Mr. Chambliss laughed, the laugh quickly turning into a cough.
I glanced at Basquiat, who was standing at my right shoulder. He gave me a look that suggested he found Beltane about as charming as I did.
“Can we trust you?” I asked Beltane. “If we fixed you up, can we count on you?”
“You fix me up and keep my limbs working, you feed me, give me a bed with no one else in it”—she looked pointedly at Kelsey—“I’ll take good care of you.”
The readout stayed in the green.
“Sam, can I talk to you in private?” Basquiat asked.
I stood. “Excuse us a minute.”
Beltane shrugged. “Take your time.”
We headed into my bedroom. Molly, Rebe, Boob, and Mom filed in behind us.
“She makes me uneasy,” Basquiat said. “She’s not our kind of person.”
“She’s a total bitch,” Rebe said.
“That’s exactly why we need her,” I said. “If you need protection, you don’t get a sweet, old golden retriever. You get a crazy pit bull.”
“I agree,” Mom said. “If someone points a gun at her, it’s just going to piss her off. I’d take her over Kelsey, to be honest.”
Basquiat held up both hands. “In that case, I’m all for her. I’m certainly not going to question your judgment, Mrs. Gregorious.”
I gritted my teeth, forcing a smile. My judgment, it went without saying, didn’t carry the same weight.
We paraded back into the living room and I welcomed Beltane to TruthCorp.
“I’m honored,” she said. “Now can you get me the hell out of this chair?”
“Oh yeah,” Beltane cooed from the kitchen. “Oh God, do me. That’s it.”
I pressed one hand to my forehead, shook my head.
Boob looked up from the computer screen. “Is he done with her arms yet?”
I glanced into the kitchen. Beltane had both arms raised over her head as Mr. Chambliss worked on attaching the salvaged left leg. She threw her head back. “God, that feels good.”
“Yep. He’s on the legs.”
“Good. Maybe she’ll shut up soon,” Boob said.
“I heard that!” Beltane called.
Boob flinched. He put his head down and dove back into his work. I didn’t blame him—Beltane was scary.
Mom put a hand on my shoulder as she passed through the alcove and into the kitchen. “Beltane? Once you’re up and running, are you up for joining me on an errand?”
Beltane’s eyes lit up. “Once I’m standing I don’t plan to sit for about a month.”
“Great. We need cash. I want Rebe to run that facial recognition search, see if we can figure out who that woman was working for.” Access to all the private surveillance video out there was not cheap.
“Where are you going to get cash?” I asked.
Mom looked me in the eye. “We’ll get it. That’s all you need to know.”
I could tell Mom expected me to protest, but the truth was, if stealing could save our lives, I was okay with stealing.
Molly passed between us, carrying a plate of french fries. Then she disappeared into my room. With all that had happened, I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her alone, to tell her how sorry I was about the shower incident.
I waited a minute or two, then followed her. I knocked on the open door. “Can I talk to you?”
Molly shrugged, chewing. “If you can find a place to sit.”
I cleared someone’s clothes off the bed. “I haven’t had a chance to apologize to you.”
Molly studied her plate, rearranged the fries.
“I’ve always thought apologies were lame—you do something awful to someone, then say some words and expect that to somehow absolve you for what you did. Except I don’t know what to do besides say the words. I’m so sorry.”
Molly’s eyes had filled with tears while I was giving my little speech. “You know, if it had been any other guy, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’d be furious, but I wouldn’t be surprised. But you…you’re my friend. You’re the person I trusted more than almost anyone. I never would have thought you were capable of doing that to me.”
Even while I was doing it, I’d felt guilty, but I figured Molly would never find out, and I would never tell another soul, so where was the harm?
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to make things right.”
Molly didn’t reply. I took that as my cue to leave.
“Wait.” Molly set the plate down and walked up to me. I thought she was going to give me a hug, but instead, she slapped me across the face. Hard. It felt more like a punch than a slap.
I doubled over, clutching my cheek.
With some effort, I straightened up, still holding my cheek.
“You better go put some ice on that.”
Cheek throbbing, I left.
The bathroom door opened and Beltane was suddenly blocking the hall. It seemed like half of her was made of glistening tungsten.
“You have no idea what a pleasure it is to be able to wipe my own butt.” She raised her arms toward the ceiling. “Melissa? I’m ready. Let’s roll.”
I leaned back in my chair, turned my head side to side to stretch my tense neck muscles. My head ached constantly. When was the last time I’d gotten more than two or three hours’ sleep in a day? A month ago?
Rebe was working on the facial recognition search. Boob was sitting at his monitor, head down, doing nothing. I was about to get on him for slacking when I took a good look at his face. He was pale and sweaty.
“Are you okay?” I went over to his little station in the dining area.
Boob shook his head. “I can’t do this. I can’t concentrate. I can’t sleep, can’t eat.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’?” He gestured toward the backyard. “Someone tried to kill us, and they’ll try again. I’m scared.” He blew out a big breath. “I forgot to mention it during enhanced truth or dare, but I’m also a coward.”
Mr. Chambliss appeared in the kitchen doorway. “You’re suffering from an anxiety disorder. I could see that in class, but it didn’t seem appropriate to bring it up then.”
“Fine,” Boob said. “I have an anxiety disorder. I can’t take this. I need my life to be boring and predictable.”
The walkie-talkie crackled to life. “Chambliss?” You can’t hack a good old-fashioned walkie-talkie and spy on people through it.
Mr. Chambliss lifted the device to his face. “Yep?”
“I’m getting hungry up here. Can you send up a ham sandwich and a Coke?” Kelsey asked.
“I got it.” I went into the kitchen, pulled the ham out of the fridge, piled half of it on a slice of white bread, and squirted mustard on it. I was guessing on the mustard part.
There was an extension ladder leaning against the side of the house. I managed to climb it with one hand. When I reached the roof, Kelsey was there to take the plate.
“How well can you see with those eyes?” I asked.
Kelsey turned and looked off down the street. “Nothing’s gonna get within a thousand yards without me seeing it. And I mean nothing. I can see ants ten blocks away. At night.”
“Damn.” I knew the artificial eyes were superior to the real thing, but I had no idea how superior. I felt a little safer. I’d have to pass that information on to Boob. Maybe it would calm him.
I made a bathroom stop before heading back to work. Voices drifted from the bedroom as I passed. I poked my head in.
Basquiat and Molly were sitting on the bed close enough that their shoulders were touching. They were speaking in low tones, heads down. The jolt of jealousy was immediate and overwhelming. I thought I’d gotten past that, but no.
Molly noticed me. “Hey. Any word from Rebe?”
�
��She’s still working on it,” I managed. My heart was racing. I swallowed, trying to shrug it off.
“Here we go,” Rebe said from the living room. Then, louder, “I got something.” I hurried away.
We gathered around Rebe, who was playing a video clip of a woman walking down a street, then walking up the steps of a brownstone.
“That’s got to be New York City,” Mr. Chambliss said. “Brooklyn.”
“That’d be a bingo,” Rebe said. “Thirty-two Livingston Street, Brooklyn Heights. Picked up by a surveillance camera on a traffic light a block away.”
“Wow,” Mom said. “I’m impressed.”
“Nah, this is easy if you’ve got the bank,” Rebe said.
Gingerly, Beltane pulled on a jacket Mom had lent her, wincing from the pain in her atrophied muscles. Mom was only slightly better. I’d never seen two people consume so much ibuprofen.
“Let’s see if I can boost the body count a little,” Beltane said.
“What?” Molly and I said almost in unison.
“We’re after bodies? I thought we wanted information,” I said.
Beltane held up a handgun, popped out the clip. “You think they’re going to sit still and answer questions? No. Let me explain this to you. This isn’t a freaking action movie. If someone points an assault rifle at you and pulls the trigger, the bullets don’t ricochet off handrails and catwalks while you run away. You die. Unless you happen to have eighteen grand for a bulletproof jumpsuit.” She slapped the clip back into place. “We get them when they’re in their pajamas, while they’re taking a leak and their hands are holding their privates instead of assault rifles.”
I looked at Mom, who raised her eyebrows and nodded. I hadn’t pictured our people going off in the middle of the night to crawl in other people’s windows and shoot them.
“Sweetie, things are going to get ugly,” Beltane said. “If you don’t have the stomach for ugly, give that jackass your invention now and just walk away. At least this way, we’re stopping them before they stop you.” She turned to Mr. Chambliss. “Can I borrow your car?”
“Mi car es su car.” He fished the keys out of his pocket.
“Are you going?” I asked Mom.
“Only me,” Beltane said. “That leaves you two and a half soldiers if there’s an attack.”
Rebe looked around. “Who’s the half?”
“Chambliss there is the half.” Beltane pointed. “He was trained, but he has no combat experience and no enhancements.”
Mr. Chambliss gave Beltane a little salute. “My ex-wife always said I wasn’t half the man her father was. She was wrong—I am half a man.”
I gazed at the rings lying in my palm, feeling an awe bordering on religious ecstasy. They were brass, not much to look at, definitely no one’s idea of fashion. We’d linked them to Beltane’s phone, because the phone had to be activated to interface with the quantum computer at MIT. We risked being located the same way they’d located us last time, but we were hoping Leaf’s people didn’t know about Beltane, and we’d masked the data better this time. You wore the VR glasses or contacts that came with your phone, locked onto someone’s face with the photo feature, and the readout appeared in the bottom left corner of your lenses.
They worked. We had our prototype.
“Now we focus on finding a partner,” I said. “Someone who can provide start-up cash and distribution.” It killed me that Theo wasn’t here to see this.
“I’ve been working on that,” Rebe said. “There’s a woman named Mott. She owns a distribution business.”
“Does she distribute electronics?” Basquiat asked.
Rebe shrugged. “She distributes pretty much everything. She’s black market.”
“She’s a criminal?” Molly said.
Everyone’s a criminal, Mom had told me a few weeks earlier. That’s why we hire a criminal of our own to make sure we aren’t cheated. She’d been referring to a lawyer, but the principle was the same. “If she distributes black market goods, she knows how to do it quietly, through underground channels,” I said. “And she must have security protecting her operation. That’s exactly what we need.”
“I don’t actually know her, but I know of her. You want me to try to make contact?” Rebe asked.
I looked around. “Let’s at least talk to her. If we can’t trust her, we’ll know soon enough.”
I flinched when someone rapped on the window. Boob jumped about a foot.
“A little help here,” Beltane said through the glass.
She had a body in the trunk. A guy wearing nothing but boxer shorts, with two bullet wounds in his big belly. A lot of blood.
“You could have put down some trash bags first,” Mr. Chambliss said.
“I wounded another,” Beltane said, ignoring him.
Rebe held up her wrist, snapped a photo of the dead man’s face.
Beltane ducked into the backseat of Mr. Chambliss’s car and came out with an assault rifle and a handgun. “Who wants one?”
“Hang on,” Mom said. “They’re not trained.”
Beltane shrugged. “So we train them.”
“I’d like to learn,” Basquiat said.
“Dibs on the rifle,” Rebe said.
“Fine, but run the facial recognition on this dude first. He was sleeping with a forty-four under his pillow.” Beltane closed the trunk. “I’m going to dump him. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
* * *
—
“Oh, baby.” Rebe looked over at me. “Hey, is this Xavier Leaf?”
I jumped out of my chair to take a look. Leaf was pushing a shopping cart through the cereal aisle of a grocery store, the dead man in the trunk of Mr. Chambliss’s car walking beside him. The dead man grabbed a box of Cap’n Crunch and put it in the half-filled cart.
“He shouldn’t be eating that,” Mr. Chambliss said. “That crap will kill you.”
Rebe isolated Leaf’s face. “Let’s see if we can find out more about him.” She ran his face through the database. Hits began to pop up quickly. Xavier Leaf walking past cameras on the street, sometimes alone, sometimes with others.
Mr. Chambliss leaned closer to the screen. “Where are these? That’s not New York.”
Rebe tapped the air. “Washington, DC. Almost all of them.”
“Washington?” Mr. Chambliss muttered. “Could their company be based in Washington?” He lunged at the screen, his elbow bumping my ear. “Wait. What the hell is that?”
“Hang on.” Rebe called up a video.
President Vitnik was giving a speech on the White House lawn. Leaf was in the video for only a few seconds. He wearing a dark suit, and his hair was shorter, but there was no mistaking his face as he passed behind a crowd of dignitaries.
“Rebe, what’s the date on that?” Mr. Chambliss asked.
Rebe brought it up. “February. Eight months ago.”
“He’s Secret Service.” Mr. Chambliss put one hand on top of his head. “We’re not fighting a tech company, we’re fighting Vitnik.”
That didn’t make sense. The president of the United States was trying to get control of the truth app? She had killed Theo?
“Pack up!” Mom shouted. “We’re getting out of here. Now.”
Beltane pulled a backpack off the dining room table and headed into the kitchen. “I got food.” Packages and cans clattered as she swept them into the pack.
Mr. Chambliss grabbed my arm and squeezed. “Pack everything you need for the project. We’re not coming back.”
“Why are we rushing?” Basquiat asked. “Why would they be coming any minute?”
“They sent one assassin because that’s all they thought they needed to take out five kids, and they didn’t want their fingerprints on this,” Mr. Chambliss said. “Now they’ll fly in an elite plato
on. As soon as it shows up, we’re dead.”
“Where are we going?” Boob asked.
“Far away.”
There were way too many of us to fit in Mr. Chambliss’s car, so we went on foot, staying inside the narrow strip of trees between our street and the one behind it until we crossed Old Route 304 into denser forest. It was dark in there, and we had exactly one flashlight.
“Are we going to walk all the way out of the suburbs?” Boob asked. “That’s got to be twenty miles.”
“Right now we’re just getting away….” Mom trailed off.
We all heard it: the thump-thump of a low-flying helicopter. Kelsey took off running, back the way we’d come.
Thirty seconds later, he had returned, puffing from the exertion, clutching his lower back. “It’s a V-280. Room for twelve. They set down at the house. Must have searched it and then torched it.”
“They’ll consult satellite footage to figure out which way we went,” Mom said. “We have to move fast. Stay under trees as much as we can.”
Kelsey led the way, choosing the easiest path, which still involved pushing through heavy brush. Branches snapped back into my face as I half walked, half jogged and tried to stay on my feet.
The president. I couldn’t believe it.
We were all wheezing by the time we reached Zukor Road. We were probably going to circle around the wall of Clarkstown Heights and head to the heavier forest out past South Mountain Road. From there, we could climb the hiking trail over High Tor mountain.
“Who’s slowing us down?” Beltane asked from near the front of the line.
“Sorry,” Rebe said. “If I had known I was going to have to run for my life, I would have kept in better shape.”
Beltane let people pass until Rebe caught up with her. “Get on my back,” she commanded. When Rebe hesitated, Beltane shouted, “Do it!”
“Okay. Don’t shout at me.”
Beltane wrapped her arms around Rebe’s calves and took off. “Now, let’s move.” She was so damned fast. I picked up my pace. Molly, who had been on the track team for a while, was jogging at a steady pace; Basquiat the stud athlete was gliding along behind her looking like he could keep up that pace for a week. Boob and Kelsey were the weak links now, but I wasn’t exactly fleet-footed.
The Future Will Be BS Free Page 10