Contents ( 44)
- DAUGHTER OF GOD
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- CONTENTS
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- EPILOGUE
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
As the PC’s hard drive clicked and whirred, her eyes went to the ceiling, to the wire grid that had once been attached to the bed frame to support her mattress. It was now suspended from the sprinkler water pipe by a length of sheet strips knotted into rope. One end of the sheet was tied at the middle of the wire grid, making it hang like a floppy upside-down “V.” The sheet rope ran over the pipe and back down to floor level, where she tied it to the leg of the desk.
Zoe was so distracted by her own thoughts that she barely heard the hard drive grinding away, pulling the files over the network. Her eyes and thoughts went over the preparations once again, looking for flaws; every step had to succeed flawlessly if she were ever to see the sun again.
To see Seth again.
She had run an electrical wire from the heater’s cord to the suspended wire grid. Again using the fingernail clippers, she had cut one of the “hot” wires in the heater’s electrical cord and stripped the insulation away. Then she had cut the plug and prongs from the extension cord and stripped away the insulation from two of the three wires at each end. At one end of the mutilated extension cord, she attached the two wires to each of the bare wires born of the single severed wire in the heater’s cord. Twisting the connections tightly she then used strips of bedsheet to wrap and bind them, more to secure the connection than to insulate. Finally, strips of bedsheets made that end fast to the desk leg so that movement would not pull the twisted connections loose.
Next, Zoe knotted the whole free end of the extension cord around several of the wires in the metal mattress grid for strength. Finally, she twisted the two bare extension-cord wires around the wire grid a couple of inches apart and bound them with bedsheet strips as well. The electricity going to the heater would take a detour: coming out of the plug, it would go up one of the spliced wires in the extension cord, through the wire grid, and back down the other extension-cord wire to the heater cord and thence to the heating element.
Or maybe the electricity moves the other way, she thought No, she thought, if she remembered her Dad’s lesson well enough, alternating current went both ways. No matter. What counted was that the mattress would complete the circuit when she turned on the heater; the standard 220 volts found in European electrical mains would charge the whole metal mattress support grid. Zoe patted her pants pocket and felt a hard bulge in the left one left by the plug end she had cut off the extension cord. She had stripped the insulation off all three wires, twisted them together, and insulated them carefully with the remaining bedsheet strips.
So absorbed was Zoe in going over her preparations that she did not hear the hard drive stop working, the file transfer complete. Then the creak of footsteps in the room above jerked her back to the moment. Fear clutched at her heart like a cold steel hand. In the past they had conducted surprise inspections of her cell at odd hours of the night.