The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) (32 page)

“It’s nothing, Mom,” Marshall said. “It’s idle gossip. They’re trying to start a rumor about me. We’re not falling for it.”

“You had sex with your teacher?” Lisa said. She seemed unusually relaxed as she spoke, as if, now that they were down to business, she could finally be herself.

“He had a long, passionate romance is what he had,” said Kim. “Started mid-way through last year and continued through the summer.”

“Shut up!” Marshall said. “I will not have people tell lies about me to my own mother!”

“Your mother will want to hear this,” said Galen. “The implications can be severe for the family. Daciana is careful to protect the brand of her precious school. A teacher having an affair with a student is something she would take very seriously. I fear that, in the face of such a scandal, her response would be to make all parties…quietly disappear.”

“I think we’re done here,” Marshall said. “I’m going upstairs.”

As Marshall left the table, his mind raced through the past twelve months. They had been so careful. Both of them knew the gossip hounds were watching. Every single liaison with Patricia had been perfectly secret. They hadn’t left a shred of evidence anywhere. No paper trail. No photos. No one spotting them together outside of school. The cloak and dagger of it all had been half the fun. They worked hard and planned way ahead to keep their encounters a secret.

The Renwicks had nothing.

Relax Marshall
, he told himself as he neared the stairs. There was no proof. No proof in the slightest.

“Honey, I think you should come back,” Lisa said. “We can talk through this. Everyone in Washington has secrets. The key is how you deal with them.”

Marshall ignored her and continued his trek.

“Your mother’s right, Marshall!” Galen called after him. “We don’t have to be enemies. We’d actually make one hell of a team.”

“Fuck you!” Marshall yelled back.

He was past the landing and onto the second flight, almost out of ear shot, when they caught him like a calf at a rodeo. It was Kim who said it.

 
“She’s pregnant, Marshall. You’re going to be a father.”

Chapter 30

Jill returned to school on Monday fearful that she would have to spend the day explaining her absence from the Brawl.

She was pleased to find that nobody cared.
 
Brawl in the Fall was simultaneously the most interesting topic of conversation at school, and an event most of the students wanted to forget. The gossip about the night was intense, but in a shameful way. Students were in full-on damage control mode, every one of them spinning the gossip to their favor.

Sure, I was there when the riot started, but I didn’t participate.

No, I didn’t see what happened. I just wanted to protect my girlfriend.

I only had a few drinks. I’m embarrassed at the way our classmates behaved.

The few times Jill did have to explain her absence from the Brawl, once to Mattie and once to Andrea, Annika came to her rescue. To Mattie, Annika said, “Girl’s been sick, give her some space.” To Andrea, who made a crack about Jill ‘finally deciding to join us today,’ Annika said, “Yes, I’m honored that Jill made that decision. Now you should decide to get lost.”

Lunch for Jill that day was at Budokan, just her and Annika. Over shrimp tempura and miso soup, Annika told Jill about another phone call she had with Shannon, this one early in the morning.

“She asked if you could get two IDs,” Annika said. “She told me she’ll have an escort get her out of the country when it’s time, some girl named Raquel. That girl will need a fake ID too.

“Not a problem,” said Jill. “I need some way to identify this Raquel person in the Brazilian database. Personal stuff. Name, date of birth, government ID number.”

“I’ll get it,” said Annika. “Maybe I can stop by tonight and give it to you.”

“Just bring it to school tomorrow,” Jill said. “I won’t be home tonight.”

“Really? Where are you going?”

“Just got some business to take care of,” Jill said.

Annika didn’t press for more. Jill’s just-in-time discovery that Melissa was chasing after Shannon had made her into something of a mystic in Annika’s eyes. Jill found she could be as weird and cryptic as she wanted and Annika wouldn’t ask any questions, which was good, since tonight’s business, and every night’s business until further notice, was to go to Nicky’s house in the hopes that Melissa Mayhew would show up.

From school to lunch, from lunch back to school, from school to home—everywhere Jill went, the green station wagon followed her. The sloppy stalkers had given up on Nicky altogether and were all about Jill now. She drove slowly to her house, making it easy for them to follow. That night, she went to Nicky’s, and waited. Melissa never came.

On Tuesday, all the teachers brought traditional Chinese mooncakes to school and served them during first period. While Jill and her classmates ate the sweet snacks of the lunar harvest festival, her teacher, Mr. Donovan, told the legend of Chang’e.

“She was the most beautiful girl in the village,” Mr. Donovan said, “so beautiful that the god of the sun came down to visit her. He offered her a pill that would grant eternal life. He said he wanted her to come live in the sky with him where all the world could admire her beauty. She agreed. She became immortal and moved into the night sky. But the sun is a jealous lover. On nights that he can’t see Chang’e, he doesn’t allow us to see her either. Once a year, on the night of the harvest moon, the sun gets a complete and unobstructed view of Chang’e, and shines so brightly on her face that we can’t help but marvel at her beauty. That is what we celebrate with the Festival of the Moon. The beauty of Chang’e, the first immortal goddess of the night.”

The week between the Brawl and the Date Auction had nightly events to continue the Festival of the Moon. On Tuesday, students gathered in the courtyard and released a thousand paper lanterns into the sky. On Wednesday, the theater club performed traditional Chinese fire dragon dances on the north lawn. On Thursday, the Thorndike arts center became a gallery for the best artists in the world, who displayed their latest creations in honor of the immortals.

Jill skipped all these events, and Annika made sure no one questioned her about it. Every day after school Jill went home and checked in with her mom. Every evening she went to Nicky’s. Every night she waited up late with the assassins. Melissa never came.

And all the while, the two teens in the green station wagon stayed on her tail.

“They’re kind of unnerving,” Jill confessed to Gia one night. “I feel like I should go introduce myself to them or something.”

“Just a few more days,” Gia said. “We should be thankful for their presence. They are proof to us that Melissa hasn’t given up.”

“But when is she going to act? What’s she waiting for?”

“We have to remember that vampires live on different timelines than we do. To you, it seems like she is taking forever. To Melissa, hardly any time has passed at all.”

“Well she needs to get moving,” Jill said. “I can’t spend my nights at Nicky’s house forever. Things are fine right now because my dad is out of town. When he gets back, he’s going to wonder why I’m never home at night.”

“We’ll get some movement soon,” Gia said. “I’m sure of it. We just have to be patient.”

Gia might have been content with a wait and see approach, but Jill wanted to know more. She had some ideas about how to beef up the
Where in the World is Melissa Mayhew
program, and on Friday afternoon she rushed home from school to work on the software before it got dark.

Driving faster than the speed limit, but not so fast as to lose the green station wagon, Jill got home before four o’clock and raced up to her room. She sat at her computer and shook the mouse to bring up the login screen.

But it never came. The computer went straight to an open session, with no security login of any sort. It was a jarring break from the norm, one that instantly sent her into panic mode. She thought she had been caught, that
Clean Street
or Melissa Mayhew or Kim Renwick or somebody had ratted her out as a Network spy. There was no other explanation for her security measures to be off. Someone with high level access had hacked into this computer.

The usage log only added to her terror. It showed activity on the computer barely twenty minutes ago. Someone, or something, had cracked this terminal open at nine in the morning and had been running processes on it all day. How did they get past her security?

Even more disturbing was the type of activity she saw in the log. All open programs had been closed except one. One at a time, all the processes on her machine were shut down, giving a single program full access to the computer’s resources.

That program was
All the King’s Horses
, her all-but-abandoned attempt to decrypt the scrambled data she had stolen from Tremblay Property Management.

Someone knocked on her doorframe, startling Jill so much she leaped out of her chair.

“Jill?”

It was her mother.

Dear God it was my mother.

She understood it all now. Her mother had cracked open the user session. She had found
All the King’s Horses
sitting open in the background. She investigated it. She figured out what Jill was trying to do.

Ratted out by my own mother.

“Mom, what did you do?”

“I know you value your privacy, Jill.”

“Damn right I value my privacy.”

“Please don’t be angry at me. I’ve seen you struggling in here. I knew you were working on something, and like I told you, I’ve run out of work to do.”

“So you hacked into my machine and looked at the software I was writing? Mom, how did you even do that? Have you been snooping on me? Did you steal my password?”

“I used our home network to speak to your machine at a deeper level than the operating system. It’s an easy trick if you--”

“I know all about the trick, Mom.” She almost added,
I invented the trick
. Her mother had broken into her work station the same way Jill had once broken into Annika’s laptop. Go figure. Like daughter, like mother.

“I suppose it was a rude thing to do, but you have to understand, I’ve run out of work.”

She spoke as if running out of work was the same as running out of air.

“Why did you open my program? What interest is it to you?”

Her mother coasted into the room now, clearly excited to answer the question. “Oh Jill, all these algorithms you’ve written on your walls…I came in here on Monday and I was entranced. You’ve been struggling with one of the great questions of our time and you’ve made tremendous progress. You are asking the computer to find order in chaos. It’s groundbreaking work, and the implications are extraordinary. The universe tends to disorder. With this program you might well turn that all around. I’ve spent the past week thinking about the algorithms you’re trying to write, and I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”

Jill felt herself starting to relax. It sounded like her mom had no idea what
All the King’s Horses
was really about. All this stuff about reordering the universe might be nice and all, but Jill was just trying to recover some data she stole.

“This first version of the software has limited applications, of course,” her mother said, “but the things we could build on top of it…the potential for science and medicine...”

“The first version of the software? Mom, I never got the program to work.”

“You came close enough. All the pieces were there. The only thing I did was give you a push.”

At that moment, Jill had the strange experience that she was floating, as if the air around her had turned to water and wanted to take away all her bodyweight.

“Mom, are you saying you got the program to work?”

“I couldn’t help but notice you had some scrambled data you were using for tests. What a smart way to make the program work. I ran the data through the program after I modified it. Have a look now. The file is named Output 1.”

Jill saw the file right away, sitting there on her desktop. She opened it. An electrical diagram for a single wing of a house appeared on the screen. It was the sort of document one would find on the TPM servers—a piece of proprietary info about an immortal’s mansion. It was a snippet of stolen data, run through the software, and perfectly reassembled.

“Mom…this...”

Jill didn’t know what to say.
I can’t believe it? How did you do it? This is amazing?

No combination of words was adequate. What her mother had done was more than amazing. It was game-changing. It was world-saving. Her mom had solved the unsolvable problem.
All the King’s Horses
could now reassemble the stolen data. A full terabyte of the Samarin clan’s most treasured secrets. This would change everything.

Strangely, in her stumped silence, Jill felt like she and her mother were communicating more than they ever had before. They were looking at one another, neither of them able to speak, but both of them understanding what the other wanted to say.