Page 131 of Not Quite Dead Yet

She darted through, avoiding the discarded clothes – not that Andrew would be able to tell if anything had been disturbed. It was all disturbed; that’s how he kept it.

She bent down to look beneath the unmade bed. Nothing here, just some socks that had escaped, found a place to hide.

Jet straightened up. Checked the closet instead. Not much left on the hangers, or in the drawers. And nothing that looked like it belonged to Nina. Damn. How long did she have left? Jet thought about Billy downstairs, fought a smile, thinking of the panic in his eyes. Smiled just to think of him anyway, actually.

Back into the living room, Jet skirted beyond the couch to the same closet Billy had in his apartment. Pulled one door open with her left hand, then shuffled back to open the other.

Stuff everywhere. Shelves full of it. Boxes lining the bottom.

Jet’s eyes scanned quickly across it all, squinting to try and stitch the world back into one. They did, just about, settling on a cardboard box tucked into the farthest corner.Ninascribbled across the top, flaps not quite meeting, too much inside.

‘Yes,’ Jet hissed, leaning forward to drag the box out, herright foot stepping in when it snagged on another box, helping her left hand to free it.

It slumped down onto the floor with a thunk.

Jet dropped to her knees in front of it, her thumb tracing across Nina’s name, dipping in and out of the ridges of the cardboard. She opened one flap, then the other.

The first thing she saw was a hoodie, folded neatly, balanced precariously on top. Dark burgundy with a bright yellow logo for Norwich University. The second thing she saw was a pile of loose photographs, fanning out against the fabric of the hoodie.

Jet scooped up the photos, looked at the first one. Nina and her mom, grinning behind a plate of homemade tacos, too many for a family of three. Shuffled that to the bottom of the pile, looked at the next photo. Nina’s clear skin pickling with acne, turning her back into a teenager. Her arm slung around a blond girl grinning at the camera, braces fixed to her teeth. Emily. She must have been about fifteen here, the photo taken on the patio in the Masons’ yard. Emily stared back at Jet, with the same brown-green eyes. One sister blinked, the other couldn’t. Emily’s hair was lighter than Jet’s, longer – too long, right down to her waist. So long it had killed her.

Jet placed the photos on the floor beside her, lifted out the hoodie, trying to keep its neat folds even though she only had one hand. Her stomach lurched – heart too – when she saw what was buried in the box beneath it.

A MacBook.

A rose-gold MacBook Air, one deep scratch on its case, cutting theApplelogo into uneven halves.

‘Yes,’ Jet whispered, taking it out, tucking it under her arm. ‘Thank you, Nina.’

‘Well, I’m going to hell,’ Billy announced, opening the front door, freezing as he spotted Jet by the coffee table, two laptops open in front of her. ‘You actually found it?’

‘Mission accomplished.’ Jet grinned. ‘Also, side note: it is very,verydifficult to open a laptop with just one hand, by the way.’

‘Ah, but you’re a trouper.’ Billy hurried over.

‘I don’t give up,’ Jet said, which wasn’t true: she did give up, all the time. But that was the old Jet. ‘Andthe battery was dead. Of course it was, been sitting in a box for eleven months. So I plugged it in with the ch-char-ch – white wire thingy. It’s just waking up now.’

The laptop burred, a whirring sound beneath the keyboard as the screen switched from the charging-battery symbol to the lock page. A matching whirring sound inside Jet’s head as she leaned forward, clicked the touchpad to enter.

The home screen sprang straight up.

‘No password?’ Billy asked. And then: ‘Why do you always have to sit on the floor?’ He dropped beside her, legs too long, studying the screen.

Jet jostled, made space for him. ‘Maybe Nina never had a password. Or maybe Andrew had to get it unlocked after Nina died, documents he needed access to or something.’ The something could just have been that he missed his daughter, hoped to find some of her still inside this machine. ‘That’s the first obstacle. Now we have to cross our fingers that Facebook is still logged in.’

Jet double-clicked on Safari to open the web browser. It was already connected to WiFi, probably Andrew’s router next door. She moved the cursor to the URL box, started typing, one finger to one key at a time.F a c

‘You’re typing like someone called Margaret.’ Billy smirked.

‘Funny.’ She smirked back, stuck out her elbow.

e b

It auto-filled for her, some ID code at the end of the web address, and Jet pressed enter, crossing the only fingers she had.

The Facebook log-in page.

The username was already filled in:[email protected].

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