Uncaged (20 page)

She didn’t know that the exit had a silent alarm, which flashed at the front desk. Montrel, the kid on desk duty, hurried over to the emergency exit as soon as the light winked at him. Emily saw him coming just as Shay, Cruz, and Cade came through the door with the dog trailing behind.

“Where’s Twist? We thought we saw him heading out here, we need to talk—” Emily said, improvising as she tried to block his view.

“Out with some actress you’d recognize,” Montrel said, puffs of his Afro billowing out from the requisite miner’s hat as he peered past her. “Or parts of her. She’s played a pole dancer in, like, five different movies.”

“Living the dream,” said Emily. “Probably trained at Juilliard and did Shakespeare in the Park. But you know, the number of decent speaking parts for women in Hollywood …”

Shay, Cade, and Cruz were veering off toward the service elevator in a clump, the dog on their far side. But Montrel wasn’t blind.

“Hey! Whatchu got there?” he asked, switching on his headlamp.

They kept going. “Nothing,” Shay lied over her shoulder.

“Well, Nothing’s got a tail, and Twist don’t allow no tails.”

Cruz turned back and handled it. “The dog’s hurt, Montrel, we’re just trying to take care of it for a couple of days. You sound like the
policía
.”

Montrel recoiled. “Damn, I do, don’t I?”

“That’s cool, we all go a little power mad sometimes,” said Cruz. “But Shay’s gonna go up to her room.”

“Yeah, well … make sure nobody gets bit.” Montrel turned the headlamp off.

Inside the room, Shay led the dog to her bedside and said, “Lie down.”

The dog looked at her with curiosity, but made no move to lie down. “Sit,” she said. “Sit.” Nothing.

She sat on the bed herself, and the dog sat down, still watching. “Try lying down,” Emily said.

Shay put a pillow against the head of the bed and lay down, and what followed was a several-minute stare-down before the dog simply dropped onto his belly. His sharp yellow eye looked away from her and took in the surroundings, and his erect ears were cocked to catch any unexpected noise.

“Wait—I got something this boy is gonna love,” Emily said, and she darted into the outer room, dug through a chest full of junk, and came up with an old porcelain dog bowl that said
DOG
. She found a bottle of water by the bed, filled the bowl, and shoved it toward the dog.

The dog ignored it.

“Now what?” Shay asked.

Emily didn’t know. They sat without talking, and finally Emily said, “Screw this, I need a shower.” She gathered up her beauty supplies and headed out. With Emily gone and the room suddenly silent, Shay could hear the dog’s breathing, like he had emphysema or something. She looked up, feeling his eye on her like a burden.

“I’m sorry you don’t feel well,” she said.

The dog maintained his hard stare. Shay wasn’t ready to let go of first impressions, but now that they were alone, she considered him more closely: wolfish, but in reality, not nearly as large as a wolf,
maybe eighty pounds. And not entirely gray, either: white socks on his front paws, a white shield on his chest, a Y of black like Magic Marker over either eye and down his nose. Shay suspected he was a German shepherd mix, or something crossed with one of those smiley-faced sled dogs, though this dog, when he wasn’t baring his teeth with ferocity, had a face so brooding it felt almost human.

“You got another name?” she asked quietly. “Is
X
okay?”

Still staring …

“Yeah, it’s no fun being an unknown value,” she said. The dog didn’t react; apparently he didn’t know algebra.

She stood up and stretched her sore arms and back, rolled some noisy cracks out of her neck. She hadn’t noticed his tail in much detail, either, and stepped around to see that it was long enough to curl around his hips and tipped with white fur.

“Ever felt happy enough to wag that thing?” she asked him quietly.

The dog dropped his chin on his white paws and let out a sigh, like he was thinking. After a while, he closed his eye, and Shay, dropping back on the bed, just let him be.

Later that night, after she’d showered, and when she was sure Emily was asleep, Shay looked at the thumb drives. She picked through them for the one that had the numeral 1 written on the side in silver ink. She plugged it into her laptop. The first thing that popped up was a password box, subdivided into small squares for letters or numbers or symbols, with instructions that said:

You always had a problem managing the rook ISH
.

Answer:

Beneath the box was a warning:

After three unsuccessful tries, the drive will be destroyed
.

A problem managing the rook ISH?
Ever since they got their first laptops, Odin had loved sending his sister messages that took a password to unlock. A password generated from a kooky-sounding clue. It was a hedge against any of their foster parents reading their emails, and Odin, non-neurotypical guy that he was, had concocted some real brain twisters.

Shay counted thirty-four squares and groaned. A problem with the rook ISH? She didn’t have days to work out a puzzle—her brother was in trouble.

Shay lay down on the bed to think about possibilities. She guessed that
rook
might refer to chess—they’d both belonged to a junior high chess club—but what the heck did
ISH
stand for? They’d never really played that much chess together anyway, so what problem with a rook was he …

She crossed into sleep, without even a minute or two of fighting it. After the whales and Odin and the dog, biology simply called time.

Much later, she woke to a quiet slurping sound. She could hear Emily snoring lightly on the other side of the nightstand.

She sat up to locate the dog and the noise stopped. It took a moment for her eyes to focus, but then she saw him in the glow of the night-light, his tongue poked through the wire muzzle; he’d been lapping from the bowl, and now was looking at her with an
expression Shay recognized as pure guilt. She’d lived with foster parents who made you feel guilty about eating their groceries, and that’s how X looked.

Shay slipped out of bed and approached the dog cautiously, whispering so as not to wake her roommate. “It’s okay, boy. You can have as much water as you want. It’s free.”

He had to be hungry too. She’d have to spend time trolling the Internet for advice on feeding a dog since she’d never had one. Emily kept an assortment of snacks in the closet, but gummy bears or Cocoa Puffs probably weren’t wise food choices for a dog any more than they were for a human. Peanut butter—she still had some left, and some saltines.

As Shay uncrinkled the wax bag, Emily stirred, mumbled something that sounded like “Will you take a quarter?” and fell back into sleep. Meanwhile, the dog went down with a thunk, seemingly out of gas, though he was rapt when Shay started buttering crackers with a plastic knife.

“Here, these are for you,” she said, and placed a pile by his nose.

The dog stared at her, unmoving. She stared back at him for a while, then remembered what Odin had said on the beach, that the dog only ever seemed to eat and drink when he was left alone.

Shay climbed back into bed and pretended to go to sleep. Even fake-snored a bit. After a few minutes, she peeked with one eye and saw that the food was uneaten and he was watching her.

At five o’clock, she woke to find the dog still watching her. Every last bit of the crackers and peanut butter was gone.

It was a start, she thought. “You need a walk?”

The dog had no trouble walking down the stairs. They went out the back through the kitchen; the breakfast crew came on at five-thirty. Shay found a brick to block the self-locking door that led to the loading dock, and then led the dog around the parking lot until he pooped.

Going back up was another problem.

X made the first two steps up the loading dock, but then fell back on his haunches and looked at her as if to say,
I’m just too tired
.

She hadn’t had much experience with dogs and didn’t quite know what to do. She gave his leash a tug and tried pleading, and he stood and made the last three steps. The freight elevator was generally considered to be off-limits to everyone but people going to Twist’s loft, but she had little choice: the dog could hardly walk by the time they got to the stairs, and was too heavy for her to carry up four flights.

She called the elevator and then urged him inside, where he flopped to the floor, and they rode up to five. From there, it took two minutes to walk ten rooms down the hall; she whispered, “X, come on, come on. People are getting up …”

When X got back in the bedroom, he lay down and closed his eye. Shay watched him for a moment as Emily quietly snored in the other bed. Everybody was asleep—and Shay lay back down and, a minute later, was gone as well.

By eight, they were all up again. Emily was dressed and out the door; there was an estate sale of a
Star Trek
set designer rumored to have kept one of everything, from a pair of Spock’s ears to one of Captain Kirk’s many identical command chairs.

Shay, meanwhile, needed to get to a supermarket and see about
buying actual dog food. Maybe he just needed some better nutrition? Hope against hope. He was awake and alert, but wasn’t yet standing. She left him some more peanut butter crackers.

It would be X’s first time alone in the room, and she wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t be destroyed when she came back. She decided to pen him inside the bedroom.

“Don’t chew the legs off the bed,” she said as she closed the door.

The supermarket was a twenty-minute walk. Shay used the time to work on the thumb drive’s password. Supposedly, the files on the drive were filled with horrible and inhumane things being done to animals, but Shay’s only interest in discovering the password was to learn who had forced her brother into the van. If Odin didn’t surface again soon—either directly or through Rachel—she saw no choice but to contact West. And/or the police.

An hour later, back at the hotel with a twenty-pound sack of organic dog food recommended by a clerk, she unlocked the door to her room and found X sitting on the other side.