The Keystone: Finding Home

by Seren Goode

  We were probably getting played. And wouldn’t that be the biggest life lesson Waters taught us?

  Chapter 10

  The Stones

  I stretched and winced, my muscles protesting. This time, Waters put a new twist on our training, a much more physical one, and I ached everywhere, but at least I didn’t get hit by a car like Shim. Actually, he had hit the car. I imagine it still hurt.

  Waters had hooked us up with these parkour guys. The brothers loved it but were still learning to land moves. I had flopped around like a fish out of water and had several painful and embarrassing face plants I was still trying to live down.

  At least we were no longer sleeping on the hardwood floor. I swear, I was getting splinters in my backside. When we had realized we were going to be with Waters for a while, the twins had purchased sleeping bags, and we had cleaned out one of the upstairs rooms in the old Victorian. It didn’t feel like home, but by piling cheap foam pads on the floor in a nest, we could huddle together in our bags in the illusion of safety.

  I heard the mechanical whine of Jaxon squeezing Duchess while he slept. It had been a week before he had stopped guarding her like Shim was going to ship her back, tail between her legs, in the middle of the night. We all still kept her close, worried Waters would find her and sell her off. Jaxon had taken to sleeping with her curled up in his arms, which no one mentioned but everyone had agreed was one step away from having a teddy bear. It made Jaxon happy—well, it made him less grumpy.

  As part of my nightly ritual, I reached up to my necklace and fingered the flat metal. I contemplated calling Shim. That didn’t sound right. I wasn’t dialing up his neurons. Contacting was a better word for it. I pulled my hand back. I was still pretty nervous about some of the things Waters had us doing. True, we were just lifting wallets off each other now, but I knew where it was heading.

  Across the room, silhouetted by the moonlight streaming through the window, I saw Shim roll onto his back and slip his hand into his pocket, tugging the ring free of the denim. It glittered as he spun it on his finger, then hooked it onto his thumb and brushed the center stone with his index finger. My hand was already on the necklace, fingers moving to the stone. It was like a magnet drawing my touch.

  Before I could say anything, Shim asked, “So…what happened with your mother?”

  I groaned. Now I had to talk to him.

  Every night since “first contact”—communication through the stones seems worthy of a science fiction name—I thought he was going contact me, and I got nothing. At first, I had wanted to talk to him. There were a million questions jumping around in my head, from how the stones worked, to my suspicions of Waters. Whatever he was training us for, I was not okay with it. I thought about leaving, finding my father on my own. But how would I even begin to do that?

  So, every night, I would hold onto that damn stone in the necklace and practically glare at Shim across the room. And what would Shim do? Roll over, showing his back, and go to sleep. And during the day, he was completely unapproachable and moodier than Jaxon. Plus, I didn’t think we should talk about stuff in front of Waters. It just felt like it would be a mistake.

  I’d finally gotten used to the cold shoulder. And now he wanted to talk—about my mother?

  “So, what happened to your mother?” He asked again.

  I wondered if the stone had a “Do Not Disturb” button. Rolling onto my back, I stared up at the ceiling. Did I want to do this?

  “She left.” Guess we were doing this.

  “When?” Shim asked.

  “The accident was last year.”

  “Accident?”

  See, this was why I didn’t want to talk about it. It was so much more complicated than most people wanted to hear. People liked clean stories. She died, or she left, I got over it, the end. At least, I thought it was the end. But this story was harder than that. And I never really got over it.

  “Tell me,” he coaxed.

  Closing my eyes, I let go of the fear and concentrated on his voice.

  “She was a diver and volunteered on a team documenting the floor of the Monterey Bay. She often went out on her own, though she always let people know when and where she was going.”

  “Is it safe to go on your own?”

  “It is if you are good. It can be safer than going with someone who isn’t really experienced. And she was—is—a really good diver and swimmer. She loved—loves—the water. Master swimmer, diver, and sailor. She taught me.”

  “You can sail?”

  “Yeah. My dad sold the sloop a few weeks after she died. We loved that boat. There was a time when the three of us lived on it for several years. It was more home to me than any apartment we had ever rented. He said we needed the money, which was always true, but I think he couldn’t bear to look at it anymore.”

  “So, what happened? She went out diving and—”

  “—and didn’t come back. A couple of fishermen found our boat adrift.” I paused. This was where the story gets tricky. “They called in the authorities, who searched for a while and sent down divers. The other members of her team searched for her. They found her gear on the seafloor a couple of miles away.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, they say that meant something happened after she got back in the boat. Maybe her gear fell in and she jumped in to try and rescue it.”

  “You said ‘they say that.’ What do you think happened?”

  I was surprised; people never asked me that. They just told me what they thought happened. “I thought…at first, I didn’t believe it. I know she couldn’t die in some diving accident. She wouldn’t go in after her gear. And even if she had, she was a very strong swimmer. If she didn’t die, and she didn’t come back. Then…” I left things hanging.

  “Then you thought she left.”

  “Yeah, at first.”

  “Anything else to back that up?”

  “Well, my dad. He and my mom were very close. But after the accident, I don’t know, he changed, checked out. I don’t know what to call it.”

  “He was sad?”

  “Profoundly. He sunk into a deep funk. Counselor at my old school said he was depressed. She was going to try and talk to him, but we left that school too. He never speaks about her dying, always about her being gone. He got even more paranoid, and he sold the boat and everything else we had registered. Kept our van, but he got new license plates for the old VW. We moved several times in a row, so many he didn’t even try to put me in school, and we changed our names a couple times.” Oddly, I realized even though we moved up and down the coast several times, we still ended up back near Monterey on the Central Coast. Like he couldn’t be too far away from where he had last seen her.

  “He thought the authorities lied about what had happened to her?”

  “He never specifically disagreed with them, and his sadness is real. It oozes from every pore of his body as if she haunts him. I didn’t believe for a long time, resisted. I kept making up reasons why she had left us; I was angry. I’ve heard stories about parents who couldn’t take it and just walked away, and our life was crazy. But finally, I gave up and tried to grieve.” Before I knew it, my whole miserable life story was spilling out of me—well, the highlights—and to my surprise, he listened, interjecting questions at different parts and laughing at the appropriate places.

  Born, constantly moved, homeschooled, Mom died, moved more, bullied at school, took care of Dad, more moving, ended up here. It was a short story when I thought about it.

  I’d had enough of talking about me. It made me sad. I started poking questions back at him. “Why did you steal the ring from your mom?”

  Shim groaned and, after a long pause, confessed, “I didn’t. I caught Logan stealing it, so I took it back from him.”

  “Logan is your dad, right?”

  There was a
long pause before Shim answered, “That’s what they say. But he makes me call him Logan.”

  I hesitated. What did he…did he mean… “What do you mean ‘that’s what they say?’”

  “I’m being stupid. Ignore that comment.” From across the room, I could hear Shim’s deep exhalation.

  “Well, no. That’s a rather important comment. Do you think—” I didn’t have the slightest idea how to put into words what I was thinking, and I really didn’t want to hurt Shim.

  “—don’t say it. I can’t— just don’t say it. I know I don’t fit there. I know I’m nothing like him. But I’ve not even allowed myself to think it, so don’t say it…please.” Shim trailed off, the last word a faint whisper in my head.

  Okay, time to change the subject. “…So the ring?”

  “Yeah, the ring. Logan doesn’t care about things; he cares about control.” Shim’s voice lost the uncertainty. “If you do what he wants, you can usually stay off his shit list. If you don’t, well, he puts you in your place, usually by taking something you care about and making sure you don’t see it again. He knew Kindle cared about the ring because she NEVER takes it off. That’s why he took it. If I hadn’t seen him, the ring would have been gone forever.”

  “What did he do when he caught you?”

  Shim didn’t respond.

  “Are you afraid of him?”

  No response.

  “Do you think your mom knew what the ring could do?”

  “Kindle had the ring a long time. How could she not?” Shim finally responded, then paused. “Usually, you know everything that’s on Kindle’s mind—because she is yelling it at you. But she never made a noise about you guys or the others. I think, that is what has me most concerned—her silence.”

  Chapter 11

  Graduation Day

  The next morning, I woke feeling optimistic. For years, I had stumbled around trying to be as least disruptive as possible to my world and the people around me. In a way, I had been sneaking through life. Now, I’m a proactive part of my own story. I had no idea how we would face what was coming next or how we were going to find our parents, but I was doing something to make it happen.

  After unzipping my sleeping bag and crawling out, I neatly folded it, then took my turn in the bathroom. We had figured out an ingenious workaround for no running water that involved different buckets for different task. With my teeth freshly brushed and face still wet, I headed downstairs to join the others, my mom’s necklace thunking comfortably against my collarbone. For the last two weeks, Shim and I had been talking every night through the stones. Sometimes, it would be a long discussion, like the night I told him about my mom. Other times, it was just a quick check-in. Maybe those stones messed with the wiring in my head, programming out fear and replacing it with misguided confidence.

  Or maybe finally being able to talk about all the things that worried me somehow released them into the universe and allowed me to step back with a fresh perspective and rebalance, instilling new confidence—no, more likely it was the rewiring thing.

  My euphoric state burst, like an overfilled water balloon, when Waters announced his plans for our Graduation Day, and all that newfound confidence swished out of me like someone had flushed a functioning toilet.

  ∞

  A couple of hours later, we stood on a busy sidewalk and stared up at a large building that looked like it had been turned inside out, all the metal structure exposed around the smooth shell.

  Over a breakfast of power bars eaten while squatting on the kitchen floor, Waters declared classes were done, and we were ready to graduate. We had hopped on a Muni bus along the waterfront, then the light rail down Market Street, getting off at Seventh. Staring up at the fortress, he made his big announcement.

  “That’s it.” He had a hard smile on his face, one I now recognized as meaning he had scented money. “In three days, this is where you are going in.”

  My jaw dropped. The San Francisco Federal Building? He wanted us to break into government property? Fabulous. Petty thieves to felons in just weeks. Really, Waters should write plots for movies. No one else would believe the stuff we did.

  I looked around at the others. They were staring up at the building, a little glassy-eyed. My fingers played with my collar bone as I caught myself unconsciously reaching up for the necklace again. All morning, I fought the urge to use the stone to contact Shim, torn between wanting to check in every minute and wanting to keep the stones a secret.

  I’m not sure why I thought talking to Shim would help. He was a Jekyll and Hyde roulette. There was the Shim I saw in front of me—bullying his brother, distant, silent, calculating—and the one I knew in my head—funny, smart, insightful, a little too perceptive. Maybe having the Shim I talked to in my head being so very different from the one I saw each day in person was normal. Were all guys like that? I hadn’t gotten to know very many to find out.

  I glared at Shim, and his eyes widened as he made sure I could see his hand slide into his pocket before he casually turned his back on everyone and walked off a few feet. I ran my finger over the stone at my throat.

  “What?” He husked out.

  “What?” I replied indignantly. “What? What do you think?”

  “I know.” His shoulders slumped. “This seems a little crazy.”

  “You think?” I knew I was freaking out, but that warm fuzzy feeling of assurance I had woken up with was gone…completely. “We could go to jail for this.”

  “We could,” Shim agreed.

  “Hard time. Like, they would try us as adults.”

  “I know.” His shoulders sagged, and he turned around. The others were distracted. Breeze and Skylar were deep into their own discussion, and Jaxon was having a staring contest with Waters. “I don't like this anymore than you do. Do we have a choice?”

  I thought about that. I believed you always had a choice. Beyond right and wrong, good and evil, and all the subtler shades of grey, you always had a choice. Maybe not good ones, maybe not better ones, but every path branched off into choices—and outcomes. What would we be giving up in information from Waters if we didn't pass his final test?

  “I don't know if I can do this.”

  “I know.” The flush of relief hit hard. He didn’t have to agree, but he understood.

  “I mean, gah, he is such a weasel!” I tried not to let my frustration show as I vented to Shim. “He gives us a place to stay and knowledge to stay safe on the streets, but on the flip side, I know he is using us, and I see how he eyes our bags.” We had all seen the gleam in Waters’ eye when he caught us rooting around in our backpacks for something. And we knew he had noticed we never left the bags behind. Someone was always watching or wearing them. “He would rob us in a heartbeat.”

  “Unless—”

  “Unless?”

  “Whatever he thinks we can do for him here is more valuable than what he thinks we have in the backpacks? What if this”—Shim's eyes shot up to look at the huge metal structure beside us—“what if breaking into this building has been his end-game all along?”

  I thought about it. But if that was true, then how do we beat him at this game? Shim must have been reading my face.

  “We have to be smarter than him. Whatever he wants from here, we have to make sure he doesn't get it until we have what we want from him.” This was the only hope we had of getting the information we needed from Waters, and when I thought about it, there was another problem.

  “We have to be ready for anything and ready to run, or else we will never be free.” This had been a worry of mine for a while, that Waters might string us along, making us pass test after test, eking out little bits of information to us, piece by piece.

  “Should we tell the others?” Shim asked.

  “To be ready?”

  “Yes, and about our suspicions”—he hesitated—“and m
aybe about the stones and how we can talk through them?”

  I thought about it. It would be so easy to screw the whole thing up. Someone is going to get hurt because of the decision you make. Every taunt that had ever been thrown at me boiled down to that. Screwup. Loser. Chicken…And I was—I was chickenshit. Well, I had been. It was time I changed that. Right or wrong, I was going to take some action to change my future.

  “Yes, yes, and no.” I declared firmly. “We tell them our suspicions of Waters, we see what he wants, then we figure out how to beat him. We keep the stones as a backup.” I paused. Was my desire to keep the secret of the stones only to hold on to my connection with this inner Shim—the one so different from the guy I had come to know in real life? Maybe, partially. But it felt like the right decision. It was risky to tell them. Waters might get to one of the others, might get them to talk somehow. The stones were too important to become part of Waters’ product line.

  ∞

  “The San Francisco Federal Building offers a frank, contemporary response to its context, but more importantly, it establishes a benchmark for sustainable design in its use of natural energy sources.” Breeze read the architect’s description of the building aloud as Skylar snapped photos of the lobby.

  The self-tour was an ingenious way for us to infiltrate the building. Most Federal buildings were pretty tight with security, but this facility was funded to educate in sustainability, and so it provided greater access to “the people,” i.e., us, to view, or scope out, the modern landmark.

  Our three days of planning were up, and we were narrowing in on our target, specifically a coin on the desk of some guy who worked on the ninth floor. Waters had a source who claimed the coin had a username and password taped to the bottom.

  It was actually more complicated than just a little B&E, and it all started because of Breeze. Weeks ago, while we were watching our parents being abducted, that baby Einstein had been the only one smart enough to snap a photo of the van that took them away and email it to herself. We would never have found out about this, except during one of Waters demos, Breeze got hit by a case of Krispy Kremes that Jaxon and Shim were fighting over and ended up with a fat lip. She was moping about with a bit of ice pressed to the wound, mourning the loss of her phone and the inevitable selfie she would have taken, when she mentioned the last photo she took, real casual like it wasn’t the most significant breakthrough we’d had since finding Jonas’ shop.