Page 98 of Master of Lies

“Yeah, yeah, got it,” I said, my voice strangled. “Don’t cut me. Please. I need my eyes for this, okay?”

“No,” Nicole said coolly. “You need one eye, bitch. Zip it, and get to work.”

So I did. First, a bunch of numbers. Then a single letter from the poem. More numbers. Another single letter. Still more numbers and symbols. Lines and lines and lines of them. Then another letter. Doling them out like breadcrumbs in the forest.

No matter what happened to me and Jed, Ethan needed to know as much as I knew, at least. This nightmare had to serve some purpose. For Shane.

“Please,” I said. “Just tell me the name of the client who stole Shane from you.”

“We’re not telling you shit, Masters.” Boer whacked me in the side of the head, making my hands jitter on the keyboard. Which meant I had to go back, backspacing all the way to the last letter I’d entered. When the stars in my head stop spinning, the third dialog box was ready. I entered the period. It was getting harder to hold the image steady in my head for constant reference. It flickered, wavered, distorted.

No. Stay tough, girl. Five more passwords to go. Keep your shit together, for Shane. For Jed. For Holly. For Ethan.

The next line to enter backward was “So Eden sank to grief,” so I inserted it into my mental image. ,feirgotknasnedEoS. I lit up the letters in my head, trying to keep the image steady, and started entering garbage numbers and symbols slowly.Hurry, Ethan. Hurry, Drakes. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t go on with this. I’m going to crack.

So many moving parts. But Ethan knew where we were. My only job was to keep Boer and Nicole too busy to cut Jed to pieces. Hah. No pressure.

I hit “enter” on the third password. Held my breath again. Another dialog box.

The fourth line from the bottom was “Then leaf subsides to leaf.” That would be .faelotsedisbusfaelnehT. I inserted those onto my hilltop image. Lit them up.

Jed appeared to be unconscious. He hung there, plastic cuffs suspended from a looped chain hanging from the ceiling. His feet touched the ground but he wasn’t standing on them. The cuffs had dug so deeply blood ran down his arms.

Look away. Concentrate.More numbers, more symbols. More, more, more. I entered them grimly, until I heard Boer start to make ugly, impatient muttering noises.

I finished that one, hit “enter.” It worked. Four more to go.

The next phrase was, “But only so an hour.” I inserted .ruohnaosylnotuB’ into my mental construct. Only three to go after this. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I had to slow down.

I started entering the fifth string of letters. I must have been at that one for twenty-five minutes of solid typing before I hit “enter.” Three more to go.

And if I got to the end, and nothing happened? Then what? Oh God, then what?

“Her early leaf’s a flower”…wait. Hold on. Did this line have a comma at the end, or a semicolon? On top of the rest of this horrific shitshow, I now had to make a life or death call over something as trivial as punctuation. Fuck my life.

I gritted my teeth, and decided if it were a comma, I would not have hesitated. I stopped because some part of me remembered something different. I voted for the semicolon. Betting my lover’s body parts on it. ;rewolfas’fealylreareH.

I took even longer with this one. My stomach roiling with doubt. I typed in the final H and about twenty lines of random garbage after.

I exhaled, and hit “Enter.” Tears slid down my face, mixing with the blood.

Yes.The dialog box appeared, for the second to last line.

Now for “Her hardest hue to hold.” Which would be .dlohoteuhtsedrahreH.

Nicole and Boer were completely silent now. Nicole still pressed that bloodied knife under my eye, still holding up her phone to film what I was doing. The knife vibrated with tension against my face. I couldn’t string this out too much longer. Those psychopaths were already completely unstable. The strain would make them explode.

I entered the final letter. Hit “Enter,” and the very last dialog box showed up.

Last chance to stall. I had to drag this out as long as I could. Make it count.

“Nature’s first green is gold,” that was the first line. .dlogsineergtsrifs’erutaN.

I took my time like never before, but after about forty minutes of my typing, Boer spoke up. “Do you know what I think, Freya? I think you’re fucking with us. What do you think, Nicole? Do you think she’s fucking with us?”

“I do, Wex. I really do. I think a code this long is impossible for a human brain to memorize. So yeah. This sneaky little cunt is definitely fucking with us.”

“What kind of punishment do you think she deserves?”

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