Page 153 of Patching Over

“He said something about the one you wrote last night and sent to him.”

She giggles and the happy sound seems to lift some of the fog from the brothers’ eyes. In tense situations such as this, we aren’t used to hearing something light, airy, and sweet. Usually, we’re battle ready, scowls blanketing our faces and growls escaping our lips. Laughter is a foreign concept to us when a serious call comes through before the sun has kissed the horizon.

“Sorry,” she says, waving her hand in front of her face, fanning it. “I love it when someone isn’t a techie and is given instructions by somebody who is. I know what address and network he wants me to log into. I’ll be set up and ready to meet with him in less than five.”

We all watch, fascinated, as her fingers fly across the keyboard, never once looking at one key. Hawg’s voice soon comes through the screen and we all crowd around so we canhear what he has to say that’s so fucking important we’re all up before the donut guy.

“Selah, I found something, but I can’t decode it. I’m not familiar with the method they’re using for communication. I sent it to Beast to check out, and he’s never seen anything like it. After two hours of us working together to try and decipher it, we decided it’d be better if we had you take a glance at it,” Hawg says.

“I’ll see if I can crack the code. What file did you place it in?” Selah questions, her mouse hovering over a folder on her home screen.

“TFOTC communications,” Hawg instructs her. And when she opens up the file he named, a plethora of documents pop up. There must be hundreds of them stored in that location. “It’ll be labeled ‘scratch my head’.”

“Okay. Shit. This may take me about half an hour to go through. It’s a mix of languages. I’m going to open up a secondary screen and transcribe what I’m deciphering. Butcher?” she asks.

He’s quickly by her side and asks, “Yeah, Lah?”

“In the side zipper of my bag is a box that has a secondary screen inside of it. Can you get that for me and take it out of the packaging?” she questions, never looking away from the monitor.

He nods and moves to her bag, finds what she asked for, then opens the box and hands it to her.

“Thanks, biker man.” She winks at him then takes it from him and latches it onto her laptop. Pressing a few buttons, she connects it, and it gives her a secondary screen to view things from.

We all watch as she opens up a tab, chooses a blank document, and drags it over. Now, she has two manuscripts she’s working from. As she works, she opens up and gives usmore information into her background. “Our forefathers, the leading founders of the community, come from Russia and Iceland. This dialect is a mixture of Slavic and Icelandic. The linguistics are vernacular and hard to break down unless you’re intimately familiar with the vocabulary, in particular the way they’re both spoken and written, and I don’t mean studying the language like someone going to a foreign land for vacation… this is old school. Most of it has been lost through the generations and reconstructed. The syntax has been combined, a mash-up that is only known by the elders who have relocated to America. I take that back, their inner circle, the higher ups have studied it and know it too.”

“How did you learn it?” Butcher asks.

Not like any of us truly understand what she’s talking about, except for Hawg, of course, but it’s kind of interesting in a vague way.

Her fingers stall for a moment before she starts to speak. “Once I became fluid and bilingual in both languages, I invented the sublanguage. As I mentioned, only a few were privy to it, most still use the cheat sheets in order to share the intel back and forth. Each community has someone in a leadership role who has taken classes and has familiarized themselves with the encryption residing in their village. It’s the only way the system works.”

“Can you make me and Beast one of those cheat sheets?” Hawg interrupts, his voice coming across as enthusiastic.

“I can pull it from my personal files. I kept it there for safe keeping. It’s in a confidential location, only known to me, where everything I’ve invented for them went in case I needed it at a later date and time. Blackmail material in case I needed it to get my girls out. So far, I haven’t had the opportunity to use it, trust me, nothing I have yet scares them. They have allies insome high places. So, I’m biding my time and I placed it into an unlocatable storage file on the dark web.”

“We don’t need to use it against them. We’ll be using brute force to get Hannah and Moira back… if they have her too,” Butcher says, amending the last part of his statement because out of his peripheral vision, he catches the way I stiffen at the use of her name connected to them.

A panicked gasp escapes Selah’s mouth. Her hands tremble as she announces, “They have her. Dammit! Those motherfuckers found her.” Selah’s shoulders shake as silent tears fall from her eyes.

“Fuck!” I roar as I begin to break every piece of furniture in the room outside of what’s bolted into the floor as well as the chair Selah is sitting in. I briefly note that Butcher wraps himself around Selah in an attempt to save her from the broken furnishings as they splinter and fly through the air.

My Roanoke brothers tackle me to the ground, trying to calm me down, but I’m past that point.

“I’m okay,” Selah says to Butcher, patting his hands as they skim her body. “Help them subdue him. I need an hour to scan the documents and get us a location.”

Butcher jumps into the fray so he can help my brothers keep me restrained, because they know with the adrenaline and dopamine coursing and pumping through me, I’m nearly unstoppable. Selah’s innocent statement that they’ve recaptured Moira,my ol’ lady, has released the proverbial Kracken. And when we find those fuckers who dared to touch something that’s ours? They’ll find out exactly what that means.

Now that I’ve slightly calmed down, we start to talk about what we’re going to do as Selah continues to talk to Hawg. I hear her tell him where she put the cheat sheet she created and he says, “I’ll send this to Beast because there are additional ones that we need to sift through, extract, and decipher with a fine-toothed comb. As you were working on that one, I found a dozen more.”

“From the sounds of the conversation happening around me, once I’ve narrowed down where they’re keeping Moira, we’re hitting the road. Butcher has his Bluetooth enabled, so if you need any help with any of the verbiage, contact me. If I need to get online, we’ll pull over for a break,” she replies.

“I’ll take you up on that. Stay safe,” Hawg says before signing off.

“Guys!” Selah yells.

“What is it? What did you find?” Butcher asks, going behind her and massaging her shoulders. “Tell me you’ve got something, baby girl. Kracken is ready to go on a rampage if we don’t give him something soon.”

“They’ve been hiding beneath our noses, Butcher,” she mutters.

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