Immoral Code

by Lillian Clark

  Yes, tomorrow. Because this was it. Thursday. One day to go.

  Oooooh, ominous, right? Or, exciting! This. Was. It. Time for lens flares! Voice-overs! A crackling, quick-cut montage to the tune of the movie score’s most kick-ass track!

  We started out at a Starbucks around the corner from FI, for coffee (obviously), because no one could stand the room anymore, and so that five teens huddled in a group, discussing Something of Importance with decidedly suspicious vibes, weren’t, you know, suspicious.

  Though maybe that was ridiculous? Lens flares and voice-overs, right? Maybe that was just me being arrogant. Me being self-important and the reason we can’t have nice things or whatever.

  “San and Reese,” I said, clutching my latte close, “you’re on outdoor duty because anonymity. Bellamy, Keagan.” I couldn’t meet his eye. I was brave enough to infiltrate the digital recesses of a major company, but I couldn’t look my boyfriend in the eye after a fight. “We’ll do what we can to scope out the inside.”

  “What are we, you know, looking for?” Reese asked.

  Good question. We weren’t robbing some super-vault in a casino or lifting a priceless piece of art from a wall in the Louvre. We were having a faux employee walk into an office building, into an office, to plug a flash drive into a USB port and download a malicious program onto a computer. That’s it. Ta-da. No vault to crack. No sack of cash to pilfer. Just a puncture, a drip. A digital trickle to carve a canyon over time.

  “Just…” I shrugged, which was probably not super confidence inspiring. But hey, call me flustered. Consider me Taken Down a Peg. Half a peg. A quarter peg. “What normal feels like.” I shrugged. AGAIN. Ugh. Like even my regular Nari skin didn’t fit quite right that morning. “I don’t know. Practice walking to the building like you do it every day, or something. Look for the security cameras on the street. Check for exits we might’ve missed on the security feed. We want San to be as ignorable as possible tomorrow. And for both of you to know all your outs.”

  Reese took a sip of her coffee. “Gotcha.” No smile. No wink. If this was getting even to her? I was down a third of a peg. At least.

  “And us?” Bellamy asked.

  I smiled. “We get to do the fun part.”

  REESE

  Sun Flares and Satellites

  “B squad,” I said.

  San laughed. “Today.”

  “True, true. Tomorrow will be our time to shine.”

  “Like a sun flare,” he said.

  “And its shadow.”

  “Do sun flares have shadows?” He shrugged. “I’ll ask Bells.” He pulled out his phone to text her. Half a minute later, his phone buzzed with her reply. “No,” he read. “Charged particles at the poles can cause auroras, though. And they can disrupt wireless communications.”

  “Huh. Still cool. And still sorta works. I’ll be the flare—”

  “And the aurora.”

  “—and you’re the disruption.”

  He laughed a little, still looking at his phone, texting Bellamy back. Something between them had shifted. Their will they/won’t they dynamic brightening from a pale salmon pink to fuchsia. Which made me think the shift was from “will they” to “they did.” Plus I totally eavesdropped when we were camping. Rude, sure, but come on. Who doesn’t like to eavesdrop on occasion? It’s better with strangers, but still. I didn’t hear much, considering the tent was set back a few yards from the fire and I was cocooned deep in my sleeping bag with my hat pulled down over my ears, but there was definitely sweet laughter and cozy murmuring and a lengthy quiet during which I fell asleep.

  “She okay?” I asked him. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to Bells alone yet, but I had thought about what if my mom had peaced out instead of trying, rather relentlessly, to prove she loved me despite the broken home, and the feeling was the color of punching a wall. Blood orange, but rotten and tinged black. I was taking a leap—a baby step?—that based on the above observation, San had talked to her alone.

  He exhaled a heavy breath. “I think so.” And we shared a look. I may be aromantic, meaning I’ve never been romantically attracted to someone, I’ve never had a crush, but I know what it’s like to care deeply. All of us, couples and attraction aside, we care deeply, wholly, enough to hurt with and be hurt by and to hurt for each other. And that’s what was in our look. A quiet acknowledgment. Because quiet was all we needed.

  We meandered down the sidewalk along the side of the FI building. I’d tell you what side, but I have no sense of direction. Like, none. I knew the ocean was west, but I couldn’t see the ocean, so. It was not the front side, which was Nari, Keag, and Bells’s problem. Or the back side, since that was an alley. Or the other side, which was attached to the neighboring building.

  Our job was small. While the others got a feel for FI’s actual goings-on, San and I were to basically stay out of the way. I’d have offered to stay out of the way while window-shopping and browsing art galleries, but I think the unspoken other item was provide moral support, the “hurt with” part. And I felt a little guilty already. Not that last night’s shitstorm was my fault. Keagan threw his own grenade. Suggesting Split Pig hadn’t helped, but we were already primed and, yeah, thanks to my contribution of the fake IDs, lubricated. What I mean is, guilt or none, when the ice’s this thin, you scooch across the surface with caution, with hands joined in a human chain in case one of you breaks through and falls in. You don’t stomp across the frozen lake alone.

  I stopped and looked around. The traffic was steady. People walked the sidewalks minding their own business. Some of those people walked in and out of the Foster Innovations building’s side doors. I tried to decide if they looked very innovative, but it was mostly folks in suits, who were maybe innovators and maybe accountants and human resources managers and interns and whatnot. Maybe they didn’t even work for Bells’s dad at all.

  San glanced back down the block. “Well. Now what?”

  “Uh…we lean against that wall over there”—I gestured across the street—“and try to look inconspicuous?”

  San nodded. I waited for the inevitable joke about me never being inconspicuous, but then I remembered I was talking to San and not some rando or even Keag. Santiago didn’t tease people. Ever. He wasn’t the sort. Took people at face value, while somehow silently encouraging them to give him their best face. It was a skill. Skill? Character trait? I don’t know. Charisma or something. He’ll make a great coach someday. Because he believes in people when they need it most. Example: The week after I came out as acearo to them late sophomore year, he gave all of us pins of the ace pride flag and told me that if I ever wanted them all to wear them, for whatever reason, to say the word.

  We walked to the end of the block and crossed the street like normal, ignorable people, then made our normal, ignorable way down to loiter against an empty space of wall.

  The brick was warm, soaked through with delicious sunshine. I leaned my head back against it and felt the heat sink through my hair to my scalp.

  “You think they’ll work it out?” I asked. A truck drove past in the bus lane, a huge ad for office supplies on its side.

  “Nari and Keagan?”

  I rolled my eyes at him like obviously, and he said, “Yes.”

  “Just ‘yes’?”

  He shrugged. “Unless Keag’s right, and we get caught and go to jail.”

  His face was totally expressionless, but when I sighed a laugh, he smiled.

  Through the slow-moving traffic I watched a man walk out one of FI’s doors and head down the street. He was totally banal. White and middle-aged with brown hair and a black suit. Seriously, a clone. But I had to wonder, Is that him? Him, Robert Foster. Nari had shown us pictures: a current professional portrait, one from when he was in a frat in college, a few from vacations he’d taken with his wife and kids. All from Facebook and Instagram. Yo
u know, the low-level, socially acceptable brand of stalking. And damn if I could remember what he looked like. He was that bland. That boring. If a much richer and cleaner and better-dressed sort than average. But it made me work to remember that yes, all people are their very own special people living their very own special ohmygod I couldn’t even finish the thought it’s so freaking dull.

  Instead, I looked Santiago straight on. “Why are you doing this?”

  He glanced at me, then back at the doors to FI, all forest-green politeness and calm. “Because I care about Bellamy.”

  “Sure, but also?”

  “Because I want to see if I can do it.”

  I frowned. “Do it, meaning walk into a building and plug a rectangular thing into a suitably rectangular slot and double-click a mouse?”

  He shifted his shoulders against the wall and said, in all seriousness, “I want to know I’m worth betting on.”

  My eyebrows rose. “For real? State Champion Santiago?”

  “Is that so weird?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He laughed a little. “How about: because my parents don’t support me trying something they can’t be sure I won’t fail at, so I want to prove to myself I can do something extraordinary and not fail. Better?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, better.”

  “Why are you doing it?”

  “Um, because as Keag so loudly pointed out last night, I am the ‘adventurous’ one?”

  “Public disturbance and possible criminal trespassing, not to mention aiding and abetting, are a tad more adventurous than dyeing your hair.”

  I put a hand to my chest, covering an imaginary wound. “Damn, San! That stings.”

  “Hey”—smiling, he held his hands up in surrender—“I told you mine. ‘For real.’ ”

  “True.” I slouched against the wall. “But that is my ‘for real.’ Mostly. I just don’t ever want to be one of those people who say no to something out of fear.”

  “Fear seems like an okay reason to say no to something.”

  “Fear of regret, then. Not, like, fear of dismemberment or serial killers.”

  “So…base jumping?”

  “Do it.”

  “Swimming with sharks?”

  “Really? They put you in a freaking cage under the water. How is that even scary?”

  “Okay, okay. Sail around the world alone.”

  “Yesss. That. That is a perfect example,” I said. “Storms, equipment failure, communication issues. You could die. People have, right? But that’s life-changing. In the best way. Even if you don’t meet Poseidon or make friends with a pod of dolphins.”

  He smiled. San has a good smile. Like sunlight. Not a color, really, just light. Warmth and brightness. More a feeling than anything else. Well, and nice teeth. “But you wouldn’t be risking what we’re risking tomorrow,” he said. “Sailing doesn’t tend to end with life in jail.”

  “No.” A cloud passed over the sun. I pressed my palms to the wall, absorbing the heat still trapped there.

  San’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket, looked at the screen, and smiled to himself before tucking it back into his pocket. From his grin, I’d bet a thousand glitter pixie wishes it was Bellamy again. “But,” he said, “if we can pull this off, the success might feel the same.”

  I met his eyes. “Exactly.” San got it. Honestly, I was a little surprised.

  We went back to standing quietly and watching all the individual people with their individual lives filled with individual hopes and dreams and tastes in music filter past, equally uninterested in us as I was in them, until I said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m becoming one with the wall, with the pavement. Let’s go count cameras again or something, then find those guys for lunch.”

  BELLAMY

  Paternity Isn’t Parenting

  Emotions are chemistry: stimuli and chemical reactions in your brain and body that result in what we call fear, lust, anger, sadness, and so on. Dopamine, or 3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine, produced primarily in the midbrain, is a “feel-good” chemical, playing a major role in reward-motivated behavior, motor control, arousal, reinforcement, and pleasure. Another “feel-good” chemical is serotonin, the vast majority of which can be found in the body’s enterochromaffin cells in the gastrointestinal tract, where it regulates intestinal movements. Then there’s norepinephrine, which is synthesized and supplied by the central nervous system but can also be released directly into the bloodstream from the adrenal glands located above the kidneys. Related to the “fight-or-flight” response, norepinephrine increases alertness, enhances memory and focus, and promotes vigilance in the brain while increasing heart rate and blood pressure in the body. Shifts in brain and body chemistry can contribute to everything from a sense of wellness to debilitating depression to diseases like Parkinson’s. But for me, in that moment, they were making me feel in danger of shifting clean out of my skin.

  My father was in that building.

  My father, the contributor of half my DNA and an unknown assortment of genetic traits ranging from predispositions to various diseases to certain of my mannerisms, not to mention the color of my eyes and the shape of my thumbs.

  Last night I’d filtered through memory after memory; absences and almosts. All the times my mom and I had come up short or missed out. The new laptop she wanted to buy me but couldn’t afford. The trip to see her favorite aunt that we’d never gotten to take. Jobs she couldn’t get without the education she could never afford. Holidays spent with Nari’s family because my mom was at work. Her dyeing her hair out of a box because she couldn’t afford the salon. Our secondhand clothes, shoes, kitchen table, couch. My friends buying me dinner, never asking me to chip in for gas, and now…this. A hundred opportunities sitting out of reach. The thousand little indignities that come with being poor. And finally, the biggest ones, MIT and the sound of Robert Foster hearing who I was and hanging up.

  He wasn’t my father. He was our mark.

  Nari, Keagan, and I loitered across the street from the main entrance to the Foster Innovations building and watched the comings and goings of the people with business there for most of the morning. We matched faces to the pictures Nari had saved to her phone from Foster Innovations’ HR files, searching the continuous stream of people entering and exiting for those we knew had meetings scheduled with FI’s executives, if only to check that those meetings were kept. Around eleven, Keagan split off to see what he could of the lobby.

  Nari and I watched him walk down the block toward the streetlight. At the corner, he waited patiently for the light to change and the walk sign to flick on. Nari scoffed and shook her head. “He won’t even jaywalk. I don’t know why I ever thought he’d be okay with this.”

  I pushed my glasses back up my nose, more out of habit than because they’d slipped, and rocked back and forth from my heels to my toes. I couldn’t make myself still. When I tried, crossing my arms and concentrating on keeping my feet flat, my attention to myself was distracting. The light changed and Keagan crossed the street. Nari stared at the sidewalk, chewing the inside of her cheek.

  Nari and I are devoted. I don’t have siblings, so I can’t liken our friendship to that sort of bond, but we’ve been one of the most important people to each other for more than half our lives. I’ll stand beside Nari through anything. I’ll defend her even when she’s wrong. I’ll choose her, every time. She makes me stronger, brighter, more daring. But she’s still the strongest, the brightest, the most daring. For us, for the most part, that’s okay. It works.

  But sometimes the brightest stars make the others appear duller if only because the dimmer stars are farther away. Nari shines so brightly now. But maybe Keagan will shine just as brightly later.

  “Maybe,” I said, “this doesn’t have to be something he’s okay with.”

  She frowned.
r />   “You’re—I’m asking a lot of him. Of everyone.”

  She looked up and met my eye. “We. We asked. But also? We asked. As in, past tense. He could’ve said no.”

  “You know he’d never do that.”

  “Well. Maybe he should have.”

  “That isn’t fair.” Nari’s brow creased. She looked at the sidewalk again. “He hates this idea,” I said. “But he’s here anyway. For you. For me. For Reese and San. He’s here for us. That’s admirable, Nari.”

  “God,” she groaned, and let her head roll back so she was looking at the sky. “I know. I know. Which is just so obnoxious.”

  I laughed.

  She laughed, too, and met my eye again. “Right? Mr. Moral Nobility making me feel all…” She wiggled her shoulders, squirming like her shirt itched.

  “Imperfect?” I offered. “Fallible? Vulner—”

  She knocked me with her elbow. “Thanks, Bells. Point made.”

  We watched the traffic for a minute; then, quietly, she said, “It isn’t your fault. Keag’s…whatever. The whatever between him and me.”

  I stared up at the windows of FI’s higher floors, still rocking back and forth from toe to heel, heel to toe. “I know.”

  “Also, your dad? And that whole abandonment thing? Not your fault either.”

  I snorted a laugh and looked back at Nari. She was trying and mostly succeeding at keeping a straight face. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. Totally.”

  And we both burst out laughing. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders and squeezed.

  Across the street, Keagan came out of FI’s front doors, waited for traffic to clear, then jogged across the street. I poked Nari. She dropped her arms, looked to where I pointed at Keag jaywalking toward us, and rolled her eyes.

  “You’re going to be shocked,” he said when he stopped between us. “But it looks exactly the same as it did in the eighteen-plus hours of security footage we watched.”