A Million Shadows

by Janci Patterson

  They could be anyone, anywhere.

  “You okay?” Kalif asked quietly.

  “Not really,” I said.

  He frowned. “I want to hold your hand, but I don’t think we want to draw that kind of attention.”

  I nodded. Whether his body was female or male, he was still Kalif underneath. I wouldn’t have minded holding his hand in these bodies, but he was right. Two young lesbians walking down the street would draw an unfortunate amount of attention. I couldn’t help but feel bad for normal people who had to deal with that, who couldn’t just shift their bodies to fit in.

  The rest of the walk, I paid close attention to my body language toward Kalif. Holding hands wasn’t the only social cue for attraction. I had to watch the way I looked at him, the way I smiled. This wasn’t just about avoiding the attention of passersby; if Mel was following us, he’d be looking for inconsistencies in behavior to identify us. He’d be looking for us to mess up and act like ourselves.

  When we got to the mall, we slipped into the family bathroom, which was bigger and open, with no stall divider separating the sink from the toilet, but wouldn’t cause us to draw attention when one of us walked out of it as an old man. I locked the door behind us and pulled the old lady clothes out of the bag and turned around to change. I took my time adjusting my body; I’d done old people before, but not often. I stooped my frame at the shoulders and hips, making my elbows and knees loose and wobbly. Then I loosened my skin over my entire body, so it hung limp over my bones. I darkened my veins, so they showed through, and crinkled my face so I could place the wrinkles exactly where the laugh lines would form.

  When I turned back around, I found Kalif looking about ten years younger than I now did; his face a bit fatter, so he didn’t have to line it with so many wrinkles.

  “Now you’re robbing the cradle,” he said.

  “Or maybe I’m your mother. Can you get wi-fi in here?”

  Kalif pulled out his phone. “Probably,” he said. “You want me to check on your mom?”

  “Please,” I said. We needed to replace that phone as soon as we could. In fact, we needed to buy all new phones. Make a clean break. But for now, just a quick check.

  He pulled up an app and started looking.

  “What do you think your dad was doing?” I asked. “Do you think he went there to kill us?”

  Kalif shook his head. “He’d have made sure you were there. That looked like he was searching for something.”

  “For proof it was us? That’s what I’d have been looking for if I got into his apartment.”

  Kalif nodded. “Probably. He must have wanted you to know he was there, or he wouldn’t have used that face, or left a mess.” Kalif pulled up Mom’s chart. “A nurse just checked on her. She’s still unconscious, but she’s doing okay.”

  I shook my head. “Why would he do that?”

  Kalif shrugged. “To scare you into running? Or maybe he intended to wait for you until you came back, so it didn’t matter if you did try to run.” He looked up at me. “Obviously to scare you, though.”

  I nodded. He’d succeeded on that count. “Do you think—"

  Kalif looked up at me.

  “Do you think that your dad has the same offer from your grandparents that I do?”

  Kalif turned off his phone and rubbed his forehead. “What, turn you and your mother in and get away with murder?”

  I swallowed. It made a sick kind of sense. “Like they have us each looking for each other. It’s a race to see who will sell out the other first, who’s the better shifter, who’s more useful in the long run. Who gets to live and work for them and who has to die.”

  Kalif shoved his phone into his pocket. “That sounds like them.”

  I shook my head. “Aren’t they supposed to abide by some code of justice? The murderers must die? The rebels must be punished?”

  Kalif nodded. “Unless we work for them. Think about it. Even real police make those kinds of compromises. They work with some criminals so they can catch others.”

  I shivered. Everyone wanted something from us. And as much as I didn’t want to work with the Carmines, I’d rather have seen Mel face Carmine-style justice than get away with what he did to my family.

  “We need to talk about what we’re going to do.”

  Kalif gave a sharp nod. “And get food. I’m starving.”

  My stomach growled in response, and I nodded. “Dinner,” I said. “Then a decision.”

  We both took a deep breath, and though I had no idea what we were going to do next, I was just glad to be in it together again.

  Ten

  As we left the bathroom, Kalif pulled off the old man shuffle with style. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d been pulling off a variety of personas with style all day. He’d grown a lot in the two months we’d been apart.

  We moved even slower in these personas than we did as the teenage girls, but Kalif offered me his arm, and I held onto it.

  My stomach growled again. I hadn’t had anything to eat since that cinnamon roll.

  Kalif glanced over at me. “I know someplace quiet where we can get dinner and go over the job.”

  I shook my head. It wasn’t smart to go places Kalif normally went. Those were the first places everyone tracking us would look. “If you’ve been there before—"

  He shook his head. “I haven’t. It’s just a place I saw one time and wanted to take you. It’ll be safe. We’ll get some nice clothes and make an evening out of it.”

  I gave him a skeptical glance. “After all that’s happened, you want to take me on a date?”

  He grinned at me, revealing slightly yellowed teeth. “Technically our first, right? Maybe one piece of this day can go the way I pictured. If you’re up for it.”

  Honestly, dinner and conversation sounded like a nice change of pace, even if the talk was all about hunting down Kalif’s father. “Okay,” I said. “But only if we can wear these.” I motioned to our shuffling bodies. “And say it’s our fiftieth anniversary.”

  Kalif grinned, his face folding naturally into itself. “Done,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go shopping.”

  When we reached the restaurant—which took a while at less than half our normal walking speed—I could tell that Kalif hadn’t suggested the new clothes at random. The sky outside was completely dark, and the lighting inside was dim, but it was enough to see the three tables immediately inside the door. Each table was set with crystal goblets and napkins folded in fans that stood eight inches off the table. At the center of each table was a candle in a wine glass. The restaurant was built in an old Victorian-style house, and the whole place screamed dress code.

  I clung to Kalif’s arm, my back stooping slightly, and smoothed the loose silk of my skirt with my free hand. “This looks expensive,” I said.

  Kalif gave a startlingly good impression of a full-bodied old-man shrug. “Don’t worry about it. I have some money.”

  I sighed. “I really don’t feel right about being so frivolous with your mother’s stolen money.” The money we spent on the clothes had been bad enough.

  Technically my parents could have taken me to places like this all the time when my dad was alive, and in their wilder days, I knew they’d lived the high life. But after they’d had me, they’d pared down and lived more simply, I guess to raise me with middle class values, or something like that.

  It had worked. Being around people with money always felt more like work than play to me.

  Of course, we were here to work. And I had to give him this—a nice place like this would give us a whole lot of privacy.

  Kalif ducked his face close to mine, which didn’t take much in our stooping bodies. “Don’t worry about the money. Really. It’s not stolen, and it’s not hers.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him, giving him my best withering old-woman glare. “Explain,” I said.

  Kalif laughed. “Let’s sit down first, okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “But if it’s more bad
news, I’m going to throw my false teeth at you.”

  Kalif laughed. “Good thing for me those babies are real.”

  The greeter smiled at us, and she and Kalif made pleasantries about our anniversary as she led us through the restaurant. The lateness of the hour worked in our favor, and the weeknight probably didn’t hurt either. I could hear some glasses tinkling in one of the rooms at the back, but otherwise, the place was empty.

  As we followed the greeter up a narrow set of stairs, Kalif put a hand on my back. The hostess led us to a table in one of the rooms on an upper floor, with a view of the small garden below covered in winding ivy.

  “Is this all right?” the hostess asked Kalif.

  He looked at me.

  “It’s gorgeous,” I said.

  She smiled, and left us with our menus.

  When she was gone, Kalif took my hand across the table.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “I feel like I need a fancier persona for this,” I said.

  He nodded. “You’re right. Your real face would be much better.”

  I smacked his arm across the table. “Cut that out,” I said. “Or I’m going to ask you what you did with my boyfriend.”

  He held out his palms. “What? I can’t be nice?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I feel like you’re buttering me up. Where’d you get the money?”

  He ducked his chin sheepishly. “So about finding my dad—"

  I whacked him harder in the arm, which now that I thought about it, probably would have bruised an actual old man. I needed to watch it, or the waitress was going to report me for spousal abuse.

  “Seriously, though,” he said. “Are we going to look for him, or are we just going to pretend?”

  I took a deep breath. “If he found me and my mom once already, I think we have to look. We can’t let him sneak up on us, and Laura told him my mom’s in the hospital. We need to be the ones watching him.”

  Kalif nodded. “It’s a shame he saw us at the apartment, because now he’s not likely to come back. But we can follow up on my mom’s lead. And I have one other. Someone accessed my server three days after your dad died, from Sacramento.”

  Kalif’s server had the assembled information for all the jobs my parents had run while they worked with Kalif’s family, as well as all Aida and Mel’s professional files. “You still have the server? Isn’t that dangerous?”

  He nodded. “But I’m careful. It’s offline, now, and I’ve hidden it. Even my mom doesn’t know where it is. She said it was better that way.”

  I shook my head. I wondered if there was enough evidence in there to make Aida’s parents want to punish her for her sins, along with my mom. “The hack, though. That happened before you unplugged it. And you think it was your dad?”

  He nodded. “I do. He deleted a bunch of files that had data about where Dad was and when around the time of those murders he framed your parents for. I’m not sure who else would care enough to get in and do that. Plus, he had the passwords for remote access. Those can be obtained other ways, but the easiest is if the hacker already knew them.”

  “You recovered the files he deleted, of course.”

  He smiled. “Of course. That’s how I know what was in them.”

  Mel had done that before; after he framed my parents for his murders, he’d deleted the mission files that gave them an alibi. That was how Kalif and I had caught him the first time. “So your dad was in Sacramento.”

  Kalif nodded. “And here’s the thing. That medical record my mom found? In Rocklin.”

  “Outside of Sacramento.”

  “Right. And here’s the kicker. Remember when I told you that Dad disappeared when I was a kid, and didn’t come back for six months?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “That job was also in Sacramento.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “Are you sure your mom isn’t setting you up? She’d know you would put that together.”

  Kalif nodded. “I know. But it’s all we have.”

  A bad lead wasn’t made better by being the only lead. “We’re lucky, you know. If your mom had thought about it, she might have realized she didn’t need me. She could have just sent you after your dad.”

  Kalif scrunched his eyebrows together. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. Your shifting is improving, and you’re a genius with tech—"

  “Jory,” Kalif said, “I can’t do this by myself.”

  I shrugged. “Name one thing I can do that you can’t.”

  “You tell me when I’m wrong.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. Fantastic.”

  Kalif grabbed both my hands. “No, really. You’re the one who first suggested I should get out of the crime business. Was I going to think of that myself? No, I was going to take any job that paid me to play with other people’s security, legitimate or not, and never wonder about it. You’re the one who pointed out that maybe that wasn’t a great thing to do with my life. And you were right.”

  He made a good point. Which reminded me that I was in the middle of calling him on his crap, if he’d quit interrupting. “Okay. So if you’re not stealing the money, where are you getting it?”

  Kalif sighed. “We came back around to that fast.”

  I shot him a pointed look. “And I’m not going to forget about it, so you might as well spit it out. Otherwise I’ll have to tell you how wrong you are, which is apparently my main role in this partnership.”

  Kalif gave me a sheepish smile. “Okay,” he said. “So I kind of . . . well . . . I started a business.”

  I leaned toward him. “You did what?”

  Kalif rubbed his palms together nervously. “I thought a lot about what you said, about wanting to find something positive we could do, instead of hurting people. And I still don’t know what the answer is as far as the shifting, but I have these skills, as a hacker, you know?”

  His nervousness was kind of adorable. “I’m familiar.”

  He nodded quickly. “So I dug into our parents’ files, and I targeted some of the companies I’d already hacked, and then I contacted their security officers and asked them if they were looking for someone to test their systems for them, as a freelancer.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at that. “You asked people if they’d pay you to hack them.”

  He sat back in his chair, the loose skin of his forehead tightening. “It’s a real job. Other people make a living at it.”

  His defensiveness was really adorable. And what had I been doing with my time? Robbing drug dealers. “I wasn’t doubting you. So how many companies did you hack?”

  “Just a couple,” Kalif said. “But they paid well. And they’ve started recommending me around, so I’ve gotten a few more requests. There was only so much work I could do with Mom and her parents looking over my shoulders, but I took what I could.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You used a persona for all this, I assume.”

  “Of course. I was careful, since I wanted to build something I could take with me when I left. I even registered the business with the state. It’s legal. I’m set up to pay taxes and everything.” He cringed. “Under an assumed identity, that is.”

  I squeezed his hand. “I didn’t know I was dating a legitimate businessman.”

  Kalif rolled his eyes.

  I cleared my throat. The dryness that produced the old woman rasp was starting to chafe. “So why didn’t you tell me you were doing all this?”

  “I didn’t get to tell you much of anything.” He fidgeted with his napkin. “I guess you didn’t get to tell me much of anything, either.”

  My face burned, and I corrected the color. I looked down at the lacy tablecloth. “We both left a few things out.”

  “Besides, I wanted to surprise you. It’s not that often I get to tell you good news.” Kalif sighed and hunched forward. “I was hoping,” he said, "that it would make things easier for you.”

  I looked up at him. “For me?”

  He nodded. “Ye
ah. You wanted to find something constructive to do with shifting, right? Well, this way there’s no pressure for you to figure out what that is right away. And when you do figure it out, it doesn’t have to be something that makes money. ’Cause . . . I can support us. You know?”

  He looked at me like he’d just said something offensive, and was waiting for my reaction.

  “I feel like I’m missing something,” I said. “Am I supposed to be upset about this?”

  He shook his head. “I just don’t want you to feel . . . insulted.”

  Yes. I had definitely missed something. “Insulted. That you have a job.”

  He cast his hand around in the air, like he was searching for something. “That I’m trying to . . . that I’m suggesting I could take care of you. It just seems so . . .”

  Ah. “Gender typical?” I suggested.

  He nodded miserably. “Sexist, even.”

  I smiled across the table. “Well, I certainly don’t expect you to provide for me, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  He sighed. “But I want to. I mean, I don’t want you to feel like I don’t think you can take care of yourself, because obviously you can, but . . .” I sat back in my chair, waiting for him to finish, and he sighed. “I just want to make things easy for you for a while.”

  Easy.

  How long had it been since anyone tried to make things easy for me? My face grew hotter, and tears threatened the corners of my eyes. Kalif noticed; I recognized his look of panic—I’d seen it from him once before.

  I waved my free hand at him, closing my tear ducts to prevent more fluid from escaping. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m happy.”

  Kalif shook his head at me. “I’ve seen you happy. You don’t cry.”

  I laughed, then, and between that and what was left of the tears I probably needed to add dementia to the persona.