“You’ve done it now.” Kail drags me to a stool, bends me over it, yanks my panties to my knees, then delivers three firm smacks.
The silver collar slides down to my chin as I clutch the rungs and stay there, assimilating this new sensation. I actually…like it. The vibrations travel and that, along with the glowy heat, is turning me on.
“I don’t think this will work as punishment. May I have another, sir?”
“Hmmm.” His palm smooths over my ass. “I can live with this kink of yours. I like this red color on you.”
It’s past nine PM, and the house is dark. The path this catlike creature takes, carrying a bowl in its mouth, travels the length of a hallway that stretches to the rear of this part of the house. Past study, past small bedroom, past gymnasium-come-sex dungeon it continues, before Not-cat vanishes to the left into a black opening.
In near utter darkness the small creature trots down a set of stairs that lead to an unlit cellar. The slight tapping noises of catlike feet going down those timber stairs ceases. The floor is irregular and littered with grit and lumps of something that Not-cat barely notices. It can see well enough and keeps trotting toward the back wall.
Silence rules for ten or twenty seconds.
There is the sound of the food-filled plastic bowl being dropped and pushed across the concrete floor. Then comes thesound of something, or somethings, chewing, and a plethora of scuttling with many tiny feet.
Not-cat stays there on its haunches, guarding its friends while they satiate themselves on this food provided by the two-legged things Not-cat has become acquainted with. It purrs gently, because that is what cats should do.
31
MESSAGES FROM THE PAST
I swivel my phone toward me as I pour the last of the boiling water into the mug and check the time on the screen—seven forty-five PM—before I look up. “Melody says she has a place for us out near the lake. It is isolated though. Too dangerous?”
Kail cranks his head off the double bed at the end of the RV. “Is anywhere safe in this town?” His feet are propped on the opposite wall. “Is here?” He casts a dirty look over the interior then sits up against the wobbly headboard.
This RV of Rasmus’s is a lukewarm hell. Every surface has junk on it, from stuff to do with his PC repairs to old magazines he’s collecting, on guns or coins or games, to other things I’m afraid to touch. I swear half an inch of dirt and mold lies beneath anything that has space under it.
We’ve been in this RV that’s parked out the back of his shop for only a day, after two at the Laramie house. Too long.
Coffees in hand, I return to the bed and slide my mug into the space we’ve cleared on the small set of drawers, careful not to spill anything on my open laptop. I hand Kail his mug thenwriggle in next to him. He kisses the crown of my head, as he often does.
“You okay? I say we move on.”
My sigh accompanies some thought as I rifle through what we are supposed to be achieving, and come up with, well, nothing. “Sure. I’m beginning to wonder if we have a hope of pinning this on Clay or the institute.” I place a finger on the laptop keyboard. “We’re no closer to getting the cache, and Rasmus has had my old email address to play with all day. We don’t know how to see inside the institute as security is tight. Moving around town from house to house, or here, is going to let them track us, eventually. They aren’t stupid.”
“I can protect you.” He places his free hand on the leg of my pink flamingo PJs and squeezes me, then says quietly, in a voice that runs deep inside me, “Your father was murdered, Hailey, and this is your fight, not mine, but I have to ask this. How will you feel if you don’t try for more than a few days?”
I twist my mouth then blow on the surface of my coffee, which is now trembling. “Terrible.”
“Then maybe we— Someone is coming.” He rises, puts down his coffee, and leaps over me. His thuddy landing rocks the vehicle, but he’s at the RV door a second before someone raps on it.
“It’s just me! Rasmus.”
Kail unlocks and opens the door. “Hi there.”
“Can I come in?” The man hesitates and looks Kail up and down, as I’m sure I would if confronted by a frankenstruct I’d barely met. “Bring your laptop over, Hailey.”
With his red, wayward hair, Rasmus seems to brighten most rooms and, like Kail, he’s close to hitting the ceiling in here. I’ve swung my legs to sit on the edge of the bed by thetime he’s edged inside past Kail. I join the two men at the compact square table, sliding in next to Kail.
“If you go to that old email address, input this as the password. I decided to let you try and prefer not to send this online.”
The slip of paper he pushes across the table to me has a string of letters and a few numbers.
“Okay.” I open the website and punch in the password. It spins and I wait for the usual pop-up saying I’ve entered the wrong string. Instead, it lets me in and the emails spool down the page. Either the spam filter works well or no one has sent me anything for three years, judging from the dates on these.
“Fuck. It worked. I’m in. Drafts?” I look up at Rasmus and he nods. I hesitate, finger high, knowing in there might be Dad’s last words to me. My heart rate is skipping upward. “How?”
“I looked for your address in a few of the older hacks. Found it in one. I had to buy the whole bunch of them to see this. I really hope no one finds out as being in possession of those is legally bad.”
