Harlowe

I sit up in bed, sneaking a look over at Pru. She’s fast asleep. Good. I glance down at my plum and send a reply to Harlowe, using a voice command via my bot.

Not taking the bait. You heard what Maude said. Hazing canceled. Get w/ the program.

The response from Harlowe appears almost instantly.

if u don’t want your friends to suffer too much, meet me @ the driveway outside the main house. 5 min.

I snap to attention. Would Harlowe really do something to hurt the other members of the Nine? The Similar members of the Nine?

I shove my feet into my sneakers. I won’t wake Pru, not when this is probably a prank. It’s got to be a trick to get me out of bed and scare me into thinking that my friends are in trouble.

I leave my key around my neck. I feel more trackable with it on my body. Traceable.

Slipping out the back door of Cypress, I note that except for the beams from a few lights dotting the campus walkways, it’s pitch-dark out. And cold. And so silent, all I hear are my footsteps on the asphalt and the distant hum of crickets.

“Dash,” I whisper. “Send a buzz to Maude, Theodora, and Pippa. Ask them if they’re okay. Tell them to pin their location.”

“Will do, Emmaline,” Dash replies.

When I arrive at the circular drive in front of the main house, I’m totally alone, save for a single car waiting there. It’s an older model red Volvo, probably vintage; that’s how ancient it looks. I wonder briefly what it’s doing there. But mostly I’m looking for Harlowe. There’s no sign of her.

“Dash,” I say more urgently this time. “Any response from my friends?”

“I’m sorry, Emma,” he replies. “All three of their devices are off-line.”

My chest tightens. Off-line? If it weren’t for the midnight session, it’d be perfectly reasonable for my friends to turn off their plums. It’s way past curfew. But the Nine meeting starts in under an hour. I doubt they’ve gone to sleep. Why aren’t they answering?

I scan the grounds for Harlowe. Not seeing her anywhere, I start to turn back, annoyed with myself for falling for this, when someone leans out the driver’s-side window of the red Volvo.