He was just trying to be comforting. There was no use assigning meaning to it.
Still, I double-checked my face, to make sure I hadn't thinned out my cheeks, or narrowed my chin. My face was naturally a bit round, just like Mom's. I padded it just a little, to make up for whatever my subconscious had been doing to it around Kalif. I hoped it hadn't already given him any unfair ideas.
Kalif pulled out the chair next to him. I sat down, paying special attention to my body, to make sure I wasn't filling it out, or sitting with my posture open toward him. I didn't want to shun him, either, so I settled for sitting with my shoulders squared to the table, neither leaning toward him, nor away.
It was especially bad now, if something had gone wrong with this job. Trouble always meant a change in our cover, and that would mean moving, leaving everything behind.
Relationships included.
"Thanks for breakfast," I said.
Aida waved a hand dismissively. "It's the least we can do."
Kalif looked me over with concern. "You okay?"
I tried to relax into the chair, but even that motion came out stiff. Please, I thought. Let him attribute that to worry about my parents.
I really needed to do some drills at home for acting normal around hot boys. That wasn't something my parents had trained me to do, and clearly my education was lacking.
Kalif looked at me expectantly, his worry obviously increasing.
Oh. Right. He was waiting for me to answer his question aloud. "Not really," I said. "My parents never do this."
Kalif's eyes flicked toward his mom. Out of the corner of mine, I could see her sipping her coffee, watching us.
I'd offered to help twice. She didn't believe I'd give it up, just because she said I should.
She was right. If just Mom or Dad had gone on this job, the other one would be out looking right now. Once, Dad got arrested and it took him two days to slip out. That was particularly dangerous, because we can't hold onto personas in our sleep; the subconscious takes over whether we want it to or not. So Dad had to break out of jail after being awake for fifty-plus hours. I was only ten years old, but Mom was out every minute, looking for him, sending me messages about exactly where she was and exactly how she was keeping herself safe, so I wouldn't lose two parents just because she couldn't sit at home and wait for Dad.
Back then, I couldn't help much. Shifters are born with the ability to form our own faces, but we can't look like adults until after puberty, and we don't have control of our powers immediately. Since babies don't have a self concept, our brains model ourselves after our mothers from the moment we're born. We keep our biological anatomy through our first decade of life—long enough for most of us to develop a gendered self-image. We continue to form ourselves after our parents as we grow, gaining powers little by little as our psychology becomes more complex. I was first able to control some shifts at six years old, but I couldn't do a full impression of an adult until I was twelve.
Now that I could shift at will, things were different. There had to be something I could be doing.
I waited for Aida to finish her coffee, and turn to rinse her mug in the sink. Kalif looked up from his book at that moment, as if he'd been waiting, too.
I jerked my head toward the door to the basement, and he gave a sharp nod.
"I need to do some server maintenance," he said. When he stood up to go downstairs, I followed. Aida didn't stop me, though I could feel her watching us go.
At least we'd get a minute of peace. That would be enough for me to ask Kalif for help.
Kalif sat down at his desk. I paced the floor behind him. "I'm nervous."
Kalif turned around on his stool, watching me pace. "Do you have any way of finding them?"
I squeezed my hands together. "We have a meeting place," I said. If we were ever permanently separated from each other, we'd agreed to meet at an apartment complex we'd picked out in San Mateo. We'd rent an apartment and hang a sign outside that said "Happy Spring!" no matter what time of the year it was. "But if they can't get to a phone to call me, do you really think they're waiting there?"
Kalif looked down at my hands as he shook his head.
I looked at my hands myself. Was he worrying about the way I held them? I was as bad as Mel, fidgeting instead of acting, but for the life of me, I couldn't remember how to hold them normally.
This was stupid. I knew better than this. I needed to pull it together, so I stopped pacing and turned to face him. "I can't just sit here. I need to do something."
Kalif hesitated. "I get that, but you heard my mom."
I groaned. "Did she really mean that? Would she abandon your dad?"
Kalif nodded frankly. "He disappeared for six months, once. She didn't look for him then."
The room seemed to tilt, and I sank onto the stool next to Kalif. Six months? I'd just discovered Mom and Dad were missing. If hours turned into days, or weeks, or months, what would that mean? "Jeez," I said. "I shouldn't be whining then, should I?"
Kalif looked up at me in alarm. He shook his head. "That's not what I meant. It's not the same situation."
I looked sideways at him. He was still staring at my hands, and I swear I saw his own fingers twitch on his knee. "No?"
His hand moved slightly, and I thought for a moment he was going to grab mine, but he folded his arms across his chest instead. "No," he said. "We knew when he went on the job that it might be a long time. And it was just him who disappeared, not both of them."
I put my hands on my knees. "So you didn't spend every minute wondering who'd caught him, and if he was being tortured, or tested in some lab?"
Kalif cringed. "Maybe we should talk about something else."
My leg bounced up and down on the floor, so hard it was actually shaking the stool. Jeez. Way to bring up bad memories. "Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to pry."
Kalif reached a hand toward my knee, but stopped just short of touching me. "I meant for your sake. You're shaking."
I planted my feet on the rung of the stool. "Technically," I said, "I'm jittering."
Kalif smiled. "My point stands."
It did, but being quiet wasn't going to help. "I'm going to think about this stuff whether we talk about it or not."
Kalif sighed. "I was scared. I thought at the time that this must be what families feel like when men go off to war, and you don't know if you'll ever see them again. But Mom always said he'd come back, and he did."
I looked over at him. Our stools sat a foot apart, but our bodies leaned toward each other, our arms and knees nearly touching. So much for avoiding my unconscious signals. I knew I should pull away, but he smelled clean, like Ivory soap, and everything in me wanted to lean into him, rest my face against his flannel shirt, and let him wrap his long arms around me.
Jeez. If my mom wanted to keep us apart, causing me stress was not the way to go. I hadn't realized how much harder staying away from him would be.
Maybe we'd been better off upstairs.
Kalif met my eyes, looking from one to the other.
I coughed. "Do you know what your dad was doing when he disappeared?"
Kalif turned away from me slightly, and I locked my own body down, forbidding it to follow him. "Mom wouldn't give me the details," he said, "but I'm pretty sure he was seducing someone's wife."
My stomach dropped. Mom and Dad didn't take jobs like that. Mom said there was a fine line between cheating on each other and just doing their jobs, and they tried to keep out of situations that blurred that line. "Your mom was okay with that?"
Kalif shook his head. "Not really. Things were tense for a long while after Dad came back—almost worse than while he was gone."
I looked toward Kalif's open doorway. I hadn't heard any noise from the kitchen, or on the stairs. I hoped his mother couldn't hear us, for more reasons than one. "Things got better eventually, though, right?"
Kalif shrugged. "I was never sure if things actually got better, or if they just got bet
ter at faking it, for each other and for me."
My heart ached, and I realized too late I'd been leaning toward him again. Our sleeves just barely brushed.
Kalif sat up straighter, and I corrected my posture as well. I was such a spaz.
He looked at me sideways. "I try not to think about it, you know? You're the first person I've told."
"Really?" Oh, man. I bit my tongue, wishing I could go back and clip the eagerness from my voice.
But Kalif didn't seem to notice. He just shrugged. "Yeah. I mean, who would I tell?"
Oh, right. It wasn't about me, just about his isolation. "You could tell anyone you want. They don't have to know who you are."
This time, I was pretty sure that Kalif did notice my defensiveness, because he smiled, his lips parting slightly. "Well, maybe I never wanted to talk about it before."
My heart beat in my throat. I made him want to talk about his family? His past? Things he didn't want to think about? Dad said this was how you groomed a source—you told them personal things, to develop a close relationship.
Could Kalif be grooming me for something?
Or—I swallowed—was he trying to get closer to me for real?
Kalif shifted uncomfortably. He's just said this totally personal thing, and then I'd been quiet for too long, again.
"Oh," I said. "Oh." I closed my eyes, mentally clocking my head against the desk. What was wrong with me?
When I opened my eyes again, one corner of Kalif's mouth crooked up in a smile. "Look, I wasn't trying to one up you."
I forced myself to sit upright. "I know. I asked."
Kalif resettled himself on his stool. "Yeah, but it's okay that you're nervous for your parents. I'm not trying to shut you up."
"Have I shut up?" I asked.
He looked me up and down. "Kind of."
Ugh. The closed posture was also the wrong answer. I needed to stop studying eye scans and start studying clear interpersonal signals.
If only I could decide which signals I was trying to send.
"So, my parents," I said.
For a split second, I thought he looked sad. Then he nodded. "Your parents. You want to do something to help, but you probably shouldn't."
I turned around to face his computer. "We don't have to do anything big. Can't you hack into their security and see their video?" Kalif sometimes got remote pictures of areas our parents were going to infiltrate by breaking into the servers of the companies in question.
"Not at Eravision," Kalif said. "Their security cameras are on old machines. They aren't connected to the network."
"But they must store the video somewhere."
Kalif nodded. "On hard disks, routed by cable. I tried to get into it before your parents took jobs there, but I couldn't do it. Their security is pretty low-budget, which in this case gives them an advantage. Dad's going in person, though. He'll probably find something."
I tapped my nails on the edge of the desk. If just Mom were missing, Dad wouldn't depend on Mel to do the looking. "But if your mom didn't even go looking for your dad after he disappeared, how hard do you think they're going to look now?"
"You make a good point," he said. Kalif's program beeped, and he punched some keys.
I looked at the clock. "It's almost eleven. They've been gone for eight hours. Everyone at Eravision is at work by now. Something is seriously wrong."
"You're probably right, but that doesn't mean you should put yourself in danger."
"I'm not going to do anything stupid," I said. "Not yet."
Kalif ran a hand through his hair. "Great. That makes me feel lots better."
I wanted to ask why he was so worried about me, but if I was trying to be fair to him, fishing around to know why he cared was definitely off limits. "Let's just go over the mission parameters, and see if we can find anything your parents missed."
Kalif considered me for a moment. Finally, he sighed. "We can look at it. I can't see what the harm would be in that."
Kalif pulled up the mission profile for me. It looked simple enough. The client had hired us to steal some data on their competitor's new software, and then frame two of the competitor's employees for the breach. The people we were to frame were both former employees of the client, who took classified information with them when they left. Eravision stole information and engineers from Circom, and now Circom was coming back at Eravision to ruin the traitors' careers and steal data in return.
Backstabbing was a way of life for big-time tech firms, and we were the ones who benefited the most. More often than not, Mom and Dad played both sides, stealing from one firm in one set of personas, and then adopting another to offer revenge. We couldn't enjoy flashy spoils, like a big house or other permanent things, and I knew that my parents lived extra modestly because they were worried if they spoiled me I'd turn into a brat. But the jobs were challenging, and netted us more than enough money to run and start a new life anywhere in the world whenever we wanted to.
We never quit working, though. Mom and Dad enjoyed their jobs too much for that. Mom always said our talents made us good at one thing—fooling people. It did no good for us to pretend to be straightforward, or upstanding, because that wasn't something we could ever be. "So what was the plan, exactly?" I asked.
"Your parents were taking on the personas of the people they were framing," Kalif said. "Going in with their door codes and key cards and everything, downloading the information from their boss's secure computer, and then leaving and pretending to botch the cover-up on the way out."
"Sounds easy," I said. "Like it should have taken less than an hour."
"Right," Kalif said. "And they've both been working at the company part time under different personas, so they had complete profiles on the people they were framing."
I looked at the case file over Kalif's shoulder. "The easiest way for that to go wrong is for them to get caught by the people they were impersonating. Who were they?"
Kalif pulled up the profiles in question, complete with photos, personal information, and daily schedules. I looked at the profiles over Kalif's shoulder, careful not to get close enough to give him the wrong idea.
Mom had spent the last month profiling Art Cambrian and Nick Delacruz—following them home, chatting them up at the office, tagging them with trackers and tapping their phones. Art was a wiry man with a thick black goatee, and Nick had his head shaved, revealing a skull the shape of a potato. Their images stared up at me, complete with three-sixty rotations of Mom and Dad, dressed up in Art and Nick's bodies and clothes.
I put my elbows on Kalif's desk, leaning toward his computer. "Where were these guys supposed to be last night?"
"Art left the office at five o'clock to go home. There was a Giants game on, which he never misses, so he was supposed to be home all night watching that. Nick Delacruz has a weekly date night with his wife. They have little kids and are too paranoid to get a babysitter, so they order in a pizza and watch a movie. He told your mom this week was his wife's turn to pick, so he was going to have to watch a chick flick."
I blew my hair out of my face, then thickened it to make it stay put. Sometimes I didn't know how Mom did it. She got right into the details of these people's lives, chatted them up, pretended to be friends, and then turned around and got them fired, or even arrested. I had to learn to be like her, if I didn't want to feel guilty for the rest of my life. "So that's why they chose last night, then," I said. "Because both subjects had places to be, but they shouldn't have had solid alibis."
Kalif nodded. "Right."
"So it couldn't hurt to check on Art and Nick," I said. "See if they went in to work today, or if they've been fired, or what."
Kalif closed the files and turned on his stool to face me. Our knees were a hair's breadth apart; goose bumps broke out down my legs. "My dad thought the first thing to do," Kalif said, "was to check the site and see if the job's been done."
I tried not to let my emotions show on my face. I shifted my knee away from
his, just slightly. Come on, Jory, I thought. Get a grip. "Sure," I said. "But your dad has that covered, right?"
"Probably. So we should wait for him to come back."
I rubbed my temples. "That could be hours." I needed to check on Cambrian and Delacruz now.
Kalif sighed. "If you really have to start looking, it seems like the first thing to do would be to check your parents' email. It's right here on the server. I can do that without putting anyone in danger."
Kalif could do that without me. "Okay," I said. "That sounds like a good idea, too."
Kalif narrowed his eyes at me. "You told me you weren't going to do anything stupid."
I held my hands in the air. "I'm just going to make some phone calls. Where's the harm?"
Kalif crossed his arms again. His elbow barely brushed mine, and the goosebumps spread up my arms. "What would your parents say if they knew you were going to do that?"
I flattened my skin, trying to focus on the question. How would my parents react? "Dad would be proud of me. Mom would be pissed, but she wouldn't have a leg to stand on. In my situation, she'd do the same."
Kalif rolled his eyes. "I should stop you. But I'm not going to."
I smiled. "You're the best. I'll be back in half an hour."
Kalif nodded, but he didn't look happy. It was harder than I wanted it to be to drag myself away from him, but I did it, walking purposefully up the stairs. I wished I could take him with me—make the phone calls with him right there. But I couldn't afford to be distracted while I was interviewing Art and Nick, and I certainly couldn't call them where Aida might overhear.
I ran into Aida on my way to the door. I checked my posture as I stopped to talk to her. It was one thing to send unintended messages about my feelings for Kalif, and quite another to put my parents in more danger by alerting her to what I was doing. "I'm going to walk down to the gas station and buy a soda," I said.
Aida hesitated. "I'm sure Kalif would go with you."
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