The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four) (27 page)

“I have so many questions for you, Nicky,” Lena said. “Let’s start with the betrayal Melissa mentioned. What betrayal was she talking about?”

This one was easy. The simplest lie is always the best one.

“I don’t know,” Nicky said.

Lena furrowed her brow, clearly unhappy with this answer.

“So take a guess, then,” she said. “Why did Melissa think your family had betrayed the clan?”

Nicky stood in place for a few seconds, imagining herself under Lena’s spell.
I’m searching through my memories, Lena, just like you want. I’m being a good girl who’s doing exactly what you tell her to do.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Lena’s jaw dropped open.

“So whatever it is, they’ve kept you in the dark,” she said. “How very clever. Well then what
do
you know, Nicky Bloom? Think of something you’d be afraid to tell me under normal circumstances. Think of something you’d be frightened to say to a vampire, and then say it to me.”

Nicky went with the first thing that came to mind.

“There’s a tear in your shirt,” she said. She pointed at a small hole at the seam on Lena’s shoulder.

Lena tilted her head to one side, confused, and then looked where Nicky was pointing.

“So there is,” she said. “We were playing in the woods earlier. And it’s cute you’d be frightened to tell me about a hole in my shirt. But that’s not what I’m looking for, Nicky. I want to know your secrets. I want to know why Melissa called me from your house. Think. There must be something in your head. Something you overheard. Some mysterious behavior you witnessed. Some shady friends of your parents. Anything.”

Lena was right in Nicky’s face now. How long was she going to have to keep this up?

“Lena!” came a voice from down the hall.

Both Lena and Nicky turned to see Sergio rushing towards them.

“Daciana wants to speak with you,” he said.

“Right now?” Lena said. “About what?”

“Yes, right now, and it isn’t my business to ask what it’s about. Yours either. Come on.”

Lena turned back to Nicky.

“We’re not done,” she said. “We’ll finish this conversation when I get back. You will wait for me to come talk to you again. Do you understand?”

It was all Nicky could do not to smile.

“Yes,” she said.

As Sergio led Lena away, he glanced back in Nicky’s direction. A fraction of a second—that was all the time it took for them to make eye contact, all the time it took for Sergio to tell Nicky that Lena wasn’t going to be a problem for her anymore.

“Holy shit, Nicky,” came Alvin’s voice inside her ear. “What the hell was that all about?”

“Relax,” Nicky whispered. “I’ve got it under control. Tell Jill I’m on the way to the bathroom now.”

*****

Jill was frantically searching Daciana’s bedroom. The single LED on her wand charm was a lifesaver. Without it, the room would be pitch black, and she wouldn’t stand a chance.

She found the first thing she was looking for in a pencil shelf underneath the computer desk. A tiny screwdriver with a familiar logo embossed on the handle.

Black Dart Enterprises.

Many years ago, before Jill was even born, some slick-talking sales rep had convinced her father to order six cases of these tiny screwdrivers and give them out to clients. When Jill was little, her house was swimming in screwdrivers. Even today, some twenty years after Walter had ordered the stupid things, you could still find them in pencil dishes and desk drawers all throughout the Wentworth home.

How happy she was to see one now.

She kept searching the computer desk, eventually finding something else she needed. It was in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, sitting on top of a stack of out-of-date computer cables. A can of compressed air, the plastic straw still hanging from its spout. It looked like it had been years since anyone had touched this can. Daciana’s servants probably kept the keyboard so clean that a can of compressed air wasn’t needed.

Jill picked it up and shook it. Music to her ears—there was still a little bit left inside!

With her two implements in-hand, she knelt down in front of the server rack and slid the bottom tower out, carefully placing it on the marble floor. She put the flashlight charm between her teeth, aimed the light at the screw on the top corner of the computer tower, and got to work.

If only her father could see her now. Would he ever have guessed one of his beloved Black Dart screwdrivers would be used to do this?

Jill had removed hundreds of computer casings, and this one took her only a few seconds to disassemble. She shook the can of compressed air and aimed the straw at the memory modules inside the now-open computer. She pulled the trigger and listened as the air squirted out.

She felt the can grow colder in her hand.
This just might work
, she told herself.
Come on Nicky, get that charm out of the outlet so I can have some power.

The hack she came here to do tonight was her favorite kind: the cold boot attack. Because the hack relied on a weakness in the hardware rather than the software, it was very reliable, so long as you moved quickly enough.

Whenever a computer is shut down, traces of information get left behind in the random access memory. Jill loved to find those traces and use them to her advantage. It was a hack she had practiced at home many times, and performed more than once when she was modifying Thorndike’s admissions database to get Nicky Bloom into the school. Cut the power to the computer, turn it on again quickly, load an operating system using a boot sector on a thumb drive, and then steal the remnants of the memory still floating around in there from when the computer was on before. All the encryption keys she needed to take control of the computer were in those remnants, and all the security that was meant to shut out someone like her was useless once she had those keys.

But the hack only worked if you loaded the boot sector within seconds after cutting the power. The data remnants faded quickly after the power was cut. So much amazing, powerful information, so rapidly decaying into a random assortment of electrons—Jill imagined all that beautiful data disappearing like steam off a coffeepot.

Fortunately, you could slow down the data decay by cooling the memory sticks.

The compressed air can was cold in Jill’s hand now. The air coming out was near freezing. The memory sticks had to be like little ice cubes.

But the flow of air was slowing. The can was running out.

Slower…slower…slower…

Gone. The can was empty. The sticks were as cold as they were going to get. Jill leaned back, afraid that even her body temperature might be the difference between finding something in this computer and coming up empty.

And then the lights inside the stack came on. The fan started whirring. The hard drive started clicking.

“Give me an update,” Alvin’s voice whispered in her ear.

“I have power,” she said. She looked up at the screen, which was black with a single phrase in white letters.

Booting from disk.

“I think we’ve got it, Alvin,” she said. “Hot damn tell Nicky I think we’ve got it!”

*****

“Did Daciana tell you why she wanted to see me?” Lena asked.

“No,” Sergio said quietly.

“But she said it was important.”

“Every time Daciana asks to see you it is important.”

“It’s just…that girl I was talking to, do you know her? The new girl?”

“I have danced with all the girls wearing black.”

“Yes, of course you have,” Lena said.

Sergio led her through the dining hall and towards the back half of the house. As he entered the south corridor, the scent caught his nose. The same scent of strawberry perfume that had flummoxed him in the moon room.

“Daciana didn’t seem angry to you,” Lena said, “you know, when she asked to see me?”

“There is no point in asking me these questions,” Sergio said. “I have no information to offer to you. Daciana wanted to speak with you right away.”

“Where is she?” Lena asked. “Are we going back outside? What’s going on?”

The truth was, Sergio did intend to take Lena outside. He was leading her to Daciana’s cremation furnace where, at this very moment, the bodies of all the slaves who died in the hunt were being cooked.

He wanted to find out why she was so interested in Nicky, then kill her and dispose of her body.

But that scent—why did that scent seem so significant to him?

“This way, Lena,” he said, moving towards the stairs. The cremation furnace could wait. He felt compelled to follow the strawberry scent before the trail went cold.

*****

Bootup from the software on Jill’s USB took three minutes. The cold memory sticks in Daciana’s computer held their data remnants. When it was time for the system to reveal its secrets, the encryption keys floated neatly to the surface.

With full control over the computer, Jill created a data stream that flowed out of Daciana’s house, bounced around a series of Network servers, and landed in the basement of Alvin’s home in Colorado.

A clean hack.
The Network had control of Daciana’s computer.

Now, onto the banking software.

She clicked on the icon labeled “Account Aggregator.” The software opened up and, with help from Jill’s boot disk, bypassed the user name and password. Jill sat quietly, watching it load, knowing that in seconds she would be in a position to empty every financial account belonging to the clan. All the vampires in America, the entire endowment of Thorndike Academy, the Coronation pot, all of them, bankrupt. In one swoop, the clan would be crippled and the Network would have nearly unlimited financial resources.

It was taking a long time to load.
That’s okay
, Jill thought.
I’ve got nowhere else to be. My whole life has been leading me to this moment.

A pop-up window and a system chime happened simultaneously, startling Jill. The words running
across the top of the pop-up window made her heart sink. She tried to be cool about it, but when she read the words a second time, she panicked.

Verification
Code Required
was written on the pop-up. Underneath the words was a text box with a blinking cursor inside.

“What verification code?” she whispered.

“Is everything okay down there Jill?” came Alvin’s voice.

“Yeah, it’s just asking me for a verification code that I don’t have.”

“Doesn’t your software bypass that for you?”

“I think this code must not be on the local machine,” said Jill. “Dammit.”

“I don’t understand. Can you access the bank accounts or not?”

Jill shook her head. She should have known this would happen. After all, her mother wrote this software.
Bulletproof
. In the requirements document, that was the word Daciana had used to describe how she wanted the security for this system. And a lesser programmer would have designed a system that could be beaten with a cold boot. But if you told Carolyn Wentworth to make it bulletproof, she made it bulletproof.

“Yeah, this is a second layer of security after the local login,” Jill said. “It’s written into the software on the server side. I’m not going to be able to bypass it.”

“Then get out of there,” said Eve. “Two vampires have left the party and are headed in your direction.”

“I hate to leave now,” Jill said. “I
just need a minute to think.”

“You’ve given us complete access to Daciana’s computer from my servers in Colorado, right?” said Alvin.

“Yes.”

“Then you can have all the time you need to figure this one out later. Right now, you’ve got to get out of there.”

Jill sighed. Alvin was right. This was a puzzle she’d have to solve at another time.

But she was so looking forward to completing the whole hack tonight and declaring victory.

“Okay, I’ll get moving,” she said.

A few minutes later, her right hand holding her shoes by their straps, her left pressed against her side to prevent the charm bracelet from jingling, Jill was running back the way she came. She was nearly to the moon room when Eve made her stop.

“It’s Sergio and Lena,” Eve said. “They’re coming straight for you. Turn around and go back the other way.”

Jill tapped twice on her earring to acknowledge
Eve, and then backtracked as quietly as she could. She was nearing the crypt when Eve chimed in again.

“And now we’ve got a servant coming at you from the other side,” she said.

“So which way do I go?” Jill whispered.

“End of the hall, door on your left. Hurry.”

*****