13

Nemesis.

I considered the word.

The inescapable agent of someone’s downfall.

A long-standing rival; an archenemy.

I thought of the murders I’d endured. Deaths that made me question my sanity, even the fabric of reality itself.

Yet here, on this familiar desk, in this comfortable office, at the heart of the sleepy little town I’d called home every day of my life, was a decade-old contract linking my mother and my psychiatrist in some sort of secret agreement about me.

And I’ve had a nemesis ever since.

“Min?” Tack repeated, but I still didn’t respond. I was paralyzed.

With an irritated grunt, Tack spun Lowell’s chair so that I faced him, worry lines creasing his forehead. “Yo, Melinda J. What’s up?”

I looked away. Couldn’t explain. Not without telling him everything.

Pull yourself together.

“It’s nothing.” My voice shook. I covered it with a cough, grateful for the dim lighting. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

Tack’s gaze lingered, blue eyes glinting in the lamplight. Then he pointed to his side of Lowell’s desk. “I only checked the top drawer so far. Nothing worth discussing.” He yanked the bottom one open. A single object rested inside.

“Bingo.” Tack removed a MacBook and placed it on the desk. “Think we should steal it?” He drummed the laptop with his thumbs. “We could visit a tech-geek message board, maybe find a friendly hacker. Isn’t that what Anonymous does?”

“No need. I know the password.”

“Seriously? How?”

Despite everything, I grinned. “Dr. Lowell mumbles when he types. I pay attention.”

I fired up the laptop and a pop-up box appeared. I typed out eight simple letters. I even knew what the keystrokes sounded like. “Stanford. He went to school there.”

“That’s his password?” Tack snorted. “I’m pretty sure your shrink failed Data Encryption 101. Nice job, Stanford.”

I tucked my hair behind my ears as the system loaded. “He obviously doesn’t stress about security.”

“Then we’re teaching him a valuable lesson.” Tack leaned in so he could read over my shoulder. I felt his breath on my cheek as a satellite photo of Earth filled the monitor, followed by an assortment of icons. Tack pointed to a folder in the corner. “Case files. That looks promising. Click there.”

Inside were subfolders sorted by name. A few surprised me. “Mr. Fumo? I wonder what he sees Lowell about.”

“Napoleon complex,” Tack said confidently. “He’s as short as I am. Or maybe he thinks he’s a Viking god trapped in a math teacher’s body. Let’s find out. Open sesame.”

“I will not.” Indignant. And slightly ashamed for sharing the impulse. “We didn’t come here to violate people’s privacy. I only want to see my file.”

Tack rolled his eyes. “Bo-ring. Fine. But your name isn’t listed here.”

I double-checked, and he was right. Then a different name popped into my head—my terrified partner on that ride with Dr. Harris ten years ago. I rescanned the list, but Noah wasn’t there either.

I closed out and examined the rest of Lowell’s home screen. Everything else seemed innocuous. Program links. A folder labeled “Personal” that was largely empty. Some journal articles. A PowerPoint labeled “Northern Idaho Psychiatric Retreat—Presentation, 2016.” My doctor’s hard drive was as dull as his office.

I sat back, stymied. Experienced a moment of doubt. What did I really expect to find? A cache of top-secret military documents? Orders from the Joint Chiefs, in PDF format?

Tack stretched his arms over his head. “Well? We done here?”

I glanced at a nearby shelf. Lowell stared back at me, hoisting a smallmouth bass with a wry smile on his face. Is that fish me, Doc? Did I take the bait?

“No.” Sitting forward, I selected “All My Files.” Over the next five minutes I scrutinized the complete list, but my name didn’t appear anywhere.

“Welp.” Tack was chewing a thumbnail, plainly ready to give up but trying to hide it. “Maybe you’re just really, really boring. Like, his dullest, least interesting case. A total snooze.”

“Let’s try running searches.”

Melinda Wilder. Min. My birth date. My Social Security number. My mother’s name.

Nothing. On this laptop, I didn’t exist.

Tack straightened and stepped away, yawning into his fist. “Guess your file is somewhere else. Maybe because you’re a minor?”

I was about to agree. Froze instead.

Without responding, I searched the one thing I hadn’t tried.

Nemesis.

The screen blanked. Planet Earth disappeared as the laptop hummed with renewed purpose. A new home screen sprang up, backed by a high-res satellite image of the sun. A single, unlabeled folder sat in one corner.

“Oh, snap!” Tack’s eyes widened in delight. “A second desktop. Here we go!”

Taking a deep breath, I clicked the folder. A short list of files appeared. Tack swore.

Melinda Juilliard Wilder.

My name was the very first one.

“What does this mean?” Tack pointed to the metadata beside my file. “The subheading for your document is Beta Run—Test Patient A. Not gonna lie—I don’t like the sound of that.”

Abruptly, I wished I were alone. If Tack read Lowell’s notes about me—even just the highlights—he’d learn my darkest secret. I wasn’t ready for that, but banishing him now would be unfair. He’d shared the risk of getting me in here. I owed him.

So I steeled myself for whatever came next. “Only one way to find out.”

I selected my file. A new password box opened. I entered “Stanford,” but was denied. Frustrated, I typed the word again, more slowly. Same result.

“Well, fart.” Tack had a way with words.

“Come on come on come on.” I thought for a moment, then tried “Nemesis.”

The box disappeared with a beep.

“Nice!” Tack crowed, but then a red stop sign flashed onscreen.

“Shit! I’m locked out. Too many incorrect entries.”

Tack shifted uncomfortably. “Will Lowell see that?”

I shrugged helplessly, then minimized the warning and checked the folder. A red key icon had appeared next to my file name.

My stomach twisted in knots. “Damn it. I think Lowell has to reset his password or something. He’ll know someone tried to access my file.”

Tack narrowed his eyes at the monitor, thinking hard. Finally, “Lock out all the files, one by one. We can’t do anything about yours, but if we jam the entire folder, at least he won’t know which document was the original target.”

“Brilliant!” I squeezed his hand, then clicked the next file before its name penetrated my brain. “Oh God. Tack, look.”

Noah Charles Livingston.

“That jackass?” Tack sniffed. “I wonder what his problem is. Affluenza? Trust fund guilt?” He tapped the screen. “Check out the metadata.”

Noah’s subheading was similar to mine: Beta Run—Test Patient B.

I held his hand before the shots. He was so scared.

My mind was galloping in circles. They’d taken us both to that facility.

Melinda Julliard Wilder. Noah Charles Livingston.

Test Patient A. Test Patient B.

Were his sessions like mine? I thought of Lowell’s droning. The blue pills. I tried to imagine Noah freaking Livingston in my place on that stupid couch, evading Lowell’s questions, doubting himself, a ball of frustration and suspicion like me.

I couldn’t get there. But then the real question hit me, and I nearly threw up.

The murders.

The black-suited man.

Is it happening to Noah, too?

The idea that another person might be sharing my wretched experiences had never occurred to me. I didn’t want it—wouldn’t wish that on anyone—even as the notion gave me a wild surge of . . . relief.

“Weird,” Tack muttered, focused on the laptop. “There aren’t any other patient-named files here. The rest aren’t even words—just letters and numbers.” He blew out his cheeks. “Only you and Noah. I didn’t even know that douche was in therapy.”

Neither did I.

But suddenly, everything had changed.

Maybe I wasn’t alone. Maybe Noah was just like me.

My energy level surged, despite the hour. I thumped out wrong passwords for each file, proceeding down the list as fast as I could. Angry red keys appeared in a row. I was halfway done when Tack popped up and plucked the Nemesis folder off the desk. He flipped over my consent form to examine the one beneath it. Then, clicking his tongue, he thrust the document in front of me. The second patient consented for was Noah C. Livingston.

“His mother signed.” Tack tilted his head. “Didn’t she die when we were little?”

“First grade.” I traced her signature with my eyes. “I remember because we turned seven that year, but his mom didn’t come to the class party like usual, and I got shushed for asking about it. Then a few months later another woman was dropping him off at school.”

Turning back, I clicked the last document. Did a double take. “Yo, Tack!”

He dropped the stapled forms. “What?”

“This file is actually a folder, and check out the title.” My finger jabbed the monitor. “VHG Federal Land Reserve. That’s the name of the government property on Old Fort Run!”

“Where the convoy disappeared last night.” Tack actually clapped. “Open it!”

At first the contents were disappointing: a few hundred files with indecipherable names, each consisting of three letters followed by six numbers. I could tell they were password-protected like the others. Another dead end.

But then something jumped out at me. The three-letter codes seemed to repeat every dozen files or so, while the last two numbers stayed the same for long intervals. But the middle four digits always changed.

The answer came in a flash. “These numbers are dates. Look at the bottom section. They all end in seventeen. Those must be from this year.”

Tack nodded. “But what are the letters?”

One sequence was demanding my attention. VGW.

I knew those letters.

A tear spilled onto my cheek. I tried to hold it back, but couldn’t.

“Initials,” I said in an unsteady voice. “I think these are reports of some kind.”

I moused over the last VGW file. Metadata appeared.

PN_FIELD_OBSERVATION_REPORT_SUBMITTED/FILED/091817

09.18.17. The day after my birthday. Yesterday.

Tack was silent a moment, then squinted over at me. “What’s going on, Min? Seriously. No more holding back. You persuade me to break into your shrink’s office in the middle of the night, and we discover you’re part of some classified military project.” He exhaled in disbelief. “Noah too, of all people. There are files calling you a ‘beta run,’ and now we’ve got the out-of-bounds woods popping up only hours after we see an armored caravan drive into them, for the first time in, like . . . I don’t know . . . forever.” He hesitated, then said the words aloud and made it real. “Are those really your mom’s initials?”

I cleared my throat, stalling, and not very well. I wanted to crawl away and hide.

“We need to talk to Noah,” I said finally.

Tack’s jaw tightened. “How’s he gonna help? By asking his daddy to handle it?”

I understood his reluctance, but I couldn’t ignore this lead.

Noah was involved with Project Nemesis. He might know things I didn’t.

“I need you to trust me on this.”

Tack seemed about to argue, then shrugged instead. “Whatever.” He forced a lightness into his voice I knew he didn’t feel. “If you want that dope slowing us down, it’s your call. I’ll get him a bike helmet to wear for safety.”

He glanced at his watch. “Two thirty.”

I nodded, closing everything. Hopefully Lowell would think the password issue was some kind of software glitch, and ignore it. He seemed the type. I shut down the laptop and put everything back how we found it, then relocked the desk.

I wouldn’t think about my mother and field reports. Not yet.

I was returning the keys to their dish when the third one caught my eye. Burnished brass. Longer and thinner than the other two. Plainly designed for some other type of lock.

I turned around. Eyeballed the antique cabinet across the room.

Its lower doors were closed. There was a keyhole.

“What?” Tack swiveled to follow my line of sight. “Ah. Sure, why not?”

I crossed the shadowy office and knelt before the wooden panels. Inserted the key. It turned easily, and the carved doors swung open. Inside were two plastic document boxes filled with manila folders.

I dragged a box from the cabinet. Selected a folder at random.

“‘Tobias G. Albertsson—4/5/2002.’ Hey, that’s Toby!” Startled, I pulled another file. “‘Sally D. Hillman—6/24/2001.’ She was in our grade too, remember? But her family moved to Lewiston four years ago.” Then I noticed a red line slicing through her name on the tab.

Tack grabbed the other box and dug in with both hands. It held similar files, each labeled by name and date. All were former or current classmates. Tack counted thirty-three folders in his container. “I bet everyone in our grade is in these.”

“But why? Lowell obviously doesn’t treat the whole class.”

“Alphabetical.” Tack riffled through his box, a strange excitement in his voice. “This set starts with L. And . . . boom. Here’s me! Thomas ‘The Dark Knight’ Russo. This one’s gonna be tasty, folks. FYI, those are birth dates on the labels, although I imagine you guessed that already.”

He read silently. Then his back stiffened, eyes rounding as he pawed through the stack of pages inside. Finally, he slapped the folder shut and flung it across the room, staring after it like the contents might bite him.

“How in the—” Tack cut off, his mouth hanging open. Then he looked at me fixedly, with no humor in his eyes. “What the hell is going on, Min? Why does your wacko shrink have a Nemesis file on me? One that includes everything I’ve ever done!”

“A Nemesis file? How do you know that?”

Tack shook his head, uncharacteristically silent. Alarmed, I pulled another folder from the box in front of me. Jessica L. Cale—1/14/2002. Not my favorite person. The first page was a basic worksheet. Name. Address. Age. The usual particulars, typical of any intake form or official registration. Typical, until you noticed TOP SECRET stamped at the top and General Garfield’s signature scrawled across the bottom.

The breadth of information was staggering, as was the level of detail. Medical files. Report cards. Newspaper clippings from when Jessica won the Junior Miss Idaho pageant at twelve. There were printouts of her Facebook and Pinterest pages, her Instagrams, even Snapchats. Xeroxed school pictures. An analysis of her Twitter feed. At the back I found a Google Earth image of her house, clipped to a spreadsheet documenting her parents’ work histories and criminal records. There was even a roster of household pets.

I dropped Jessica’s file—having learned more about her in the last two minutes than during a lifetime of going to school together—and pulled another. Harrison S. Finch—a freckly boy I vaguely remembered from middle school. He’d broken his arm once, goofing around on the jungle gym before first bell. Then his family had up and moved, to where, I’d never learned. Inside his folder were the same types of documents, but the data collection ended in 2013, the same year he’d left town (for Billings, I now saw). Nothing in his file was more current.

I rechecked the tab. Noticed a red line through his name.

I grabbed more files. Casey F. Beam. Gregory Kozowitz. Lauren J. Decker.

All classmates. All with identical workups.

“These are like FBI dossiers!” Tack sputtered, his usual cool completely blown. “But get this—only sophomores. I checked my entire box. No juniors. No seniors. No freshmen. Just our grade. Do you know how creepy that is? Why would Lowell have this stuff? Who gave it to him? Why only our class?”

“This can’t be legal.” I waved a file to make my point. “Here are twenty pages of Cash Eaton’s medical records, about his irregular heartbeat. That kind of information is protected by law. You can’t just Google it and make copies.”

“Where’s your file?” Tack asked suddenly, eyeing the pile of folders spreading across the carpet. “The Ws should be in my box, but I didn’t see your name.”

“My group is A through K.” I thumbed through them anyway to be sure. “I’m not in here.”

Tack quickly searched the other container. “Noah’s missing, too.”

“There were thirty-eight files in this box. That makes seventy-one altogether.”

“One for everyone!” Tack swept a hand like a bitter game-show host. “We’re being spied on and charted like terrorists, by a shady head doctor neck-deep in a government conspiracy. Which is code-named Nemesis, by the way. Nothing terrifying about that! Good times. Super. I’m excited to be a part of this.”

I felt a twinge in my scar. Gunshots echoed in my head.

You don’t know the half of it.

Beta Run. Test Patient A. Test Patient B.

Yet this was bigger than just Noah and me. No denying it now.

“Did you notice some of the names are scratched out?” Tack said.

I nodded. “Six in my box. All kids who used to go to school with us, but don’t anymore.”

“Five in mine.” Tack dug up a red-lined file. His voice dropped. “This one’s for Peter Merchant. And I saw another earlier on Mary Roke.”

I got a chill. Petey Merchant had drowned when we were ten. His canoe capsized during a summer squall, way out on the lake, and he’d never been a strong swimmer. His family moved away soon afterward.

Mary Roke died when we were thirteen. Bee stings. No one knew she was allergic.

I did a quick calculation. “That leaves sixty with names that aren’t marked through.”

“Close to the exact number of kids in our class. We’ve been sixty-four strong for two years now, and these boxes don’t include you and Noah.”

“And two others. I wonder who else?”

I surveyed the files fanning out across Lowell’s carpet. To figure out who was missing, we’d have to make a list. “Let’s take pictures of everything.” I dug into my pocket for my cell. “Then we’ll have proof. I’ll email them to myself to be safe.” But my iPhone quit the moment I pressed the home button, a victim of our late-night stakeout. I glanced at Tack, but he shook his head. “Mine died before we left the bushes.”

“Damn it.” My eyes traveled the room, hunting for another option.

I noticed a splash of yellow buried in the mass of folders. Pulled it from the pile. A single sheet. The document wasn’t part of anyone’s personal workup—it must’ve been wedged inside a box between the files.

From the Desk of General W. P. Garfield.

“What’s that?” Tack asked.

“A memo to Project Nemesis.” I scanned as I spoke. “The general is thanking everyone for their service and dedication. He’s proud of everyone for ‘seeing things through to the bitter end,’ whatever that means.” Then my heart sped up. “Listen to this: ‘Final preparations are in place. Over the next ten days, we must remain steadfast and complete our objective. Godspeed.’”

Tack spread his hands. “What the hell does that mean?”

“No idea. This is dated two days ago. Lowell was supposed to destroy the message—it says so right here on the page. I wonder why he didn’t?”

When I looked up, I found Tack watching me intently. The bruises on his face gave him a ghoulish affect in the murky half-light. The wall clock ticked on, uncaring, as we sat on the floor, each a momentary prisoner of our own thoughts.

“What’s going on, Min?” Tack asked again, in a small voice. “What is Project Nemesis?”

I had no answer.

Not that we had time for one.

Outside, tires screeched in the parking lot, followed by slamming doors.