Page 30 of All Hallows Game

“Yes,” I agreed quickly and shot a glance at the door. Maybe I should have closed it. What if someone walked past and saw the picture of Virgil? What if Honey saw it, and told Mum and Dad, and then Nightmare took revenge on me for trying to save him by killing them all and—

“Guessing it’s the only photo on this phone. What is it, a nude?” Justin double clicked on the photo, opening it in horrific detail on one of his super-screens. Asshole. “Well, shit. Who is that?”

“None of your fucking business, just trace it.”

He raised his eyebrows at me, looking strangely impressed, but he turned back to the screen and did as I asked. I didn’t know what I was watching, didn’t understand a single box that opened up or a single line of code, but I had to trust Justin to do his job. Even if he was a dick who’d gleefully opened what he thought was a nude of me, and that made my fingers itch to grab my knife.

Drive it into the back of his head for the sheer nerve of thinking he could see your body. Crack his skull open until his brain leaks out and he can never look at a single woman again.

I dragged in a slow breath, ripping my stare away from Justin and the photo of Virgil on the screen, gazing out the window instead. It was raining today, clouds dark overhead. I swallowed, remembering the sudden rain the day Caroline was mauled.

I’m not killing anyone, I told the darkness in me. Never again.

“Whoever put this photo here encrypted it,” Justin told me, his voice tight with frustration. He took off his baseball cap and scratched his head. “I’ve never seen this type of encryption before. It’s going to be a bitch to decrypt it.”

“But you can, right?” I pressed, a swooping sensation of dread in my stomach. Please say you can. Please say you can lead me to my brother so I can get him out of there and stop whatever traumatic plan Nightmare has for us both.

“I can,” Justin agreed, twisting his mouth to the side. “But it’s gonna take longer.”

“I don’t care how long it takes.” As long as it got me to my brother, I’d wait all day. All week. But did Virgil have a week left? His haunted eyes stared at me from the picture, hopeless and pleading all at once.

I’ll get you out of there, I promised.

“This is gonna be boring as fuck for you, but you can stay and watch if you want,” Justin offered, taking a long gulp of his espresso.

“I’ll stay,” I confirmed, not budging until he had a location for me. I took his lead and drank my own coffee, finishing off my croissant as he worked, typing away at his backlit red keyboard for minutes. Long, long minutes. I was either adjusting to the stench of this room, or the old food and sweat scent had permanently burned away my sense of smell.

“Whoever encrypted this knew what they were doing,” he said twenty minutes later, stretching his arms with a groan. I understood exactly how his clothes got so creased if he was hunched over his keyboard for hours every day. When did he even find time to attend classes?

“Are you in?”2

“Very, very close to it,” he said, bending his fingers until his knuckles cracked, the sound driving needles into my nerves. “Just a few more lines and I should—what the fuck?”

“What?” I demanded, launching forward at his urgent tone, scanning the screens for whatever he was seeing. In one of the black boxes, text was writing itself, scrolling at a rapid rate. “That does not look good.”

“It’s… erasing itself. Shit!” Justin’s fingers hammered the keyboard. “There’s a built-in fucking self-destruct mechanism. I must have triggered something with that last line of code.”

My breath iced in my lungs. “It can’t self-destruct, it’s all I have. You’re the fucking computer genius, stop it destructing right fucking now.”

“What do you think I’m doing, Wallis?” he bit out, frantically typing.

But movement on the biggest screen drew my eye away from the boxes of code and my heart crashed when I saw the photo of Virgil had tiny squares missing. I had a copy on my phone, but it wasn’t the same as the original, and I knew as the pixels vanished one by one, I was watching my chance of finding Virgil disappear.

Why hadn’t I thought to send the picture via Bluetooth or file transfer instead of taking a photo of a photo? I was so stupid, so fucking stupid.

“It’s gone.” Justin swore viciously, thumping his desk with a closed fist. “There’s nothing left. Motherfucker!”

“It can’t be gone. Keep typing!”

“It’s done,” he sighed, scratching his head, an air of defeat hanging over him. “Fuck. Look at it; it’s devouring itself.”

I saw what he meant; line after line was rapidly erasing itself from the black boxes of code, all his work undone.

“There’s nothing I can do,” he said with a wince. “I’m sorry.”

Blood pounded in my ears as the last pixels disappeared, leaving a THIS MEDIA CANNOT BE DISPLAYED message on his screen.

Make him pay for this failure. Make him scream as a lesson to everyone never to wrong you again. Carve the word into his chest and leave him as a warning to all failure.

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