Kill the Messenger

23

Tyler knew every inch of the building, from the secret hole in the ceiling of the apartment’s bathroom, where Jace hid stuff, to the loading dock below, the storerooms, the closets, the space under the cupboard at the back of the employee break room, where Tyler sometimes hid to eavesdrop on Chi and the others.

He was small for his age, which helped in his efforts to go unnoticed. It would have helped even more if his hair was black and he didn’t stand out like a yellow duck among the Chinese. He had dyed it once when he was eight, buying a box of Clairol that had been on clearance at the drugstore for $3.49.

The process had been a lot messier than he had counted on. By the time he finished, his head was black, his ears were black, his neck was black, his hands were black—on account of the latex gloves included in the package had been way too large for him and had kept coming off. He had the stuff on his forehead, smeared across one cheek, and dotted on the tip of his nose.

Jace had said that for a smart kid he did some pretty stupid things, and Tyler had spent the next few hours scrubbing the bathroom with Comet. And then he’d gotten a good scrubbing himself.

It had taken weeks for the stuff to come out. The kids at the school he went to were mostly Chinese. They had made fun of him until his hair had grown out enough to buzz the dyed stuff off. In another couple of weeks he had started to look like that yellow duck again.

Now when he wanted to be anonymous, he wore a faded black sweatshirt with a hood. The shirt was Jace’s from who knew when, and who knew who had had it before him. It was soft with age, and the color Tyler imagined a ghost would be, like fog over darkness. The sleeves were long enough to cover his hands to the tips of his fingers, the hood so deep it swallowed his face.

Going unnoticed was a skill Tyler had honed from an early age. Jace always wanted to protect him from everything, shelter him like he was a baby or something. But Tyler wanted to know everything about everything. Knowledge was power. Knowledge diminished the chance of unpleasant surprises. Forewarned was forearmed.

Tyler believed all of these things. He was just a little kid, and too small to control his world by physical means, but he had an IQ of 168. He had taken all kinds of tests on the Internet. Real tests, not the stupid, made-up kind. His brain was his strength, and the more he could learn—through books, through observation, by experimentation—the stronger he became. He might never be able to push around someone like Chi, but he would always be able to outsmart him.

He stayed back inside the hood now as he cracked open the door of the broom closet just down the hall from Madame Chen’s office, and spied Chi with his ear to the office door, trying to listen in. Tyler had never liked Chi. He was always tense and sour. Grandfather Chen said Chi had swallowed the seeds of jealousy as a child, and that the roots were now intertwined with every part of him, and nothing would ever dig them out.

Jace had been late coming home. Again. Tyler had watched for him out the small window in the bathroom, had seen him drive in, had watched him standing like a statue beside the car, as if he was trying to decide what to do next. As soon as he had headed for Madame Chen’s office, Tyler had grabbed his secret cloak of invisibility and beat it downstairs in his stocking feet, scurrying like a little mouse to get to the broom closet.

He knew something was wrong, and he knew it was worse than Jace just taking a fall from The Beast. He had known it the instant Jace had spoken to him the night before. There had been a tension in him. He hadn’t quite looked Tyler in the eyes when he’d said he’d had an accident and that was all.

Tyler was sensitive that way. Because he’d spent a lot of time observing people, listening to people, studying people without them knowing he was studying them, he had developed an uncanny sense of whether or not a person was telling the truth. He knew Jace hadn’t been, but Tyler had been too scared to call him on it.

Grandfather Chen said lies could be more dangerous than vipers. Tyler believed him.

But now, as he crouched in the broom closet that shared part of an uninsulated wall with Madame Chen’s office, he wondered if the truth wasn’t just as bad.

The police thought Jace had killed a guy! Tyler’s eyes filled as his mind raced, picturing all the things Jace was saying about going to jail and child services dragging him—Tyler—off to foster care.

Tyler didn’t want to have to give up his home, or the school Madame Chen had gotten him into, a small private school where no one seemed to think it strange at all that a Chinese woman showed up for his parent-teacher conferences. His stomach started to hurt at the idea of being forced to leave Madame Chen and Grandfather Chen, being forced to go live with strangers.

Strangers wouldn’t know what he was like, what he liked to eat, what he liked to do. Strangers wouldn’t know that even though he had an IQ of 168, he was still a kid, and sometimes he was afraid of stupid stuff like the dark or a bad dream. How would strangers understand that?

Maybe they would be good people, and mean well, and try hard—Madame Chen and Grandfather Chen had been strangers once, he reminded himself—but maybe they wouldn’t be. And no matter what they were, good or bad, they wouldn’t be family.

Tyler barely remembered his mother. When he thought of her, he thought of the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, the scent of her skin. What specific memories he did have, he wasn’t sure his brain hadn’t manufactured. He knew that could happen, that the brain could fill in the blanks, and bridge the gaps between real events and what might have happened, or what a person wished had happened.

Tyler wished a lot of things. He wished his mother hadn’t died. He wished they could all live in a house together—a house like families on television lived in, like in those old shows like Leave It to Beaver—him and Jace and their mom. And he wished they had a dad, but they didn’t.

And he wished now with all his heart that Jace wasn’t in trouble, that there wasn’t a chance of him going away and never coming back.

Tyler tucked himself into a little ball with his arms wrapped around his legs, and his cheek pressed against his knees, and he held himself tight like that, squeezing his eyes shut against the burning tears.

It wouldn’t do him any good to cry, no matter how much he wanted to. He had to think. He had to try to gather as much information as he could, and lay it all out, and reason through it, and come up with some ideas of what to do and how to help. That was what he was supposed to do with his 168 IQ.

But even knowing that, he was still a little kid, and he’d never been so scared in his life.