Wings to the Kingdom (Eden Moore 2)

I held the fluffy little feline up and bounced her gently, trying to gauge her weight. “It’s cool when she’s this small—she weighs about as much as a can of Coke. But once she grows up, you might prefer other sleeping arrangements. ”

“Maybe,” he conceded. He reached down with one bare toe and turned the video game system off, then walked across the room to a dining nook that was occupied by a beat-up desk and a bookcase. With a sweep of his hand he indicated a sprawling setup of computer and electronics equipment. “You want to hear what we got at the battlefield?”

“Hell yes, I do. ” But the haphazard amalgam of boxes, wires, and plugs made me wonder. “Are you going to play it on this? What is all this?”

He tweaked the corner of his glasses and sat down on what looked like an orphaned piano stool. “What did you think I was going to play it on?”

“I don’t know…the tape recorder?”

“Sure, I did that first. But it’s hard to make out what’s going on. This,” he said, cocking his head at the monitor, “is FrankenHal. ”

“FrankenHal?”

“FrankenHal. ‘Hal’ for the computer in the movie—you know, ‘Open the pod bay doors, Hal. ’ And ‘Franken’ for ‘Frankenstein,’ because this system is basically a highlights version of four other computers that I gutted and raided. It’s a lot more powerful than it looks. Don’t let the case from 1995 fool you. Early Bill Gates Beige is just a color. Many wonders lurk within. ”

“Many wonders?”

“A fast-as-hell processor. Shit-tons of memory. A hard drive that could crack nuts. And best of all, for our purposes, some very expensive audio editing software that I did not pay for. ”

“Ah. And the rest of this stuff—over here on the bookcase?”

“External drives. A CD burner. Extra parts. And that thing on the end that looks like a little hot plate is a mug-warmer my grandmother gave me for Christmas. So that’s not part of FrankenHal. ”

I peeked into the mug that sat on the unplugged plate. “So this isn’t FrankenHal’s penicillin experiment?”

“Probably not. ”

Benny jammed his thumb hard into a button. With a few awakening beeps, a promising bright line of jittering life, and the hum of cooling fans spinning into action, FrankenHal was in service. Benny picked a plain silver disc up off the edge of the bookcase and inserted it into an outstretched tray.

“I saved these as . wav files. We got several really good sound bites, and a bunch of lesser-quality ones, too. Maybe you can make some sense out of them. I cleaned them up as much as I could, but it still sounds like shouted Greek to me. ”

“Shouted?”

He nodded, and the disc began to whir. “They’re shouting, trying to make us hear them. It’s wild. Next time we’ll know, though. We can tell them to speak more quietly so we can understand them. A lot of the more unclear bits sound like somebody screaming into a bucket. ”

“Are they really that bad?”

“Sometimes, it sounds like the bucket is underwater. ”

“Ah. ”

Tiggy writhed out of the light hug in which I held her and squirmed her way to the floor so she could sit next to Benny. He patted the top of her head with one hand while he worked his mouse with the other.

Before long, he had all the right programs running and a black rectangular box in the center of the screen. “Pull up a chair,” he suggested.

I grabbed the nearest stray from the dining set and pulled it close. “Dazzle me,” I dared him.

“All right, I will. This first one is one of the best. At the beginning of the clip, you’ll hear Jamie asking, ‘Why would Green Eyes leave?’ And then someone tries to answer him. I’m not going to tell you what I think it said—I don’t want to lead you into drawing the same conclusions I did. ”

“Fair enough. I’m ready. Hit ‘play. ’”

He reached out and turned up the volume on a pair of speakers that loosely flanked the monitor. Then he clicked the mouse, and a bar at the bottom of the rectangle began to move in step wit

h the clip.

“Why would Green Eyes leave?” That was Jamie’s voice, clear as day and very loud through the cranked-up speakers.

Bargainwasup.