Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) by Richard Farr Page B

and it gave us a frustratingly narrow window into your past—a dozen photos, all taken on a single not-bad spring day a couple of weeks before you, Rosko, and Iona left for Patagonia. Three weeks to the day—I did the math—before she died. The house. You in front of the house. Daffodils in almost bloom. A chestnut tree against the sky. You at the park, with a blurred jogger in the background. I wanted to linger over every frame, but you thumbed through them impatiently, your breathing short, and when you got to the end, you kept scrolling, as if you could magic more images into existence. At first I assumed you were looking for a picture of her, and of course there never are pictures of the photographer. But eventually you stopped. There were tears in your eyes—whether from grief, fear, or frustration, I couldn’t tell.
    “New Guinea,” you said. “Photographs.”
    “Not on this card,” Rosko said.
    “There are photographs,” you insisted.
    “So where are they? And why do you want to see them?”
    “Mayo.”
    “Mayo what?”
    You looked down at the camera as if it was a wounded bird and hugged it to your chest again, as if either you could save it or it could save you. Then you said, in your own voice, something simple but perfectly clear.
    “Mayo wants the answer. The I’iwa—”
    That intonation again: it was amazing. As if you spoke the language.
    “The I’iwa. They have the answer.”
    Rosko took the memory card and turned it over in his fingers again. “If there were more of these, with more photographs, Iona would have backed them up. They have to be online somewhere.”
    “Forget it,” I said. “You know Iona—her company owned the encrypted storage business. And the big sell was that other people wouldn’t even be able to find your files in the first place, much less decrypt them.”
    “Not the sort of woman whose password is password . You’re right. So, if there are other photographs, we have to find the cards they were originally saved on.”
    You reached for the little blue square of plastic again.
    “Yes,” I said. “Or Daniel has to.”

C HAPTER 5
    W ORTSPIEL?
    The morning after we’d been to the house, there was a tap-tap on the screen door: your old semi-Goth pal, Ella Hardy. Standing on the porch with a brown paper package under one arm, she was looking good, in an Ella kind of way: ripped pink jeans over glitter-red Doc Martens; a “ Black Sabbath World Tour” T-shirt; a studded gunmetal-gray fake leather biker jacket draped over her shoulders; Midnight Corpse eye shadow (guessing about the color there); and a radical new retro-seventies David Bowie ’do: short, spiky, and the dye color was, guessing again, Vomit at Sunrise.
    I assumed the package was for the Eislers, so I went to put it on the counter behind me. You took it out of my hands.
    “You need a break, Morag,” Ella said.
    “How can you tell?”
    “Hon, I’m looking at you—that’s how I can tell.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Like I said, you need a break. Looking after a—looking after Daniel must be tough.”
    “Daniel is fine,” I said. Which was a lie. What I’d meant to say was Looking after Daniel is fine . That would have been a lie too. But I wasn’t going to admit my fears to Ella, because I suspected her of thinking you were—as one of the doctors had been pleased with his own frankness for saying— another of these hopeless cases .
    “The forecast says ultraclear skies at the end of the week. Astronomy club’s going to haul out the telescopes and head east over the mountains. It’ll mean a four-hour drive, staying up half the night, and camping. It’s what you need, Morag. A total change of scene.”
    I thought of the pile of papers on the table in the basement, and the need to bug everyone I could think of about Jimmy and Lorna, the need to pick Natazscha’s brain about Mayo, and half a dozen other things. Above all, I thought about my general, overwhelming sense that I must work work