Afterimage

by Naomi Hughes

  Right.

  And that feels so, so wrong. I hate violence. I’ve always thought it was the easy way out. I come from a family of doctors, I want to be one too, and we don’t hurt. We heal.

  Earlier I was so afraid when I thought maybe I didn’t really know my mother, but now—now I don’t know me.

  I whirl around and flee. Out the door. Down the sidewalk. There’s a trash can outside the pawn store next door. I grab it just in time to throw up. When I’m done, the protestors are at the door of Fish N’ Chips, yelling. One of them calls me by name. I’m so shaky I can barely stand, but I still run, breath coming in frantic gasps, fury drowned out by a blistering panic attack, until I find the bus at a stop two blocks west. I squeeze between the closing doors, find a seat all the way in the back, and huddle into myself. The bus rumbles down the street, leaving the protestors in its smoke.

  Quint sits next to me. He doesn’t say a word.

  I lift my hand again. I know this hand, I tell myself firmly. And I know me. So I got angry. I’ve been through a hell of a lot in the last few weeks, don’t I deserve a little anger?

  But I’ve never been angry like this. It’s not right, feeling this way. That protestor had probably lost someone in the explosion. Maybe a spouse. Maybe a kid. He didn’t know my mother, knew nothing about her beyond her picture on the TV with a newscaster calling her la traidora. He’d made a totally natural snap judgment. And I’d punched him for it.

  I put my head down against the back of the seat in front of me and breathe deeply. The panic starts to fade, but that scares me even more, because I don’t know if that unthinking anger is still beneath it or not. When a sweet older lady across the aisle notices my distress and offers me a bottle of water, I take it. Think. I need to think. Get back on track—prove Mom’s innocence, figure out what Quint is and how to get rid of him. When that’s done, I’ll feel like myself again.

  I pull my phone out of my pocket and thumb it on. A sense of purpose settles inside me and I grab onto it with both hands. The pictures I took of the blackmailer are blurred and shadowy, but they’re proof. And I know exactly what to do with them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BY THE TIME THE BUS drops me off halfway across town, clouds have crept over the sky and drowned out the last few stars. Street lamps cast pools of orange light across the sidewalk, but darkness is seeping in around the edges, muffling the shadows, hiding the raindrops that have begun to freckle the pavement.

  The bus lumbers away. The exhaust fumes dissipate. With one hand clenched tight around the phone in my pocket, I turn toward the sidewalk and steel myself.

  A boy sits at the bus stop bench. He’s long and lean, legs propped up on the seat of a motorcycle, a single earring glimmering in the twilight. He’s got a pencil between his teeth and he’s staring at a crossword puzzle on the back of a newspaper he can’t possibly be able to see.

  “You had an imaginary friend when you were seven,” he says, not looking up. “Mr. Wiggles, you called him. I guess it’s too much to hope your current hallucinations are just a relapse.” He takes the pencil out of his mouth and licks the tip. “What’s a five-letter word for ‘you’re standing in my light’?”

  Quint raises an eyebrow, examining the boy on the bench. “I kind of like him,” he muses, “and I also kind of want to punch him,” which pretty much sums up everyone’s relationship with my big brother.

  I sigh and slide onto the bench, not quite managing to keep the edge out of my voice. “Good to finally see you too, Kyle.”

  Category 5, I’d texted him ten minutes ago—our code for “emergency.” I need help.

  Admitting it is the first step, he’d replied. And then, meet me at 49th and Maple. Bring snacks.

  Kyle glances up and observes my empty hands. “I see you’ve reneged on your part of the deal.”

  But I’ve had a hell of a night already, and I’ve been forced to find Kyle when I so desperately wanted him to find me, and the residue of my earlier fear and anger has left me too exhausted to pick my battles like I normally would—so I cut straight through the bullshit. “You weren’t at the memorial service,” I say flatly.

  The words burn on the way out. For me, Mom’s death is a gaping wound. For him—going about his daily life, too wrapped up in his own world to even call—it’s a weeks-old tragedy that’s apparently already started healing. I hate him for that and, even more, I hate that a part of me is desperately jealous of it.

  His lazy grin vanishes. Taking his time, he flicks the pencil around in his fingers, drops it into his pocket, and folds the newspaper. By the time he looks up, the grin is back, though it’s a bit sharp around the edges now. “Neither were you. And I was busy with training.”

  My gaze skates over the gun-shaped lump beneath his jacket. My big brother, hacker and all-purpose troublemaker turned agency recruit, who’s been so busy training for his new job he couldn’t be bothered to spend more than a few hours at his unconscious sister’s bedside.

  He sees the direction of my gaze. His eyes narrow. “What exactly was it you needed my help with?”

  I look away. Has he heard what the news said about Mom and me yet? How much can I tell him without making him go all overprotective big brother? I pick my words carefully. “I’m kind of in trouble.”

  “And you need me to get you out of it? Gotta love the role reversal, at least.” But he’s sitting up a little straighter, scanning me for injuries or signs of duress. I slip my wounded hand in my pocket before he can spot it. “Is it about the panic disorder? Or the hallucinations—are they getting worse?”

  I’m not sure how much he knows about Quint. Kyle has been an agent for a few months now, but he’s mostly just an analyst. He probably doesn’t have high enough security clearance to know more than what I’ve told Dad, which isn’t much. “Not exactly,” I answer. I pull out my phone and thumb it on, showing him the pictures of my blackmailer. “I need you to find out who this is. He stole something from me and I need to know why. You’ve got access to software that can clean these up, right?”

  Kyle frowns, flicking through the photos. I should be looking at the phone, but I’ve got all the pictures memorized already and I haven’t seen my brother in months. I can’t take my eyes off him—he looks the same, all dark eyes and messy hair and lazy snark. But something about his energy is different, older. His humor feels whittled down now, pointed and purposeful, like he’s laughing at himself instead of the world and also like he isn’t really laughing at all.

  “Is he carrying?” Kyle interrupts my thoughts, tilting the screen at me. The blackmailer is turned halfway and his hoodie pocket gapes open to show a glimmer of bright, blurry metal. Kyle’s still looking at the phone, but his jaw is tight and he’s got a dangerous glint in his eyes.

  “I don’t know,” I answer. “He didn’t threaten me with a gun, anyway.” He didn’t have to.

  The dangerous glint eases a tiny bit. Kyle turns the screen off. “What did he take? You should just report it and collect the insurance. Most stolen goods never get recovered anyway.” He’s shutting down already, picking his newspaper back up and holding the phone out to me, going distant again now that he’s decided my situation isn’t dire enough to require his aid.

  “I could go to jail,” I say softly.

  He doesn’t move. He closes his eyes and breathes out. “What have you done, Cam?”

  “Lifted an agency director’s tablet.”

  His eyes open. The storm rumbles to the west, and a few fat raindrops splatter against the pavement at our feet. He pockets my phone, grabs a helmet from the bike’s seat, and tosses it to me.

  “Get up,” he says, his tone flat. “I’m taking you home.”

  Thunder rips through the sky behind us, rattling my bones up against each other as the bike slides around a corner. “Can’t you afford a car now?” I shout, clutching my brother’s waist. I don’t really expect him to answer, since I’ve been trying to coax him out of his silence for the last ten bloc
ks with no result, but this time he humors me.

  “Cars are for weaklings,” he yells over his shoulder with a smirk that almost looks real.

  I tighten my grip around his ribs and my scabbed-over knuckles twinge in response. “Dry, safe weaklings who don’t take corners at forty-five degree angles,” I mumble. I know the basics of riding a motorcycle—Kyle forced me to learn so I could take my road test, which I failed miserably last fall—but the constant leaning and the lack of any sturdy metal separating me from the cold hard asphalt makes it my least favorite mode of transportation. Also, I think I swallowed a cricket.

  He pulls to a stop at the curb and I stumble off the bike, trying to look stoic while also physically restraining myself from kissing the pavement.

  Kyle claps me on the shoulder as he passes. “Indoorsy as ever, I see.” But that odd edge is still behind his words, like his mind is already miles away.

  I unsnap my helmet and frown, looking up at the building in front of us. “I thought you were taking me home.” This place is dingy and gray, with bars on the windows and train tracks out back. COASTAL GLORY STATION, boasts the sign above the door. We’re not that far from our apartment building—maybe he’s got an errand to run here, one of his shadier-than-normal acquaintances to meet? That might give me more time to figure out how to convince him to help me before he drops me at our doorstep and rides off into the night without a backward glance, which I’m pretty sure is his plan.

  But he pulls open the glass front door and motions at me to go in with him. “I am,” he says. “My home.”

  I freeze. My brain scrambles for something to say while I buy time to work out what’s happening. “You’ve been living in a train station? No wonder you wanted me to buy the snacks,” I say, but the words come out wrong, strung tight like beads on a necklace.

  He doesn’t say anything, only waits there at the door.

  I plant my feet. “Kyle, what’s going on?”

  He gives me a thin smile. The edge is gone from his words now, replaced by a resigned sort of certainty. “I think it’s best if you come stay at the Washington base with me until your situation settles down,” he says. Lightning flares overhead, and a gust of wind rattles against the door he’s still holding open.

  The Washington base. That means he transferred out of state and I didn’t even know.

  I grit my teeth and force myself to focus. His plan is logical—if overprotective—but I have to figure out how to talk him out of it anyway, because there’s no way I’ll be able to discover anything about Mom or my condition in Washington. I’d be stuck on the base all day every day, constantly watched by Kyle and surrounded by agents. It would be just as bad as jail—which, lest I forget, is still a possibility once Dr. Lila discovers her missing tablet. “No,” I tell him, and try to sound firm.

  But Kyle is five years older than me and he’s been winning our arguments since before I was born. “Yes,” he says simply. The “or else” doesn’t need to be spoken—he’d change his mind about me being safer at an agency base if he knew she’d threatened me.

  I consider telling him what Dr. Lila said about Mom being a suspect but the words stick in my throat. He’s an agent, after all. I have to be sure he’d pick my side before I make him choose between believing me and believing them.

  I try a different tactic. “It’s a tough time for me. I need to be at home.”

  “No, you need to stop doing stupid things, and apparently that’s not going to happen if someone isn’t around to keep an eye on you twenty-four seven.”

  A trickle of anger slices through my worry. I narrow my eyes. “If you wanted someone to be around maybe you shouldn’t have abandoned me when I needed you most, jackass.” I want to stuff the words back inside as soon as they leave my mouth but Kyle doesn’t even break eye contact.

  “That’s the mistake I’m fixing now,” he says calmly, and waits for my next protest.

  I grasp for another argument, any other way out of this. Quint’s been loitering in the background, but now he steps to my side and leans in. “Your dad,” he says. “He’d never go along with sending you out of state, not right now.”

  “Dad!” I say, and even I can hear the relief in my too-loud voice. “Dad won’t let me go. What exactly are you planning on telling Dad?”

  Kyle’s fingers tighten around the door handle. “You are going to tell him that this is the best thing for you right now. You are going to tell him that you want this. You are going to tell him that you need to see some different doctors, work more closely with the agency, be more active in your recovery.”

  A sinking feeling slides through my stomach even as I speak. “And why would I do that?”

  “Because if you don’t,” he says, and his eyes go sharp and his smile drops away and suddenly everything about his expression is tight and stark and wrong, “I will tell him the truth, which is that you’re sabotaging yourself, that you’re committing felonies, that you’re messing around with dangerous people, and that I’m not going to let you screw yourself over. You’re coming to Washington with me so I can keep an eye on you because, Camryn, I will not lose another family member this month.”

  A burst of wind scatters raindrops over us. Lightning cracks through the sky overhead, a brilliant blue-on-black spider’s web. I stare at Kyle. He stares at me. There’s no snark in his tone, no lazy grin on his face.

  My brother is serious, and I am well and truly screwed.

  He sees my realization and straightens, a tired sort of victory settling over him. He pulls out his wallet. He snags a few dollar bills and hands them to me, then tosses me my phone. “You have five minutes to call Dad,” he says. “Meet me at the ticket booth.”

  I look down at the phone. It’s a concession, in its own way. Kyle doesn’t trust me enough to let me stay in town, but at least he’s not going to call Dad and tell him that himself.

  I hold up the money with numb fingers. “What’s this for?”

  He gives a humorless smile and jerks his head at the vending machines past the entryway. “The snacks,” he says. “It’s going to be a long ride.”

  He strides into the station. The door swings shut behind him.

  Thunder rumbles long and low, a warning that I should get inside too, but I don’t move. I stand rooted to the sidewalk, a borrowed helmet under my arm, a phone in one hand and a handful of crumpled dollar bills in the other, and try to think of what I’m supposed to do now.

  “He’s got an agency ID in his wallet,” Quint says from behind me. I jump; I’d almost forgotten he was there. He’s leaning against the wall with his arms crossed like he doesn’t have a care in the world, but his eyes are fixed on my brother’s retreating back. “It looked like it works as a key card too,” he says, like it’s just a casual observation.

  I frown at him. The wind picks up, whistling through the buildings, goading me. Slowly, I turn to follow his gaze. Kyle is at the ticket booth now, knocking on the window for the attendant, flipping his wallet open and shut. I spot a glimmer of green and white near the fold.

  An agency ID. One of those could get me into non-civilian buildings, into the agency’s lower-level computer labs, into their facial recognition database. It could tell me who my blackmailer is. It could help me track him down and get the tablet back, and if I can guess Kyle’s password, maybe it could even help me restore the corrupted data.

  Kyle turns, and I whirl away before he can see me staring at him. No. Of course I wouldn’t steal his ID. How could I even be considering it? That could get me in even more trouble than I’m already facing, and get my brother fired. I just punched someone for the first time half an hour ago and now I’m considering stealing from my own brother? I won’t do it. I won’t be that person.

  But Quint pushes off the wall and shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe getting him fired wouldn’t be so bad,” he says, reading my mind. “I’ve seen how much you miss him. I was there all the times you pulled up his contact info but couldn’t quite bring yourself to
hit the send button. If you do take that card, they might fire him … but then he’d be home. And you could be one step closer to knowing the things you need to know.”

  Fire laces through my veins, because the picture he’s painting—I want it. I want it so badly that I turn back around and watch my brother again for thirty long seconds, weighing the possibility, debating.

  And then I lift my eyes. To Quint, who’s standing just a little too close now, with just a little too much intensity in his gaze. And for the first time, I consider the implications of him. For the last week I’ve been treating him like an unsettling-but-harmless daydream, but what if he isn’t? What if for the last eight days, while I’ve been ignoring him, he’s been learning me? He’s telling me to betray my brother, and he knows exactly what to say. He knows exactly how to make me want it.

  I look at Quint and, for the first time, I wonder if I should be worrying less about whether he might be real and more about whether he might be dangerous.

  “Cam!” I jump; it’s Kyle, cracking the door open to shout at me. “Get a move on, the storm will be here any minute.”

  I hesitate for a second longer, looking from him to Quint, and then I clear my throat. “Give me your wallet,” I say, and somehow the words come out normal. “If I’m going to be on a train with you all night, I’m gonna need a hell of a lot more than three dollars’ worth of Twizzlers.”

  He rolls his eyes, but relief eases his expression. He thinks I’ve given in, that I’ll go along willingly, that the two of us are okay again. And he’s so relieved thinking it that he pulls out his wallet, tosses it over without question, and turns back around without wondering whether the girl who’s just stolen an agent’s tablet might be willing to steal from him too.

  “Hurry up and call Dad,” he calls over his shoulder. “Our train will be here soon.”

  Numb, I wrap my fingers around the wallet. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll just be one more minute.”