Immoral Code

by Lillian Clark

  To the turnstiles. ID and flash drive in my pocket, listen for Reese, wait for solitude, quick glance around, jump the plexiglass partition.

  At the elevator, hover till I can catch an empty car.

  Up the elevator to floor twelve. Cross the antechamber and go through the double doors. Listen for Nari in my ear, watching the cameras, acting as my eyes a few steps ahead. Follow the right-hand pathway to the rear corner office.

  Key in the code: 17985.

  Open the door.

  Go inside.

  Wake up the computer, enter the password provided by Nari’s keystroke spyware.

  Plug the flash drive into the USB port.

  Download.

  Repeat all steps in reverse.

  Done.

  Blinking open my eyes, I let out a full-lung sigh. The others were asleep, but I’d stayed awake, lying flat on my back on the window-side edge of the bed. The room was dark and overly warm, causing the already low ceiling to feel even lower. It seemed to hover a few short feet above me, making me feel trapped and heavy.

  I rubbed my eyes. My elbows were stiff from lying with my arms motionless at my sides for so long. I stood up, rolling off the bed as carefully as I could, and stretched my back, reaching for my toes, listening to the evenness of the others’ breathing, wondering if anyone’s sleep was faked. I wondered how Bellamy was feeling and fought the urge to wake her where she slept less than an arm’s length away. But I stayed where I was. Because as much as I wanted to talk to her, touch her, kiss her, despite all of this being for her, what I was feeling right then wasn’t. It was for me.

  As close as we all were and whether we voiced it or not, each of us was here for our own reasons, beyond Bellamy. Reese because she refused to live a life of missed opportunity and avoided adventure; Nari because she truly believed this was justice and because she pushed herself to do big things if only to know that she could; Keagan because he was the fixer, the voice of reason, the one who kept us all from slipping over the cliff’s edge; me because I wanted to prove to myself that my wanting was a good enough reason for me to try.

  I lay back down.

  “Es muy poco práctico, Santiago,” my mom had said, or maybe it’d been my dad. In my memory it was my mom, but I’m certain they’ve each said those words to me at least half a dozen times. Es muy poco práctico, muy poco práctico, impractical. “Tú te irás a la universidad a estudiar.”

  “Of course I’m going to college to study,” I’d argued back, “but I earned my scholarship because of my diving.”

  “Exactly,” my mom said, arguing our perpetual argument in the kitchen after my sisters had gone to bed. “Ya tendrás suficiente trabajo con las obligaciones del equipo. Si te comprometes con algo más, no tendrás tiempo para los estudios.” She was convinced that with classes and diving for a college team, I would already have enough work, enough obligations, it was all enough, enough, enough. Anything else would be a detriment, would jeopardize my education because “It will be too much, Santiago.”

  “It won’t!” I kept my voice an angry whisper. “I can do it. The team, the extra training, school. I know it will be hard, but I also know I can do it.” Standing in the kitchen, looking between my mom and dad with my arms crossed and brow tight, I’d asked, “Si me creo en mí, ¿por qué no quiere creerme en mí también?”

  If I believe in me, why won’t you believe in me?

  And my dad had answered, “No puedes saber lo que podrás hacer.”

  You can’t know what you’ll be able to do.

  That was the argument. That was always the argument. I’d heard it too many times to count.

  I know there are parents who celebrate, worship even, their kids’ lofty ambitions, parents like Nari’s, and Bellamy’s mom, and Reese’s, current dramas notwithstanding. Keag’s would, too, I’m sure, if he knew his specific ambition. But not mine. Mine want me to respect their wishes and their choices and their sacrifices. And it isn’t that they aren’t proud. They are. And it isn’t that they’ve discouraged me from reaching the place where I am now. They haven’t. But earning an athletic scholarship to a top-tier school where I will get a top-tier education that will help secure me a steady future of steady, life-supporting work, hopefully close to home, is a far stretch from chasing an unlikely dream down a road paved with extra expenses, time, and uncertainty. Which I understand. Their argument has its logic. It is safe. My dream is impractical.

  But if our story is proof of anything, it’s that impracticality is less a reason not to do something and more a reason to try harder.

  I took a heavy breath, closed my eyes, and started again:

  Wait for Reese to draw attention, cross the lobby like I do it every day. Eyes forward, attention focused yet nonchalant. Head to the turnstiles…

  KEAGAN

  Loiter, linger, skulk, loaf, lounge, idle, laze. Wait.

  “Hot chocolate?” I stood inside the door, grocery sack in hand, doling out the junk food I’d blown the rest of our slush fund on after keeping back just enough to pay for gas to get home. Though we’d be blowing this Popsicle stand, aka the scene of our crime, one swift minute after the deed was done, Nari’d reserved the room through the night. Which meant no checkout time. Which meant we’d kill pretty much the whole day here before our scheduled programming, watching crap cable while at least one of us kept an eye on the FI security feeds, waiting to triple-check Foster’s door code and generally making sure the place didn’t burn down before our planned pillaging. Really, I was gonna miss the place. The room. Heist Headquarters. Chateau de Shit. It’d really grown on me. Like fondness. Or some kind of fungus.

  “Me!” Bellamy called, hand raised. I threw her the box.

  “Cool Ranch Doritos?”

  “Here,” Nari said, and I tossed them to her on the far mattress.

  “Seasonal fruit bowl?”

  “Yes!” Reese said, then, “Wait. Does ‘seasonal’ mean cantaloupe, honeydew, and three mushy grapes? Because I take issue with that.”

  “Maybe some of us like honeydew, Reese,” San said. He stood from his seat in the room’s lonely chair and held his hand out for the fruit bowl. “Maybe some of us happen to be craving those three mushy grapes.”

  Reese rolled her eyes. “Fine, but if there’s non-mushy strawberries, dibs.”

  I handed out the rest of my stash, from every kind of Skittles they’d had to a bunch of bananas, then settled in with my own picks: a cup of microwaveable oatmeal, two apples, deli sandwich, bag of peanut butter M&M’s, and a liter of diet Dr Pepper.

  The others sorted through their respective snack piles while Nari flipped through the channels looking for a movie. “Ocean’s Eleven!” she cheered. “Hello, serendipity!”

  I shook my head, but whatever. I was done fighting it. Not because I’d had some grand and convenient change of heart, but because…I dunno. A few things, I guess. Part of it was Bells’s stuff the other night, which had made me like her dad even less, and I already liked him a negative amount. Part of it was the one-versus-four thing, the momentum of it. Nari, San, Bells, and Reese, they were the train, speeding down the track with lonely little me clinging to the caboose, heels dug in, trying to stop all few thousand tons of it with my pathetic human muscles. So rather than get dragged along the ground being shredded into pulpy ribbons, I jumped on the train. I know that seems too simple. Why not just leave? Well, because contrary to the events of the other night, I am not a selfish asshole. At least, not usually. Maybe three percent. Yeah, I’d say I’m three percent selfish asshole and ninety-seven percent not the kind of person who would bail on my friends when they need me, even if they need me for something illegal and supremely reckless.

  Another thing was the video. That footage from Nari’s Owl Cam? It swayed me. The fancy-ass lobby up on the twelfth floor, Patrick all tailored and trendy like he’d come out of
a 3-D hipster printer, the office space itself with all that glass and light and the awesome plants and impossibly white furniture. Then, por supuesto, Robert freaking Foster himself. And not even that he was kind of a dick, talking to “Violet Murakami” with that steady condescension, but how I could see Bells in the shape of his eyes. It’d felt so real then. And I don’t mean the impending crime, I mean the abandonment.

  So, was I a convert? Meh. But I was on board, even if more as a reluctant stowaway than a co-conductor.

  Two-thirds through the movie, I grabbed a stack of plastic cups and poured a bit of my diet Dr Pepper into five of them, passing them out as I did.

  “Time for a toast,” I said, standing and holding my cup up.

  San looked into his cup, lip curled. “With diet Dr Pepper?”

  “You’ll drink it and you’ll like it!” Nari snapped, then giggled.

  I grinned at her. She held my eye a few seconds longer than she needed to, and I let my smile turn genuine and warm. We’d barely talked after she’d done her thing yesterday, but I’d slept next to her in Superbed, and when I’d looped my arms around her in the night, she’d scooted her back up flush with my chest.

  “Hey,” Reese said, snapping her fingers at me. “The toast. Or are we all holding up our cups of chemical-laced sugar water for fun?”

  “It’s diet, Reese,” Bells said. “Sugar-free.”

  “Fine. Chemical-laced chemical water, then. Also, toooooaasst.”

  “Okay, okay. Ahem,” I said, “throat-clearing, the tapping of flatware on glass.”

  “Thanks, Keag,” said San. “I think I would’ve been confused about what you were doing if you hadn’t described a few pre-speech sound effects.”

  “You’re welcome.” I tipped my head to him. “Now, we’re gathered here today in the name of the Family We Choose, to cement this union with the most lasting and strongest of glues, shared guilt and criminal activity.”

  Groans.

  “Also! Also. Before that, before today. Before all of this. You guys are…” I looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “You’re my Mutant Ninja Turtles. My Avengers and Justice League. You’re—

  “San.” I gestured to him with my cup. “I swear if you wanted to, you could make yourself grow literal wings. You can do anything. And I cannot wait to scream my guts out for you, to a truly embarrassing degree, from the stands at the Olympics someday.

  “Reese, you are such a brilliant weirdo. Our ace in the hole.” Laugh-boos all around. “Truly, though, you’re so creative and original, and my life would be very beige without you in it.”

  Reese lifted her cup and said, “Buff. Oatmeal. Ooh! Khaki.”

  “Thanks,” I said flatly, and turned to Bellamy, seated at the desk on security-feed-babysitting duty. “Bells, my bestest latchkey pal. You’re right. You deserve this. Whatever crap I’ve pulled and said and I don’t know. Just, you deserve the best and a puppy that barks rainbows, too.

  “And Narioka.” I looked at her, sitting next to San on the window-side half of Superbed. She was so freaking beautiful. I mean, she is so beautiful. Like, I know how all this conflict and discord probably makes us seem. But that’s a sliver, a narrow wedge, in the pie chart of Us. “Nari, d0l0s, Dr. Okada. I love you. Like in a totally obnoxious and irritating-to-our-friends way. In a follow-you-to-hell—or, you know, the Financial District of San Francisco—and-back way. Partly because I figure you’ll rule the universe someday and I want to stay on your good side. But mostly because you’re incredible. And brilliant. And driven. And generous and passionate and kind. And I can’t wait to spend my life finding out how amazing you are.

  “All of you. You are my favorite people.” I raised my cup, smiling wide. “And if we get caught and have to go to jail, I’ll miss you so damn much.”

  SANTIAGO

  Fresco como una lechuga.

  Cool as a cucumber.

  Keagan parked in a metered spot a few blocks down and around the corner from FI’s main entrance, far enough away that if Reese or I were caught, the police might not think to track us all the way back to his car.

  “Remember,” Nari said as I adjusted my earpiece for the fifteenth time. “I’ve only swapped the feed for the cameras on FI’s executive floor, since if they checked the lobby and didn’t see Reese, it’d be, you know.” She shrugged.

  “A flaming red flag?” Reese offered.

  “Yeah. That.” Sitting in the passenger seat with her computer on her lap, Nari scanned through the camera views, opening new windows, navigating her way through it all and preparing to swap the feeds with a scary sort of competency. It was like watching a professional pianist compose an elaborate new piece on the fly, her movements so purposeful and efficient, where if I sat and stared at the same arrangement of notes and keys, I wouldn’t know where to start. “But the rest of it—” She waved at the array of windows piled atop each other on her screen, views of the street and sidewalk from FI’s external security cams, three different angles of the lobby, even the traffic camera at the corner. “You’ll have to just keep your head down.”

  While I watched her screen, Nari pulled the window showing the executive floor’s antechamber forward. Patrick stood at the reception desk talking on the landline. He gestured with his left hand as he spoke, waving it in the air, sandwiching the receiver between his head and shoulder to grab his bag and pack his laptop and travel mug. Finally, he hung up, looped the strap of his satchel over his shoulder, and pulled out his phone, scrolling through whatever he was looking at with an occasional flick of his finger.

  “Has my father left yet?” Bellamy asked. She sat next to me, perched on the edge of the middle seat. She said the word “father” stiffly, like the shape of it felt foreign in her mouth. On her other side, Reese rummaged through her canvas messenger bag, dumping out the stuff she didn’t need onto the floor and pulling out her wig, black and sleek with blunt bangs. She worked on tying up her own vermilion hair to stuff beneath it.

  Nari swapped Patrick’s video feed for the only camera with a view of Robert Foster’s office and shook her head. The door was closed. The privacy glass was switched on, making the windows opaque. “No. Unless I missed him leaving early.”

  Bells slouched back in her seat and looked up at me, unsmiling. I looked back, trying to silently communicate everything I felt: how I wanted to pull her close and kiss her; how I wanted to fix this with a flick of a switch; how I was nervous and uncertain; how my parents’ words circled my thoughts, slathering my wall of doubt with thick layers of fresh paint; how I’d face that doubt down for her, and for me. In lieu of all that, I squared my shoulders, mimed straightening my tie, and gave her my best impression of a debonair smile. She smiled back. And that was enough.

  When I looked back at Nari’s computer, she had Patrick’s window pulled to the forefront again, showing him walking out from behind his desk, crossing the antechamber, and passing below the camera mounted above the elevator. It was 5:47.

  Nari turned around in the front seat and offered me the second of two small radios. The first she had in her lap, a headset already plugged into it. I took the other, plugged my clear earpiece-and-mic set into it. “The channel’s already set,” she said. “Get out so we can test it again.”

  I tapped Bellamy’s thigh with my knuckles, gave her a final grin, and climbed out of Keag’s car onto the sidewalk, closing the door behind me. The radio, small as it was, was too obvious tucked into the pocket of my slim-fit suit pants and too obnoxious in the interior pocket of my jacket, so I clipped it to my belt at my right hip and checked to make sure the bottom of my jacket covered it. The mic I’d clipped to the back of my tie, under the knot, with its wire run behind my shoulder and down my back, hidden beneath my jacket. I reached for the button on it, watching my reflection in the car window, and said, voice low, “Nari?” It was awkward to hold the button while I spoke, but unless someo
ne focused too long on me, they’d only see me adjusting my tie.

  “Works,” Nari’s voice sounded in my ear. “A little muffled, but it works.”

  I buttoned my suit jacket, smoothed my hands down my sleeves, rocked up onto the toes of my stiff new shoes, and checked for the flash drive and fake ID badge in my pocket, imagining myself becoming him, Ethan Marques, Foster Innovations employee.

  The street-side rear door opened and closed. I looked over the Subaru’s roof at Reese. She wore her black wig and bright, blood-red lipstick, her messenger bag slung over one shoulder. I tipped my head at her. She winked, then rounded the back of the car to join me on the sidewalk as Nari, still watching her computer, rolled the manual passenger window down.

  Finally, Nari exhaled a long, deep breath, turned to us, and said, “Time to go.”

  REESE

  Green. The color of sunlight through spring leaves. Bright and eager and anxious and vibrating.

  I went inside first. Santiago followed a few paces behind.

  The lobby was mildly busy. Like a school hallway five minutes after the last bell. People loitered, chatting, while others breezed through on their way out the doors. I strode through them toward the center of the room, projecting don’t-fuck-with-me confidence while my guts puckered like I’d eaten something sour. Out of the corner of my eye I saw San skirt the outer edge of the crowd.

  I dropped my bag on the marble floor.

  And began.

  “LEECHES!” I shouted.

  My voice echoed deliciously.

  People turned.

  “BLOODSUCKERS! SELLOUTS!” I bent to my bag to pull out the sign I’d made and slung it around my neck. Foster Inequality, it read in letters finger-painted in fake blood. “WORSHIPERS OF PROFIT! SYCOPHANTS TO THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR!”