Page 104 of Natural-Born Cullers

Light didn’t look back as he briefly shook his head. His attention lay on the wire he stripped down. “You shared a text with what meds Jack was on. And Jan was sick?”

“Hmm.” Martin nodded a little. “You missed the one on the addition of the BP meds a few days ago, then, hmm? Along with how it mentioned Jan had flu?”

Light stopped working and turned his ear a little. “Jack was prescribed BP meds?”

“I was.”

Light looked down at what he held, then he started work again. “I’m sorry…. I’d have changed the composition if I’d have known, especially if Jan was sick. It was only meant to free the locks on the manor and my ankle tag, not do any damage.” Quiet. “You all okay?”

Martin glanced around the cellar. “Just debating whether you’re telling the truth or not,” he said quietly, and again Light stopped working. “Because if I find out you did it deliberately and put Jack, Jan, and Gray in harm’s way, my offer of a friend will go to your lover here, and you will end up dangling your wares in a cage as his lovebird.”

Light took a sip of hot chocolate, then rested his mug back down. “If it was mentioned on your last text, Simon spotted your phone as you dropped it in the bathroom, remember? I didn’t know about the change in meds nor Jan’s sickness. But I should have done.” He kept it at that, and Martin nodded and eased back, arms folded as Simon took a step closer.

“How did you get access to my laptop?” Simon flicked at his jacket, giving a slight flash of a firearm, and Light turned his ear again.

“You bring a gun into this,” Light said, going back to stripping wire from the jacket with a rough tug, “you really will piss me off.”

“You mean other than you being pissed off at not being able to kill the Controller? You’re out of options and time. There’s also only one way out, one way in, Light.” Simon stilled what he’d been doing just the same. “And you’ve not been taught firearms,” he added flatly. “I have.”

“You think I’m pissed off at not killing him?” Light snorted, then started tying up his bundle of wires with a spare copper strip. “Forget it. But how many cannisters did you pull out of the manor ventilation shaft, Si?”

Simon let his hand fall to his side. “Four.”

“How many did I make, Martin?”

“Five.”

Simon’s look went to the vents in the wall, how closer they were to him than Light as Light tugged his jumper off the unit. An oxygen mask and cannister from one of Gray’s labs sat underneath it.

“You’re really starting to get cut off at the pass by us, huh? I did warn you,” Simon said flatly. “Same fucking MO there with the poison in the ventilation duct into here, right?”

“Yeah, well. Busy night.” Light tugged a car battery from under the desk and kept it there by his feet, either taken from Seth’s car or his own, but either way it anticipated a power cut. He checked around the connectors before hooking them up to clips, but it wasn’t hooked up to anything else, so maybe hehadrun out of time to maybe restore the electricity to do whatever it was he was doing with the wires. “Sometimes old is best, right?” He stood and let the ends of those clips rest close by.

A threat?

Martin snorted. Most probably.

“It doesn’t explain how you got access to my fucking laptop.”

“Seriously?” said Martin. “You’re more worried aboutthat?” He cocked Simon a brow. “Get a milking machine to play with instead, mate: no one will touch that. It’s just a fucking laptop. Move on.”

A look came Martin’s way off Simon, and Martin shook his head and raised his hands. Okay…. It wasn’tjusta laptop in his sad-ass world.

“I didn’t damage it,” Light said to him. “You got it back.”

“Not the fucking point, Light.” And it carried in Simon’s tone. “I always turned off audio and CCTV when I accessed it. Martin was cut off from seeing my passwords that way. But you?” He shook his head. “There was no way you could have gained access to it unless I talked in my fucking sleep. Which I know I don’t.”

Light glanced back, just briefly. “Not your fault,” he said quietly. “Musician here.”

Simon frowned. Martin did too because hereallyhadn’t got a bloody clue how Light had accessed Simon’s laptop. He’d just said he’d handle it.

“What the fuck’sthatsupposed to mean?” said Simon. “I’ve seen skilled hackers code an app on smartphones to capture sounds from close by with the taps on a keyboard in order to decipher passwords. But that’s a huge amount of coding, transcribing, and time. You’ve not touched your phone without permission off me. You’ve recorded nothing when it comes to what I’m inputting. I’m not that fucking stupid.”

“No, you’re not,” Light said quietly. “But the drumming kit never did make the drummer or his addiction.” He started tapping a beat on the unit, just softly. “Standard eighth note groove, with sixteen keystrokes each day, which you change over twelve days. You then repeat that groove.” The tap of one finger turned into two, three, four, each hit spaced out as if on a keyboard. “But the rhythm creates bursts of these blues… blacks… reds…. So not rocket science,” he added eventually. “Just a good ear, where every sound is transcribed into colour. Well, in my world at least.”

Well fuck me.Martin snorted a smile where Simon stayed so damn quiet. No wonder Light had kept music away from the summerhouse. He’d been playing… listener. From Simon’s look, Light may as well have knocked him out again, because anger came in the bunched fists at his side.

“Shouldn’t have fucking touched it, Light.”

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