I nodded toward Arwen. “Yeah, let him go.”
She relinquished her charm over his limbs. He raced away with barely a backward glance. Arwen moved to me and gripped my shoulder. The bushes surrounding us disappeared.
The witch made us reappear in her living room. We sank down on a sofa next to each other where, finally, I could start reading without disturbance.
“October fifteenth,” the first words printed in the top left hand corner read. “The Old Fox.”
As my eyes fell to the text beneath it, I realized that this was some kind of journal entry. Georgina had been staying with her parents on… October fifteenth. The date rang a bell. A rather loud bell. October sixteenth. That had been the date that the papers had announced Georgina’s accident.
This had been written the day before she died.
“Weather today was gloomy, same as yesterday, and all of this week. Pleasantly gloomy, though. Funny how anything familiar brings comfort in times like these…”
A line of dots followed, trailing across half the page, as if she was contemplating what to type next.
“Early tomorrow I take the train back up north. Weather permitting, I will return in time to make my evening call to Seamus. I will find a way to confirm what I told him previously, that my week was spent in the castle. Hopefully, Josh will already be in bed and asleep.”
Josh.
I paused for a second to gape at Arwen—who looked thoroughly confused—before fixing my eyes back on the screen.
“I still haven’t told Josh about the journey we’ll make the day after, of course. I will make a final visit to the grocer’s to collect some food for the journey, but even when I return for him and our bags, he won’t know. I’ll tell him that our destination is a surprise… and that as part of the surprise, he must remember his name is Josh.
When we arrive at the airport, he’ll be distracted by the shops. And when we board the aircraft, I will try to cover his ears during announcements.
FOEBA files are already encrypted. I left backups safely, just in case.
But Seamus won’t know where we’ve headed…
Seamus can’t know.”
As my eyes reached the end of the text, I trailed back to the beginning and started all over again. I read the same passage four times before I found my voice again.
“By Josh, she must be referring to Lawrence,” I murmured. “Some kind of code name for him. Who else would it be?” Plus, that was the first name Josh thought to call himself when I asked him to choose a name.
Arwen shrugged. “Then who is Seamus? Sounds like she was trying to escape from him.”
I rubbed my head. The fact that she’d made regular calls to him made me believe that it was a code name for her husband, Atticus. But why was she hiding things from him? Where had she planned to go with Lawrence?
My head was spinning. This journal entry revealed that the very same day she died, she had been planning to leave with Josh to somewhere she hoped Seamus would never find them.
“She was afraid of him,” Arwen commented.
“It has to be Atticus. Otherwise where is the mention of him in this letter? They were married. Supposedly living together.”
“Hmm… I wonder why she would feel the need to lie about her location to him—she’d been staying with her parents in the UK, and yet she led him to believe she was staying in ‘the castle’, most likely code for where Lawrence was staying with his nanny.”
Georgina’s apparent fear gave me chills. Was Atticus unsafe? Where is Lawrence now? I prayed that he was okay.
“And… what on earth is FOEBA?” Arwen went on.
I frowned deeply. FOEBA was the name of the folder in which all of the encrypted files were contained. Why had she encrypted the files in the first place? What was so secret about their contents?
“Maybe FOEBA is some kind of hunter terminology,” Arwen suggested.
I spent the next hour doing a thorough web search for FOEBA, but it did not bring up anything that sounded even remotely related.
“Great.” I sighed, slumping back in the sofa. It felt like we had hit another dead end. It was obvious that finding out what FOEBA was should be the next step in uncovering this mystery. “How do we figure it out?”
“Well, if I’m right in assuming that it’s hunter terminology,” Arwen replied slowly, “it looks like we will need to try to get the answer from them.”
“Jude again?” I asked.
Arwen reached for the necklace and ran her fingers along its silver chain before pulling out a long, brown hair that had gotten caught in the links.
The hair was too short to be mine, and off color. And it definitely wasn’t Arwen’s. Hers was too curly.
“Yes,” Arwen replied after a moment’s clause. She glanced at me with contemplation. “Looks like we’ll be using Jude again.”
Grace
It would be too difficult to get our hands on Jude again. For one thing, I doubted that he would come outside again for a while. He would probably be traumatized. He would likely also tell his authorities about what happened, and as a result, they might impose restrictions on their people venturing outside base.
“We’re probably going to have to dig around a bit for an answer about this,” Arwen said. “It’s possible that many hunters won’t have even heard of the term FOEBA. We may need to pick the brains of several people before arriving at an answer. We’re going to have to play things differently this time… I suggest that you go in disguise. We have a strand of Jude’s hair. I’ll create a camouflage potion, and you could go in as him.”
I stared at the hair and began to picture all the worst-case scenarios in my head. Would I be able to gain entrance in the first place without some special code? I also didn’t know anything about Jude’s schedule or have any idea about where he was located within headquarters. I had never set foot inside any of IBSI’s buildings before, let alone this one. I would need to keep myself hidden as much as I could… if that was even possible.
“What if I bumped into Jude?” I wondered, shuddering at the thought.
“Well, you would need to keep a low profile,” Arwen replied. “But you’re right. Setting foot inside their base really is a last resort. Thinking it through, there are so many potential problems. The thing that I’m most concerned about is the potion wearing off before you get out.”
I hadn’t even considered that yet. “Yeah… that really can’t happen.”
“But since this is a head hair, the potion should last for at least a day. Those are always the most potent of body hairs for this potion.”
“Hm…” I recalled a story my grandmother Sofia had told me. Soon after Kiev had arrived in The Shade with Mona and the rest of his crew, Sofia had been trying to bridge the gap between Grandpa Derek and Kiev. She had turned into both of them in turn, but she’d gotten stuck as my grandfather for much longer than Kiev, since she had extracted a head hair from him, rather than a leg hair, like she had gotten from Kiev.
“Before we decide,” Arwen continued, “I think there’s no harm returning to Latimer Beach tonight anyway just to see if we might get another opportunity to accost a hunter. I doubt we will, but we should try.”
I nodded, though continued to think about the camouflage potion plan.
It was just as well that I had set my mind on our last resort already. We returned to the beach again that evening but we didn’t spot any hunters. Perhaps the authorities had called for everybody to stay inside while they investigated what had happened.
This, of course, would present an additional obstacle for me. I would have to go to the entrance and persuade them to let me inside as Jude, even though he was supposed to already be inside.
Still, one step at a time. I would have to overcome that obstacle once I came to it.
Arwen took me to her mother’s potion room, where she began brewing up the concoction. Once it was ready, I went through the rather disgusting process of taking it and then the most unnerving e
xperience of turning into a guy. After the tingling in my body had stopped, Arwen signaled with a nod that the transformation was complete. “It worked!”
She couldn’t get the grin off her face. I, on the other hand—or rather Jude—was grimacing.
I’m a guy. This is so weird. Grandma Sofia had described to me what it felt like, but nothing could have prepared me for experiencing it myself.
“I’ll get you some clothes.” Arwen chuckled.
Currently I had only a bathrobe wrapped around me. Arwen vanished before reappearing a few minutes later with a pair of black pants and a black shirt to match the type of outfit Jude had been wearing. The size looked like it would just about fit. I moved away from the mirror so I couldn’t see my reflection as I changed. I wanted to preserve Jude’s modesty at least a bit.
“Okay,” I informed Arwen in my new, deep voice. “I’m done.”
She approached, holding out a small golden square object in her palm. “Fit this onto one of your back teeth. It’s a tracker so that, if something goes wrong, at least I can sense your location.”
“Right,” I said, clenching my jaw. “Good idea.” Opening my mouth, I moved the tracker inside and fiddled around until I found a comfortable position. I pressed down the tiny object against one of Jude’s molars. Once it was secure, I could hardly feel it.
“I won’t swallow it if I drink some water, will I?”
“No. But just be careful all the same.”
I drew a deep breath, moving to the mirror again. I ran my hands through Jude’s shoulder-length hair before gathering it and tying it in a ponytail, trying to mimic his style. I rubbed my hands against his beard. Prickly and coarse. Ugh. I was sure that he would look better without a beard, like Lawrence had.
Lawrence.
Thinking about him made me ache inside. I’ve got to know if he’s okay.
“Also, take these,” Arwen said, handing me a black hoodie and placing a pair of glasses on me. She looked me over. “So, are you ready?” she asked, planting a hand on my right shoulder.
“Yeah,” I replied.
Arwen returned us to the beach.
“You okay?” she asked as we faced the line of buildings.
“Yes,” I managed. “Do you have any idea which way I should head to reach headquarters? I guess it’s nearby?”
“Yes, it’s nearby,” Arwen assured me. “Walk along the promenade until you reach that red-colored restaurant on the corner, then take a left turn and you’ll find yourself facing a very long road. Right at the end of that road is IBSI’s compound. You’d have to be blind to miss it. You can already see it once you’re a quarter of the way along the road.”
“So you and Brock have sniffed around there already?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Arwen replied with a roll of her eyes. “We just checked it out from a distance.”
“Okay.” I straightened my pants, still distracted by this weird male body. “I’ll start heading there. I’ll aim to be back within a few hours—but obviously it could take longer. So I guess don’t start panicking until after almost a day is up.” Though I definitely didn’t plan to wait an entire day. I needed to get in and out of there as fast as possible.
“Okay,” Arwen said. “I’ll be waiting on this beach, directly opposite the road.” She squeezed my hand. “I won’t budge. I promise.”
I let out a dry chuckle. “You’d better not.”
Grace
Arwen wasn’t joking when she said that the road leading up to IBSI’s HQ was long. But it was broad, too, with buildings on either side.
“Amberly Road,” read an engraved metal sign.
That name sure sounded posh. Just like Latimer Beach, Amberly Road seemed to be clean and well kept. There were more cafés and restaurants along each side. I guessed that it was only to be expected that the immediate area surrounding the IBSI’s base would be kept orderly and safe.
I pulled the hood over my head and retreated into the shadow it cast over my face. Then I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a restaurant window and realized how dodgy I looked. I removed the hood and continued forging ahead. I fixed my eyes in tunnel vision on the end of the road, which, as I made quick strides, soon began materializing.
I figured that I had almost reached about a quarter of the way along the road—though it was so long, it was still hard to tell exactly—when a voice called out from my right, chilling me to the bone.
“Hey, Jude! What are you doing out here?”
I swiveled to find myself staring at a young man, standing in the doorway of a fast-food restaurant. He was a short guy with a mop of thick black hair and a sharp, hooked nose. He wore black clothes complete with a badge, though from this side of the road, I couldn’t make out what it said.
I swallowed hard. I had two options. Try to brush him off and continue on my way, or stop and engage with him.
I opted for the former approach first.
“Hey,” I called unenthusiastically, before continuing to walk.
“Huh? What’s the matter?”
“I’m tired,” I grunted over my shoulder, but he had already began to cross the road. A few seconds later, he was jogging up to me. The smell of his minty aftershave filled my nostrils as he gripped my right arm and turned me around. Now I could glimpse his badge properly. He worked in the IT security and maintenance department, just like Jude. Dev, his name was. Dev Srivas.
I realized in that moment that Arwen’s outfit had come without a badge. I had to hope that it wasn’t mandatory for hunters to wear them at all times.
“How come you’re out here?” Dev asked. “I thought you were up with Desmond?”
Who’s Desmond? I wished that I could have asked.
I shook my head. “I finished with him,” I replied. “I just need to… clear my head for a bit after what happened.”
Dev’s brows furrowed. “After what happened?”
Oh. I had assumed that Desmond had been some kind of superior who had been questioning Jude regarding what Arwen and I had done to him.
“A lot of stuff,” I replied, waving a hand vaguely. I figured that it was best to not lie, but also avoid telling the truth. “Look, Dev, I’m really not feeling well. Let me go.”
In that moment, three other guys, along with a girl sporting wide green spectacles, exited the fast-food place and joined us on our side of the road.
“Hey, Jude,” one of the guys greeted. “We have an extra one of these. Take it.” He thrust a bag of fries into my hands. The last thing in the world I felt like doing was eating right now.
“What’s up, man?” another guy asked.
Apparently, they hadn’t yet been informed about what had happened to Jude either. This at least gave me hope that maybe even security might be unaware still, which would make entering the facility a lot less nerve-racking.
“Jude isn’t well,” Dev replied for me.
“Awww, poor Judy,” the girl—Marnie Thomas, per her badge—cooed. I was completely unprepared when she moved to me and drew me in for a tight hug. Still holding the fries in one hand, I returned her gesture awkwardly. For a moment I feared that she might even kiss me, but then I reminded myself that Jude was single—or at least he ought to be single, given his willingness to go off with me on a date.
Marnie withdrew after just a hug and looked up at me compassionately.
I shrugged her attention off with a smirk before diving a hand into the fries and stuffing a few into my mouth. Food was always a good excuse for distraction. “I’m okay,” I muttered. “Just need some space.”
“Are you heading back to base?” Marnie asked.
“Yes,” I replied through a mouthful. These fries were pretty good, actually.
“We’ll walk with you then,” Dev said. “We’re heading back anyway.”
Marnie looped one arm through mine and began leading me forward.
Great.
I squinted toward the end of the road, trying to estimate how many more
minutes I would be trapped in their presence. I had to make these fries last.
Thankfully, they became pretty busy with their own food, and before I knew it, we were over halfway there. I could clearly see it now—the compound at the end. The entrance was marked by tall, metallic gates, and bordered by what appeared to be electric fencing.
“Ugh,” Marnie sighed, rubbing her plump stomach. She’d just taken the last mouthful of her wrap and tossed the packaging into a trash can. “I’m pretty tired, too. Gonna get an early night.”
“So I take it you’re not up for that chess round tonight,” Dev prodded me.
I shook my head. “Sorry, man.”
“Yeah, well, don’t think that you can escape me forever. I will beat you next time.”
I smiled wearily.
As we approached the gate, my heart was hammering in my chest. I looked around for some kind of outer security buildings, like I’d seen in IBSI’s London branch. But there was nothing like that here. Just two intimidatingly large cameras, pointing directly down at us from the top of the gate. Then I noticed on the right-hand side of the entrance, fixed against the metal, was a wide screen.
I hung back, watching Marnie approach it first. She swiped her thumb over the glass before stepping back for Dev to do the same. I approached the scanner last, pressing my thumb over it unsteadily. My fingerprint seemed to register, thank God, as smoothly as the others’ had. I realized that I’d been staring at the scanner—as if expecting it to suddenly explode—a little too long, as Dev gripped my shoulder and pulled me to the gates, which had started gliding smoothly open.
Behind them lay a world of familiar brown, oblong buildings whose walls were made almost entirely of tinted glass—many of which were interconnected by rectangular walkways.
The entrance closed noiselessly behind us. We crossed a circular stone yard, which was empty except for a few benches, and headed toward the nearest building. Passing through the revolving doors, I followed them as they took a right turn.