“I don’t know anything!” Atticus insisted. “I told you! My mom was dying. She said I was a Guardian. She said we were enemies of you guys. The Vespers. She said you were after some secret. It was all in fragments – I can barely remember.”
Casper grinned. He stood slowly and sauntered to the wall. There, he opened a cabinet door. “Maybe we can change that,” he said.
Inside were a series of long knives. Casper pulled one out, a thin blade that made a high-pitched shhhhink.
Atticus felt the blood rush from his head. For a moment he could see only white spots. The room around him seemed to shrink, its frigid temperature warming, the walls rushing in, everything decaying into a tiny trap… .
His brain flashed an image of the tiny room at the airport. A men’s room. A tiny can.
“I know! I mean, I don’t know!” he blurted, words propelling through his mouth before he could think. “That is, in actuality, I don’t know the information. In my head. But I have it. All of it. That’s how we Guardians do it. Even though we’re, like, nerds and geniuses, all we know is the inscription.”
Casper cocked his head. “The what?”
Casper came closer, casually sliding the blade along his fingernail and shaving off a thin slice as if it were butter. “Go on… .”
“It … it’s a precaution,” he said. “To avoid hypnosis. And torture. And truth serums. We just know the key sequence, that’s all. So we can decrypt it.”
Casper flung the blade’s tip forward, sending a fingernail into Atticus’s face. “What. Exactly. Is it.
“It’s all in my flash drive!” Atticus said.
Cheyenne looked dismayed. “The one I smashed under my foot at the airport?”
“No!” Atticus shot back. “Another one. Hidden on my key chain.”
Casper’s face darkened. He lifted the blade carefully over his head. Then, with gritted teeth, he hurled the knife at Atticus.
Atticus screamed and ducked. The blade tore through the fabric of the seat and impaled itself into the table behind.
“That’s for making me have to go and get that stupid key chain,” Casper said. “I threw it in the trash can outside. It was ruining the hang of my pants.”
As he left, Cheyenne walked over to the bank of clocks. She stopped near one that said EASTERN STANDARD TIME, US, which read 7:02 A.M.
“This is Boston time, set precisely by the atomic clock,” she said. “All your little friends are waking up and getting ready for school. In a half hour, at seven thirty-two, they will be running for the school bus. And you, halfway across the world, will have decrypted your flash drive and given us all your supposed information.”
Atticus was shaking too hard to agree.
Even if he could make contact – with anyone – a half hour was not enough time. “I – I – m-m -”
“Chill out,” Cheyenne said. “You’re among friends.”
“
“It’s a fast computer,” Cheyenne drawled.
“But I’m a human,” Atticus said. “Not even Mark Zuckerberg can code that fast!”
Cheyenne walked to the table where the knife was lodged. She yanked it out and held it toward the light. “Well, then … epic fail.”
