel like the girl in ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’”
“Huh?” I said.
“You know, the one whose dad said she could spin straw into gold.”
I had to grin behind my curtain of hair. Trust Lynne—even under threat of death, she was coming up with the kinds of analogies and allusions teachers loved.
Then my grin faded. Threat of death. Lynne knew. She knew the girl in the fairy tale would have been killed if she hadn’t produced the gold, and she knew she was going to be killed if she couldn’t fake knowing Russian.
“What if they figure out that the paper doesn’t really say what I’m telling them?” Lynne asked.
“Oh, but it does,” I said. “I know. I wrote it.”
Lynne raised her face from the seat just enough to peer curiously at me.
“Since when do you know Russian?” she asked.
“Since you hypnotized me on the plane,” I said.
We stopped talking while Jacques waited at a traffic light. As soon as the car accelerated again and the engine was loud enough to cover the sound of our whispers, Lynne said, “You can’t do this to me! You’ve got to explain how I—”
But Jacques was pulling into our gravel driveway just then. Lynne bit off her question, clamped her mouth shut. I turned my head slightly so I could see the view out the window: familiar willow branches, our neighbor’s cream-colored siding.
I had never been so conscious before of how close our house was to the house next door. Mrs. Dotson had said everyone in town was talking about Mom and me disappearing—what if one of the neighbors heard the car and came to welcome us home or (more likely) to try to find out where we’d been? Rona was not exactly in a neighborly mood. The best we could hope for was that she’d take more hostages, instead of shooting.
Wanting to protect all my neighbors in Willistown, I understood better than ever how my parents had felt about their fellow Crythians.
“Okay. Everybody out,” Rona ordered us. “Up the stairs quickly. Kira, do you have the key?”
Miraculously, I still did. I let us all in. I steeled myself against remembering how naive I’d been, leaving home with Rona only the night before. The phone still sat askew on the window ledge, right where I’d left it when I’d been too stupid to call the police.
But if I had called the police the night before, what would have happened to Mom?
Rona saw me eyeing the phone. She pulled the jack out of the wall.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she warned me.
We sat on the living-room floor, away from all the windows. Rona thrust the envelope at Lynne.
“Kira says you can read Russian. Tell me what this says,” she demanded.
Lynne squinted at the envelope.
“The writing’s really bad,” she muttered. She sounded like she was really offended, not just stalling for time. “But here goes. First, you have to have the special computer—”
Rona swore.
“Those were supposed to be the directions for building the special computer!” she yelled. “Aren’t there notes about that?”
Lynne looked up, slightly annoyed, a scholar interrupted in her studies. I was terrified that Lynne was going to carry this act a little too far.
“Mom has a special computer,” I said quickly.
“Huh?” Lynne said, too fast. She was startled into an honest reaction.
“Well, I don’t know if it’s the right one. I’ve seen it only once or twice. She never let me use it. She said it was a reminder of my father—this was when I thought she was my real mother, you know…. I thought it was just a sentimental thing.”
“Where’s the blasted computer?” Rona exploded.
I tilted my head to the side. This was my imitation of a not-very-bright kid doing her best to think. Lynne glared. She probably thought I was overacting.
“Out in the car?” I hazarded.
I really wasn’t sure. I just remembered the strange look on Mom’s face, back in Crythe, when she was talking about me driving the car to Lynne’s. I said before that claiming that Lynne knew Russian was my biggest gamble, but this was actually bigger.
Probably I’d decide that at every step of my plan. The whole thing was touch and go.
I didn’t like to think about that.
“Show me,” Rona said. She was so tense, she barely moved her lips.
We left Lynne with Jacques again, and I led Rona down to the old garage behind the house.
As soon as I saw the car, I was flooded with memories. My parents had bought this car soon after they came to the United States; they’d used it every day for years to drive between Crythe and their computer jobs. Between worlds. They’d worked out a lot of their plans sitting in those two front seats.
I ached, remembering a time before I was even born.
I also remembered my father hiding the car down the hill from Crythe, the night Mom and I escaped. He’d stashed one thing in the trunk: the shoe box I’d retrieved from Mom’s safe-deposit box. The computer disks inside it contained the copied memories of every single person in Crythe.
I knew that when my father had copied his own memories into my mind, he fully intended to send Mom away with both the laptop computer and me. I was certain he wouldn’t have changed his mind. And I was certain that Mom would never have thrown the computer away. I’d searched the apartment, and it wasn’t there. So it had to still be in the car. Didn’t it?
“Where is it?” Rona asked suspiciously.
She had her gun out again. I suddenly realized that she thought I had a weapon hidden out here.
Why hadn’t I thought to hide a weapon out here, oh, say, a night or two ago?
But I needed Rona alive, to tell the Crythians not to kill Mom.
I unlocked the car door, and it swung open with a rusty creak. The seats were empty. I felt around on the floor. Nothing. I opened the trunk. Still nothing. I looked under the mat where the spare tire should have been. Nothing again. I went back to the front of the car and peeked in the glove compartment, even though it was too small to hold even a laptop. All I found there was another key to our apartment.
“Well?” Rona snarled.
I snatched up the key my fingers closing around the jagged edge. Then a funny thing happened. I could tell without looking that the indentations on this key were different from the ones on my apartment key. I never would have said it was possible to memorize the feel of grooves on a key but I had.
Or my parent’s minds had.
It was scary having my parents’ minds inside my own. Where did they leave off and I begin?
I didn’t have time for philosophical ques
tions. I held up the key and said, with much more confidence than I actually felt, “Mom hid the computer on the third floor of our house. This is the key to the storage area up there.”
“I thought you said the computer was here in the car,” Rona growled.
“I didn’t know Mom moved it,” I argued. “Do you think I can read her mind?”
“What if she moved it more than once? How can you tell that’s the right key? Why didn’t Sophia leave a nice little label, ‘If you’re looking for the special computer, use this’?” Rona demanded mockingly.
I shrugged and didn’t answer. But I dared to turn around and walk out of the garage, hoping that Rona would follow me. I wasn’t sure that she had until I was halfway up the back stairs and I heard her footsteps behind me.
“It had better be there, that’s all I can say,” Rona hissed as we reached the third-floor door.
I put the key in the lock and turned. The door squeaked open. All the windows on the third floor were covered, so the only light came from behind us. It took my eyes a few minutes to adjust to the dimness. At first I thought the room in front of us was totally vacant, nothing but floor and ceiling and walls. Then I saw it, off to the side, the only object my mother had seen fit to put into storage: the computer.
Thirty-Seven
RONA POUNCED ON THE COMPUTER BEFORE I HAD A CHANCE TO move.
“Do you know how long I’ve been looking for this?” she chortled. She hugged the computer to her chest almost tenderly, as if it were a beloved child.
“I thought you just wanted the directions for making it,” I said uneasily.
“Oh, I can figure that out, if I have the model,” she said carelessly. “Come on. I want to try it out.”
“On Jacques?” I said tentatively. For a minute I was afraid that Rona would be magnanimous, helping Jacques instead of herself. I should have known Rona better than that.
“Jacques?” she repeated incredulously. “Of course not. On me!”
We went back down the stairs to our apartment, where Jacques and Lynne were staring at each other, the gun balanced on his knee.
“Okay!” Rona announced gleefully. “Let’s try this baby out. What’s the first step?”
Lynne peered down at the Cyrillic writing.
“Um, you need Sophia’s fingerprint to get into the system. Like a password,” Lynne said.
“What!” Rona exploded. “You’re lying!”
Lynne held up her hands helplessly.
“I’m just reading what it says,” she said innocently.
Rona ripped the envelope out of Lynne’s hand. I congratulated myself on having remembered to draw a finger, complete with realistic whorls, near the computer. I’d written Sophia above it, just to make sure.
Rona lowered the page and glared at me.
“Did you know about this?” she demanded.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I never even heard of Crythe until yesterday. How could I have known anything?” I tried to keep a straight face, as innocent as apple pie.
Maybe I succeeded, because Rona looked back at the paper.
“Sophia!” she said, like a curse. “She knew!”
My heart dropped. I hadn’t anticipated this. Rona was angrier than ever at my mom, and it was all my fault. Why hadn’t I thought of a different plan?
“Wow, Kira,” Lynne said, looking over Rona’s shoulder at the diagram. “Your father was way ahead of his time. He wrote this thirteen years ago, right? Other scientists are just now starting to do fingerprint IDs.”
I groaned inwardly. Lynne and her big mouth. Rona was looking at me suspiciously again.
“How fast can you have the plane ready to go back to Crythe?” she asked Jacques in Crythian.
“Now?” Jacques said. He looked thoroughly exhausted. “It’d take quite a while. I’d have to refuel, check my systems….”
Rona glanced at her watch and grimaced. I forced myself to keep my face blank, but I felt like grimacing too. How could Rona want to go back to Crythe? I’d been banking on her bringing Mom here. Jacques had just flown from Crythe, after flying there only last night. Weren’t there rules about pilots resting between long flights?
Of course, how could I expect Rona to follow any rules?
“Okay. Here’s what we do,” Rona finally said to Jacques, still speaking Crythian. “We get the rest of the document translated, then we kill both girls, hide their bodies, and go back to Crythe.”
My knees went weak, but I had to pretend I didn’t understand. I swayed only slightly. Think, think, think, I commanded myself.
“What if Sophia won’t cooperate?” Jacques asked.
“All we need is her fingerprint,” Rona said impatiently. “She doesn’t even have to be alive for us to get that.”
That sent me over the edge. I jumped at Rona, yanked the computer from her arms, and backed away, holding the computer high over my head. I was fast. By the time Rona had her gun out and pointed at me, I was halfway across the room, standing in front of Lynne like a shield.
“If you squeeze that trigger,” I said, “I’ll drop the computer. You can kill me, but it won’t do you any good.”
I was surprised that my voice came out sounding strong and sure, like Clint Eastwood or Bruce Willis or any of those other hotshot movie stars who probably would have trembled if a gun were pointed at them in real life. I was trembling myself, but it evidently didn’t affect my voice box.
“Now,” I said quickly, before I could realize how scared I really was, “you call Crythe and make arrangements for Mom to be flown here. Because I am holding this computer hostage. You are not getting it back until my mother walks through that door.”
“Kira,” Lynne whispered behind me, “what are you doing? She’s got a gun.”
“And I’ve got the computer. And you’ve got the directions,” I said, without turning around. “She won’t hurt us.”
I held the computer straight up. If I dropped it, it would fall six feet. Was that enough to destroy a laptop computer? I had to convince Rona that it was.
“If you shoot me and I drop this, you’ll never learn my parent’s secrets,” I said, doing my best to sound cool and logical. “Think how long you’ve been waiting. Think how much of your life you would have wasted on this. On nothing. A bunch of scrambled circuitry you could never put back together. Why not play it safe, do what I say?”
Rona still had her gun pointed at me, but I could tell she was wavering. I remembered my father trying to reason with her when she’d found out about his experiments. He’d been naive, trusting her, expecting her to understand that the research he did was just for Crythians, because Crythians were different from other people. He expected a woman who saw herself as alone in the world, with no obligation to anyone, to understand his sense of obligation to an entire village.
She hadn’t understood. And he hadn’t understood her.
But I’d been raised as an American. I understood greed better than my parents had. I knew that Rona saw money when she looked at the computer, nothing else. No moral issues, no ethical dilemmas, no humanitarian concerns. I knew Rona was imagining a fortune crashing to the floor, evaporating on the spot.
“Jacques,” she finally said, “can you find one of your old flying buddies to bring Sophia here?”
“I—I guess so,” he stammered. “You want Howard? George? Or—”
“I don’t care who it is!” Rona snapped.
“Call Crythe,” I commanded. “Tell them not to kill Mom. Tell them to let Mom go.”
Rona glared at me. But slowly, very slowly, she pulled her cell phone out again and began dialing.
Thirty-Eight
GRABBING THE COMPUTER HAD SEEMED LIKE A BRILLIANT IDEA DURING the half second I’d had to think about it before I leaped at Rona. Somehow I’d managed not to dwell on how hard it would be to hold the computer up in the air, threateningly, for hours.
After just ten minutes my arms were aching. If I didn’t concentrate on commanding
my muscles, Stay up, stay up, stay up, I’d find myself lowering the computer down, down, down—and then, horrified, I’d snap it back up again.
Rona didn’t seem to be having any problem at all keeping her gun aimed steadily at my head. She stared just as steadily.
“How did you get so smart all of a sudden?” she asked abruptly, when we’d been glaring at each other in silence for what felt like an eternity. “How did you know that I wasn’t planning to bring Sophia here anyway before you grabbed the computer?”
My arms felt weaker than ever.
“I—I guessed,” I stammered.
“Why is it so important to you to stay here?” she asked.
I couldn’t say, Because I was afraid you’d kill us before you returned to Crythe. I couldn’t say, Because I was afraid you’d kill Mom if I didn’t bargain for her life. My mind flickered on a detail I’d half forgotten: the possibility that the police would come and rescue us at eleven o’clock, if Mrs. Dotson had done what I’d asked her to. Mom would still be in the airplane then. Would she be safe?
I had to hope so. But I couldn’t let Rona see that I had any hopes at all.
“Crythe scared me,” I said flatly. “I didn’t like it there.”
Rona threw back her head and laughed uproariously.
“A bunch of half-wits living in the past?” she asked contemptuously. “The terrified remnants of a failed experiment? Crythe is nothing. Right, Jacques?”
“Huh?” Jacques was practically asleep, huddled against the wall behind her.
“Forget it, Jacques,” Rona said in disgust. We all watched as Jacques’s eyelids drooped again.
“When this is over, I’ll be able to hire the best and brightest again,” Rona said. “Like your parents. Did you know that they used to work for me?”
I did, but I had to pretend that I didn’t.
“Doing what?” I asked.
“Oh, they were my ringers. R and D. Research and Development. I had this little computer company, see, that was up against the big guys. And your parents developed the greatest system, something that would make Bill Gates look like a two-bit idiot. But they had funny ideas about who owned their inventions.” She looked at me sadly. “This is really just about patent rights, intellectual property … business matters.”