Frozen Solid: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned on one side, sniffed. The scent, barely discernible, was coming from the bunk mattress. Emily had had a sweet tooth, though more for dark chocolate than licorice, as Hallie remembered. Doubtless a year in this place could change a person in many ways, and who knew—licorice might have been the only candy she could get.
    It had been a long time since Hallie had slept in a top bunk. She sat up, swung her legs over the side, stretched tall, and accidentally punched two of the ceiling’s acoustic tiles, which lifted out of theirframes and then fell back into place. For a few moments she didn’t move. Then she got down and turned on the light.
    She climbed back up and knelt on the bunk. Using both hands, she raised one of the tiles she had accidentally hit and laid it aside. She reached up through the vacant space and carefully explored the back of the second tile. Her fingers touched something metallic, shaped like a deck of cards, but with sharp edges and corners. She lifted the tile carefully out of its metal frame and set it on the mattress.
    There was product information on the object:
    BrickHouse XtremeLife DVR Camera
    SXp1w3r
    PIR Motion Detection
    Two wires ran from sockets in the surveillance unit’s case. One connected to a microcamera that looked like a metal toothpick half an inch long with a tiny bulb at one end. That had been pushed down into a hole in the tile. The other was connected to a shorter, thicker metal tube—the motion sensor, she guessed. It, too, had been inserted into a hole. Hallie worked both loose, freeing the device, and saw a USB port on one side of its case.
    She connected it to her laptop computer and set it on the bunk so that it was almost at eye level. On the screen appeared a black camera shape with the same information she had seen on the case. PIR, she knew, stood for “passive infrared,” the same motion-detection system that worked intrusion alarms and automatic lights like those in the halls. And—strange to think of it now—that should have prevented the airport door from clamping down on the crippled woman’s suitcase as Hallie had said goodbye to Bowman.
    She double-clicked on the icon and a new screen appeared, showing nine MPEG-4 files. Hallie watched the first, created on January 23. It showed what the microcam had seen: a fish-eye view that included half of the room. There was no audio, and just enough ambient light for the camera to record grainy images. That light, Hallie reasoned, might have been coming from luminous numbers on a digitalclock somewhere in the room, or perhaps from a night-light, or both. She saw a shape moving onto the bunk, vague but discernible as a woman. Emily, caught by her own camera. Or—someone else’s? Emily’s eyes closed; her breathing slowed. She fell asleep almost immediately.
    Hallie kept watching. The camera recorded for three more minutes, then stopped. She thought it was probably set to turn off automatically after detecting no motion for a predetermined period. Hallie fast-forwarded through a number of false alarms triggered by Emily’s movements while asleep. Then she opened the most recent file, from January 31. Sixteen days ago. The same scene, so dark she could see only shadows moving. Then a flare and, after that died, soft and wavering light.
    Someone had lit a candle.
    Still too dark for sharp resolution, but better than the other recording. Hallie watched as one person and then another climbed up onto the bunk. Both sat with their backs against the wall. She could see the tops of their heads, shoulders, and their thighs. She could not see their faces.
    One was a woman—Hallie could make out the swell of breasts under a skin-tight black suit of some kind. A wet suit? Indoors? No, a leotard. White stripes on the tops of the thighs suggested a skeleton costume. Emily. The figure next to her was larger, with bigger shoulders and hands. He had coarse black hair and what looked like bolts sticking out of his neck at the