Neverworld Wake(49)

“Why did you never say anything?” I asked Kipling.

He glanced at Cannon, and I saw pass wordlessly between them some fleeting shadow of understanding that was gone almost as soon as I recognized it.

Kipling shrugged. “There comes a point where your personal pile of crazy gets to be a bit much. Even for your best friends.”

“That’s not quite the whole truth,” prompted Whitley expectantly, tilting her head.

Kipling looked sheepish. “Yeah, well.” He cleared his throat. “My eleventh-hour streak of Cs and Bs, revealin’ me to be a decent student who’d only been pretendin’ all that time to be abysmal? That wasn’t real.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

He seemed unwilling to go on.

“Cannon hacked Darrow’s network for him,” blurted Whitley. “All senior year. Kipling had every test from every teacher ahead of time. Including midterms and finals.”

“Not every teacher,” said Cannon.

She glared at him. “It was still cheating.”

“It was assisting a beloved friend,” he said stonily.

Whitley huffed. “You could say the same thing about what I was doing as the White Rabbit. Everyone thinks I’m the bad person? Look at what you guys were doing.”

Cannon said nothing. For years he had assisted Darrow’s notoriously backward IT department. It wasn’t unusual for him to be summoned from class to help with some bug or networking error. And though he was glaring at Whitley now in obvious annoyance, he didn’t appear to feel in the least bit guilty about this disclosure.

“How did you do it?” I asked him.

Cannon shrugged. “Social engineering. The weakest component in any given network is always the human. I sent a faculty-wide email, a required update for Darrow’s intranet. For Kipling’s teachers I included a RAT. They downloaded the trojan and I became root. It was as easy as untying a shoelace.”

He frowned at the look of disbelief on my face.

“Come on, Sister Bee. You of all people should understand. Darrow-Harker was an obstacle in the way of Kipling’s bright future. Kicked out junior year? He’d have to start over at some second-rate institution. Away from us. It’d look like shit on his record. And anyway, Kipling can’t be measured by such blunt objects as As, Bs, and Cs. No. Kipling is an experience. I had to help him in the best way I could.” He shrugged. “There are the rules of this world, and there is what you do when life comes crashing down around you.”

Cannon stared at me with such a penetrating look, I felt chills inching down my arms. I’d forgotten how intense a presence he could be, how when he focused, he seemed more energy than flesh and bone.

“So that’s it,” said Kipling. “That’s the two-headed monster in my closet who can’t stop drooling.”

“The question is,” Martha whispered, looking him, “will your secret help us change the wake?”

She fell silent, frowning, lost in thought. For a minute no one said a word.

That was what Martha did sometimes—let a question dangle for minutes, sometimes even an hour, before suddenly blurting the answer when everyone else had forgotten the problem.

“I have an idea,” she said.





That was how we came to be parked in the wild beach rose along the empty coastal road at 4:47 in the morning, four minutes before the end of the wake.

Directly across the street was where we’d had the accident—where, according to the Keeper, one Mr. Howard Heyward, age fifty-eight, of 281 Admiral Road, South Kingstown, had smashed his tow truck into our car, condemning us to the Neverworld, where somewhere, in some other dimension of time more real than this one, we were lying inside a totaled car inside a single second waiting to unlock.

Martha knew the exact spot, a hairpin curve twisting one hundred and sixty degrees through dense pine trees. She admitted she’d come back here to inspect it in the Neverworld.

How had it happened? I could hardly remember. Aggressive flashes of headlights blinding me. Hedges of beach rose trembling in the torrential rain. Windshield wipers waving as if in warning. Liquid night. Our drunken laughter spilling everywhere. Honking. Spinning. The car bouncing off the road, leaping into the dark. A loss of gravity.

“He’s a drunk,” Martha said. “He sits in the Raccoon and Hound Saloon in Warwick and drinks twelve Coors Lights. Twelve. Then he climbs behind the wheel. He can hardly stay awake. Nearly crashes into a telephone pole. In the Neverworld, he drives straight past the spot where he hits us. But that marks the end of the eleven point two hours of our wake.”

Rain hammered the roof. The windshield and windows were fogged. I felt as if we were sealed inside a submarine at the bottom of the sea. The radio stuttered classical music.

Only one car had passed us, a blue pickup. Spotting us nestled in the bushes on the side of the road, it braked and backed up. Martha unrolled the window.

“You guys got a flat?” asked a middle-aged man in a hunting vest. “Need a hand?”

“No, thanks,” said Martha. “We’re fine. We’re looking for our lost dog.”

He frowned, baffled by the sight of five teenagers dressed in green hooded ponchos smiling stiffly. With a perplexed grimace and nothing left to say, he drove off.

“Three minutes,” said Martha, checking her watch.