The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) Read online

  Jill found herself nodding, and now she was the woman in a leather jacket and jeans. She couldn’t wait to show Gordon her computer of secrets.

  “Your majesty, I am here to speak to you about the law of the land,” Gordon said. “You created the law. And you wrote it down in here. Do you agree?”

  Yes, Jill thought.

  “Carolyn, do you agree that you created the law?”

  “I…don’t know,” she said.

  “That’s alright,” said Gordon. “We don’t have to know who created the law. We just have to know what it is, and the law is written in here. You have it in this tower.”

  “I do?” said Carolyn.

  Yes, I do, Jill thought.

  “The law is simple,” said Gordon. “The law is short. It may be only a single sentence long. Or a single paragraph. Whatever it is, the law is written down here, and the queen makes sure the rest of the kingdom abides by it.”

  “I understand,” said Carolyn.

  “Find where the law is written down,” Gordon commanded, softly.

  For Jill, this was easy. She imagined herself sitting down at the computer. Her blue jeans and sleek leather jacket tightened around her body as she sat at the terminal and typed away until the law of the land came up on the screen.

  “I’ve found a piece of paper,” Carolyn said. “Is this it?”

  “You tell me, Carolyn. Are you looking at the law of the land?”

  “I don’t know. I just…”

  “Tell me what it says. Read it to me.”

  Carolyn made a whimpering sound. Jill didn’t understand why this was so hard for her. In Jill’s mind, the law of the land was already up on the screen for her to read.

  It was a single sentence. She didn’t know what to make of it.

  You are not your mother.

  “Carolyn, I am here to see the law of the land,” said Gordon. “You let me into this tower so I could read it. Tell me what it says.”

  “I can’t….read it,” said Carolyn. Her voice was trembling. “I want to read it, but it’s all gibberish.”

  The poor woman sounded heartbroken that she couldn’t read what was on her paper. Jill felt for her. In her own fantasy, the law was crystal clear.

  And yet, also, quite strange. Why did it say, You are not your mother?

  “Carolyn, it’s okay that you can’t read it,” said Gordon. “I will help you figure out what it says.”

  “It’s nothing but symbols,” Carolyn said. “Squiggles and dots and swirls all over the paper.”

  “You can put the paper down,” Gordon said. “We’ll try this a different way.”

  “I’ve set the paper on a table,” Carolyn said. “I want to leave. I don’t like it in here.”

  “Carolyn, we can’t leave yet. Don’t you want to know what is on the paper?”

  “No. I’m not meant to read it. I shouldn’t be in here.”

  “Yes you should, Carolyn. You are the queen. This is your fortress.”

  “It is not my fortress! This palace belongs to the king! I just live here.”

  “The king?” said Gordon. “Who is the king?”

  “Walter is the king,” said Carolyn.

  Still comfortable inside her own fantasy, staring at the strange line of text on her computer screen, Jill heard the words come from her mother’s mouth, and she wanted to cry.

  Walter is the king. This was her mother’s programming. Not that Jill was surprised, but to hear Carolyn say the words, to know that she saw the palace of her own mind as a place that belonged to her husband…it was disgusting.

  “Is this the law, Carolyn? Does the law say that Walter is the king?”

  “The law is what Walter says it is. The purpose of the law is to please the king.”

  “But why does the king need to be pleased?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  Silence for a moment. Then Gordon said, “I will address you as Your Majesty, because you are the queen of this fortress. Your Majesty, the reign of your king is nearing its end.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is, and when I finish counting down from ten, you and you alone will rule in this fortress.”

  “But how can that be?”

  “The fortress is yours. It always has been. 10…9…8…7…”

  The countdown took Jill deeper into her own fantasy. Gordon spoke the words in almost a whisper, and Jill couldn’t help but focus on every syllable.

  “…3…2…1…you are the queen of this fortress, and the law is whatever you say it is. What do you want the law to say?”

  In Jill’s mind she was sitting at the computer, looking at the words, You are not your mother, and feeling embarrassed at their silliness. This was the law in her land? This was the law she had dictated to herself?

  “The law can be a single sentence long,” Gordon said. “A single sentence at the heart of everything you do. What do you want it to say?”

  Jill erased You are not your mother from the computer screen. As soon as the words were gone she felt an extraordinary sense of possibility. She could write anything she wanted here and it would become the law of the land. A single sentence to sit at the base of Jill’s mind, to inform every thought that sat on top of it.

  With the sense of possibility came realization. Jill had been living her life with You are not your mother as the law of her land. What a horrible way to live! Had it really been so important to her that she wasn’t her mother?

  All the decisions that brought her to this moment had a new gleam to them. She saw her life in a completely new way. She was in the Network, risking her life and fighting the most powerful people in the world because that was the exact opposite of what her mother would do. She was using her tremendous skill with computers to undermine her mother’s skill, the two of them playing out an epic battle in the digital realm for control of information, with Carolyn spying on behalf of the vampires, and Jill spying on behalf of everyone else.

  She was going out in the world and stirring up trouble. She was being courageous and bold and trying to change the world for the better because her mother did just the opposite. Her mother hid in a study on the third floor and did whatever her husband told her to do.

  But now Jill knew better. Now she understood that her mother wasn’t some evil monster to be shunned; she was just another victim. It was time for Jill to quit using her mother to define herself.

  Still wearing the black leather jacket and blue jeans of the fantasy, Jill raised her fingers to an imaginary keyboard and typed in a new law of the land.

  I choose to do what’s right.

  The room was silent. Gordon was waiting for Carolyn to change her own law. Carolyn was sitting perfectly still.

  Jill opened her eyes. She felt fresh. She felt new. She and Gordon shared a glance. He smiled at her, and winked.

  “Carolyn,” he whispered, “write a new law, just for yourself.”

  Carolyn sat in place, her head tilted off to the side, her eyes closed. She looked like she was totally asleep.

  Jill wondered what was happening in her mother’s mind. For Jill, the fantasy had been as real and as vivid as any dream. The fortress was fully drawn. The castle was a real place. When she wrote the new law, she felt it take effect immediately.

  I choose to do what’s right.

  As she sat there watching Carolyn, Jill knew her mother was still a slave. For Jill, this exercise was invigorating. It made her strong. But for Carolyn, it did just the opposite. She looked like she was struggling in there. Her lips were pulled back in a scowl. Her body was awkward and slumped.

  “Only Walter can change the law,” Carolyn said.

  A look of frustration came over Gordon’s face.

  “Let’s not speak of Walter,” he said. “You are the queen.”

  “And Walter is the king,” said Carolyn. There was a bit of defiance in her voice now.

  “Walter does not live in this realm. Only the queen is in this tower. The fortress
exists only to protect her.”

  “And she exists only to serve the king,” Carolyn added. She pulled herself upright in the chair. As she did so, Gordon sighed. He looked defeated.

  “Carolyn, what if the queen had another purpose in her life?” he said.

  “Her purpose is to serve Walter! I hate this! Stop this now! I don’t want it! He doesn’t want this! I have work to do!”

  She jumped out of her chair and ran from the room, stomping up the stairs and slamming the door behind her. As she ran away, Jill could hear her sobbing.

  “What just happened?” Jill said. “How could she leave the session like that?”

  “It’s her choice when the session ends,” Gordon said. “That’s how it works. You should know. You fell into the quite the state yourself.”

  Jill bowed her head. “Sorry about that,” she said.

  “No, it’s good,” said Walter. “I wasn’t expecting it, but it’s good. Clearly you needed to relax.”

  “I guess I did,” said Jill.

  Upstairs, another door slammed shut.

  “She’s gone back to the bedroom,” Jill said. “She went right back to the laptop.”

  “It’s soothing for her,” said Gordon. “We should leave her there for a bit. Give her some time to come back to herself.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing more we can do,” said Gordon. “The part of her mind we need, the law of the land, so to speak, is inaccessible to her. Melissa made it that way.”

  “There has to be something,” Jill said. “We could try again tomorrow. Maybe we went too fast. She was coming along. She was role playing with you. Maybe you could bring her back there and take --”

  “No, Jill,” said Gordon. “I’m afraid you don’t understand. This isn’t a simple reprogramming like a servant from one of the mansions. Your mother’s programming is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. She is a highly functioning person with a mind running on all cylinders. She has a very simple command placed deep in her subconscious and she has restructured all her thoughts around it. But she cannot see what the command is.”

  Gordon put his hand on his chin and closed his eyes. He exhaled heavily.

  “What?” Jill said. “You’re thinking of something.”

  “The programming on this woman is so stellar. I mean, look at her. She’s a brilliant computer scientist! How many other slaves have ever done something like that? None in my experience. She’s truly remarkable. And the depth of thought we saw on that hypnosis experiment. The reason you went under too is because we had to keep going and going and going. Her mind is just enormous! Far too large to explore without a map. I wish we knew the command.”

  “I don’t know how we’ll ever find it,” Jill said.

  “I have a feeling Melissa might have recorded this one,” Gordon said. “Melissa is an artist, and your mother is her masterpiece. I imagine Melissa was quite proud of her. She would want the others in her clan to see her brilliance and recognize it. She wrote down the command somewhere.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Jill. “Melissa was breaking Daciana’s law when she created my mother. All of the records I found were hidden. I had a…”

  Jill trailed off, realizing she knew exactly where to look for the command.

  “I’m sorry, what? You had what?”

  “I have a huge trove of stolen data,” Jill said. “I stole it from Tremblay Property Management.”

  Gordon’s eyes got huge. “You broke into TPM?”

  “If the command is in there, I’ll find it,” Jill said. “Then Mom and I will be back.”

  “Where will you go until then?” Gordon said. “You’re supposed to be on the run.”

  “Yes, the Network wants me out of here,” said Jill. “But I’m not leaving my mom behind. It wouldn’t be the right thing to do.”

  Chapter 9

  Jill and her mother didn’t speak for the entire drive back to Potomac. When they reached the house, Carolyn jumped out of the car and ran inside, rushing up the stairs to her study and slamming the door. Jill went upstairs at a more leisurely pace, her body so drained that the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other was a chore.

  She opened the door to her room and immediately the bed beckoned her to come enjoy its soft, plushy warmth. It took all her will not to jump on the comforter and lose herself to some dream world that wasn’t nearly as hard as her real life.

  I choose to do what’s right.

  The words kept her grounded, quite literally. It was only those words, now plastered deep in her mind, that held her feet on the floor and her body off the bed. It wouldn’t be right to sleep right now. It would be reckless.

  Reckless because it was already five in the evening and Jill, having been awake for going on forty hours, would crash so hard she might not open her eyes again until morning, and the last place in the world she needed to be when darkness fell was this bedroom.

  Reckless because there was so much work to do and so little time to do it. The command that enslaved Jill’s mother might be hidden in the data Jill stole from TPM. The sooner she initiated a search for it, the sooner the data would turn up, and the sooner the data turned up, the sooner she could bring her mother back to Gordon and free her mind.

  Reckless because her phone had been buzzing all day long with texts from Zack. Texts she had ignored. She couldn’t go to sleep until she responded to him. She couldn’t leave him hanging. It wouldn’t be right.

  She grabbed a handbag from the back corner of her closet. Black with a pink floral pattern, she had purchased this bag three years ago because Gia told her to. It was her very first assignment as a Network agent.

  It’s a rite of passage for an agent about to go undercover, Gia had told her. You buy the bag you will pack when you leave. Something big enough that it can carry all you need when you escape, but small enough that you can throw it over your shoulder and act like everything’s normal should you run into trouble on your way out.

  Jill had sewn a flap of black fabric into the bottom of the bag. Underneath that fabric was a passport and credit card for a girl named Lenore Filkins. In the passport picture, Lenore looked just like Jill.

  Tonight, after Jill visited Zack, she would check into a hotel as Lenore Filkins, get some work done on the TPM data, and get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, when the sun was up again and she could be certain Renata wasn’t roaming, Jill would return to the house. Her mother would never know she’d left.

  A toothbrush, a change of clothes, her laptop, the charger for her phone…she was ready. As she left her bedroom, she looked up the staircase at the closed door to her mom’s study.

  See you tomorrow, Mom, she thought.

  The roads leading into Zack’s neighborhood were crowded. There was no parking anywhere. Bumper to bumper traffic and lots of people on foot. She turned left on 14th Street to find traffic at a standstill. There was a street fair going on. Tents and RVs lined both sides of the road. Big banners hung across the neighborhood announcing the 14th Street Festival. Up ahead, a police officer was directing traffic. The route to Zack’s apartment was blocked.

  The crowd was immense. People walked around with hot drinks, balloons, cardboard baskets full of food…children roamed with their faces painted, carnival games lined the sidewalk. There were booths selling arts and crafts, others selling wine. Men in suits, politicians probably, were working the crowd with smiles and handshakes. There was a stage in the middle of the street where a rock band was performing.

  Thousands of people were enjoying themselves, their days nothing at all like the one Jill was having.

  She had to park three blocks away. It took her twenty minutes to navigate the crowds and get to Zack’s front door.

  She rang his doorbell. Nobody answered.

  Jill stood there for a minute. Her legs reminded her that she was exhausted. She took a seat on the steps.

  A few weeks ago Zack was nobody to her. Now he
was the only one left. Gia was dead. Dante was dead. Nicky and Ryan were missing. Phillip and Helena were gone.

  When she was done here tonight, Zack would be gone too.

  Without expecting to, she started to cry. A crazy block party going on all around her, pretzels and cotton candy and beer and laughter and music, and she sat on the stoop in front of Zack’s apartment, her face in her hands, weeping for what she was about to do.

  “Jill?”

  She looked up. Her vision was blurred from the tears. She wiped at her eyes.

  “Zack, I’m..”

  “You’re crying. What’s going on?”

  He was on the bottom step, having just left the party on the street. He wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans. He had colorful strands of plastic beads around his neck.

  The sound of a rock band echoed through the neighborhood, drums and guitars bouncing off the buildings. The late afternoon sun had drifted beneath the cloud cover and was casting long, cool shadows over the street.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” Zack said. “You wanna go inside and talk?”

  God, yes. More than anything, Jill thought. Let’s go inside and never come out. Let’s lock ourselves in your bedroom and pretend none of this is happening. Let’s change our names and disappear.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  I’m not strong enough, she might have added. If she went inside, she wouldn’t be able to do this. She wouldn’t be able to leave him.

  “Oh. Okay,” said Zack. He sat on the ground next to her, pushed her hair out of her face, and wiped her cheeks with his thumb.

  “Tell me what’s happening,” he said.

  “It’s…you see, Zack, I have to…I’m here because I need to tell you--”

  It was like there were two Jills inside her. Calculating, analytical Jill, capable of intense feats of binary thinking, had weighed the options and knew she had to say goodbye. Analytical Jill took the new law of the land seriously. I choose to do what’s right. The right thing to do was make sure the danger in her life didn’t spill into Zack’s. Analytical Jill came here tonight end it with Zack, and get him as far away from her as possible.