Uncaged (24 page)

Inside was a rectangular port. She knew that rectangle: “Thunderbolt,” she said aloud.

A standard computer connection. More critically, she thought, a Thunderbolt connection could feed up to nine watts of power into a target device. That black disk in the dog’s head: Could it be a battery, as Girard had suggested? A power supply for the electronics that fed into his brain?

She took out her cell phone and called Twist. He answered on the third ring, and she asked, “Where are you?”

“Kitchen. Trying to hustle a little food out of—”

“Do you know where you can get a Thunderbolt line? Like a line out to a hard drive?”

He chewed on something for a moment—a carrot, maybe—then said, “Yeah, there are a few of them around.”

“Get a line and get up to the studio. Right now. Right now!”

“Hey. Calm down, I’m—”

“RIGHT NOW,” Shay shouted.

Twist showed up five minutes later carrying the Thunderbolt cable. He said, “I was—”

“Shut up,” Shay said. Twist cocked his head and looked at her. He wasn’t used to taking preemptory orders in his own studio.

“Please,” she added.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Plug your Mac in,” she said. “Use that extension cord, and get over here as close as you can to the dog.”

Twist shrugged and moved to do it. “What’s the plan?” he asked as he started unwinding the coil of extension cord.

Shay was bent over the dog. “I found a Thunderbolt port. I think that the electronics in his brain are powered off a battery—that round black thing we saw on the X-ray. He’s weak because his brain isn’t working. They’ve done something to him that means he needs auxiliary power.”

“You’re going to plug him in? Isn’t that taking a serious risk?”

Shay looked up and said, “Yes. But he’s dying. He’s getting worse every hour. If he dies because I plug him in, he’s no worse off than if he dies because I didn’t.”

Twist plugged the Mac laptop into the extension cord and the
Thunderbolt line into the Mac as he thought it over. “What if they pull some other amount of current?”

“Why would they do that?” Shay asked. “It’s a standard port. You’d just use a standard setup instead of a special one. If the black object is a battery, that means the Thunderbolt doesn’t power the electronics directly, it just recharges that battery.”

“It’s your call,” Twist said.

Shay nodded, took the end of the Thunderbolt cable, bent over the dog, hesitated, then plugged it into the port behind the dog’s ear.

Nothing happened.

“Could take a while,” she said tentatively. She wasn’t sure why she did it, but for the first time, she unbuckled the muzzle strap and pulled the cage off X’s head.

Then they sat and watched, and five minutes after they plugged the dog in, Twist reached out and put his fingers on the femoral artery, just as he had the first time.

He tipped his head and Shay asked, “What?”

“It may be wishful thinking … but it feels stronger to me. Steadier. Like somebody plugged in a pacemaker.”

Another ten minutes. Twist walked back and forth from a half-finished painting to the dog, watching both Shay and the animal.

Fifteen more minutes, and the dog lifted his head off the cushion and his yellow eye fluttered open. He stared up at Shay, who was stroking his neck.

“It’s working,” Twist said. “He seems almost alert …”

Another ten minutes, and the dog’s mechanical eye popped open. The blue was different from before—not faint and watery,
but a deep, dark navy. For several moments, the dog’s gaze stayed locked on hers, and then his tongue slipped out of his mouth and he licked her wrist once, twice.

Shay felt a lump in her throat, and Twist, tapping his paintbrush against his hand, said:

“I think you got yourself a dog.”

She had herself a dog.

The dog’s recovery was remarkable. Over the next two days, X ate everything Shay fed him. He showed some careful pleasure when he encountered Emily, Cruz, Cade, or Twist, but he was Shay’s dog, never more than a few feet from her. Shay went online and read through how-to sites about feeding and handling and exercising a dog.

In the meantime, Twist put up an announcement in the lobby that said:

After that went up, Shay no longer had to sneak X in and out of the hotel.

In some ways, the Twist Hotel was like a big high school, easygoing most of the time, but sometimes not. There were always kids in the halls, talking, laughing, arguing, coming and going. And gossiping.

A number of them thought it unfair that Shay was allowed to keep a dog when they weren’t even allowed to keep a goldfish, and they talked about that, and suggested that maybe there was something going on between Shay and Twist. But there was enough “Hey, you want to live here?” back talk that the gossipers finally gave up, and X was in.

The posters of the immigration action went out, and Twist told Shay that his dealer had sold all of them in a single day.

“We’re today’s fad,” he said as they mixed paint in the studio. “You can’t be a liberal young actor in Hollywood and not have one in your front entry. I’ll get you the cash next week, I think. It takes a while for everything to clear.”

“Is money always this easy?” Shay asked.

“Let’s not overshare,” Twist said, grinning, and handed her a bucket of gesso.

The next morning after breakfast, Shay was sitting on the building’s steps with X because X liked to go outside and exercise his nose. A
man was walking toward them on the sidewalk, a muscled-up guy with a shaved head, in khakis and a minty golf shirt and oversized Ray-Bans. He took Shay in and said, “How you doin’, sweetheart?” He had big white teeth, like Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf.

Shay said “Fine” with the kind of dismissive tone that usually moved people along.

“Fine? That’s all you got for me?”

“That’s all I got,” she said.

“I’ll tell you what …” He stepped closer, not too close, but close enough to create pressure.

X stood up, but not fully up; his hind legs were bunched beneath him like springs, and he looked at the man’s throat and snarled. The snarl was more than just a warning; it was a death threat.

The man, backing away, said, “That dog jumps me, we’ll be in court.”

Shay had a hold on X’s collar, a bit unnerved by his protectiveness but not letting the man know that. “My dog jumps you, I’ll be in court,” she said. “You won’t be.”

The man looked at her face, then at the dog, made a decision, and moved along. And Shay thought he moved … like a man from Singular. Was she becoming paranoid? Maybe. Shay stroked X between the ears and said, “Good boy.”

He licked her chin once, and they went back to people-watching, and sniffing.

Shay worked on the password for the thumb drive. Twist still wasn’t sure there was any point in trying to unlock the contents—and he privately doubted that her brother had been kidnapped—but he did recommend bringing Cade into her confidence.

Cade was fascinated.

“You always had a problem managing the rook ISH.”

Staring at Shay’s laptop screen up in Twist’s studio, he reread the pop-up riddle Odin had linked to the thirty-four-letter password box. She’d already shown him what she’d found when she’d turned to Google for ideas: how when you typed in “ISH,” you’d come up with a lot of business stuff—there was an International Shipholding Corporation with the stock symbol ISH—and dictionaries that defined the suffix
-ish
, as in
girlish
or
boyish
, and there were an improbable number of people named Ish, as either a first or last name.

Cade said, “There’s also
ish
, like when you see something nasty. You know, like people eating octopus sushi.”

“Oh, ish,” Shay said.

“Exactly. But from what you’ve told me about your brother, it’s gotta be something you could figure out, but nobody else could. Thirty-four letters and numbers and symbols … that’s a heck of a password. But with that many letters, if you just get one word right, you’d have the whole idea.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“You said you guys played chess.”

“Sure, but we weren’t serious about it.”

“What was your problem with the rook?”

“I don’t know. We had this book on chess openings at school, and we learned a few, but we were just kids.”

They were sitting shoulder to shoulder on the couch in the studio, the dog at their feet. Cade added, “It’s got to be something from your past life, right? Did you know somebody called Rook, or something like
rook
? Something that rhymes with
rook
? Or how about a castle, a rook is supposed to be a castle, right?”

“When we were really little, my folks took us to Disneyland and
we saw the castle, but that can’t be it. It says ‘managing the rook.’ I never had anything to do with managing a castle. Or anyone named Castle. Or anybody who rhymed with
rook
.…”

They heard the ancient elevator start.

“Aw, shoot,” Cade said. “The boss arrives.”

She could feel his disappointment: he’d wanted to talk. And she hadn’t minded.

The elevator stopped and X stood up, a streak of hair rising on his back. The door split open noisily, Twist pulling on the canvas strap. Seeing the three of them, he said, “Howdy.”

X wuffed a hello, let his tongue slip out and the hair on his back lay down again.

“Cade’s helping me break the code,” Shay said, and patted the laptop. Closing the cover, she got up, and X, already seeming to anticipate her moves, headed for the elevator. “We’ll work on this again,” she told Cade. “Remember: you always had a problem managing the rook ISH.”

“I’ll be thinking about it all night,” he said to her back.

Shay got inside the elevator with X and returned a smile as she reached for the strap and heaved the door shut.

Late that night, Shay woke, groped for her phone, and looked at the time: 4:15. She could hear Emily’s deep breathing from the other side of the room.

You always had a problem managing the rook ISH …

Odin had always enjoyed teasing his younger sister, making up puzzles that had simple answers when you finally saw them, but were sometimes impossible to see. Not because he didn’t give you enough information, but because you couldn’t see what was right in
front of your nose. The obvious problem was, she didn’t understand
rook
, and she didn’t understand
ISH
.

She’d nearly gone back to sleep when her brain opened the puzzle for her.
Rook ISH?
How about
rookish
? Sort of like a rook. A rook was like a crow, like all those big black birds.

Like a raven, she thought. Like Poe’s “The Raven.”

She’d memorized “The Raven” in ninth-grade English class. She’d had trouble managing one line, because she didn’t know the words, and she didn’t know how to pronounce them, and even the English teacher hadn’t been certain about it.

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe …

Was it pronounced like
KWAFF
, rhyming with
laugh
, or like
KWOFF
, rhyming with
cough
? How about
nepenthe
? Was it
NA-PEN-THAY?
Or
NE-PENTH? NE-PEN-THEE?

She still didn’t really know, but she lay in the dark and counted the letters, spaces, and punctuation on her fingers. Thirty-four. Exactly.

Shay smiled in the dark. The dog heard her moving, she heard him stir, and when she looked toward the foot of the bed, she could see in the near dark his gray-black face turned toward her.

She whispered “Shhh” and dropped her feet to the floor. She pulled on a pair of jeans and, trailed by X, carried her laptop and her sneakers through the other room, quietly turned the lock, and slipped into the hallway and locked the door behind her. She put on her shoes, then decided to head up to Twist’s studio rather than down to the lobby with its night owls. She needed the privacy.

The studio was dark, except for the ever-present red, orange, green, and white LEDs glowing on various bits of electronic
equipment. The door to Twist’s private rooms was shut. She took a seat on a couch, turned on her computer, used the light from the screen to plug in the thumb drive, and brought it up.

Thirty-four letters, spaces, and punctuation marks.

She checked that she’d spelled it all correctly, pressed
ENTER
, and got back an immediate response.

Fail. You have two remaining chances
.

The thirty-four-letter box came up again. She smiled at that, and typed in: “No, I don’t.”

That part was a private code they’d developed to fight intrusions by snoopy foster parents. They knew each other’s log-in passwords, and Odin had developed a second step that they’d both always know, but nobody else would. Even if somebody typed in the correct password, the fail message would appear. If you didn’t know the proper response—if you tried to type in another password—the system would lock up. If you typed in the proper response, which was
No, I don’t
, it would let you in.