I don’t believe in anything, he said. I test.
He’s testing you, she realized. He might not even know it, but he’s testing you.
Alix took a deep breath and turned the key off in the ignition. The MINI went silent.
“What are you doing?” Moses asked. He almost sounded alarmed.
Alix didn’t answer, just pulled the keys out of the ignition and held them up for him. They dangled in the darkness, glinting.
“Trust me,” she said. “I already trust you.”
34
“YOU ARE CRAZY.”
“Are you going to take my keys or not?”
“You don’t have any reason to trust me!”
Alix laughed. “I thought we were worried about you trusting me, not the other way around.”
“This isn’t a game, Alix.”
“I know.” She let the keys drop into the passenger seat. “There they are, if you want them.”
“Alix, don’t do this.”
“Don’t trust you?” Alix asked. “Why not? Why wouldn’t I trust the guy who goes off and rescues kids from evil foster homes? Why wouldn’t I trust a guy who spends his time trying to stop bad people from doing bad things in the world? Why wouldn’t I trust a guy who seems to have the trust and respect of probably the smartest girl I ever met? Why wouldn’t I trust the—”
“—the guy who stalked you and put you in a cage,” Moses interrupted vehemently.
Alix reached up and touched his hand where it rested on her throat. She could feel him shaking. Could feel his whole body shaking. She swallowed. “Yeah. That. Why wouldn’t I trust that guy?” She felt him start to draw away, but she tightened her hand around his, holding him there. She pressed his hand against her throat. “Why wouldn’t I trust that guy, too?”
“Alix…” On his lips, her name sounded so soft and full of regret that Alix almost wanted to cry. Instead, she pressed his hand against her throat. “I trust you,” she said. “I’m not afraid of you anymore. I know you.”
“That’s not true.”
“No,” Alix said. “It is true.” She lifted his hand from her throat and twined her fingers in his. “I didn’t know you before. Now I do. And you know me. And neither of us is the same as we were before.” She squeezed his hand gently. “Neither of us is the same.”
“Alix…” he said again, his voice ragged with emotion.
“I trust you,” she said, and his hand tightened on hers.
She was fascinated by their hands. Two people, interlocked. Tightening their connection to each other.
“How do you know?” he whispered. “How do you know you can trust?”
“You can’t know,” she said. “That’s what trust is.”
Slowly, she drew him forward, so that she could finally see him. Their faces were inches apart. He’s beautiful, she thought. He has beautiful eyes. She reached up to touch his cheek, wanting him. Wanting to see herself in those eyes, hoping that he saw something beautiful in turn.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
“So are you.”
“Do you want me to let you go?” he asked.
“No.”
“That’s good,” he said seriously. “I don’t want to let you go.”
And then they were kissing, and all Alix could think was that she was home.
“Truce?”
“Truce.”
They lay together in his bed, entangled and comfortable. Alix rolled over and looked at Moses. God, he was beautiful. She ran her hand down his chest, amazed at his skin, at his body, at his muscles. It felt so surreal. She kept trying to figure out how it had happened, if it was a dream. She wondered if he was going to suddenly realize that he’d made a mistake.
He was looking at her, amused.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing. I was going to ask you the same thing. What’s going on inside that big brain of yours?”
“Nothing.”
He nodded, but he didn’t look away or let her off the hook. He just waited. She laughed and rolled away, feeling self-conscious.
“Nothing. I was just thinking you’re like some kind of weird black Batman.”
As soon as she said it, she was afraid she’d offended him, but he just laughed.
“That is so not what I was expecting you to say,” he said, still chuckling.
“What did you think I’d say?”
He looked serious. “That you wanted to go home.”
“No.”
As soon as she said it, she realized it was true. She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to lie here in his arms forever. For a million years. She wanted time to stop. She didn’t feel like she was wearing some other skin with Moses. She was who she was. Some rich girl from Seitz who didn’t quite fit there. But fit just fine right here.
“Black Batman, huh?” He nudged her.
“Well, sure.” She snuggled into his body, lying close as she ticked off points on her fingers. “Dubious morality? Check. Comes and goes like the wind? Check. Lives in a bat cave? Check.”
“It used to be a rat cave,” he said, pinching her hip.
“Shut up.” She slapped his hand away. “You’re distracting me.”
“Is that bad?” His hand ran up her skin. Alix laughed and pretended to be trying to squirm away, before letting him capture her and kiss her.
When they came up for air, she said, “The only thing that isn’t like Batman is that you actually have friends.”
He froze at that. He stopped tickling her and let her go.
“What?” She turned to see his face, suddenly worried. “What did I say?”
His expression had turned serious. “Nothing,” he said. “I’m on my own, that’s all.”
“On your own…” She sat up, looking at him. “You mean you’re not doing anything now? I thought you all had left to go do some other… thing.”
He shook his head. “That was just kid stuff. It was bullshit.”
“No.” She shook him. “It was good. It was cool.”
“It didn’t make any difference. None of it does. I finally wised up about it.”
“And everyone else left?”
“It’s dangerous, Alix. If I wasn’t right on my game, Tank would have died. It wasn’t fair to keep them around here, taking risks for no reason.”
“So you just… gave up?” Alix stared at him. “But I came all this way.”
“Why do you care? It didn’t make any difference. We brought all those news cameras in, and you know what people focused on? SWAT guys in cages. You couldn’t even see all the banners. It was all there, laid out. Williams and Crowe. The Doubt Factory. All of them right there, and the cameras didn’t even care. It was just another freaky thing protesters do. Occupy Wall Street shit. The freaks getting covered ’cause they’re freaky.”
“But…”
“We took big risks on you. Game-changing risks. Some of us are over eighteen. Shit gets serious then. And the bad guys, they’re good. We can’t stay encrypted all the time. You can’t stay off every single surveillance camera. Not every time. I know the FBI’s got an angle on my face. They’ve got Cyn, too, from Seitz records we had to match.” He shook his head. “We were gambling that they were dumb and divided and weren’t paying attention, but that lasts only so long. Eventually, your luck runs out. We hit that research lab for the rats. That was a huge heist. Kook had tabs on a bunch of animal rights groups, and the FBI was all over them right after we pulled it.”
He paused, smiling slightly. “That was actually kind of funny. Watching the FBI come down on PETA and the Animal Liberation Front, and come up with nothing.” He looked at Alix. “Sobering, too, though. Seriously sobering. When they rain down on someone, they don’t screw around.”
“But they didn’t get you,” Alix said. “You did it right.”
“Sure. But then we did your school. And then we grabbed you. And then the bait-and-switch with the cages. Our luck was already too good. That last one…” He shook his
head. “We were a little too clear about who we were, that time. Some dude in a cubicle probably is spending every waking minute trying to match up every single person the Doubt Factory has ever screwed. Every company they’ve worked for. Cyn…” He shook his head again. “They’ll be trying to pattern match her for sure.”
“And you…?”
“I’m a dead trail. Have been for years. I’m a ghost.” He looked at her pointedly. “But it can’t last forever. If the feds weren’t so busy looking under rocks for the next al-Qaida, they’d probably have bagged us already.”
“Maybe you’re just that good.”
Moses grinned, a flash of ego. “Maybe I am.” He sobered. “Even really smart people get nailed eventually. My uncle was the best, and he’s in prison doing fifteen years. And that man was seriously good. Eventually, you make a mistake.” He gestured at her. “I mean, hell, you figured it out. You found the bat cave, right? FBI’s probably right behind you.”
“Bread,” Alix said. “Cynthia said she smelled bread a lot at home.”
Moses grimaced. “There you go. Bread. One wrong question from the feds and you would have led them right to us. I don’t really care, for myself. No one’s going to mind one more black kid in prison. Nobody gives a shit about me—”
“I care!” Alix interjected angrily.
“Okay, but aside from you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? What am I? Just, like, chopped liver?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Well, then listen to what I’m saying. I care.” She gave him a hard look, driving it home.
Moses smiled. “Okay. Okay. Point taken. But Cyn? She’s a serious genius, and she’s up to her neck in this. Probably going to start the next Google if she doesn’t end up in jail. And Tank? That boy would never survive in juvie. It would eat that little freak alive. Adam? Kook?” He shook his head. “Nah. I couldn’t keep risking them. Not to get nothing.”
Alix looked up sharply. “But you didn’t get nothing. You got me. I’m here. I want to help.”
“You want to help.”
“Actually, I want you to help me.” She smiled. “I’m thinking about hitting the Doubt Factory.”
35
SO THIS IS WHAT IT’S like to have a secret, Alix thought.
She’d been such a good girl, and she’d kept so little from her parents, that it felt like she was a completely new person. As if she’d dragged all the cloying membranes of childhood off her body and she’d emerged.
There was Old Alix, the Alix who had gone from home to school and back again. Who’d done her good homework and gotten her good grades and been such a good girl that she’d always known she could call Mom and Dad for help if she strayed a little.
And now there was New Alix.
New Alix had secrets. New Alix slipped away in the afternoons and met Moses on walking trails in various state parks that Moses selected at random to keep their patterns broken up. New Alix persuaded Sophie to cover for her on the weekends while she slipped down to Jersey and slept with Moses in his empty factory.
But more than that, New Alix saw the world differently. She did all the same things she’d always done, and yet nothing was the same. Every morning she put on her school uniform: white blouse, plaid skirt, white kneesocks, black shoes… and even though all the movements were the same, she was different.
New Alix watched the things that Old Alix had done, and laughed.
So this is what it’s like to have a secret.
Alix shrugged into her Seitz blazer and checked herself in the mirror. Smirked. Cocked her head. Raised an eyebrow.
No sign of a secret. Not even a hint that at night she rifled through the filing cabinets of her father’s study, hunting for names and details that she and Moses could use to create a clearer picture of what the Doubt Factory did. No sign that she took photos on her camera phone of everything from Christmas cards from Doubt Factory clients to the tiny doodles that her father put on sticky pads and then stuffed into file folders that he always forgot to sort out later.
The filing cabinets had been easy: the key was on Dad’s key ring, right there on the kitchen island the first night Alix had crept down the stairs to snoop. It was almost ridiculously easy to go through her father’s papers.
The computer was another matter. She’d suggested putting a keystroke logger on the computer, to maybe grab Dad’s password, but Moses had vetoed the idea.
“No. I don’t want you getting nailed. He might see the USB key, and when he does, there aren’t enough other people to blame. You’d get caught for sure.”
“I would not.”
“Well, I don’t want to risk it.”
“You were willing to risk me before.”
Moses had the grace to look embarrassed. “Yeah, well, now I’m not,” he said. “So don’t do anything stupid. I don’t want to risk you. I like you too much to lose you.”
“You like me?” she goaded. “You like me?”
Moses rewarded her with an even more embarrassed smile. “Quit hassling me. I’m a guy. Guys don’t talk about this stuff.”
“I think that’s just dudebros. Real men talk about their feelings.”
Moses shook his head and blushed. “Just don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
He likes me, Alix thought as she stared at herself in the mirror.
Downstairs, she found Jonah complaining to Mom about how his trig teacher hated him. Alix found a nonfat yogurt in the fridge, watching with amused distance as Mom and Jonah went back and forth.
“Jonah,” Mom said finally, “it would be a lot easier for me to take you seriously if Ms. Scheibler didn’t like you as much as she does.”
“That woman hates me.”
“Nah.” Alix dipped her spoon into the yogurt. “She’s a sucker for bad boys like Jonah.”
“I’m a bad boy?” Jonah perked up at that.
Mom gave Alix an exasperated glance. “Please don’t encourage him.” She paused, studying Alix more closely.
“What are you smiling about?”
“Who? Me?”
“Who? Me?” Mom mimicked.
Bad boys, Alix thought. I was thinking about bad boys. Bad boys like Moses Cruz—
“Batman,” Alix said. She rinsed out the empty yogurt container in the sink. “I was thinking about Batman.”
36
“I WISH YOU’D QUIT CALLING me that,” Moses said.
“Batman? Why?”
“I’m not a superhero.”
“I don’t know.” Alix laughed. “You are kind of unbelievable.”
They were on a walking trail by the river. They’d met on the turnpike and then driven into the Connecticut greenery to find a walking trail. It was far enough away from Alix’s normal haunts that she felt safe from anyone she knew seeing her, and it was still close enough that she could pick up Jonah at Sirius Comix within an hour.
“I’m serious,” Moses said. “My uncle could pull off amazing things, too. And then he teamed up with the wrong person, and it all went sidewise so fast he didn’t even see it coming.”
“You were with him a long time?”
“Since I was eleven,” Moses said. “I’ve been orphaned twice. Once after my parents died, then after Uncle Ty got himself arrested.” Moses kicked a rock ahead of him. “Maybe that’s why I’ve gotten so lucky recently. Universe is trying to balance me out.”
Alix didn’t know how to answer. There was a hole of loss there that she didn’t really know how to fill. “I’ve got more files from my dad,” she said, fishing in her purse and handing over an SD card. “It’s a good one.”
“Yeah?”
“His latest idea is to create a cheap news-syndication service. He actually wants to sell slanted news, instead of worrying about trying to make journalists take his quotes. I took some pictures of the mock-ups he had in his briefcase.”
“Alix—”
“There’s one other thing in there, too. He’s got a whole notebo
ok with a hiring plan to put a bunch of sock puppets out to monitor news articles for keywords. It’s like a whole professional trolling operation to get the first comment on online news articles—he’s calling it BSP Lightning Response Services. The whole pitch is that the first comment gets almost as much reader impact as the news article itself.”
“So you just piggyback on the news story and refute from comments.” Moses was nodding.
“And it doesn’t even look like a PR company’s doing it,” Alix added. “Just Bernard Henderson from Indianapolis.”
Moses stopped walking. Alix had already taken a few steps before she realized he’d stopped. She turned back to him. “What’s wrong?”
Moses had the memory card in his hand but didn’t pocket it. “You know you don’t need to bring me this stuff, right? That’s not why I’m with you.”
“I know that. It was my idea to do it in the first place.”
“Still, it’s not your fight.”
“This from the guy who told me it was on me if another kid died from Azicort?” Alix looked at him incredulously. “Of course it’s my fight.”
“When I said that before, I was just trying to manipulate you.”
“Yeah, I know.… But still, you were right.” Alix went back over to him and looped her arm through his. Frustratingly, he was looking away from her, and she couldn’t get a read on his face. When she could see his eyes, she had a better sense of what Moses was thinking. “So… what are you trying to do now?”
Finally Moses met her gaze. Alix was surprised at the emotion she saw there. “I’m trying to make sure you don’t do something stupid and get yourself caught,” he said.
The words were so genuine that Alix felt her heart warm. She reached up and patted his cheek affectionately.
“You’re worried about me?”
“This is serious stuff, Alix.”
Alix laughed. “I think I can snoop on my dad without getting caught.”
A guy with six dogs on leashes came down the path. The guy was sweating, running after the panting pack. Alix and Moses got out of the way of the stampede.
The Doubt Factory Page 28