The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions Book 1)

MY LITTLE PROPOSITION SEEMS TO have worked, however, for Leo leads us up the stairs into a large red room with a cracked nonworking fireplace and one long, massive desk along the wall—a counter, more like. The rest of the place might be falling apart, but the Mac is massive and new. What holds my attention though, is the map.

The thing spans an entire wall of the room, crisscrossed with differently coloured threads and pins. I move toward it, but Leo closes the drapes, shaking dust into the air and making Jamie sneeze. And casting the map in shadow.

The monitor blinks, swinging my attention toward it. Leo gestures us all to the screen, opens an app and types in a URL.

“You’re using Tor?” Jamie.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Touché,” Jamie acknowledges.

Mara raises a hand. “Um, Tor?”

“The dark web,” Daniel says.

“Because let’s make everything sound as sinister as possible,” Jamie says.

“Some of it is,” I say. “Snuff films on there, aren’t there?”

Jamie nods. “Afraid so.”

“Lots of porn though, I imagine?” Goose says.

“If one can think of it, there’s a porn of it,” I say.

Mara half smiles. “Oh?”

“It is known,” Jamie agrees.

Leo clicks an app that looks like a globe. “So this is the Tor browser,” he says when it opens. “Like Google, but completely anonymous. If we’re going to work together on this, you should probably all download it.”

Goose looks rather sceptical. “Won’t that land us on some Big Brother American Patriot Act government watch list of some sort?”

“We . . . crossed that bridge a while ago,” Mara says.

Jamie turns his palms up as if to say, What can you do?

“Well, I haven’t crossed it,” Goose says.

“Don’t whinge,” I say as a page appears on our screen as if from 1997, a message board, with the words “special snowflakes” written in Comic Sans.

The messages vary in their weirdness. One post is titled “How do I make myself psychotic?”; another one “gifted cats?” Jamie sweeps by Leo and clicks on it before he can stop him—dozens of cat GIFs appear, mostly of kittens falling off things, others of kittens riding things. Scottish folds are quite popular.

A shadow darkens Leo’s face. “Um, can I have that back?”

“Sorry,” Jamie says. “I just really like cats.”

Mara puts her hand on his shoulder. “Who doesn’t.”

Leo types a URL into the browser: 61f73d/4ffl1c73d

“Wow,” Jamie says. “Takes me back to my MUD days.”

“MUD?” I ask.

“Multi-user dungeon.”

My mouth silently rounds the word “Oh.”

Jamie looks at Mara, “You deserve better.”

Haven’t got the time or the interest to decode whatever Jamie’s on about. “So what are we looking at?” I ask Leo. I hadn’t known it was possible to be impatient and bored simultaneously. Leo clicks on a screenshot of a local news site in Charleston, South Carolina.

SUICIDE CULT CLAIMS FIVE

South Carolina: Police discovered the bodies of five students in a basement on Montagu Street on Monday, victims of an apparent suicide pact.

They included two students in their senior year at Ashley Hall, and one student from Summerville High, also in his senior year. Two freshmen at the College of Charleston were also among the dead.

No further details are available at this time.

Below the screenshot is a post from someone calling themselves truther821:

“This never happened. I was one of Marissa’s best friends. She never would’ve killed herself. She was GIFTED, like us. Cover-up maybe???”

I try and match up what I know to be true with that post, and . . . it doesn’t. I’d have seen them die if they were like us, no?

Leo scrolls down. On and on they go, posts from teenagers, purportedly Gifted, in several states—in several countries, in fact, though I don’t call attention to that detail—posts about teenagers going missing or committing suicide in the past three months.

“They’re not all legit, obviously,” Leo says, reading my mind. “But they’re getting more frequent. All feature someone eighteen years old or close to it, all with prior diagnoses of mental health disorders, or so the media claims.” Leo sucks in a breath. “I also know that some of the posts are about people we knew, and some are written by Nons.”

“You keep using that word . . . ,” Jamie starts.

“Non-Gifted. Friends of theirs, or family I guess. Anyway, word’s getting out, is the point.”

But how could it? He claims to have known some of these people—past tense. But again, I’ve seen only three deaths thus far.

We’re all silent, until Leo says, “And in the interest of not wasting any more time, I also know that this doctor—Kells?—wasn’t just experimenting on you. She was injecting other kids with something, trying to induce abilities in them.” He walks over to one of the plastic card tables and holds up a file. “I imagine the name Jude rings a bell?”