"I swear, if I'm dying tonight because of you, I'm gonna haunt your ass so hard, Harrington!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah! I'm gonna go full Poltergeist and shit!"
"Then bring it, Graveswood."
"Challenge accepted."
***
In which after years of suppressing their...
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Chapter Ninety-Eight: The Music Clue
(The Mall Rats, Pt. 4)
***
Rowan stared at the translated words of the Russian message—or the words they managed to translate—on the board, still as confused by them as when they had all been translated into three sentences.
It had taken them hours to just get those sentences—hours that had afternoon slip into night, where it was only them left in the entire mall. Rowan had to use Scoop's phone to call her aunt and let her know she was still with her friends and not have Aunt Aco go into a panic. It had Rowan immensely thankful that Eddie had already offered to cover her shift tonight to make up for last night, because then she'd have to lie to Jonah Kingston about why she missed her shift—she didn't think "translating a secret Russian message my brother's friend picked up on his possibly illegal radio tower" could cover for a good excuse even it was the truth. But aside from that call, her time had been taken up with translating the message—or more accurately, helping Robin and Valerie as they took point in translation, spearheading it and making actual ground in it. Rowan honestly didn't think that if they hadn't got involved, she, Steve and Dustin would still be stuck.
Which lead to their efforts being realised on this board, in three, very confusing sentences.
"The week is long," Rowan read out alongside Steve, Robin, Valerie and Dustin. "The silver cat feeds. When blue meets yellow in the west."
Rowan frowned. Even when it was read out, nothing about the words made sense to her head. If it was accurate—and Rowan knew it was because Robin and Valerie translated it—then the Russians must have made this a joke message because no way in fucking hell could it be anything serious or important.
Unless... that was want they wanted anyone who picked it up to think, to confuse them and hide the true meaning under layers of deception and trick-words. Keep anyone from digging too deeply and keep continuing whatever the fuck they were doing undetected.
Then again, it could also be a joke, a red herring to amp up American paranoia and do a wild goose chase in thinking it was something serious. Rowan honestly thought it could go either way.
Whatever. She guessed they didn't really know unless they translated the rest of it—which had to be tomorrow, because no way in hell was Rowan having a sleepover in fucking Starcourt.
Apparently, Steve also thought it was a joke, as he said while rolling down the cover for Scoops Ahoy, "I mean it just... it just can't be right."
"It's right," Robin said immediately as Steve caught up to them, the five of them walking toward where Steve and Valerie parked their cars. In the silence of the usually-empty mall, their footsteps echoed, bouncing off the glass ceiling and reverberating back to them. Neon lights and signs still lit up the mall, but it gave a sense of fluorescent-hued ominousness that gave Rowan the creeps, a sense of abandonment accented by saturated, brightly coloured light, helped by the semi-darkness of the stores behind their covers, making the products and mannequins inside look distorted and more sinister than they would be in the light of day and with far more populace than just five teenagers.
