She ignored him and opened the laptop.

He glanced down at the screen. The only open item on the desktop was a Word document with a single line of type on it.

“Read it,” Susan urged him.

He did.

Hello, pigeon. Did Archie like his birthday present?

Archie’s skin got hot. He looked up at Susan, perplexed.

Her eyebrows jumped impatiently. “It just showed up on my screen this afternoon,” she said. “Don’t you get it?” She held the screen next to her face, her wet black hair combed back over her ears so that the pink of her skull was visible behind the white skunk stripe. Her nail-bitten fingers gripped the computer so hard they were white. “She hacked into my computer, Archie,” she said. “I don’t know how, but she did. I had started writing about last night. I wrote two pages. Then I fell asleep. And when I woke up, I took a bath, and when I came back to my room the story I’d written was gone, and this was there instead.” Her cheeks were pink, every freckle on fire.

“I don’t understand,” Archie said, stepping back.

Ginger gave up on Susan and trotted over to Archie.

“It’s her,” Susan whispered.

Archie’s eyes went back to the screen. He could feel his body going cold.

“Gretchen hacked into your computer and wrote that?” Archie said.

“Yes!” Susan said.

Archie lifted his hands and rubbed his face, as if he could scrub what he was seeing from his vision.

Hello, pigeon. Did Archie like his birthday present?

It didn’t make sense. She was trying to distract them with some meaningless riddle. He hadn’t gotten a birthday present from Gretchen. He had spent the better part of his birthday alone, unconscious in the mud.

Hadn’t he?

Archie got the flash drive that Leo had given him out of his pocket and looked at it. “Give me a second,” he mumbled to Susan, and he made himself walk over to where his own laptop hummed on the kitchen bar. Ginger thought he was going for another treat and scurried past him into the kitchen. He was out of his body now, willing himself to put one foot in front of the other, to slide the flash drive into the USB port. He waited for something to happen, an icon to appear on the screen, a window to open, but nothing did. His outer-space screen saver looked vast and empty, billions of stars floating in a black void.

Ginger came around the corner, looking disappointed, and flopped down at his feet.

Susan stepped beside him. “What are you doing?” she asked.