The Taken by Inger Ash Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page B

second. Webpages have names so we can remember them, right? But don’t they all have numerical addresses too?”
    “Try it,” she said. He typed HTTP:// 419.20.028.04 into her browser and after a couple of seconds, something began to happen. A page was loading.
    “That’s it,” he murmured. “Come on …”
    There was a box in the middle of the screen, like an abstract painting. The browser rendered it slowly, finally revealing a dirty whitish image. They stared at it, disappointed again, but then the image began to drift. “Whoa,” said Jenner. “It’s a webcam, I think.”
    She was right. They were looking at a moving image. A camera was scanning slowly to the right, tracking along a wall, a painted concrete wall, it seemed, stained by water. There was a shag carpet and some litter scattered around the bottom of the wall. It was a basement. The camera moved slowly, in total silence, picking up faint pools of light and leaving them behind. There was nothing of interest in the room, and the pan took a full minute to reach its farthest righthand extremity and then the image flickered, went black, and renewed itself where it started: an image of the empty room and the camera beginning its pan to the right again. They watched the entire sequence a second time.
    “I can’t believe this,” said Wingate.
    Jenner stabbed the screen with her finger. “Wait – did you see that?”
    “I saw someone’s dirty basement.”
    “No,” she said. “At the end. Watch again.”
    He leaned in closer to the screen and followed the camera’s gaze. As it got closer to the end of its movement, he noted again a shadow on the wall: it stretched to the left. But something was moving within it.
    “There,” said Jenner, and she held her forefinger against the right-side edge of the screen. “It’s a person.”
    He hadn’t seen it, and he watched again. And on the fourth pass, he saw it. Just a flash, onscreen for less than a second, but unmistakable: the right leg and arm of a person, someone seated in a chair. Visible for an instant against the gloom of the wall behind and then gone, and it was moving: a jittery motion caught on its downbeat. On the fifth viewing one more detail popped out, and Jenner clamped her hand to her mouth. In the upper third of the image, glinting for a millisecond, there was an eye, floating in the dark in an unseen head, an eye wide open in terror. Someone was looking at them, someone knew they saw. A fraction of a second was all they needed to read the message in that eye. It said
HELP ME
.
    “Good Jesus,” said Wingate. “I better get hold of the skip.”

] 6 [
    She’d told Wingate she’d meet him upstairs: there was no computer in the basement, but when he got to the house, she was still downstairs putting on a housecoat and getting ready to negotiate the stairs. Glynnis offered him something to drink, but he declined and waited in the front hallway, uncomfortable and nervous. There was something roasting in the oven – a rich, meaty fragrance filled the main floor of the house. “Sit at least,” said Glynnis. “Or has she told you to refuse all hospitality?”
    “No, no, not at all,” he said hastily, and sat in the chair in the living room closest to the hall. It felt like he was taking Hazel out on a date.
    Glynnis vanished into the kitchen and then reappeared with what looked like a glass of beer. “You like apple juice?”
    “Uh, yeah, I like it.”
    “Fresh-pressed,” she said. “No preservatives.”
    He thanked her and sipped it in her presence and then nodded to show how much he liked it. He could hear Hazel coming up the stairs, and Glynnis opened the door for her.
    “Orpheus arrives from the underworld,” she said, and Hazel waved her off.
    “What was so urgent?” she asked Wingate.
    He stood and put his drink aside. “Can you take me to the computer you said was connected to the internet?”
    She took him down the hallway, ignoring both Glynnis and the smell of