Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  “You’re killing yourself,” he said.

  Her lashes drooped, and her lids closed.

  The moment swallowed him. He shook her harder, shook her until she looked at him again. “This has to stop,” he said. “You’re killing yourself, and you’re killing me.”

  She looked away, drifting as far from him as she possibly could.

  He slid to the floor beside her, grabbed her, and pulled her tight.

  Her eyes rolled over, locked on to his, and tears spilled down her cheeks.

  “I want my fucking sister back,” he said. “I want you to be you again.”

  She leaned into him, and the tears broke into big, wet, honking sobs.

  The weight of the world crushed down.

  “We’ll find her,” he whispered. “We’ll find her.”

  She nodded against his shoulder.

  The crying slowed, and her breathing settled. Jack stood and pulled her up after him, got an arm around her waist, picked her up like an overgrown baby, and managed to get her out of the bathroom without hitting her head against the doorframe.

  She was out cold by the time he reached the bed.

  He let her drop and stood over her for a moment, watching, wishing things could have been different for her, for him. But they weren’t and never would be. What they’d lived was what they had, and wishing couldn’t change Clare any more than self-medicating erased the past. At some point everyone had to grow up and take ownership of their own life, and for Jill, that should have been years ago.

  This wasn’t Clare’s damage anymore.

  He returned to the bathroom, shut off the water, and grabbed the purse.

  He emptied her crap out onto the floor beside the bed, nudging through life detritus that had, whether Jill realized it or not, become her own version of a tool bag: makeup and hygiene products, money, ID, scraps of trash, and the drugs—of course the drugs—which she rotated through in a razor-blade walk between amnesia and addiction.

  He stopped at the sight of the cell phones, three of them, neatly organized in small Ziploc bags. The day phone he recognized, cover off, battery out, SIM card tucked inside a micro case with spare SIMs. And the burner was familiar, too. But the Blackphone, that was new.

  The strategy wheel started up.

  Technology was a moving target, but for years the Blackphone had been the securest smartphone on the market, trusted by governments, law enforcement, and high-security enterprises, and the only way to get one now was to find one on the secondary market. Far too expensive for a secondary burner.

  The wheel spun faster.

  Jill already used commercial call and text encryption on her day phone.

  That made this third piece redundant.

  Jack glanced at his sister, sprawled out on the bed, snoring away, with her hair strung out over her pillow-smashed face. He’d asked where the money for the Tesla had come from, had accused her of working favors, and now had the closest thing to proof in his hands. He turned the baggie over.

  There was no such thing as a safe phone. No cellular communications device was 100 percent secure against network vulnerabilities that allowed anyone with a little bit of cash and the right kind of know-how to triangulate within feet of the device anywhere in the world, and no phone could prevent cell tower spoofing from stealing IMSI data out of thin air. But the Blackphone was a close second best. Its telecommunications software used Voice over Internet Protocol rather than cell signals, routed through servers in Switzerland. With the SIM pulled, as it was, the phone was off grid as far as the more vulnerable cell networks were concerned while still able to send and receive encrypted calls using Wi-Fi.

  Jill was waiting on more than just a call from Clare.

  Jack dropped the phone into his palm, brought the screen alive, and pondered the security code. Jill had denied and denied, hadn’t wanted him to know, and would never have wanted Clare to know, she was working favors. But if anything ever happened, she’d want him to be able to follow the breadcrumbs to her and that would have guided her security choices.

  He let his mind wander.

  The strategy wheel, spinning through permutations and possibilities, jerked to a hard stop on mother dearest, the woman without whom Jill would have never begun working favors in the first place. He followed the tangent back to the beginning—their beginning—to the name they’d first learned on the day Clare had given them their French birth certificates, their real birth certificates, a name she’d never used before or since.

  Of all the identities Clare had morphed through over the years, only Catherine Lefevre was their mother, just as Catherine Lefevre was the only Clare they didn’t know.

  Jack tapped out the letters.

  The device unlocked, and he faced an empty screen without phone access, without apps, with nothing but a slate-black background, and he sighed.

  It didn’t mean much to get into the phone itself when Jill had utilized the sandboxed spaces—a feature that created virtual phones within the phone—each isolated from the others, each with its own user-set security level. He swiped from the top.

  A drop-down bar followed his thumb.

  He tapped the icon for the first space, and with no password required, the device rolled over. On the new home screen, a single customized icon waited for him—specifically for him. Black letters against a white background spelled his name, his real birth name.

  JACQUES.

  His face flushed and his stomach flipped with the anger of having fallen for another setup. He’d lost again, had emotionally invested, only to be made a fool so she could have a laugh at his expense, but unable to help himself, he tapped.

  A note opened. He read:

  If you get this while I’m still alive, do us both a favor and let me explain in person. I’m asking nicely. If you ignore me and take a crack at the other spaces anyway, you’re going to make whatever’s going on right now way worse. Just trust me on that. If I’m dead or missing or in a coma or locked in or locked up, then that’s different. In that case, feel free to take this as notice that revenge needs doing and shit needs blowing up. Watch your back. And never forget that no matter how much of a bitch I was at times, I still always loved you.

  His stomach somersaulted in the opposite direction.

  This wasn’t taunting. This was real. He stared at the screen, mind racing, insides rebelling.

  This phone was tied to Jill’s present and Clare’s past. He could only imagine how, couldn’t know if the connection was more than tangential, but it all wrapped together somehow, and the one person who could explain was in a drug-induced coma.

  The words on the screen, chains to his brain and lead to his lungs, made it impossible to soothe the itch that so desperately needed scratching. He would have ignored Jill’s written warning if not for the chance, however small, that he might lose both mother and sister to impatience.

  He placed the phone on the bedside table, tugged a water bottle out of their supplies, set it beside the phone, pulled the blanket over Jill, and returned to sitting on the floor with notepad in his lap, no longer able to focus on the lie-woven tall tales, which might not have been so tall at all.

  Catherine Lefevre stuck in his head.

  Birth certificates stuck in his head—birth certificates that had no father. Except for the obvious DNA donation, the man didn’t exist outside Clare’s imagination. They’d never met him, never spoken to him, and never heard from him, yet Raymond had asked about him as if he’d mattered.

  Clare had shown them a picture once, when they were younger. Told them their father was from Russia, and that when they were ready she’d give them the story of his life. She never did. Not even when Jill, as a thirteen-year-old, had threatened to run away if she couldn’t go live with him—whoever he was, wherever he was—because anything was better than living with Clare.

  Never short on stories, she’d refused to tell them the one they wanted to hear.

  Instead, she’d looked Jill over, pressed h
er lips tight, and turned away with some bullshit about how, for Jill’s own safety, it was better not to know.

  They were sixteen, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, when she’d handed them a decade’s worth of shifting identities and told them they were old enough to decide what to do with their documents. She’d saved the birth certificates for last, hesitating like she had something to add, but in the end, she’d shoved those down into their tool bags with the rest.

  He’d known then it was a story he’d never hear.

  And he’d known then Clare was preparing to say good-bye.

  He’d just had no idea how soon.

  CHAPTER 20

  JACK

  AGE: 16

  LOCATION: NEAR THE US BORDERLANDS, MEXICO

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS

  NAMES: JOSE MANUEL VALERO SANTOS

  THE MEXICAN DESERT IN THE WINTER WAS STILL A VAST MOISTURE-SUCKING wilderness, just colder. They were two days out on foot, surrounded by rock, brush, and dry creek beds that stretched on in every direction under a merciless sun, and they were dangerously low on water. Perfect, really, if dying and never being found had been Clare’s plan.

  Jack leaned into the backpack on the ground behind him, took a costly glug from his dwindling water supply, and recapped the canteen. They’d calculated the distance, measuring liquid against its weight against time without a lot of room for error. They’d reached Error more than a day ago.

  It was all so ridiculously, unnecessarily stupid.

  He pulled off his trail boots.

  Best chance for walking out of this alive—besides a miraculous rain shower—was keeping his feet in good condition.

  He swapped sweaty socks for dry and laced back up.

  Jill, several paces to the right, did the same.

  Neither of them had the energy to talk. Neither of them wanted to talk, just like neither of them had wanted to make this trip—especially not the way Clare had insisted they make it—heading out into desolation to cross the border on foot as part of the undocumented flow of immigrants headed for a better life in the United States.

  They’d argued hard against the move when she first told them about it in Belmopan and had kept on arguing all the way to Zaragoza.

  She wouldn’t be dissuaded.

  There was no point in arguing now.

  It had to be done, she’d said. They were American citizens, and it was long past time they experienced their own culture and claimed their heritage.

  American citizens.

  That had come out of nowhere the night before last, dropped from her lips as matter-of-factly as if she’d said their jeans were blue. He’d gaped, speechless, torn between the urge to laugh out loud and the need to shove her own nonsense in her face.

  That would have been the thing if she was simply a bald-faced liar.

  The problem with Clare was that no matter how bizarre or inconsistent her statements got, she earnestly believed every word. In her upside-down world, offering French birth certificates one day and claims of American citizenship the next somehow made perfect sense, especially when wrapped within a plan to sneak paperless across the US border.

  He’d called her on the contradictions.

  Had bet the water in his canteen there’d be American documents waiting to be picked up on the other side, which meant the so-called American citizenship was as legitimate as any other legend they’d lived under: another identity, another role to assume, another game to play. That didn’t make it real.

  Unfazed, same as always, Clare had doubled down.

  By her accounting, as far as their government was concerned, her kids had been born in the United States and had never left, and she wanted to keep it that way. One day he’d understand. One day he’d thank her.

  He would have thanked her more if they’d just stayed in Belize.

  He had no desire to move to the United States.

  He’d met plenty of Americans over the years, had always found them loud and overly friendly, and they offered opinions on everything even when no one wanted to hear them. They were fun in small doses, visiting would have been fine, but living there until he turned eighteen was so far from what he wanted that the idea suffocated him.

  Worst would be the language.

  Clare hadn’t even started them on English until they were nearly ten, and because English was so widely understood, they’d rarely spoken it with each other. He’d struggled, botching words and sentence structure, his discomfort made worse by his obvious accent. Russian was his mother tongue, the language of choice between him and Jill. French came next. Even Spanish would have been a better fit than English.

  He’d said as much to Clare in his litany of arguments against the move.

  She’d laughed and, ignoring every other point, had told him if Spanish was what he wanted, then he’d do just fine in Texas.

  Her dismissal had only made him madder.

  Life had been so much easier when he’d worshipped the ground she walked on and accepted every one of her twisted turns of logic as a matter of fact.

  All he had now was a baseline of disbelief and second-guessing.

  Best he could hope for was that this was another stress test.

  Jack pulled the map from his pocket and took a compass reading. Come nightfall, he’d use the sextant to get a more accurate measure of where they were. He dotted the map, tucked it away, and watched from the corner of his eye as Clare haggled with the coyotes: human smugglers she’d hired in Zaragoza as guides to minimize the risk of getting caught crossing the border. They were brothers in their early thirties, lean and leathered, Sherpas of the desert who’d been making the trip for years.

  They’d bragged of their connections and quoted ridiculous prices for handing them off to partners on the other side, who’d then smuggle them around U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints and even out of Texas, if they were willing to pay a higher price.

  All Clare had wanted was to be guided to the best crossing and part ways.

  They’d pushed hard in the other direction, selling the value of their experience on the Mexican side to avoid Federales and paramilitary raiders from competing drug cartels, and a list of disasters that could put them in a grave before ever reaching the border. Full of exaggerated fearmongering, they’d talked down to her, as if, because she was a transient out of Central America, she was dirty and uneducated.

  The dirty part had had a little basis, considering they’d been on the road for weeks, and their gear out of Honduras had added a touch of authenticity. Central American transient had been plausible, too, when taking their foreign Spanish, dyed black hair, and darkened skin into account. But even if they’d gone with a full-blown disguise, only an idiot could have assumed they were uneducated, and these men, slimy, manipulative, greedy scum, weren’t idiots. That they were nearly out of water with miles to go had far more in common with extortion than with being lost, which meant the biggest flaw in this ordeal, outside of making the trip in the first place, had been relying on outsiders for any part of the journey. And Clare didn’t do flaws.

  The volume of the exchange went up a notch.

  Jack slid a shiv out of a shin strap.

  He could recognize a shakedown by the time he was six, had got shaken alone for the first time in Harare when he was eleven. He knew what this was. He just wasn’t sure who was shaking down whom.

  Jill, too, switched from hot and thirsty to alert and twitchy.

  Clare picked up her pack and hefted it to her shoulders.

  The younger coyote stretched, loosening his shirt, exposing a gun grip in its holster, like he was some caricature in a badly scripted Western.

  Clare moved away from him with cautious regard to potential danger.

  She wasn’t carrying. She’d always preferred stealth, smarts, speed, and lies as weapons, and the odds of a foreign trio being harassed while traveling a hodgepodge of ground transportation up from the Guatemalan border were too high, and the penalty for getting caught wit
h weapons in Mexico too big, to make carrying firearms worth the risk.

  Both men, loud and vocal, strode after her.

  Jack stood, reacting on instinct, years of training colliding with doubt and an unwillingness to make a game of life and death. Best as he could guess, two old S&W L-frame revolvers made up the entirety of the brothers’ armory. He scanned the area, alert to the unexpected that might come at them from behind. Numbers and distance and light and weight and lies and truth spun wild in a struggle to understand how far into another of Clare’s tests he’d fallen.

  Body language clashed with words and tone.

  These coyotes would steal a desperate mother’s last dollar, would take everything from her children, down to the packs on their backs. In all likelihood, the brothers would leave them here to die in the desert rather than waste the bullets needed to kill them, but Clare had known this before hiring them.

  Revolvers out, laughing without mirth, the brothers closed in on her.

  Jill left her pack on the ground and, one deliberate foot in front of the other, closed the gap until she was nearly at Clare’s side.

  The brothers laughed at her, too, careless with their weapons, crude in their gestures, taunting the little baby who thought she could rescue Mama and promising to turn her into a woman as soon as Mommy was gone.

  Jack played the shiv against his fingers. He moved closer.

  The brothers, alert to him, stopped laughing.

  In a rapid shift that said these men were no strangers to street warfare, they leveled their weapons at his chest and Clare’s head. If they were smarter, less sexist, they’d have focused on Jill, who was creeping incrementally closer.

  Clare, voice low and steady, said, “You’ve been paid. You’re free to leave. We’ll finish the journey on our own.”

  Little Brother backhanded her hard across the face.

  Jack’s stomach clenched, and his head swam.

  Against his better judgment, he took another step forward.

  Big Brother met him partway.