A Thousand Faces

by Patterson, Janci

  Kalif still didn't look at me. His data transfer neared completion. When he spoke, his voice was clipped. "Let's talk later, okay?"

  My hands gripped the back of his chair. "You can't do that to me," I said. "I'm going to imagine it's much worse than it is."

  The file finished transferring, and Kalif ejected the drive and pocketed it. "I really think it would be better—"

  "No," I said. My voice was getting louder than it ought to. I lowered it again. "Now."

  Kalif looked up at me, registering the fear on my face. I saw something in his eyes, a flicker of feeling.

  Oh, no, I thought. It's pity.

  What had he seen that inspired that?

  "I need to see," I said.

  Damn. I sounded like I was begging.

  Kalif nodded slowly. He turned back to the computer, moved the cursor over a file, and clicked.

  Then he reached for my hand.

  A video opened, showing the empty hallway between the cubicles. It was footage from the camera I'd just noticed in the hallway. The time stamp showed it was sometime in the early morning, about twenty hours before.

  The hall was empty.

  "There's no one there," I said. "I thought the cameras didn't monitor all the time."

  "They don't," Kalif said. "This one triggered when the front door was breached."

  I shook my head. "My parents wouldn't go in the front door."

  Kalif squeezed my hand. I was so riveted to the screen that I barely felt it.

  "Wait," he said.

  Nick Delacruz's head appeared at the bottom of the screen. As he walked down the hall, the rest of his body came into view.

  I held my breath. That had to be Mom.

  "She came from the break room area," I said. "The elevator is the other way, so it wasn't her who tripped the door."

  Kalif's thumb rubbed the side of my wrist. The way his eyes stayed riveted to the screen told me this wasn't romantic. He was bracing me for something.

  The elevator doors opened on the far side of the camera's view. Still in Nick's persona, Mom stopped and casually leaned against a cubicle wall, checking her phone. It was a good pose—one that wouldn't draw suspicion from a passing co-worker.

  But out of the elevator came two figures dressed all in black, ski masks over their faces. They ran at Mom, who looked up in surprise and then turned to run. One of them grabbed her arms and twisted them behind her back, applying pressure to the back of her knees to force her to the floor. Another stretched a ski mask over her head, but with the eye holes in the back so she couldn't see.

  I bit my tongue to keep from crying out. I wanted to run out into the hall to save her—to find her where we'd just been. But this footage was from last night. I couldn't save her. All I could do now was watch as the men bound her at the wrists, and forced her to her feet. They grappled her into the elevator. The doors closed behind them, and the screen was still again.

  Seven

  I couldn't rip my eyes from the screen. "Where's Dad? Why didn't he save her?" Maybe that's what he was doing now—trying to find her, trying to get her out. Maybe that's why he hadn't had time to call.

  Or text.

  "There's more," Kalif said. "From the camera on the street." He closed the video and pulled up a second file, all without letting go of my hand.

  My throat closed up. This one showed an image of a large vehicle, parked along the curb, as four people disappeared into the front door.

  An unmarked, black van.

  Only Kalif's hand kept me anchored to the floor. Without it, I would have spun right off the earth and into oblivion. "No," I said. "No way."

  Kalif stood out of his chair, bracing me by the shoulders.

  "That van," I said. They'd parked so I couldn't see the license plate. The face of the driver was obscured by a ski mask. But I'd seen one of those once, cruising down our street, hiding the faces of those inside behind tinted glass.

  "Lots of people use them," Kalif said.

  I barely heard him over the blood rushing in my ears. Not a lot of people had the cause or know-how to kidnap my parents in the middle of a job. "Why would they go in the front? That's stupid."

  Kalif's arm tightened around me. "Maybe they weren't afraid of being caught?"

  I stared at the van, still parked in front of the Eravision building, waiting. "You're always supposed to be afraid of being caught. Why are they just sitting there?"

  Kalif hit a button and the video fast-forwarded. Two black-clad figures emerged from the building, dragging along another man with a ski mask stretched backward over his head. I didn't have to ask who it was—I recognized Art Cambrian's clothes. I'd helped Dad pick them out.

  I held my breath, waiting for Dad to break loose, to knock his assailants out, to run around the building, shift, and escape. But though Dad fought, twisting against his captors using the same moves he'd taught me, they kept hold of him and shoved him into the back of the van.

  Moments later the other team dragged Mom—still dressed as Nick Delacruz—out through the glass doors and into the van as well. The masked people slammed the back doors and boarded through the front, and the unmarked van disappeared down the street.

  I watched the rear of the van, searching for the license plate numbers, but the license plate was covered with tape. It didn't matter if we could zoom in on the footage, we weren't going to get an ID from that.

  The image of the empty road was still on the screen—the space where my parents had once been, the last place that I might ever see them. My head spun, and I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. My parents had been kidnapped by the people who'd been following my dad for months. The ones we thought we'd lost. The ones who scared him so bad he didn't feel comfortable working alone.

  Kalif closed the file and shut down the computer. He faced me, placing one hand on each of my shoulders. I no longer felt like curling into him—all my joints felt stiff. I wasn't sure I would ever move again.

  "Stay with me," Kalif said. He cracked the door, checking the hall.

  I double checked Andrea's persona, to make sure I'd held onto it. I had, but I'd lost half an inch of her height—a small enough amount that an average person would chalk it up to posture, but sloppy all the same. I restored it, trying to steady myself.

  Kalif turned back to me. "It's clear. Let's get back to the car."

  I nodded. Finding my thoughts was like groping through fog. He was right; we had what we came for, now it was time to make our exit. But my limbs felt sluggish. I couldn't possibly move fast enough to escape. "That's all the footage from last night?"

  Kalif shook his head, his face close to mine. "There were other cameras. But I didn't even have to dig into the raw footage. Someone had already flagged and isolated these files."

  My mouth felt like sandpaper. "Nick's boss saw it this morning."

  "Office security must have alerted him. Who knows what they think of it. Nick and Art are still walking around, denying everything."

  Images flashed through my head of my parents, kneeling in the back of the van, black clad figures pointing guns at their heads execution-style. My breath caught in my throat. Mom might kill to get out if she had to; she said self-defense was a human right. Dad wouldn't, though. Maybe if we were innocent, he always said. But in our line of work, we forfeit the right to self-defense.

  At that moment, I wished I could count on him to beat his way out of that van at any cost.

  "They're gone," I said. If Mom and Dad hadn't made it out in the first twenty hours, that was a bad sign. They both had self-defense training, but judging by how quickly those teams took them down, they were outmatched.

  My head throbbed. Like an idiot, I hadn't thought anyone could outmatch my parents. Like an idiot, I'd thought breaking in here would lead me right to them.

  Kalif anchored me in place. "We need to get you out of here."

  I knew we should make a plan first. Always have a strategy, that's what Mom said. What were we going
to wish we'd done while we were here?

  My mind had turned to taffy. I had the questions, but not the answers. So I followed Kalif down the hall to the elevator, past the same spot where I'd seen Mom dragged away. Kalif pressed the button to call the elevator, and I tensed. There was no one here to hurt us, I told myself. That was last night. They were long gone.

  The image of the gag being jammed into Mom's mouth played over in my mind. They'd been dragged to the van still in persona. Mom and Dad had been up for almost thirty hours by now. How long could they stay awake, if they had to? Maybe three days, but not longer. Especially not without stimulants. They'd fall asleep and revert to their subconscious bodies. If their kidnappers didn't know they had shifters before, they sure would then.

  Kalif took hold of my hand as we rode the elevator down. I felt detached, like someone else was controlling Andrea's body with strings. Kalif kept giving me worried looks. He nudged me as the elevator doors opened, and I realized I'd been staring into space, my eyes fixed on events we were far too late to change.

  Kalif had to let go of my hand to get in the car. I went to climb into the driver's seat, but Kalif steered me around the other side. "I'll drive," he said. "You are in no shape." I sat down on the passenger seat, pulled off my glasses, and hugged my knees to my chest. Andrea's legs were gawkier than mine, and her knees knobbier, but I held them tight.

  Kalif climbed in the driver's side and put a hand on my arm. Now that we were in the car, he dropped John's stuffy voice for his own. "You're shaking."

  "Let's just go," I said. We needed to get out of here before I lost concentration on Andrea. In the rearview mirror, I could already see that her face was looking younger and rounder, an outward manifestation of my utter uselessness.

  As we drove back to the parking garage to return Andrea's car, Kalif kept glancing at the rearview to make sure no one was following. "It's clear," he said. "Whoever took your parents, I don't think they're still watching."

  Mom didn't think they were watching anymore, either. She'd told Dad over and over we were safe.

  And look what happened to her.

  Kalif drove through the streets, toward the garage where we'd swapped cars. "This is progress, right?" he said. "Now we know we should be looking for them."

  Logically, he was right. Knowing they were kidnapped didn't actually make them more kidnapped than they had been before. But this felt like a thing that had happened just now, before my very eyes.

  "We've got some leads," Kalif went on. "I can try to ID the van."

  My tone came out flat, like a machine. "It's from Megaware," I said. "They were following my dad before we met you."

  Kalif paused. "Megaware. I read about them in your dad's files."

  "They probably know he's a shifter," I said. "Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to track him so far." My eyes burned. Twenty-four hours was enough time to sell my parents to the government, hook them up to lab machines, and begin to dissect them. There were stories—no, legends—that we didn't even have genetic faces, just gaping pits where our features should be.

  Even if we could find them, I couldn't identify my own dead parents.

  I could feel my body shrinking in my seat, and I struggled to hold on to Andrea's form. "Have you ever seen a dead shifter?" I asked.

  Kalif put a hand on my shoulder, keeping the other one on the wheel. "Don't. Your parents are fine. We're going to find them."

  My voice sounded small, like a child. "But have you?"

  "No," he said. "I haven't."

  My hands shook. "Me neither. I asked my mother once if she had, but she wouldn't tell me."

  Kalif spoke slowly and quietly, like he was trying to coax a frightened deer. "You can't think like this. We've got a lead. We'll keep looking."

  I stared at the dashboard. He was right. We could look. But my whole body felt cold, and I couldn't drum up the will to warm it artificially. I just sat there, frozen.

  Kalif pulled the car into the garage and parked Andrea's car in the spot where we'd found it. Instead of hopping out of the car, he squeezed my arm.

  "Jory," Kalif said. "Talk to me." He leaned closer, his arm stretching around my shoulders. Even his nearness wasn't enough to thaw me.

  I wasn't like a regular girl, with neighbors and family and school friends. We'd moved so much, fled so often, that my parents were the only people who really knew me. If we didn't find my parents, what would happen to me? Would I just disappear?

  "Jory?" Kalif said. I turned to look at him, and his face was closer than I'd anticipated, only inches from mine. I'd been so caught up in the idea of leaving him that I hadn't even stopped to consider it was my parents I might never see again. Kalif ducked his head a little so it was even with mine, looking me straight in the eye.

  "Really," Kalif said. "Don't panic. We'll find them."

  My voice wouldn't rise above a whisper. "They could already be dead."

  Kalif held my gaze with his, though his eyes were John's icy blue instead of his own deep brown. "If these people wanted them dead, they could have killed them in the office."

  I squeezed my eyes shut. "Not if they didn't want to leave a mess."

  "Hey," Kalif said, gripping my shoulder. "Don't think like that. They're okay."

  My words came out as a wail. "You don't know."

  Dread passed over his face like a shadow. "No," he admitted. "I don't. But these are the thoughts that are going to get you through this, so you need to think them, okay? Will you try?"

  I straightened in my seat, stretching Andrea back to her full height. He was right. I did no good to anyone paralyzed. If Mom and Dad were already dead, I couldn't make a difference, but if they weren't, I shouldn't be wasting time lamenting what might have happened. I had to stay focused, until we knew for sure.

  I shifted my voice to sound confident. "They're probably fine," I said. "We'll find them."

  Kalif squeezed me, drawing my face even closer to his, his eyes still trained on mine. "That's right. We're going to look until we do."

  I took a deep breath. Even though Kalif still looked like John, I could feel his breath on my face, warm and soft, and my body still felt cold and frozen, like I might never move fluidly again.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Hey," Kalif said. "That's what I'm here for."

  He hesitated, his eyes leaving mine. And again, I could swear that he looked directly down at my mouth. He bit his lip, as if steeling himself for a decision, and then slowly retreated, widening the space between us.

  Panic choked up in my throat, rushing in to take the place where he'd been.

  "Wait," I said. I sat forward, drawing him close again. I put a hand on his arm, and I swear I could hear his sharp intake of breath. His eyes searched mine. I reached for all the reasons this was wrong—the fear, the inevitability of loss—and my thoughts came up empty.

  I had nothing left to lose.

  So I closed the inches between us, and let my mouth find his.

  The gear shift dug into my hip. Despite the long moments of hesitation, Kalif's lips were soft with surprise.

  And then his arms wrapped around my waist, and he pulled me in. The heat from Kalif's mouth raced through me, melting my frozen paralysis. I wanted to climb over the gear shift and into his chair and melt away into him, but I settled for sliding my arm around his side, and pressing our foreheads together.

  When he broke away, I was so startled to see John's face looking into mine that I actually jumped.

  Kalif laughed, his smile lighting up his whole face. And though I should have made him fix them, his version of John still had Kalif's dimples. He whispered into my ear, "you might have waited to do that until we were ourselves again."

  "If I had," I whispered back, "I would have backed out."

  Kalif's smile didn't fade. "Am I that ugly?"

  And, in spite of everything, I laughed. "Hideous."

  Kalif pushed Andrea's hair behind my ear. Then he gave me a long look, like he w
as trying to decide something.

  "What?" I asked.

  He looked regretful, like he hated himself for saying it. "We should get you home."

  I shivered. "I don't want to be alone."

  He smiled, his thumb grazing the corner of my mouth. "Let's at least get out of here and back to ourselves, okay?"

  "Okay," I said.

  I barely remembered the drive home. My mind overloaded, like when Kalif ran too many programs at once on his computer, and its processing slowed to a crawl. When we arrived, we sat in the driveway for a moment, both of us quiet. I looked up at the empty house.

  I was aware of Kalif giving me sideways looks, like he was trying to decide what to say. But he stayed quiet—maybe because he couldn't think of anything that was better than the silence.

  When we got out of the car, Kalif came in and changed. Then he hovered by the door, like he wasn't sure what to do. I wanted to clamp my hands around his arm, to hold him there so I wouldn't be alone in the empty townhouse, with no hope that my parents would be home on their own.

  "Do you want to stay for a while?" I asked.

  Kalif ran his hands up and down his arms. "Do you think it's safe?" he asked. "I don't want my parents to notice I'm gone."

  I could tell that there was more, and for a painful moment, I wondered if I'd ruined everything. Did he regret kissing me? I couldn't afford tension between us now—not when I needed his help to find my parents.

  My parents. They were the point, and they had to be my single focus.

  "We need to keep looking," I said. "They can't stay awake forever."

  Kalif looked me over. "You need sleep."

  My hands shook. "I can't sleep now."

  Kalif gave me a long look, appraising me. And then he closed the distance between us and gathered my hand in his. "You're no use to them if you work without rest."

  I let my head fall against his shoulder. Why did he have to be right? If I tried to work in this state, I'd miss important things, or worse, make mistakes that would expose my parents to even more danger.

  "Fine," I said, my voice muffled against his sleeve. "Then we should tell your parents. They can start working on Megaware."