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  Walking down Burleigh Street, past the Grafton, she was suddenly aware of the number of CCTV cameras that were needed to protect this brave new world. She had read somewhere that the United Kingdom was the most surveilled Western democracy, and today she saw that it could quite possibly be true.

  She felt like the most surveilled person in a Western democracy today, and though it was just paranoia, she ducked her head and stared at the pavement. Tried to look like she was just a normal girl, walking normally. Even though she felt like she was going to suddenly explode from the panic that was filling her up.

  The air was cool and she wished that she hadn’t needed to sacrifice her hoodie to distract the guys who were following her. It made it harder to tell if she was shuddering from fear or because of the weather.

  She passed Forbidden Planet—one of her favorite stores in Cambridge—then a few thrift stores, took a right down Adam and Eve Street, hurried past the parking lot and out onto East Road. She hustled her way through the two lanes of stationary traffic, cut through the park on the corner, then headed up Mill Road just as it started to rain.

  Uncle Alex lived on Devonshire Road—just off Mill Road, before the bridge and running nearly parallel to the railway line—in a bay-fronted Victorian house with windows that looked like they hadn’t been cleaned since … well, the Victorian era.

  A lot of the houses down here were broken up into student bedsits, and the one next door to Uncle Alex’s house was a case in point, with a window open and the strains of Bob Marley’s Exodus leaking out from within.

  Ani hurried past Uncle Alex’s and stopped ten yards down the road, as if she had just remembered something, even pretending to pat her pockets to make it look realistic. While patting, she checked she wasn’t being followed, observed, or pursued by robot drones and then spun on her heels and made her way back to the house.

  She walked down the tiny path that crossed the house’s postage-stamp concrete yard, gave the door knocker a good hard rap, and stood and waited.

  The door swung open and Uncle Alex stood there, eyes widening when he saw who was doing the knocking.

  Her dad’s brother was a tall, stick-thin man with a hairstyle that on anyone else she would find tragic. But somehow the black hair swept back into a ponytail had always seemed to fit Uncle Alex, even though the front was now starting to thin.

  Somehow on him it seemed … well, rock ’n’ roll.

  Like the faded crew T-shirt from Nirvana’s Nevermind tour he was wearing, a souvenir from when he’d had to stand in on a couple of nights as Kurt Cobain’s guitar technician after the regular guy had fallen ill.

  “Ani,” he said brightly. “Claire’s at her mother’s and won’t be here until next weekend… .”

  He must have suddenly seen the tension in her face because he left the sentence unfinished, and his eyes narrowed.

  “Can I come in?” she asked, and he nodded and stepped aside to let her pass.

  “What’s going on?” he asked when he’d closed the door behind her.

  “I—I’m in trouble. Really big trouble.” She was startled to discover that she was crying.

  In a kitchen wallpapered with tour posters from bands of the seventies and eighties, over a cup of sweet, grape-tasting tea, Ani managed to get out the story.

  Uncle Alex just sat and listened without interruption, occasionally nodding. He narrowed his eyes when Ani described the scene on the roof when the man drew a pistol but he let her tell it in her own way.

  When she was finished he reached over and squeezed her arm. “That’s a heck of a day you’ve had, kid. Are you okay?”

  Ani gave him a fake smile and nodded.

  It didn’t fool Uncle Alex. “I’m glad you thought you could come to me,” he said. “I don’t know what this is all about, but I’ll help you any way I can.”

  This time, Ani’s smile was real, made up of equal parts gratitude and relief.

  “I’m guessing you want me to take a look at—or listen to—that .wav file of yours,” he said.

  “Am I that transparent?”

  He had no way of knowing, but Alex had just confirmed what she had always thought about him: that he was just about the coolest adult in the world. He had given her no grown-up lectures, had asked her no stupid questions. He had just homed straight in on the heart of the matter.

  “Like a window. You want to come through to the Lab?”

  Ani nodded. “Thank you.”

  “What for? We don’t know that I’ll be any help at all.”

  “You already have been. And that’s what the thank you was for.”

  Alex opened a door in the kitchen, fumbled around for a light switch, found it, and then they were both descending the stairs that led to the cellar.

  “The Lab” was an Aladdin’s cave of recording and performance gear left over from the decades that Uncle Alex had been the go-to guy for obscure rock ’n’ roll equipment.

  Ani’s dad had once told her that Uncle Alex could build a guitar out of scrap, and that it would be better than ninety percent of the guitars you could buy in a music shop. He also built synthesizers from scratch, and once mended one of David Bowie’s performance amps with a chewing gum wrapper.

  Ani looked around at the high-tech gear that filled every available piece of wall space in the vast cellar: stacks of amplifiers; keyboards of weird and wonderful designs; gadgets with wires spilling out that she had no idea what they could be.

  In the center of the room, like an altar, was a mixing table with so many rows of lights, knobs, buttons, and sliders that she figured you’d need a degree to operate it. And coming off the side of it, so it made an L shape, was a Mac computer with a massive display.

  “Take a seat,” Alex said, pointing to a chair in front of the mixing table, taking the one in front of the computer himself. “Let’s see what you’ve got on this thumb drive.”

  Ani took the memory stick from her pocket.

  “It phones home,” she warned. “Kicks holes in firewalls and tells its real owners where it is.”

  Alex smiled. ”It might phone home on your hacker friend’s system,” he said, “but he sounds less careful than you and me.”

  Ani looked unconvinced, but handed the drive over anyway.

  Alex plugged the stick into a USB hub and waited for it to appear on his desktop, then double clicked and pointed at the screen.

  “This the file that’s got you so scared?” he asked her.

  There was a file called prime.wav in the finder window.

  “That’s the one. Careful. It bites.”

  Alex laughed.

  And double clicked the file.

  Ani held her breath.

  “Hold on to your hat,” he said.

  The .wav file opened in a piece of editing software that made it appear as a series of jagged spikes on a timeline.

  Alex studied them and wrinkled his nose.

  “It’s a .wav file all right. Kind of odd-looking, though. Wanna hear it …?”

  Suddenly a dialogue window appeared over the sound editing software: a familiar yellow warning triangle with a red skull-and-crossbones over it:

  Ani watched as Alex clicked GENERATE and then he turned and saw the surprise on her face.

  “Hey kid,” he said, “I got moves, too. And you certainly didn’t get your hacker skills from your dad, now did you?”

  Ani smiled, suddenly thinking about how computer illiterate her father actually was, even needing her to set his DVR.

  “I just keep forgetting there’s a Vader edge to your Yoda,” she said.

  Alex rolled his eyes.

  “I’m all about the edge. So, as I was saying before I was interrupted, wanna hear it?”

  Ani nodded.

  He reached across her and made some adjustments on the mixing table, flicking sliders and pressing buttons, then he grimaced theatrically, and pressed PLAY.

  At first, there was nothing to hear.

  Ani could see from the computer
screen that it was because there was a flat line at the start of the file, which represented silence. Then the software’s playhead marker started approaching the body of jagged lines and Ani felt a strange apprehension.

  Whatever was in that file had gotten people excited enough to come to her house with guns. Suddenly, she was almost afraid to hear what it was.

  When it hit, the result was nothing like she’d been expecting. And through Uncle Alex’s setup, the sound was loud and incredibly clear.

  First there was a low bass sound; a rumbling buzz that she felt as much as heard. It worked its way through her until it felt like her whole body was vibrating right along with it. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant feeling; just a very, very strange one. She thought that maybe she felt the way a plucked string would on a guitar, if it were capable of feeling.

  Then the bass notes plunged even lower—getting so deep they were almost all sensation and no noise—and this new frequency seemed to hit her in the stomach like a punch.

  She felt a moment’s panic—it was like a physical pain growing inside her. Then over the buzz, or, rather, out of it, came a weird rush of high-frequency sounds that seemed not to belong together, so ugly and discordant was their overall effect.

  The feeling in her stomach now felt like a hand folding up into a tight fist, closing on her guts.

  Hard and cruel.

  She looked over at Uncle Alex, but he seemed utterly unaffected by the sound, almost bored by it.

  By the time some mid-range sounds kicked in—again ugly and disorganized—the sensation was spreading out through the rest of her body. From her guts it reached outward, making her fingers and toes tingle from within, then she felt it squeezing itself upward, into her head.

  Suddenly the sound was in her brain, right inside, and she saw the sounds starting to gain form in her mind’s eye: a knot of strange, squirming patterns that edged out all other thoughts until there was nothing left, just … soundforms—unsettling patterns—that were playing out in the cinema behind her eyes.

  She didn’t want to see them, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer. So she watched as the patterns unfolded and evolved inside her head.

  Now there was something distinctly wormlike about the images that had forced their way into her mind and she felt a sudden wave of revulsion but, again, she was powerless to resist them.

  She was no longer aware of the sound that had made them appear: she was aware of very little except those squirming things in her head.

  Her body was still vibrating, but it seemed distant and unconnected to her. The images were crowding out all other thoughts and sensations.

  She felt sick as the wormy things grew clearer and more definite in form. They glistened wetly, and seemed to be growing, getting fat on her fear. Suddenly they split open, and hatched into her brain, pouring millions of tiny living threads into her mind and body.

  She could see them clearly now: shiny and wet, boiling in a dense mass throughout her body. She realized that they weren’t worms, or even particularly wormlike, it was just the closest her mind could come to describing them. Like the information she was receiving wasn’t visual at all, but her consciousness was desperately trying to understand the input it was receiving, and images were just the closest or most convenient way to do that.

  She didn’t know.

  But she did know one thing.

  She knew one thing without a shadow of a doubt.

  Whatever this data stream was that was flowing through her, it was dangerous.

  She felt it probing, prodding at her mind, looking for a way in. It was filling her up, and its intentions were not good or honorable. It wanted her. It wanted to use her as a vessel. It wanted to keep splitting, keep hatching, keep writhing and poking until her defenses gave up. And then it would be her. It would flow into the spaces that made her Ani and push them aside, devour them, until it took her over.

  That was what she sensed now, above all other things. The hunger of the sound, of the things that weren’t worms. Its total and single-minded appetite for her body, for her mind.

  There was nothing she could do.

  There was no defense against it.

  No happy thoughts that would defeat it.

  Soon, it would eat her up and hollow out her body, and make her into it.

  She felt the sound/worm/soundforms finding a crack in her mind. A backdoor into who she was.

  She felt terror, loathing, sorrow, and loss and then …

  … and then it was gone.

  It didn’t slow, then fade, then stop. It just disappeared. One instant she thought she was about to be consumed by the soundforms, and the next there was nothing.

  The relief was like a physical force.

  She opened eyes that she couldn’t remember closing and was back in her uncle Alex’s cellar.

  The lights were suddenly very bright, but she didn’t avoid them—indeed, she basked in their intensity.

  Better to be dazzled than to have to look at those horrible soundform things for a moment longer.

  Uncle Alex was standing over her, looking down at her, and his face was worried beyond belief.

  “Ani?” he asked nervously.

  “Only just,” she managed to reply. “That was the most terrible thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  Uncle Alex looked at her strangely.

  “What just happened?” he asked. “I played the sound and suddenly your eyes rolled back in your head… .”

  “How long was I out?” she asked. “I mean, that seemed to go on forever.”

  Again the strange look from Alex.

  “The .wav file was about ten seconds long, but I cut it off after about five when you started looking demonically possessed… .”

  “Five seconds?” Ani asked, thinking that Uncle Alex was playing some kind of joke on her. But his face didn’t look like he was joking. It looked like he was terrified.

  “It was six seconds, max,” he said. It sounded like he was apologizing to her.

  Ani did the only thing she could to deal with what had just happened to her.

  She fainted.

  CHAPTER FOUR: YETI

  The Pyramus Club was on Dover Street, a mere stone’s throw away from the pomp and luxury of the Ritz Hotel, but you really had to be looking for it to find it. It was hidden in plain sight, like the purloined letter in the Edgar Allan Poe story, and hundreds of people an hour hurried past without giving it a second glance.

  Joe, on the other hand, had a cell phone and it led him straight to it.

  It was an anonymous-looking building that hinted at a long and great history without giving many clues to the precise era it was erected. Only a tiny brass plate on the wall provided an identity, but it offered no clues to the type of club that lurked behind two stern oak doors.

  Joe pressed the buzzer and posed for the camera in the intercom system.

  A curt voice asked, “Yes?”

  “I’m here to see Victor Palgrave,” Joe said, upper class English accent very much in use. “I believe he’s expecting me.”

  “One moment,” the voice replied, then kept him waiting five minutes.

  Standing there, Joe ran through the few facts he’d gleaned from Ellie Butcher, just to get them straight in his head before seeing Lennie’s father.

  Which, on the face of it, amounted to a whole lot of not much.

  All he knew was that there was a new musical subgenre of dubious artistic merit that Lennie had gotten himself mixed up in. There had been a marked change in Lennie’s behavior, maybe a change in his actual personality. And there was the odd thing about the math puzzles that allowed access to the bands’ songs.

  Joe would probably have thought X-Core was irrelevant if it weren’t for two persuasive counterarguments: first was Abernathy’s Welcome back when he’d mentioned X-Core. That meant he’d thought Joe had stumbled on to the right track; and second was the song he’d listened to on Ellie Butcher’s MacBook. He couldn’t put his finger on
it, but it had sounded … wrong somehow, and he couldn’t imagine that someone as sensitive as Lennie would find anything there to pull him away from his Chopin.

  It was a puzzle, that much was certain.

  And Joe suddenly realized that a puzzle was just what he needed right now.

  Finally the door opened and a man dressed like a valet from Downton Abbey appeared around it and gave Joe a rather withering look up and down. The man’s center part would have looked appropriate for a stage play, perhaps, but not real life, his hair pasted down with Brylcreem, and his scalpel-slash-thin lips were pursed in what looked like perpetual disapproval.

  “Ye-e-e-es?” The man stretched one tiny word into an entire sentence. It was both a question and a critique of Joe’s outfit.

  “Joe Dyson. To see Victor Palgrave?”

  The man raised a beaklike nose into the air and spun on his heels, walking off inside without another word. Joe, guessing that he was meant to follow, stepped across the threshold, closed the door behind him, and followed the man across a luxurious foyer into the club. If Joe was to characterize the interior designer’s choices, he would have to say that he had an almost single-minded fondness for dark wood panels and watercolors of hunting scenes.

  The man led him through a reading room and toward some private rooms. Half a dozen pairs of eyes dragged themselves away from their newspapers to follow them past. Joe recognized one of them as a political talking head from the evening news.

  The valet stopped suddenly and knocked on an ornate door with intertwined roses carved into the dark wood with quite some artistic skill, and a single bark from within must have served as an instruction to enter.

  The cut-rate Carson held the door open for Joe, nose still up in the air. Joe was sure the man sniffed indignantly as he passed.

  The door closed behind him.

  Victor Palgrave was a long, lean man with intense dark eyes and a politician’s smile—the kind that would make pain seem like pleasure and bad news sound good. He was sitting in one of a pair of enormous armchairs by a roaring fire, drinking coffee, flanked by two guys who made it look like the Secret Service was scraping the shallower end of the gene pool these days. When Palgrave saw Joe his face lit up, and it seemed genuine.