Read Online Ring of Fire by Pierdomenico Baccalario - Free Book Online Page B

murdered.”
    “And maybe because of this briefcase,” says Elettra. “He was being followed. He was scared. He said that it had all begun.”
    “He doesn’t seem to have been very lucky to me. …”
    “He was even saying ‘twenty-nine.’ Like our birthdays.”
    “And don’t forget: yesterday was December twenty-ninth,” Sheng says, biting his fingernails.
    The light from the bulbs hanging from the ceiling suddenly dims.
    “You want to make those blow up, too, Sheng?” Harvey teases.
    “Hey! I didn’t do it!”
    “Oh, no? You mean I just imagined the whole thing?”
    “Sheng’s right,” Elettra says as the basement lights go back to normal. “It wasn’t him. There’s a street right above us and the lights dim whenever a truck passes by.”
    “Hear that?” Sheng retorts.
    “Besides, yesterday …,” Elettra goes on, “I think it was me.” She drags her finger over the sheet hiding the briefcase and forces a smile. “I might as well tell you. It wouldn’t be the first time it happened to me. … But it’s never been as strong as it was last night.”
    Mistral gives her a look of understanding.
    Harvey leans back to rest on his elbows. “Sorry, what happens to you?”
    “I make lightbulbs explode … without even touching them.”
    “Hao!”
cries Sheng. “How do you do that?”
    “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel strange … charged and … Well, laugh if you want, but when I feel that way I even make computers go haywire.”
    “Like some sort of virus?”
    “No. I interfere with their electrical current. At least I think that’s what it is. Sometimes all I have to do is walk by and thepaper in the printer gets jammed or some of the computer screen’s pixels burn out. And … I make mirrors go dull,” Elettra continues. “After I’ve used them for a while, mirrors lose their shine. They get all blurry and … and they fade. They reflect less. I can’t explain it any better than this, but that’s basically what happens.”
    “So what happened to you yesterday?”
    “I started feeling this surge of energy when we were talking about our birthdays. I felt hot and I couldn’t breathe. In the end, when the heat was getting to be more than I could stand, I wound up touching Sheng on the shoulder and—”
    “I had my hands on the lamp—”
    “You funneled all your energy into him and—”
    “And the lamp exploded.”
    In the basement, there’s a long moment of silence.
    “Something like that, I guess,” Elettra admits, embarrassed.
    “Never heard anything like it,” Harvey breaks in. “But anyway, that’s got nothing to do with this briefcase.”
    “Actually, the same thing happened to me later on,” explains Elettra. “On the bridge, when we ran into that man. I felt hot. The same surge of energy.”
    “And now?”
    The girl shakes her head. “No. Everything seems okay right now.”
    “So what do we do? Do we open it up?” Sheng asks impatiently.
    “And after we’ve opened it?” asks Harvey.
    Sheng brushes his finger against the briefcase, fascinated and scared at the same time. “We see what’s inside.”
    “And then?”
    “Then we keep it a secret. We swore we wouldn’t tell anyone anything, didn’t we?”
    “Actually, maybe what we should do is take it to the police and forget this whole thing ever happened,” suggests Harvey.
    Elettra thinks back to what the man shouted out in the snow. She repeats it aloud. “It’s begun.”
    “No one’s going to come here to claim the briefcase,” says Sheng. “So we might as well see what’s inside.”
    “It’ll be our secret.”
    “Whatever you guys want.”
    “So who’s going to open it?”
    Harvey, Sheng and Mistral look at Elettra. “He gave it to you,” Harvey says. “You open it.”
    She nods, rests her hands on the briefcase and clicks open its gold hasps.
    Clack.
    The pale sun peeks out from behind a thick layer of clouds. The snow that fell during the night is piled up along the curbs.