“We’re gonna have to crawl. Follow Archie.”
Archie directs us off the pretty sandy path and into the bushes. We clamber through the flower beds and past hedges shaped like swans. My skin prickles, anticipating invisible bullets but even crawling on the ground I still find time to appreciate how tacky Mr. Parker is. I went to the Palace of Versailles as a little girl, and even in the dark, I can tell this garden is a low-rent knockoff with its marble fountains and swirling lawns. I can just imagine Mr. Parker shoving a tablet with a picture of the palace to a landscaper and going, “do this.” I see the oak from a distance rising, out of the darkness like the Washington Monument. It’s twice as tall as anything around it and totally out of place with the faux French vibe.
Archie leads us right up to the trunk and stands, helping me to my feet. “This is it, boss.”
I look up at the towering trunk.
“What now?” Bill asks. “Who’s gonna get up there?”
I know he’s talking to Archie, but I raise my palm. “I can climb. That way you can both keep a lookout with the guns.”
“You sure?”
I nod. “I’m good at tree climbing and I’m not a great shot.”
“But it’s really high,” Bill shoots back. “If you fall…”
Sweat breaks out on my palms. I wipe them on my fatigue pants. “I’m not afraid of heights and my legs are strong from dancing.”
Neither of them looks too convinced.
“This is my idea,” I remind them. “And I’m the boss.”
Archie doesn’t smile, but his mouth loosens. “Okay, boss. Try not to die.”
“I will. Can I have one of your backpacks in case I find anything?”
From their expressions, Bill and Archie think I’ll find nothing except leaves, but they empty one of their rucksacks full of guns and hands it to me. Bill gives me a boost onto a low-hanging branch and then both men stare at me, as though expecting me to ask to come back down. Instead, I grab the next closest limb and start hauling myself up.
To my relief, the oak is easy to climb with lots of sturdy branches and I wasn’t lying. I climbed trees when I was little, and I liked it. When Daddy was alive, I went to a summer camp, and I went up a huge rope bridge without a second thought. But when he died, and I got engaged to Mr. Parker, I wasn’t allowed to climb anymore but I’m relieved to find it’s like riding a bike. My body remembers. The empty rucksack swings from my shoulders as I get higher and higher, the ground shrinking as I’m surrounded by breathes and leaves.
“Thereisa safe,” I whisper. “There’s a safe and I’ll get it open even if I have to pull it out and shoot it.”
My hands are already scratched from crawling through the garden and soon they’re raw and stinging with blood. I rub it on my top and find the residue makes my palms sticky.
“Better for gripping,” I tell myself and actually find myself smiling. I’m not happy but I can’t believe I’m doing this. That I could get so high. Soon I can see most of the compound. It’s huge. As big as a middle school with a ton of interlocking buildings and a big pool and tennis court lit by streetlights.
I’m concentrating so hard on my climbing that I nearly miss it—a blue-grey box buried in a fork of two huge branches.
“Yes!” I scream, then press a bloody hand to my mouth. “Yes!”
Any hope of pulling the safe out instantly vanishes. It’s embedded so deeply that it might as well have grown there. And shooting it seems like a good way to have a bullet ricochet into my chest. With shaking fingers, I press the dirt and leaves away from the safe. There’s a little screen with a buzzing blue light and an old-school keyboard with the numbers one through ten printed on it.
“Shit,” I whisper. What could the passcode be?
Seconds pass as I stare at the keypad. I think of Doc. Try to imagine what he’d say.
Tits, this is all super fucked.
“Not helpful, Nico,” I say. “What do you know about codes?”
It can’t be the same changing one as inside the compound, Doc says.
“Why?”
Because if you needed to get the special pass out because Parker was dead or whatever, you couldn’t use the pass to get it out.
“Oh. So, it’s like, something Parker came up with?”
