Bethany did a good job of coating that last sentence with sarcasm and pretending not to care—but I’d mastered that particular art when I was nine, and I saw straight through it. If Bethany had known the code, she would have given it to me.
“I’m not sure about the numbers,” Skylar said brightly, “but I can try.”
“For the last time, Skylar,” Elliot interjected. “You’re not psychic.”
“And Kali isn’t super girl,” Skylar cooed back. “Your brotherly wisdom has been absorbed. On a related note, your job is distracting Reid.”
Without waiting for a reply, Skylar darted across the room, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me out. Bethany followed on our heels.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked her. A few hours earlier, she’d refused to let us anywhere near the lab.
“Kali, a horde of zombies attacked my house. Vaughn said they were wearing some kind of high-tech collars, and I’m pretty sure that normal zombies aren’t supposed to coordinate their flesh-eating efforts. I may not be the sharpest eyeliner in the box, but even I can read in between those lines.” She paused. “Besides, I’m getting really tired of you being the hero. When people bite me, I bite back.”
“Boyfriend’s little sister’s in the room,” Skylar reminded her. “If you could avoid talking about biting people, I’d really appreciate it.”
Bethany rolled her eyes. “There.” She brought us down an extra set of steps and gestured to a thick, metal door. “If you can crack the code, be my guest.”
Skylar nodded and bit her bottom lip, but before she could place her hands on the door, I reached out and stopped her.
“Let me try something first.”
Skylar may have been a little bit psychic, but I’d spent the morning rifling through Dr. Davis’s desk. I’d almost forgotten that his cell phone hadn’t been the only thing I’d taken away from my little recon trip.
I’d also memorized the passwords taped to the bottom of his desk.
23
I don’t know what I expected to see in Paul Davis’s home lab, but what I saw was … nothing.
The walls were made of chrome. The floors were tile. The sound of my footsteps echoed through the room, and I could see the colors in my clothes reflected in the walls—blurry, indecipherable shapes.
Skylar and Bethany stepped into the room behind me. Besides the three of us, the only things in this entire room were a computer monitor built into the wall and stacks and stacks of hard drives, lining the floor like Legos.
“Got any more passwords?” Bethany said, gesturing to the computer.
“Got a keyboard?” I returned.
It took us five minutes to find it—hidden beneath a panel in the wall. I ran through every password I’d seen taped to Dr. Davis’s desk and came up empty.
In unison, Bethany and I turned toward Skylar.
“I got nothing,” she said.
I resisted the urge to send my fist into the shiny chrome walls. If I let myself hit something, let myself want to …
I could feel the need rising inside of me, except this time, it wasn’t hunt-lust. It was an ache, an emptiness.
Blood.
The thought was overwhelming, all-consuming, and suddenly, I could smell the scents of the room so clearly.
I could smell Bethany—Skylar—
I could smell their blood.
“What?” Bethany said defensively. “Do I have something on my face?”
I tore my eyes away from her neck, but I could still hear the beating of her heart.
Thirsty. Thirsty. Thirsty.
Suddenly, Zev’s warning about needing to feed when I hunted seemed a lot more reasonable. In retrospect, pushing my healing ability to the limit and then locking myself in a small room with two walking bags of blood probably wasn’t my finest idea ever.
Stop it, I thought firmly. They’re my friends.
The word might not have meant anything to the mindless, senseless parasite inside of me, but it meant something to me.
“What are you doing?” Bethany asked.
I’m trying not to tear out your jugular, I thought in response. When I told you I didn’t know what I was, it’s possible that I was not being 100 percent honest.
Then I realized that Bethany hadn’t addressed her acerbic comment to me. She was talking to Skylar, who was down on all fours, investigating the hard drives.
“I’m looking for a USB port,” she said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Move your foot.”
Bethany didn’t move. “Why are you looking for a USB port?”
“Because I thought it might annoy you,” Skylar answered, the picture of innocence. “And also because Darryl gave me this.”
She held up a USB drive.
“Darryl?” Bethany repeated, utterly lost. “Who’s Darryl?”
“Big guy? Sits with me at lunch?” Skylar continued running her hands over the various drives, looking for a port. “Sound familiar?”
“Mute?” Bethany said finally. “You’re crawling all over the floor because of something you got from Mute?”
If the popular crowd called Darryl “Mute,” I really didn’t want to know what they called the rest of us.
“Darryl does talk,” Skylar said. “If you listen. And FYI, I have a really strong feeling that he’s going to be the next Bill Gates, so you might want to be a little nicer to him.”
“I have a really strong feeling,” Bethany deadpanned, “that if you don’t tell me what’s on that USB drive, I will end you.”
“Aha!” Skylar brandished the hard drive like she was getting ready to embark on a three-gun salute. Without answering Bethany’s question, she plugged it in, and the blank screen on the monitor gave way to a matrix of letters and numbers, rotating through the screen in multiple directions.
“Darryl likes codes,” Skylar explained. “A few weeks ago, I asked him what someone might hypothetically need to break into a supercomputer. He hypothetically made me this.”
Suddenly, the walls all around us gave way to images. Apparently, the monitor wasn’t just built into the wall. The monitor was the wall.
Glancing at Beth and Skylar out of the side of my eyes, I moved toward the keyboard and then double clicked on the first folder I saw. It was password protected, but Darryl’s program made mincemeat of that protection, and a few seconds later, the three of us were staring at gibberish.
Scientific gibberish.