“Have I told you how much I love you?” Harper said absently as she took another hearty bite and looked across the table at him, moaning, savoring the sandwich. She forgot the napkin this time and just licked the crumbs off her lips.
Rome’s sandwich was frozen in midair, just in front of his mouth. He was staring at her with a peculiar look on his face and a twinkle in his eyes, but it disappeared just as quickly as she saw it.
What was that all about? Did her voracious appetite scare him, too? Maybe his usual dates were the sidesalad type and never actually ate.
“I’m glad you like it,” he said after he took a big bite of his own sandwich.
“What can I say? I like to eat.” She tried to guess what he was thinking. Impossible. He shook his head at her and went back to his sandwich.
Being an athlete for most of her life, she knew the importance of the energy food provided to keep her body healthy. Nutrition was just as important as physical training. Moderation was the key, and she had been careful not to overindulge her chocolate tooth, but she was never one for abstinence when it came to good food.
After practically inhaling her sandwich, she placed the empty plate back on the tray and dragged the laptop back in front of her as she sipped through the bendy straw in her glass of ice water. It took less than a minute for her to get back into decoding mode, her mind and body now replenished.
“How much longer?” Rome asked.
“Not much,” she answered, keeping her focus on the display. She could tell she was very close to unraveling the data by the way the level of complexity had skyrocketed with her last directive.
After ten more minutes, Harper sat back and ran her fingers through her hair. She stared at the blank screen, which was blinking a solitary cursor back at her.
One more command.
With her next move, she and Rome would know whether she’d deconstructed the code correctly. If she had, Bobby’s data would be accessible. If not, it would be gone forever.
Harper was confident in her programming and deprogramming skills, but she’d had little sleep and her stress levels were beyond measurable. She’d gotten this far, but any single wrong command along the way could still destroy it all. She knew Bobby masked lines of code and she wouldn’t know for sure whether she’d unmasked them properly until this last entry.
“All done?” Rome’s deep voice broke into her thoughts. She glanced over the laptop at him. He was watching her closely but with an encouraging smile. He scooted his chair around the table to sit right next to her and glance at the screen.
She was afraid. Afraid that she’d screwed up the decoding. Above all, she was afraid that even if she had cracked Bobby’s code correctly, it wouldn’t contain the information she desperately hoped was there. Information that could sort this all out.
But Bobby had stashed this flash drive for her. His last dying words were for her to get it. The answers had to be there.
And then there was Rome, sitting quietly next to her, his warm thigh resting snugly against hers, looking at her with all the confidence in the world. This man who’d chosen to stand by her and help her, risking his own life and career in the process. She just hoped she hadn’t let either of them down.
“I guess we’ll find out,” she said ruefully, and typed in the last command. Her finger hovered over the Enter key in a moment of tight hesitation. The she pressed it and held her breath.
The screen went blank.
No cursor. No data stream. Nothing but a black void.
Harper silently counted to sixty and still nothing. She let her breath out and shook her head slowly. She couldn’t even find the words to describe the misery threatening to overtake her; she felt as if she were underwater, unable to break the surface.
She chanced a sideways peek at Rome. His intense blue gaze was glued to the screen. Watching. Waiting.
“I guess I messed up,” Harper said quietly after another eternal minute passed. Rome reached over and pulled her hand onto his thigh. Enveloping it in his grip, he gave it a comforting squeeze and let out a long breath.
A flicker.
Both she and Rome straightened, gawking at the monitor.
A cursor began to dance among the blackness like a frenzied shooting star. The display went black again. Then they watched in sheer fascination as manic data streamed down the screen, drizzling characters like the northwest rain.
And it stopped abruptly once more.
Once again, the empty black screen flashed bright characters and then morphed back to the original innocuous blue desktop.
With a new yellow folder in the bottom right corner, simply titled Harpie.
Harper dragged her finger over the keyboard’s touchpad to open the folder. With a click, the folder opened and showed two subfolders. One named Research and the other generically named New Folder.
Harper clicked on the Research folder first to open it. The screen lit up with subfolders of various natures. They were organized by type and date, all with titles that included dates. She randomly clicked on one, opening a document inside.
Trial 1517.5.
Vegetation subjects 6-7 under incandescent light fail to respond to serum. Dosage immaterial. Vegetation subjects 15-17 under fluorescent light fail to respond to serum. Dosage immaterial. Vegetation subjects 4-5 under simulated sunlight respond to serum. Dosage immaterial.
Harper narrowed her eyes. Vegetation subjects responding? What was that all about? She closed the document without reading further and opened one dated later.
Trial 2761.5
Vegetation subjects 3-6 survive deep freeze. 4 of 25 branches frozen. Deep freeze duration 361 hours. Survival span 167 hours current. 3 of 4 frozen branches fully regenerated.
“These are Bobby’s research notes,” she explained, her mind in turmoil. “Considering the number of files, it must be everything he was working on. The serum mentioned here must be what’s inside me.”
“I’m sure it is,” Rome agreed, deep in thought. “We’re going to have to read through all those to figure out just exactly what he was doing.”
“Thank goodness Bobby’s notes are concise.” Harper sighed, but cracked a smile.
She was happy for the first time in a while. Actual for-real happy. The information about the mysterious serum that flowed through her blood, that was now part of her essence, surging in her mind, was all there. It was just going to take some time to read through it all.
“Open the other folder,” Rome suggested. She closed the Research folder and opened the nonspecific New Folder.
Inside was a single document. She started to read from the beginning.
Lower Interior Five Watch facility Section 21-244. Witness to testing on human subjects. Using serum derivatives.
A crash made them both jump, startling them out of their reading trance. A young server had knocked over a mug while clearing the two tables that had seated the group of teenage girls. Its white shards, among dark droplets, sprinkled the hardwood floor. The matronly woman strolled out from behind the counter with a dustpan and broom, calmly bending to sweep it up.
Harper rubbed her weary eyes and stared back at the screen. The typed words were in Bobby’s crisp voice, but uncharacteristically rushed and clipped. She wanted to keep reading, but as she turned to watch the unhurried cleanup, she realized they needed to get somewhere private to go through it all as carefully as they needed to. She didn’t want to miss a single detail.
“Maybe we should take this somewhere else,” Rome suggested, reading her mind.
“Sounds like a plan.” Harper closed the files after protecting them with several encrypted passwords. She saved the Harpie folder to the flash drive and erased any remnants of it from the computer. Then she pulled out the drive and slipped it into her jeans pocket. She shut down the computer and stood, smiling at Rome. “Let’s go.”