Free Beyond the Grave by Mara Purnhagen Page B

familiar tech language was as comfortable to me as my pajama pants. When we worked on a DVD, the audio had to be completed first. Then the raw video clips were trimmed and placed within a timeline. It was an intricate puzzle, one I loved piecing together.
    â€œWe’re using footage taken at the penitentiary last year, but we need to splice it with some of the shots we got with Pate.” Shane held up two memory cards. “Your choice—old stuff or new?”
    I reached for the new card. Watching scenes featuring Mom was not something I was sure I could handle. The clips came up on my monitor, and I realized the amount of work we had to do. One afternoon at Pate’s had resulted in a thousand different clips, each one needing to be sorted through and pruned down to about ten minutes of video.
    â€œWhat’s our deadline again?”
    Shane had more than three times the video I had. “Less than a month. It’s doable, but we need to get going.”
    â€œGot it.” I opened a clip of Noah first. The reenactment scene would come toward the end, and I wanted to see how much we had. I smiled when his face appeared on the screen. The project wouldn’t be so bad if I could spend most of the time watching my boyfriend. In fact, I wished he was with us now. He knew how to edit better than most people. I suggested it to Shane.
    â€œI asked him, but he’s busy tonight. Some school project.”
    He was probably taping a football game for AV class. His teacher had put Noah in charge of training all the new students, which basically meant taking them to different sporting events and making sure they didn’t break the cameras.
    We continued to work for a while. Shane turned on some music, but I begged him to turn it off as soon as I heard the heavy guitar intro. “Can’t you play something from the last decade?”
    â€œThis is classic rock. It’s classic for a reason.”
    â€œIt’s dead-guy rock.”
    â€œBlasphemy!” Shane put a hand over his heart. “I have impeccable taste in music. It’s why Trish put me in charge of the wedding playlist.”
    â€œPlease don’t make her regret it.”
    â€œThat’s the same thing she said! Trust me, it’s going to rock.”
    Over the next hour, we made some real progress. Shane had put together an outline, which made it easier to choose clips and discard the ones I knew we wouldn’t use. I fell into a nice rhythm as I marked in-points and out-points, then dragged the video into our timeline. I liked getting lost in the work. Thoughts of school and concerns over Noah were replaced with a focus on lighting and where we could splice in effects.
    â€œCan you show me the hallway?” Shane asked. I was so absorbed in my work that I was barely aware of his presence.
    â€œSure.” I clicked on a segment.
    Shane wheeled his chair closer. “Crap. That might be a problem.” He showed me original shots of the hallway. Compared to the more recent shots, there was a definite difference. The graffiti had doubled, and some of it would need to be blurred out if the show was going to air on television.
    â€œI can’t believe Pate thinks we’re the problem, when obviously people have been sneaking in for over a year,” I said.
    â€œAnd coming up with inventive new ways to describe bodily functions,” Shane added.
    Something on the opposite wall caught my eye, and I opened a clip that showed it more clearly. In tall, lopsided black letters was a single sentence that stretched from one end of the hallway to the other: The gate is now open. Beneath it, a shaky arrow pointed toward the execution chamber.
    â€œWas that there last year?” I asked.
    Shane checked his footage. “Nope. That’s new.”
    â€œThe gate is now open,” I whispered. On the surface, it sounded so simple and nonthreatening. But it bothered me. I studied the still image, trying to