Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(90)
“Home.” She has never thought of her dorm that way, but she supposes it’s the right word, for now the only home she has.
They walk in silence. She tries to focus her attention on anything but him. A gray squirrel worries over a pinecone. A leaf blower whines in the distance. A football spins through the pale blue sky and drops into some boy’s outstretched hands. And on the asphalt trail they follow, Matthew’s shadow falls across hers.
“Don’t ask me about anything related to lycan history,” she says.
“I won’t.”
“Good. I’m sick of it.”
Through the cluster of pine trees up ahead she can see her dorm. She quickens her pace and Matthew falls behind and she feels she has shrugged off an invisible leash. Then his voice calls out to her, “Hey, are you in some kind of trouble?”
She stops in the shadow of a pine. Browned needles rain around her. She turns and tries to read his expression—eyebrows raised, lower lip tucked beneath his teeth. “What does that mean?”
He peers around as if afraid someone might overhear him. “I was at the registrar yesterday. Signing up for my spring courses. There was a man there. Some suit. Everybody behind the desk seemed nervous about him. He had a list of names he was cross-checking. You were one of them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. I just thought I’d let you know.”
Her dorm room is unlocked. She holds the knob in her hand and looks both ways down the hall. Empty. A bad lightbulb sizzles in and out of shadow. Several doors are propped open and music filters from them. She reaches a hand into her pocket to grip the knife there. Slowly she pushes open the door. A rusted hinge screeches.
Failing sunlight falls through the window. No one is in the room, not under the beds, not in the closets. Her hand releases the knife. She closes the door and shrugs off her backpack.
She nearly cries out when a second later the door opens and Andrea walks in, her flip-flops snapping, her body cocooned in a towel. She brings with her a cloud of mint shampoo. She sets down her shower-spotted tote and withdraws a pick from it and flips her hair forward and begins to rough out the damp tangles.
As much as Claire hates to admit it, she needs her roommate. It would be easy to write her off as a complete idiot, but Andrea is bewilderingly smart with computers and graphic design. During orientation, she said, “Give me that piece of shit,” and stole away Claire’s laptop and spent the next two hours uploading software along with an extensive collection of music and videos, much of it pirated. She runs a blog called PinkGrrl. She does web consulting for a firm in her home city of Chicago and writes code for her computer science course while instant-messaging friends, and virtually every evening somebody knocks on their door asking a question about Linux this and Kerberos that.
“Andrea?”
“Yeah.” She twists her body and looks at Claire sidelong and flinches as she rakes through a painful kink.
“Remember what you were saying the other day—about if there was anything I ever needed, to let you know?”
“Course.”
“I need help.”
She has to clear away the mess on the floor to drag her chair next to Andrea’s. They sit side by side at the desk, their faces lit by the glow of Andrea’s iMac. Claire doesn’t know much about computers—Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, and iTunes are the limits of her technical savvy—but she has heard Andrea brag about this one, its quad-core processor and advanced HD graphics and FaceTime camera. Desktop Nirvana, she calls it.
Andrea transfers the files from the laptop to the desktop with a thumb drive and opens the articles into so many windows the screen looks like a mess of playing cards. She then clips away the images from each PDF and formats them into Photoshop. All this with a rapid-fire series of clicks Claire can barely keep track of.
When Andrea squints at the images and asks, “What do you even care about this old crap for?” Claire says, “It’s just a history project.”
She wonders if Andrea can sharpen up the pictures, zoom in on this figure in the background—there and there and there—pointing at the screen.
“No prob.”
Claire isn’t positive what Andrea does next—the mouse moves too swiftly, the windows open and close at shutter speed—but it appears to have something to do with the density of the files. Here is the photo of the bodies on the street. “Nasty,” Andrea says and then zooms in and clarifies, zooms in again and clarifies. “Best I can do.” The face is blurry and somewhat pixilated, like rain-smeared newsprint, but they can tell he has a beard.
The same for the other two photos. Andrea calls up the image of the federal courthouse, the image of her father, and they study the back of the man in the foreground. “I guess there’s nothing to be done on this one,” Claire says.
Andrea shrugs her apology and then answers an instant message that pops up before returning to the photo. “Maybe, maybe, maybe,” she says under her breath and then drags the magnifying function over the entryway to the courthouse. A glass revolving door with the sunlight brightening it. Andrea drags it closer and closer still. She changes from color to gray scale and then messes with the lighting to dampen the glare. Clarifies again. The pixels rearrange into the reflection of the man with the braids. Not perfect, but focused enough to clearly observe him from the waist up. His face half-hidden by his beard. His jacket, leather fringe. Professor Alan Reprobus.