“Yes or no, then.”
“Asshole,” Kenzie said affectionately. “What’d you bring?”
“Deluxe from Bernini’s.”
“Did you bring me some lyrics?” Kenzie asked. “What do you think? Got any tunes for me?”
“What do you think?” Kenzie said with breezy confidence. “I’ve got tunes that will rip your skin off.” Jonah dropped his backpack on Kenzie’s bed and unzipped it. Pulling his MP3 player from the front pocket, he plugged in Kenzie’s headphones. It took Kenzie a couple of tries to get them settled properly over his ears and find the play button.
Jonah clenched his fists, resisting the temptation to help. “Here’s what I did with the last tab you sent me. If you like what you hear, I’ll copy the files for you,” Jonah said. It was a recording of Jonah singing, accompanying himself on the guitar.
Kenzie nodded, closing his eyes, losing himself in the music. Gradually, the frenetic movements slowed, then stopped entirely. His flexed muscles relaxed, his head dropped back, and he smiled dreamily.
That was how the music thing had started. Right after Thorn Hill, Kenzie had been severely psychotic—plagued with hallucinations, voices, seizures, and other kinds of brain misfires. The healers caring for him worried that the repeated seizures would damage his brain beyond repair.
Jonah had discovered that he could calm Kenzie’s demons with music, especially when accompanied by Jonah’s voice. He wished he could embrace his brother, wished they could share the comfort of touch. But he could only touch him through his voice and his presence. He didn’t dare do more. Jonah had killed his sister with his terrible gift. He hoped he could somehow save his brother.
He rooted around in the small refrigerator, pulled out bottles of water, twisted free the caps, and set them on the window ledge next to the pizza. He dug two plates from the cabinet. Kenzie always ate more when Jonah joined him.
Setting his plate aside, Jonah sat down at Kenzie’s workstation, bypassed the voice-recognition software, and opened the music folder. He moved two new poems into their shared folder. Once Kenzie read them, he’d scarcely need to look at them again. He had a photographic memory.
Jonah moved back to the window ledge, watching Kenzie, eyes closed, chewing thoughtfully. Kenzie opened his eyes and grinned at Jonah. “Good shit,” he said, cheerfully profane. Yanking off the headphones, he reached out, grabbed another piece of pizza, and devoured half of it in one bite.
“Mose is here,” Kenzie said. “Did you know?”
“He is?” Worry rippled through Jonah as he realized that he hadn’t seen Mose Butterfield since the gig at Club Catastrophe. “Since when?”
“Yesterday. He’s on five, back of the building. Natalie stopped in to see me after handling his admission.”
“I need to go see him,” Jonah said, recalling that Mose had wanted him to come over the night of the show at Club Catastrophe. One more item to add to the guilt list.
Jonah and Kenzie sat companionably, downing pizza, licking their fingers, and chugging water until the pizza was gone.
“Too bad,” Jonah said, pulling a long face. “No leftovers.” He stuffed the empty box into the wastebasket and cleared away the plates.
Kenzie blotted at his lips with his napkin. “I ate too much,” he said.
“Maybe you should wear the headphones whenever you eat,” Jonah said. “It might make it easier.”
“How was the show?” Kenzie asked.
Jonah relayed what had happened at the club, and afterward, in the Flats.
“So you don’t know what this Lilith has in mind?”
Jonah shook his head. “I’d like to know more about it, but Gabriel isn’t interested.” He paused, took a deep breath. “I have some good news. I should be around a lot more than before. I’m out of Nightshade.”
“What?” Kenzie yanked the headphones away from his ears. “When did that happen?”
“A week ago.”
Kenzie eyed him shrewdly. “Whose idea was it? Yours or Gabriel’s?”
“Gabriel’s, I guess,” Jonah replied. “He wants me to spend more time with him. Learn the business.”
“Which business? Music or medicine or mayhem?”
Jonah snorted. “Anyway, I should have more time to research on my own. I’d like to find out more about Lilith. She claims she was a sorcerer who died at Thorn Hill. I’d like to verify that, somehow, and also identify anyone who either left Thorn Hill right before the massacre or was there and survived it.”
“Adults, you mean,” Kenzie said.
“Right,” Jonah said. “Sorcerers, especially. Gabriel thinks that someone at Thorn Hill collaborated with the Black Rose to poison the wells. It’s a long shot, but I have to start somewhere. I want to generate a short list of suspects.”
“I thought there were no adult survivors,” Kenzie said.
“Yeah. That’s what we’ve been told.”
“Did you ask Gabriel?”
“He says there aren’t any records from Thorn Hill here at school, but I’m not so sure. Would there be a way to check?”
“I don’t have to check. There are all kinds of databases from the commune. Sorcerers are natural geeks. I used some of that info to track down Jeanette. Now, whether it will help us here, I don’t know.”
Kenzie frowned, thinking. He swiveled back toward his keyboard and slid his headset back into place. “Harry. Search THLIS databases,” he said into the mouthpiece. He scanned the screen, then turned to Jonah. “Hmm. ‘File not found.’ It was just there a few weeks ago. Let me dig deeper. Nothing is ever totally deleted, know what I mean?”
“What site are you accessing?” Jonah asked. “How did you get into it?”
“The server is located somewhere here on campus. I can give you the IP address if you want, but it likely won’t do you any good. Gabriel has a kick-ass data security system. I have to keep running to stay ahead of this one.” Kenzie continued to murmur commands into the headset.
“Is there anything I can do?” Jonah asked.
“Get me a pop from the fridge,” Kenzie said.
When Jonah returned with cans of pop, Kenzie was moving files around. “Got it. I’m going to copy all this over to a safe place so we make sure they don’t disappear again.”
“Can you tell when the files were removed?”
“Harry. Show info.” Kenzie’s eyes scanned over lines of data. “Looks like it was in the last couple weeks. I guess I could’ve compromised something when I was looking for Jeanette.”
“Maybe,” Jonah said.
Once he had the files where he wanted them, Kenzie rummaged through them.
“Harry. Scroll down. Search Thorn Hill work-share logs. Scroll down. Select October twenty-third week.” He paused and, when the record came up, said, “Open spreadsheet, data entry view.”
“What are the work-share logs?” Jonah whispered so Harry wouldn’t overhear.
Kenzie hit mute on his second try. “Everyone at Thorn Hill was required to contribute work to the commune every week,” he said. “They didn’t tolerate slackers. They weren’t good about keeping track of comings and goings, but they were sticklers about work records. These are the last sets before the massacre. By comparing the work schedule with the casualty lists, we should be able to identify anyone who was at Thorn Hill immediately prior to the massacre, but who doesn’t show up on either the casualty or survivor lists. Now, what’s this sorcerer’s name?”
“Lilith Greaves.”
Kenzie turned back to his screen. “Harry. Search THLIS databases. Scroll down. Select casualty lists. Select survivor lists. Open work sheet. Data sort on last name.”
Through this process, Kenzie verified that a sorcerer named Lilith Greaves was at Thorn Hill immediately prior to the massacre, and showed up on the dead list after.
“Can you tell what kind of work she did for the commune?”
“She worked in the compounding labs, apparently. Making either weapons or health and beauty aids, depending on who you ask.” He paused. “Here’s another Greaves. A sixyear-old girl who worked in the vegetable garden.”
“Lilith said she lost a daughter in the massacre,” Jonah said. So far, this all seemed to verify what Lilith had said.
Now Kenzie generated a list of four adults who were on the work-share lists immediately before the massacre who didn’t appear on either the survivor or casualty list.
Jonah scanned the list. None of the names was familiar.
Then they worked their way through the four names, three men and a woman. Three were repeatedly honored in subsequent memorial services at the Anchorage and elsewhere. The fourth, Tyler Greenwood, a sorcerer, was not. Three of the names continued to appear for a time in legal and probate records, child custody proceedings, obituary listings, and cemetery records. Then they dwindled away. The fourth, Tyler Greenwood, did not appear at all. He vanished, digitally speaking, after the massacre. His name didn’t appear in Social Security death records, online obituaries, any of that.
“Well,” Jonah said. “It was a major disaster. Maybe he just got overlooked somehow.”
Kenzie frowned. “People don’t just vanish. These days they live on, digitally, anyway. As you can see, there’s always a bit of a backwash, even if they’re dead.” He flipped back to the work-share records. “He was a musician,” Kenzie said. “Some of his work shares had to do with that. He also did general maintenance and worked in the labs and the gardens. From what I can tell, he wasn’t at Thorn Hill very long.” He narrowed his eyes, a predator on the hunt. “I’ll just go backward in time until I find him.”
Jonah’s mind drifted, his brother’s voice a reassuring buzz in his ears.
“Search Google for Tyler Greenwood. . . . Scroll down. . . . Search Google for music and Tyler Greenwood.”