Lies I Live By

by Lauren Sabel

  “If the criminals we are chasing think someone we love could have some information about our missions, they’ll stop at nothing to extract the information from them.” Hence that whole field trip thing with my mom.

  The front door closes behind me, sealing me into the small space in front of the X-ray machine. Other than the whirring sound of the conveyer belt and the ever-present sound of National Public Radio, the lobby is silent.

  “Hello?” I call, knowing that Anthony won’t be able to hear me on his hourly smoke break. Anthony’s our security guard, but he’s about as protective as a three-toed sloth, and just as fast. His beer belly is as round as his balding head, and he couldn’t run if his feet were on fire; but worse than all that is his insistence on talking about himself in third person.

  While I wait for Anthony to return from wherever it is he’s disappeared to, I listen to the radio. The reporter is talking about a satellite that was just shot into space.

  “It will enter a ring of satellites twenty-three thousand miles above the earth’s surface,” the reporter says. “Regarding the recent solar activity, NASA says—”

  “Anthony’s back from the dead,” Anthony announces, returning to the front desk. He whistles under his breath. “And no one better to bring me back to life than you.”

  “Good morning,” I respond, ignoring his flirtatious tone like Indigo has advised me to do. I drop my bag onto the X-ray machine’s rubber tongue and walk through the metal detector, wondering what I look like with just my bones exposed.

  “It’d be a better morning on the back of a Harley, out on the open road with you,” Anthony says from behind the front desk. He flips off the radio without taking his eyes off my naked, bony body on the screen. “Still fighting the good fight?” he asks, clearly copying Indigo’s famous phrase.

  I nod, wondering which fight Anthony’s talking about. Of course, I’ll never know. Branch 13’s number one rule of psychic viewing is never to psychically spy on anyone outside of work. “You can lose your mind doing it,” Indigo says. “Without the proper controls, you can enter a session, and never come out.”

  It’s still tempting to sneak a peek inside someone’s mind, especially when I can’t tell what Charlie’s thinking, but I always remind myself how Indigo said that human minds are made up of millions of little parts, all of them working together like gears of a clock. If even one of those parts gets pushed too far and cracks, the whole thing falls apart.

  “Fighting the good fight?” I repeat, answering Anthony’s question. “Until hell freezes over.”

  “Anthony feels the same way,” Anthony jokes, “but he’s on the side of evil.”

  “Me too,” I respond, making devil horns with my index fingers. “Evil all the way.”

  Even though I’m kidding, I can’t help but think about Indigo’s initial warning about letting the evil in this job affect me too deeply. Back then, I didn’t really understand what he was saying. It was only later that I realized how evil the world really could be. But by then, I’d helped Branch 13 stop an armed terrorist from boarding a plane to Newark, and I knew I could save lives with my gift. I knew then that I’d never walk away from this job, no matter what it cost me.

  “Keep up the fight,” I say to Anthony. I pick up my backpack and hurry upstairs to the staff room before the last of the coffee runs out.

  The staff room is a tiny windowless box with a candy machine, a table with four chairs, and a cheap coffee pot. Indigo claims our entire staff room fits into one stall of the CIA headquarters bathroom, that’s how low on the totem pole we are. Since Branch 13 is funded by the CIA, and we get all of our orders from them, we consider ourselves part of the government. But since they don’t want to be publicly responsible for a band of freaks we have a contractual agreement: we don’t frighten the taxpayers by being openly on the government payroll, and in exchange, we are allowed to take on extra clients if we want. Not that I’ve ever seen any extra clients.

  In fact, I’ve never seen anybody I don’t know come into the office, I think as I wander into the recovery room, where we hang out and “de-stress” after our sessions. I pause for a moment, taking in pale blue walls, which Indigo painted specifically because blue is supposed to be a calming color. He’s also placed soft couches haphazardly around the room, and as always, the lights are kept dim.

  I bypass the recovery room’s empty couches and pull open the staff room door, happy to see there’s a bit of coffee left at the bottom of the pot. I pour myself the watery coffee, add lots of sugar and creamer, and am heading out to the recovery room when a young guy I’ve never seen before struts into the office, his arm around Indigo.

  “Turbulence, the whole way here,” he’s saying, but he stops when he sees me, his lips slightly apart, his electric blue eyes tingling across my skin.

  “Callie, meet Jasper. Jasper, Callie,” Indigo says. He looks back and forth between us. “You’ll be working together.”

  I have a boyfriend, I remind myself, but those thoughts break apart in the force of Jasper’s eyes. He crooks a smile at me, this kind of lopsided, joyful smile, more like a mischievous child than a teenage guy. His eyelashes are long, curling up at the ends, and his lips look full and soft. Why am I looking at his lips?

  “Cal-lie,” he says, splitting my name into two distinctly separate words. “What’s going on, Cal-lie?”

  I find it charming; I can’t help it. Indigo obviously does too: he’s glowing with pride like he found a shiny penny at the bottom of a mossy fountain.

  “Looks like work, smells like work,” I force myself to answer. “Must be work.”

  The grin gets wider. Jasper rubs his closely shaved head with the palm of his hand. He has on a silver ring, thick and choppy, and a bracelet made of wooden beads. “I see that.” His mouth turns up at the corner, making him cuter than before. My stomach clenches.

  Seriously, Callie? Get it together. He’s not as good-looking as Charlie—not nearly. Charlie’s magazine-cover material, and this guy, well, he’s almost as short as me, and the hairs on his hands are coarse; he’s no beauty queen. But there’s something about him, something magnetic, something mesmerizing.

  “Callie’s the one I was telling you about,” Indigo says.

  “Saving the world from radiation,” Jasper says.

  “All in a day’s work,” I respond.

  “Jasper just transferred here from our New York office,” Indigo says.

  I’ve never met anyone from that office. It’s the office I’d like to work in someday, but it’s only for psychics who can influence events, not just watch them happen.

  “Welcome to the happier coast,” I say. “You planning on staying long?”

  “Long as I can,” he says.

  “Just leave before you start saying groovy.”

  “Good advice.”

  “I’ve got lots,” I say, trying to look away. “Ask anytime.”

  “I will,” he says. His blue eyes are drinking me in, making me dizzy, like I’m swirling around and around in a whirlpool. “And really, the pleasure is mine.”

  My hand tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear, and I grimace at my own awkward preening, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “I didn’t say it was a pleasure.”

  Caught in the magnetism of his stare, I nod my head quickly and walk past him into the recovery room. I’ve only gotten a few steps when I feel his hand on my arm, and a warm tingling feeling goes through my body. “Good to meet you, too,” he says.

  I’m still shaky from my encounter with Jasper, but I quickly pull myself together and join Indigo in the viewing room. It’s nothing much, just a small beige room with no windows, the only decoration a red-and-white Mickey Mouse balloon hovering near the ceiling. There are psychic spies all over the world, and nothing is more valuable to them than seeing into the secrets now lodged in my mind. That’s where the balloon comes in. If those psychics picture me in this room, and they see a Mickey Mouse balloon, they won’t believe they are seeing t
he truth, because what self-respecting government program would keep a floating Mickey Mouse balloon in their top-secret headquarters?

  I lie down on the couch in the dim room and stare at the ceiling. I’m shaking to my core, trembling in a way I never have before, not even with Charlie. Why does Jasper have such an effect on me? Crossing my arms over my chest, I breathe deeply, and make myself focus on my work.

  Indigo sits down in the chair across from me, a sealed manila envelope containing my target in one hand. It wouldn’t be helpful to open it—inside, there’s just a set of numbers that don’t mean anything to me, or at least not to my conscious mind; they are just there to trigger the viewer’s vision. It’s also double blind—not only do I not know what the numbers are or what they represent, neither does Indigo. The only person who does know is hidden behind a desk somewhere at the CIA, and will forever remain anonymous.

  “Was it just me, or was there some serious energy going on there?” Indigo asks me.

  I cross my arms over my chest and smile. “Shut up.”

  “Don’t freak out,” he says, and holds his hands in the air. “I’m just saying Anthony’s gonna have some competition.”

  “Anthony?”

  “And every other man who looks at you like you hung the moon,” Indigo says.

  I roll my eyes. “Don’t flatter me. I know what you’re doing.”

  “What am I doing?” Indigo asks innocently.

  “You need a favor.”

  “That’s not true!” Indigo protests, but then pauses. “Well yes, it is. You up for doing me a favor?”

  “As if I’d say no.”

  He grins. “Can you make Jasper feel at home here? He’s a talented guy, but a bit rough around the edges.”

  “Of course,” I say proudly, but inside, I feel a surge of anxiety. “Will we be monitoring each other?”

  “From time to time,” Indigo says, which surprises me. Indigo usually insists on monitoring me himself. Since Branch 13’s west coast office is so small, with Indigo in charge and only a handful of psychics beneath him, I’ve only been monitored by other viewers a few times, and since we all have different schedules, I rarely see anyone other than Indigo anyway. It doesn’t bother me too much, but it does make it hard to get any monitoring experience. Over the past year, I’ve only been a monitor a couple of times, and only when Indigo asked me to.

  “Consider it done,” I say.

  “Thanks,” Indigo says, and I nod. “Now let’s get to work.” He puts the sealed envelope on the table in front of me, and then presses Record on the remote control, which starts up a video camera in the upper right corner of the room. Click.

  Every psychic has their own method, their personal way to get into the zone. Some people can go straight in, bypassing the voices yelling about the forgotten house keys and the undone errands. But not me. I start by imagining a brown leather suitcase. I open it, and one by one, stuff each anxiety and distraction into it, which, sad to say, takes a while. Then I close and lock it. I’ll get it on the way out. It’s always there, waiting.

  Jasper flashes through my mind again, but I push him away. Instead, I imagine myself on a boat in the ocean, putting on scuba gear, and getting off the boat into the warm water. I drift toward the ocean floor, slowly adding small weights until I’m ten feet from the bottom, from full sleep. I glance up at the surface of the water. It is mirrored, reflecting the gray-blue sky that doesn’t really exist. That is awake. So I stay here, hovering between awake and asleep, living and dream, for several hours, until the visions start to come.

  At first they trickle in, just dim sights and sounds, but then red smoke blinds my eyes. An explosion rocks through my body, and the images come fast and furious, images I can feel but can’t quite see: a door flying open, a window shattering, red smoke surging and leaping across the horizon. My breath catches in my throat as the smell of burning hair prickles up my nose, and roaring pounds through my ears, eating up all other sounds.

  Through the darkness, the red smoke clears, and for a brief second, I see a logo painted onto the side of a building, and then it’s gone. At that moment, something washes over me—a feeling of falling fast, like when you go over a hill on a roller coaster and your body drops while your stomach hovers there, in midair.

  I hear Indigo’s voice, bringing me back to the moment: “Where’s the target?” he asks. I suck on the word target, a hot stone in my throat.

  I spin around, trying to locate the source of the radioactive red smoke, but I can’t find it. My nostrils burn, and I sputter out a cough. When I look down at the ground, my thumbnail automatically presses into the thin skin of my index finger, jolting a sharp pain through me.

  Beneath the layers of red smoke is a body, plastered facedown on the sidewalk, covered in glass shards and blood.

  After our session, I can still picture the body trapped under the red smoke, and how the smell of blood mixed with the odor of burning hair.

  From the chair across from me, Indigo is watching me finish writing my observations on a post-session file. I glance up at him, and although he doesn’t say anything, I know he wants to.

  “Silence doesn’t fit you,” I say.

  Indigo leans forward in his leather chair. He props his elbows on his knees, and rests his chin on his upturned palms, like he’s holding up the weight of his face. “What happened in there? You were kind of . . . mumbling.”

  Although I know better by now, I touch my ankles to make sure blisters haven’t bubbled up on my skin. Even though I couldn’t actually feel the radiation pour over me, my mind imagined the pain, which can sometimes feel just as real.

  I draw jagged flames around the word RADIATION on my long post-session file, and then I push the paper across the table toward him.

  He glances down at the paper and then back up at me. “Any hint of a location?”

  I shake my head. “It was dark. But Indigo, there was a person caught in it.” I shiver at the memory.

  Indigo takes a note on his notepad. “Did you see anything else?” he asks.

  “I saw a logo on a building, but it was only for a second.” I pause, trying to remember exactly what it looked like. “It looked like an infinity sign, but each side was an oval-shaped earth. Like two earths glued together.” I wipe my sweaty hands on my jeans, and the denim catches at my dry skin.

  “Do you know when it happens?” Indigo asks.

  “I must have missed the subtitles,” I joke. Since psychic viewers never know the exact time we see something, we can never assume it’s happening at that moment. Sometimes we’ll be viewing a weapons manufacturing warehouse, for instance, and see people building a cannon, and that will be a dead giveaway that we’ve gone back to a time when people actually used cannons. But that’s our only clue. There’s no flashing year at the bottom of the screen. Then, after we emerge from the past, present, or future, we report what we see, try to wipe our hands of it, and go home for the day.

  Home. I rub my fists in my eyes. Even though it seems like one session per day wouldn’t take a long time, it always does. Between preparing to view, viewing, and writing about it afterward, it takes several hours of concentrated mind work every day. And after a session this intense, I really want to go home and get in bed, curl up with a cup of coffee, but I promised Charlie I’d meet him after work.

  “Something about the place felt familiar,” I say, standing up from the couch.

  “Like you’d been there before?” Indigo asks. “Off the record, of course.”

  “Off the record? Maybe.” I get to my feet and head toward the door. “You homeward bound?”

  Indigo shakes his head. He never stops working. “But you should be,” he says, bringing his hand to his forehead in a fake salute. “Good work today.”

  Thinking of how my mom would wince at my terrible faux Spanish accent, I say, “Hasta mañana, compadre.”

  That makes Indigo smile. And since I’m the only person around the office who can make him smile, that�
��s worth any price.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Even at four o’clock on a Wednesday, Pier 45 is humming with activity. There’s a merry-go-round playing circus music, a bunch of booths catering to tourists (really, who else buys sand paintings?), and a cluster of food stalls. As I walk past the booths, glancing at the sea lions barking from their floating wooden docks at the end of the pier, I’m so lost in thought I almost run into the homeless man shouting, “Beware, earthlings! A great flood is coming!” but I manage to avoid him just in time and duck into the Musée Méchanique.

  In the entrance, the creepy chuckle of Laughing Sal scratches like steel wool against my nerves. “Har, har, har,” the giant doll laughs, her mechanical body jerking back and forth, like someone having a seizure in slow motion.

  “Charlie?” I move down the aisle as quickly as I can and maneuver through hundreds of old machines. Charlie usually works in the back, near the plaster model of a two-headed baby.

  “Charlie?” I call again, and hear a snort of laughter coming from Death Row.

  Death Row is a row of machines that Charlie and I are obsessed with. My favorite is an old machine called Execution. When you put a penny in, a little wooden character comes out of the tiny brick building, puts a noose around his own neck, and gets hanged. Can’t find more fun for a penny anywhere, Charlie always says.

  I hear Charlie’s sturdy laugh again, and then, behind the animatron that continually vomits onto a pile of old bottles, I suddenly see who Charlie is talking to.

  She’s the kind of blonde that makes you think she really has more fun. She has on these skinny jeans—I mean blood-clot-inducing tight—and a T-shirt that says New York City in cursive over the Statue of Liberty. How original. But it’s low cut and high on her tummy, and only a blind man wouldn’t notice the glistening of her tanned skin.

  I quickly turn away, and pretend to be interested in the animatron spewing puke until I feel Charlie come up behind me.