Under the Rose (33 page)

“I’d offer you something to drink but I think you may have had enough caffeine today, and everything I’ve got falls into the Jolt category.”

“Jenny,” I said, “when we get back to school, you’re going into therapy. Or at the very least, sitting down with your folks and your priest and talking about some of this stuff.” I sat on the nearest office chair. “I’d say you should take your problems to Rose & Grave, but—”

“You don’t think they’ll have me back?” She shot me a rueful smile.

Frankly, no. But aside from that…“I was going to say, it doesn’t seem like you put a lot of faith in what we do.”

“And you do?”

“I—”

“It won’t matter pretty soon anyway. Take a look.” She sat in front of one of the consoles and brought the screen to life. “Remember back at the beginning of school when we got those weird e-mails?”

“The rhyming ones?”

“That you guys made non-stop fun of? Yes, that one.” She pulled up a few windows. “Well, I sent it. And in an unprecedented display of disinterest, you promptly ignored it.”

“No, we just didn’t understand it.”

“I was trying to spark a little investigation, Amy. Thought if the Diggirls were worried about what was happening, they’d look into it.”

Well, we’d tried to look into it. Even tried to get Jenny to do some research, but she’d washed her hands of the whole matter. “Jenny, please. What do you mean, ‘what was happening’?”

“Your society is being pulled out from under you and you don’t even know it.”

“What? Why didn’t you just tell us, then?”

“Hi, remember, secret agent bent on destruction? I couldn’t really help you outright.”

I rolled my eyes. “Like we’d run and tattle on you to your boyfriend? Jenny, I repeat: therapy. Sometimes it’s okay to come out and tell a person something.”

“I’m trying to do that right now. Look.” She pointed at the screen and I leaned in. “Certain members of the club have, since the beginning of school, been involved in a secret pact to form a society
within
Rose & Grave. A males-only version that they feel has been unjustly taken from them. I’ve been tracking their e-mails since shopping period.”

Cut through the web in which you’re caught.
“Wait, you’ve been what?”

She shrugged. “It was an easy hack. Phimalarlico security is designed to keep outsiders out, not to keep insiders from snooping around.” Kind of like the doors on Old Campus. “I can read anyone’s e-mails if I want.”

“I’ll sleep better knowing that. Now, what are these guys doing?”

“Systematically disenfranchising you.” She handed me a stack of printouts. “They meet in secret to discuss the details of their society, and have slowly been siphoning off money from the trust.”

“They’ve been stealing our cash?”

“Through the help of interested parties on the TTA board. The unfriendly patriarchs? They aren’t gone, they’ve just transferred their ‘allegiance’ to Elysion. If Elysion gets enough support, enough money, your society will be a joke.”

I skimmed through the e-mails, all of which were addressed to people called things like Theseus-X1 and Hector-X1. Some of the conversations were little more than chatter, or harsh rundowns of what had happened at Rose & Grave meetings and how to avoid such “embarrassments” once the switch took place. They’d increased in frequency ever since the Straggler Initiation Night, and mentioned losing Howard as a catalyst to gain support. Many spoke of money, or how the movement within the patriarchy was gaining ground. “Elysion, huh?” I said. “Like the Elysian Fields, the heaven of the Greek underworld, reserved for heroes?”

“Exactly.”

“So who are they?”

“I’ve been slowly putting together a key to their identities, based on timing and content of the messages. It would usually be easy, given ISP addresses, but the Eli wireless system makes that tough.” Jenny looked at me. “This is all I’ve got so far. Brace yourself.” And then she handed me a list:

E
LYSION
M
EMBERS

Hades = Kurt Gehry

Hector = Nikolos Kandes

Theseus = George Harrison Prescott

Ajax = Benjamin Edwards

Orion = Omar Mathabane

Orpheus = Kevin Lee

Nestor = James Orcutt

I swallowed hard and leaned back against my seat.
Stay cool. You don’t have enough energy left to indulge in rage. Deal with it.
“Who started this?” I choked out.

“I’m not sure. It hasn’t been discussed on e-mail. But I bet it happened this summer. Nikolos appears to have been one of the first organizers.”

No surprise there.
Learn of the thief who can be bought.
It was a reference to Graverobber. I was right again. Go, me. “And there are five of them. Every man in the club except—”

“Josh, Greg, and Harun.”

George was on the list. And Poe. How could I not have known this? Of course, Poe was no big shock, though it did make my little street performance ring with a sudden truth. But George! How the hell had he made time for Elysion with all of our other activities? If he was involved in both societies, he definitely wasn’t seeing anyone else. It wasn’t a matter of desire, it was a matter of scheduling.

She picked up another sheet. “I’ve been trying to track the other patriarchs involved as well, but it’s much harder to learn their identities. They don’t send e-mails. Here’s what I’ve got so far….”

But I never got a chance to look. Someone started pounding on the door. “Jennifer Santos!” an angry voice called. “Open this door. We know you’re in there.”

We both froze, but Jenny regained her wits quickly. “Put these in your bag,” she whispered, and handed me a stack of papers. “We’ve got to run.”

“What?” I said. “What if that’s the police?”

Jenny was busy doing something to her computer. Within a few seconds, she’d closed everything down and was pulling out flash drives and unplugging little metal boxes. “Please,” she said. “It’s the Elysions. They’re back, and this time, my super didn’t hold them off. We can’t let them catch us. We can’t let them find out how much we know.”

“I think they know exactly what it is we know,” I said. “Why else would they be here?” Had Poe called them? Had he figured out that I’d ditched him because I’d found Jenny?

The pounding on the door gave way to a much more insidious sound—that of locks giving way. Apparently, some pockets ran even deeper than Jenny’s. Wonder what bribe—or threat—had finally won over the prickly super? So much for all bark and no bite. “What are we going to do?” I said. “This is an apartment. There’s only one exit. They’ve definitely got the fire escapes guarded.”

“Got it covered. Let’s go now.” Jenny pressed a few more keys and all of the computers in the room began making a hideous grinding sound. She grabbed my hand and pulled me across the room to one of the windows. “Go!”

I looked out and down, and for a second wasn’t sure what I was seeing. A ladder stretched diagonally from the window across a tiny space. I stared down into a minuscule courtyard ringed by tall, thin walls studded with windows. “What is this?”

“A light well. Go.”

I swung my bag over my shoulder, gave her a look of skepticism, and went. The ladder was freezing, wet, and slippery. It also bent and popped with every step. I was sure that any second it would slip from its mooring on the lower ledge and send us both clattering to the refuse-littered ground four floors below. The only thing keeping me moving was the sound of the Elysions hammering at the door and trying to get the chain to break off.

At last, I reached the bottom, where the base of the ladder rested against another window ledge on the opposite side of the light well. I slipped inside. Jenny clambered down after me then swung the ladder away from her window. It crashed to the ground.

“They’ll be back down any second,” she said. “We have to hide.”

She pulled me farther into the room. There was a narrow, steep set of stairs leading down into the floor. We descended, and I found myself in some sort of storage area. Giant crates of pop and pallets stacked with snack foods surrounded us. We were in the back room of the bodega.

Jenny leaned against the wall. “So now you see why I’m scared.”

“Yeah. All this on-the-run stuff really does a number on your adrenaline levels.” Speaking of which, I’d just about run out. All-nighters, too much caffeine on top of too little food, and thrilling escapes—not to mention I hadn’t exactly slept well the night before last—and you had a girl ready to drop. “Explain why we ran?”

She blinked at me. “Because they were trying to break into my apartment.”

“Then we call the police,” I said. “We don’t need to hide. What are a bunch of businessmen going to do to us in broad daylight on the streets of Manhattan?”

“This from the girl who a few hours ago thought I’d been kidnapped,” she snapped. “I don’t want to find out what they’d do to me. Hence, I don’t want them to catch me.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “So what do we do now?”

“You mean what are
you
going to do, Amy. You’ve got the information now. Are you going to let them snatch your society out from under you?”

“It’s your society, too, Jenny.”

She looked down at her feet. “Not anymore. If it ever was.”

So the fifty-dollar bill Jenny had slipped the bodega employee had nothing to do with overpriced Manhattan energy bars. Instead she’d charged him with taking her car out of storage. Within half an hour, we were on the highway heading back to New Haven. I spent the time text-messaging Josh and Clarissa that they could stop worrying about Jenny, but please don’t spread the word until I’d spoken in detail to them both. After that, I tried again to get in touch with my old boss, Gus Kelting, member of the TTA board. Gus was on a business trip to Reykjavik, and according to his secretary, he wouldn’t be available for several days. I was transferred to his voice mail and pressed the 312 code, which I’d learned last summer took me to his special Rose & Grave mailbox. I hoped like hell he was checking his messages from Iceland. If not, we kids would be on our own with this one—though maybe it was time to see if we could hack it without help.

I stayed awake as long as possible, watching to see if we were being followed and debating with Jenny the necessity of our thrilling escape.

“These guys’ idea of being a badass is sabotaging a summer internship, not breaking kneecaps,” I said, finally agreeing with the argument everyone had been throwing at me since Jenny vanished.

“How about hiring thugs to break kneecaps?” Jenny asked. “I’m from the Bronx. I don’t take chances.”

Fair enough.

I fell asleep soon after, and awoke only when Jenny parked in the York Street garage and turned off the ignition. Home sweet home.

“I don’t want to go back to my room,” she said.

“Why not? It’s nice and clean now.” I gave her a weak, sleepy smile. “Come home with me if you want. Josh will probably be in the room, and we can tell him the whole story. I promise he’ll be more coherent than I am.”

She bit her lip. By this point, I was surprised she hadn’t bit it through. “I don’t know how I can face Josh. I don’t know how I can face any of them.”

Frankly, I didn’t know how she was going to do it either, but hopefully we’d be able to steer quickly past accusations and recriminations and straight on to the issue at hand: Elysion.

Speaking of people we didn’t want to face at that moment, the first person we saw as we entered the gate of Prescott College was none other than George Harrison Prescott himself.

“Hey there, Boo,” he said, his tone jovial and not at all indicative of his months-long duplicity. Cold, man. Ice cold. “Back from New York?”

“Looks like it,” I replied, while Jenny pulled down the brim of her baseball cap, exposing her boyish, shorn nape, and pretended to read the bulletin board.

“Find anything?”

I shrugged, because I couldn’t trust myself to lie to him. I wanted to wring his neck. And what would be the point of making conversation anyway? It was entirely possible he was toying with me, that he and the rest of his Elysion cronies already knew about the break-in at “Ada Lovelace’s” apartment. No doubt the super had told the men about Jenny’s visitor before he’d let them have his keys. “I’m really tired. I’m going to try to grab some sleep.”

“Can I see you later?” He slipped an arm around my waist. Jenny’s back stiffened, echoing, no doubt, my own sudden relationship with good posture.

George noticed my decided lack of thrill when it came to his touch, and dropped his arm. “You okay?”

“Fine. Just tired.” Which was true, or at least half true. I
was
exhausted, only not “just exhausted.”

“Well, give me a call later if you want to get together. I probably won’t be in until late.”

“Okay,” I mumbled.

Jenny and I continued on our way, through the courtyard and up the steps to my suite, which glowed with warm yellow lights. I could see the door to my bedroom standing slightly ajar, and my eyes grew heavy again.
Come on, Amy, buck up. Miles to go before you sleep.

“I don’t think he recognized you,” I said, swiping my card at the entryway door.