The Doubt Factory

26

ALIX SAT IN AP CHEM, staring out at the sunshine. Another hot spring day, with everyone wilting and complaining that for a rich school, Seitz ought to be able to figure out how to get its AC right. All of them sticky and bored in the heat, and all of them stuck in neutral, waiting for the clock to run out and real life to start.

Sophie texted her under the table. GOING OUT. YOU WANT TO?

Sure.

Whatever.

Cynthia was gone.

Moses hadn’t been seen again.

2.0 had disappeared entirely, like they’d evaporated into the hot spring sunshine. Poof, gone. A strange hallucination that left everyone shaken but fundamentally unchanged.

Alix thought about the whole thing often. She couldn’t stop thinking about the moment when she’d handed the USB stick to her father. The moment when she’d been on the verge of doing something dangerous and against the grain, and then stopped short. The moment when she decided not to go play in the traffic.

Safe, because she loved her family.

Safe.

She couldn’t help wondering what might have happened. If there were an alternate-reality version of Alix Banks who’d plugged that USB stick into her father’s computer and unleashed the fury of the universe.

Maybe that Alix had ended up as a smashed hood ornament on the front of a Lexus, but this one was fine.

Shaken, but fine.

Shaken, until, after a little while, she shook the fear off. And then what did she have? An odd little story that she was starting to doubt more and more as time passed. There wasn’t even anything she could point to to say that her near miss with the mysterious-dangerous-whatever had even been real. 2.0 was gone.

Not a trace.

Poof! Gone!

A magic trick.

Now you see it, now you don’t.

It pissed the FBI off, royally.

Not only had Williams & Crowe failed to notify them that they were about to go after a target of FBI interest, but they’d lost them entirely. Terrorist cells weren’t supposed to just evaporate into thin air, and yet 2.0 had managed the impossible. Pictures of Moses and Cynthia circulated. A few blurry photos from the rave had been recovered, showing Adam, the beautiful blond DJ. And then… nothing. Every lead was a dead end.

Cynthia turned out to be a ghost: Stolen SSN, false history, a PO box for an address. Surveillance tapes never seemed to catch any of them.

Moses showed up on a couple of tapes from when he’d punched the headmaster, but even then he always seemed to know which way to turn his back so that it was impossible to get a clear look at his face.

Moses was a phantom. Cynthia was the most solid lead they had, and she petered out. Maybe her father really had worked in tech and done data mining. Maybe she really had been accepted to Stanford. Or maybe it was all lies, because no one could dig up a likeness. And the rest of them?

A kid whose aunt worked with asbestos? No good records.

Some gutter punk girl? You could find them on every street in every city in America.

Some Latino foster kid with an asthma problem? Nobody even bothered to keep track.

Of course, the FBI went over the factory with a fine forensic comb, but it had been full of human detritus from the huge rave that 2.0 had thrown. If there was decent physical evidence of anything at all, it was hopelessly obscured. What they did come up with were a lot of banners and a whole host of surveillance cameras that seemed to observe every angle of the factory.

The FBI tech who had studied them reported that they’d been sending encrypted signals to… nothing at all. Some kind of nearby local network that no longer existed. Still, they’d managed to match a pattern and connected to another local net that led onto another—link after link in an anonymous chain that eventually dead-ended in Estonia, and left investigators pulling their hair in frustration. They had nothing.

Well, rats. They had a lot of rats. 2.0 had left the rats with a sign that said FREE TO GOOD HOME. Those were the rats that Alix had seen at the rave. It turned out that they’d been heisted from the same testing facility as the ones 2.0 had used in the school. A private lab that had been involved in evaluating Tank’s asthma drug, the one that supposedly caused comas.

Williams & Crowe had confiscated the rats as evidence, along with several vats of Azicort, the bronchial dilator, and a long screed from 2.0 about pharmaceutical companies doing suspect testing. According to the banners, the rats in question were being used by George Saamsi and Kimball-Geier to prove Azicort was a safe substance suitable for use on chronic asthma.

It looked as though the rats had been meant to be released in another massive wave, reminiscent of the prank at Seitz, but by the time the cages had opened, most of the rats had already died of a different kind of respiratory failure—choking to death on pepper spray and tear gas.

Everyone admitted it was a lot of dead rats.

In the end, after hours and hours of investigations, the FBI came up with nothing. 2.0 was gone. Disappeared into the wind, leaving behind a fading memory of their oddball pranks and little else.

If the misfits of 2.0 were still out there, they had probably moved on. At least, that’s what the FBI said. They’d resurface. And in the meantime, the FBI was patient. It had other investigations and other emergencies that were more pressing. Alix’s father was given the name of an agent in charge of their case, and the FBI packed up and moved out.

A few weeks later Williams & Crowe left, too, taking Lisa and their armored SUVs with them.

Alix was hugely relieved to see Death Barbie go, not least because she couldn’t help but get the feeling that Lisa blamed her for getting the Williams & Crowe security people locked in the cages in the first place. It had taken hours to get them all out. They’d eventually resorted to using cutting torches.

After that, Lisa had trailed her everywhere and Alix had meekly submitted to her guard. Neither of them suggested that Alix deserved to have time to herself or that Death Barbie had been overly protective—one of those irritating moments when the adults had read the situation better than Alix had and subsequently let her know that she was now on thin ice and had to earn her way back into their good graces.

But now, finally, Death Barbie was gone, and Alix was left feeling…

Lonely?

God, Alix, you are so lame.

She didn’t have a bodyguard and a spy living with her 24-7. She should have been grateful for that much at least. Sophie and Denise were still here, and boys like James kept asking her out. And Derek was always good for a laugh, even if he didn’t have Cynthia to try to compete against anymore. Derek was ridiculously relieved to find out that Cynthia had actually been a graduated senior.

“I was having major inadequacy issues,” he admitted. “I was studying all the time.”

Days slipped by. Alix went to the occasional Mom-and-Dad-sanctioned party. She rolled toward finals, and everything was fine, in theory.

Except… What?

She’d gotten her SAT results, and they were great, but her first thought was that she should tell Cynthia, who had helped prep her. And then she realized once again that Cynthia was gone.

That girl was like getting your braces off. The smooth, slippery feeling of nothingness, where there should have been something.

Alix looked at her SAT scores and wondered why she didn’t care at all. It all felt so fake. Like she was one of those lab rats that they run chemical tests on. You took the tests, you ran through the maze, you got the score… then they chopped out your brain to check for tumors.

The sound of books being gathered up startled Alix. Even more startling was that it was last period, and she’d somehow managed to drift all the way through the last half of school, without taking much notice of anything at all.

Jonah was standing outside her classroom door, waiting for her. He started jabbering about how Mr. Ambrose was a Nazi for docking him a grade.

“Who gives a damn how I format my bio notebook?” he kept saying as they climbed into Alix’s cherry-red MINI. “I should have gotten a perfect score.”

“Yeah. He screwed me with that, too,” Alix said absently.

Cynthia had gotten a perfect score on her SATs, Alix remembered. She knew how the SATs were built, top to bottom, and had happily tutored Alix.

It was just a test, she’d said.

“You can make the mistake of thinking test scores say something about you,” she’d said when Alix had expressed awe at Cynthia’s numbers. “But they don’t. They’re just something they use to put you in a box.”

At the time, Alix had taken her words for false humility and as a sop to Alix in case she royally screwed the test. After all, Cynthia had gotten a perfect score. But now Alix knew that not only had Cynthia gotten a perfect score, but she’d also walked away from it all to run with 2.0, a surreal gang of OCD crazypants kids dedicated to some other game entirely.

Different rats, running a different kind of maze.

Cynthia, good girl gone bad; a different rat in a different maze, passing a different kind of test.

Tests.

Alix remembered Moses handing her the USB stick.

There were all kinds of tests, and Alix couldn’t decide if she’d failed or passed hers. She’d gotten away from 2.0. She’d warned her father. She’d protected her family—

“Are you even listening to me?” Jonah asked.

Alix realized she’d been sitting in the car with the engine running.

“Sure,” Alix said as she put the MINI in reverse. “Why? What did you say?”

“Fuckin’ A, you’re getting as bad as Dad,” Jonah said. “You never pay attention anymore.”

“I do, too, pay attention.” Alix pulled out of the school parking lot, heading for home.

“Ever since that whole thing with 2.0, you’ve been acting weird.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Yeah, you have.”

“My freak show brother is telling me that I’ve been weird?”

“You know what I think?” Jonah said. “I think you miss being caged up by 2.0.”

Alix glared at him. “Take that back.”

Jonah grinned, completely unrepentant. “Oh come on. I bet it was way more interesting being all caged up like that. Kidnapped, by the mysteriously hot leader of the outlaw gang 2.0…” he trailed off suggestively.

“You are one screwed-up—” Alix glimpsed movement on the sidewalk and slammed on her brakes. There was a familiar figure cutting between the cars along the street.

Oh my God.

Black guy in a bomber jacket.

Moses.

Her heart lurched. The guy turned his head. The world righted itself. Not Moses at all. Just some random guy. He didn’t even look like Moses. He had a goatee, and it was graying. He was just some old guy.

Ick.

Alix watched the man unlock his BMW and climb in.

Jonah smirked knowingly as she got the MINI going again. “That wasn’t 2.0,” he said.

“Fuck off,” she said.

“Bet you’re disappointed,” Jonah goaded.

“Seriously, Jonah. Fuck off. If you keep this up, I swear I’ll make you walk home.”

Her brother snorted, but at least he shut up.

Alix’s heart was still hammering from that first glimpse of the man. Something about the way he’d moved or his style had triggered the response. Adrenaline and fear and surprise… and… what? Something else that she didn’t really want to look at, and didn’t like Jonah poking at.

PTSD was what her shrink was calling it.

And not just about Moses. The 2.0 crew all tended to trigger her. Sometimes it was Moses. Other times, Cynthia. Blue hair immediately reminded her of the hacker girl, Kook. Willowy blond boys could make her see Adam. Alix had even hallucinated that she’d spied Tank once, a skate rat barreling down the sidewalk.

Alix’s shrink warned that there might be depression after all of Alix’s stress incidents and recommended medication to combat the lethargy and forgetfulness that Alix had started exhibiting. After all, Alix had stopped getting out of bed on time. She’d forgotten Jonah at school twice. She’d started skipping track and field practice because she just couldn’t muster the will to care whether she remained on the team. As far as Mom and Dr. Ballantine were concerned, these were hanging offenses.

“It’s just running on track,” Alix had protested. “It’s not like I’m failing school, Mom.”

“It’s just not like you,” Mom replied. “You never lay around the house like this. You never watch TV like this. Or play that game all the time…”

“Skyrim.”

“It’s not like you. Sophie called again, you know.”

Sophie, wanting to go out and do… something. Shop for lipstick or try to find a dress that would make her size 6 look like a size 2 or… whatever. Alix couldn’t be bothered. She had dragons to kill—on the Xbox that it turned out 2.0 had bugged, right inside her own house.

When Alix had told them that Cynthia was a double agent, Williams & Crowe had been delighted because it helped explain the listening devices they’d started discovering all around the Banks’ property.

Cynthia had been good at what she did, that was for sure. Everything about that girl had been a lie.

So Alix had ended up at Dr. Ballantine’s office, listening to the woman drone on about kidnapping and stress and trigger this and trigger that.

Dr. Ballantine had an abstract oil-smear painting on one wall. Alix would stare at the browns and reds, and fantasize about smashing it on Dr. Ballantine’s head, and then she ended up wondering if that was a sign that she really was somehow going crazy.

She could almost hear Mom saying, “Violence isn’t like you, Alix.”

Alix wasn’t like Alix.

If she’d been smarter about hiding how she was feeling, she’d have been able to avoid the couch sessions, but instead, she’d ended up talking to Dr. Ballantine while the shrink made notes.

“Were you scared?” Dr. Ballantine had asked.

“Of course I was scared. But I’m fine now. I mean, I got out all right.”

“Are you scared now?”

Alix shrugged. “No.”

Yes.

No?

Yes?

Not really.

Alix didn’t know how she felt.

“Are you still skipping track and field?”

“I dropped it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not a real thing. Who cares if you win or lose?”

“Some people care.”

Alix rolled her eyes. “Well, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

Because it’s all bullshit, Alix wanted to say, but that would just start up another line of questioning about why she felt that running was bullshit, and the only answer to that was that she couldn’t help but think that every time she went out onto the track to run around and around the that damn oval, Moses would be sitting up there in the crowd, watching from behind his reflective aviator lenses, and laughing at the goofy things rich kids did with their spare time while he and his crew were busily hacking together another crazed attack on “the man.”

Moses and the 2.0 crew had played a different game. The games of high school seemed silly and small after that.

Alix realized that Jonah was looking at her worriedly. Again.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Sure you are,” he said. “Are you taking that Xanax or whatever Dr. Ballantine says you should take?”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I wouldn’t,” Jonah said. “They’ll make you fuzzy. Fuzzier,” he amended, looking at her critically.

“How would you know?”

Jonah gave her an exasperated look that reminded Alix of Mom when she was trying to get Jonah to pay attention to her, and that made her realize how differently he was acting generally. He hadn’t been running off. He was always where he was supposed to be after school. Hell, he was practically always around, just like he’d been waiting outside her classroom when she came out of class He was bitching about his grades, she realized with a start.

He’s keeping an eye on you. And then she almost laughed out loud at the sudden surge of affection she felt for her ADHD caretaking little pain-in-the-ass brother.

“Do you want to go get coffee?” she asked abruptly.

“Seriously? You think I need to be more wired?”

Alix laughed and pulled into the Starbucks. The girl at the counter looked like Cynthia. Alix stifled shock/nostalgia/fear/camaraderie as she handed across her credit card. PTSD. It will keep happening, but less and less, Dr. Ballantine claimed. For now, though, every time Alix saw a girl with long lustrous black hair, she was sure it was Cynthia.

And, of course, it was always some other Asian girl, and then Alix would hear Cynthia say contemptuously, “Her? She’s not even Chinese. She’s Vietnamese. We’re not all the same, you know…”

As Alix and Jonah made their way back to the car, Alix deliberately made herself look at every single person in the parking lot, proving to herself that she wasn’t seeing any more Cynthias or Adams or Kooks or Tanks or Moseses. None of them were here. They were all gone.

Alix put the car in drive and got them back out on the road while Jonah prattled about whatever Jonah prattled about now.

The FBI and Williams & Crowe had assured her that 2.0 had moved on, probably dedicated to wreaking havoc elsewhere. There was no one stalking her. There was no one peering in through the windows of her house. There was no one watching over her.

Jonah punched her shoulder. “Are you even listening to me?” he demanded.

“What?”

“You just ran that stop sign!”

“I did?”

“Yeah. And you stopped at the crossing before, where there wasn’t one.”

“I guess I’m distracted.”

Jonah groaned. “You are so going to get me killed.”

“Do you ever wonder about the kind of work Dad does?”

Jonah gave her a surprised look. “Are you still thinking about all that 2.0 stuff?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Kind of.”

Someone honked behind her.

Alix stepped on the gas and then, in a split-second decision, swerved for the turnpike entrance.

“Where are we going?” Jonah yelped as he grabbed for a door handle.

“Who cares? I don’t want to go home right now.”

“Is this a kidnapping?” Jonah asked.

“I just want to drive. I’m sick of people looking at me and asking me if I’m okay.”

“Welcome to my world.” Jonah snorted.

Alix gunned the MINI. They shot up the on-ramp to merge with turnpike traffic, rolling north toward Hartford. Alix rolled down her window, trying to enjoy the rush of noise.

“As long as we’re driving…” Jonah hooked his phone into the stereo, and pretty soon they were arguing about whether he was really going to try to play Raggaeton in her car while she was driving. Wind whipped Alix’s hair. Jonah turned up the music, full of swagger and Spanish and innuendo.

It felt good to drive.

You could just keep on driving. Just keep going. Don’t stop. See how far you can go. Just fuck it and bail.

Alix wondered if this was what it had been like for Cynthia when she walked away from a Stanford education to join up with 2.0.

It was an insane choice. Like a train jumping its track and then deciding it was supposed to be a lear jet, instead. Girls like Cynthia didn’t belong in gangs of pranking, political crazies. And yet she’d joined Moses and the rest of the crew. Cynthia had done everything perfectly. She’d gotten the perfect scores. Gotten the perfect acceptance letters. She’d shown herself she could do it, and then she’d walked away.

Alix thought of all the students at Seitz, every one of them Ivy League crazy. Like horses with their jockeys whipping them forward from their starting gates, trained to gallop, to clear their hurdles… And then there was Cynthia, who, after being given the winner’s cup, had thrown it down and walked away.

And for what?

Moses. The crazy prophet, leading his crazy crew right off the crazy cliff on the way to crazy town.

And because her father was dead, a voice reminded her.

So she said, Alix reminded herself. Cynthia’s father was dead from Marcea’s heart attack drug—if she could be believed.

“We’re all like that,” Cynthia had said.

Well, fuck you, Cynthia. Oh, and fuck you, too, Moses.

“What?” Jonah asked.

Alix realized that she’d been speaking out loud.

“Are you keeping an eye on me?” she asked Jonah suddenly. “Is that why you’re being so good all the time now? Did Mom and Dad put you up to this?”

Jonah looked offended. “Of course not!”

“Then how come you stopped running away?”

“I don’t know.” He made an uncomfortable shrug. “It was kid stuff.”

“You are a kid.”

He glanced over at her. “You seriously want to know?”

“I’m asking, aren’t I?”

Jonah glanced away, looking out the window at the bright green leaves of the birch trees along the curves of the turnpike.

“You didn’t see what it was like when you went missing,” he said. “You didn’t feel what it was like at home. Mom and Dad about went catatonic when you didn’t come home the next morning. They didn’t say it, but they were expecting to find your body. You took off, and then you just disappeared off the map. We were all just waiting for you to show up dead. Some rag girl dead in a Dumpster. Probably all chopped up.” He looked over at her then stared back out the window. “That was some sobering shit.”

“But I’m fine,” Alix pointed out. “Nothing happened to me.”

“Only because…” He shrugged. “2.0 wasn’t homicidal. They could have done anything with you. They just made you disappear. If they’d been different, the cops would have found you floating in the river or dumped out in the woods somewhere.” He swallowed.

“But they weren’t like that. They were never like that.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they’re still nerving up to doing something really crazy. Who knows what nutball activists will do? PETA? Occupy Wall Street? Jeffrey Dahmer? They’re all pretty much nuts.”

“No…”

Alix remembered Cynthia pulling her out of the cage. That had been real. Cynthia cared about her.

Unless it was staged, a cynical voice reminded her.

Alix slammed the steering wheel with her palm, frustrated. “How the hell would I know?”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Had it just been some kind of good cop, bad cop routine? Moses acting all scary, and then Cynthia coming in to save her? How was she supposed to tell what was real? All the things 2.0 had said to her about her father? Or what her father said about 2.0? Truth. Lies. It was just a muddle of stories that exactly contradicted each other.

Either 2.0 was a crew of lunatic kids, or Dad was some kind of uberevil wizard, throwing dream dust into the eyes of the world, making sure that it stayed asleep while companies pillaged and maimed and killed.

It sounded absurd no matter how she sliced it.

Truth? Lies? Madness? Sanity? How the hell could she tell?

The news coverage sure hadn’t taken any of it seriously. The entire prank had become one of those thirty-second oddities at the end of the newscast. Activists Create Human-Sized Rat Cage. They’d really dug on the giant exercise wheel. There’d been a quick pan of the hanging murals, and that was all. Hilarious. Done in less than thirty seconds. Judging from the news, the only sane thing a watcher could conclude was, “Gosh, Diane, kids sure do wacky things these days! And now in Sports…”

2.0 had shot its wad, and the world had yawned. But still, Alix would sit at dinner and look across at her father and wonder.

According to Moses, he wasn’t just bad, he was practically the devil. Doing evil things for evil amounts of money and knowing it and loving doing it. Laughing while he danced on graves.

It made no sense. This was the man who forgot to eat dinner because he was texting. The husband who was cut off from caffeine because it raised his blood pressure and he couldn’t sleep at night and then would stay up in the kitchen eating ice cream out of the carton. The dad who had picked up her and Denise and drove them home in the middle of the night and never busted either of them for being drunk and stoned.

Seriously?

“He’s not a monster,” Alix muttered.

“Who?” Jonah asked.

“Nothing,” Alix shook her head. “Something 2.0 said about Dad. That he was doing bad things.”

Jonah glanced over at her. “Why would you even listen to them after all the stuff they did to you?”

“I don’t know. Some of the things they said…” She glanced over at her younger brother. “What if they’re true?”

“This is that Stockholm syndrome thing, right?”

“No, jerkwad, it’s not.”

“It kind of is. Seriously, Sis. Don’t go all Patty Hearst on me. I’ve read up on her. She totally joined up with the people who kidnapped her. Went all crazypants, robbing banks and shit.” He suddenly looked interested. “But if you wanted to rob a bank, I’d totally help. I’ve got an idea about how—”

“Will you shut up and listen to me for once?”

“Okay, okay, I’m just saying.”

Alix gave him a dirty look. “You’re the one who called in the bomb threat last fall, aren’t you?”

Jonah looked at her, surprised. “Duh.”

“I knew it!”

Jonah didn’t even look embarrassed. “I needed to break into the admin office. I couldn’t clear people out, otherwise. I was going to fail English and Trig and World Civ.”

“I don’t want to know.” Alix tried to collect her thoughts. “Look, I’m just asking, but what if some of the things they said about Dad are true?”

Jonah looked at her, confused. “Like what? He’s an ax murderer or something?”

“No. Like he gets paid to…”

To what? To make people confused about some company’s report about some drug? To take over the government?

It all sounded so silly. The cartoons of her dad on the factory walls…

Alix heard her father’s voice. “Sometimes people need to make someone into an enemy just so they can make themselves feel important.”

Alix thought of conspiracy theorists like the 9/11 truthers. Or the people who still thought NASA hadn’t put a man on the moon. It was like they needed to know something that was special. Needed to be unique somehow, by being smarter and more clued-in to the secrets of the universe.

“They kept telling me that Dad was the worst thing in the world, basically. And all these companies, they talked like all the companies were practically satanic. Like they’d do anything for money. People we know, even. Like everyone was just a bunch of moneygrubbing psychopaths.”

Jonah laughed. “I thought everybody was moneygrubbing. Rich people just do it better.”

“My little cynic brother.”

“I’m just saying.” Jonah spread his hands, laughing still. “Anyway, whatever those people say, it’s only one side of a story. These crazies always want to make it sound like some company’s completely evil. You’ve got to talk to both sides—”

Alix picked up the quote, “—and you shouldn’t rush to judgment, because that’s how you end up being wrong…”

Alix broke off.

Son of a bitch.

She could practically see Moses laughing at her, wagging a finger as she quoted her father encouraging her to see both sides to every story.

But what if it wasn’t about sides, or perspectives, or radicals? What if it was just about truth?

How did you find truth when everyone was talking about sides?

Moses was grinning at her. Alix could practically see the self-satisfied smirk as he whispered in her ear. “Makes it kind of difficult, doesn’t it?”

Screw you, Moses, Alix thought.

“Would you quit talking to yourself?” Jonah said. “It’s driving me crazy.”

27

ADAM SAID, “THEY KILLED THE rats, Moses.”

“I know they killed the rats! I was there, too. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t give up just because we had one setback.”

“You call rat murder a setback?”

“Christ, Adam,” Kook said. “You sound like PETA.” She lit a joint and inhaled, blowing sweet smoke at the ceiling.

“Leather kills, goth girl.”

Kook regarded him with dilated pupils. “I’d eat those rats if it would make you shut up.”

“Cut it out,” Cynthia said. “Adam’s right. We didn’t see them coming in like that.” She looked seriously at Moses. “We didn’t plan on being gassed like that. We had a lot right, but we missed the tear gas.”

Moses looked from one face to the next and didn’t like what he was seeing. A lot of fear and uncertainty. Before, he’d always been able to coax and cajole them to believe, but now? Now it was serious.

“We all saw those dead rats,” Tank said. “Stakes are high is all they’re sayin’.”

“Stakes have always been high,” Moses pointed out, but he could tell he was losing them. “So, what? We quit now? We walk away?”

“Quit while we’re ahead,” Adam said.

“And just let everything they’ve done… what? Just go? Like it didn’t count or something?”

“It counted,” Cynthia soothed. “Of course it counted. But getting ourselves gassed to death doesn’t do anyone any good.”

“Maybe at least then someone would notice!” Moses shot back. “News loves bodies.”

He wished he hadn’t said it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Wrong words. Wrong tone. Everything was wrong. He’d always been good with words. He could hack people with his words as easily as Kook hacked servers in Eastern Europe. But these were the wrong words, and he knew it as soon as he said them.

“Dude,” Kook exhaled smoke. “I so didn’t sign up for a suicide pact.”

“If you’re dead, there’s sure as hell no party,” Adam added.

“When the hell did either of you agree on anything?”

“Around the time you started talking crazy,” Kook said.

Tank didn’t say anything.

“Look,” Moses tried again. “I’m not saying we should suicide-pact or anything—”

“Big relief,” Adam interjected.

“—I’m just saying that we’re finally seeing what these guys are capable of. We finally see how they act. What they do, how they roll… and now we’re walking away? We knew they were bad, right from the start. Of course they were going to use all that tear gas—”

“If that had been Tank, he would have been dead, for sure,” Cynthia said. “His asthma would have wasted him.”

Tank looked at Moses mournfully.

“I know!” Moses retorted. “I get it. I’m not blind!”

“So why do we want to keep stirring these people up? They’re coming for us. We poked them too many times, and now they’re getting serious. The next time this happens, one of us ends up dead.”

“So you’re okay with what they did to your family now? Because I’m not okay with what they did to mine, I’ll tell you that. They’re still in business, and they’re still making money. I’m not stopping until I figure out how to make them pay.”

“Here comes the Don Quixote shit again,” Kook muttered.

“Shove it, Kook. They’re out there right now, making money while people die. They’re making money, and they’re laughing all the way to the bank because no one stops them.”

Cynthia sighed. “It’s just that no one cares, Moses.”

“They only don’t care because they don’t know.”

“Sure they do,” Cynthia said. “Everybody knows. People say it all the time. ‘Corporations control politicians.’ ‘Money controls politics.’ ‘Lobbyists control Congress.’ ‘Corporations write the laws.’ ‘The politicians are all corrupt.’ ‘The little guy doesn’t matter.’ ”

The others were nodding at her words.

“Everybody already knows, Moses. Everybody says those things. It’s probably the one thing you can get a bunch of Republicans and Democrats to agree on: The system’s rigged. We all know it. The truth is that people just don’t care. We’re just starting to think that it’s not worth dying for something that no one cares about anyway.”

Moses wanted to tear out his hair. “I thought we were trying to make people care!”

“Maybe it can’t be done!” Cynthia shot back. “Even the Doubt Factory doesn’t take money to make people care. They take money to do the opposite. Status quo is easy to sell. People like to be nice and consistent. They like to be told to just stay in their seats, and don’t worry about the theater burning. So what are we selling? Revolution?” Cynthia laughed sadly. “Who wants to buy that?”

“It happened in the Middle East.”

“We kind of got it better than they do,” Kook observed.

“So… what? We just sit here and let them go because they aren’t screwing over enough people. Just a few? Just us? Just our families?”

Cynthia stood up. “Be serious, Moses. It’s dangerous. We’ve got the FBI on us for sure now.”

Kook was nodding. “Definitely got Williams & Crowe’s attention. Those fuckers are playing for keeps now. I’ve got trackers all over them, and they’re like a bunch of stung hornets. They got clients who are shitting about us, wondering who’s next. You know it wasn’t an accident they used gas like that. They don’t want us just caught, they want us dead.”

“I don’t know about you all, but I’m playing for keeps, too.”

Tank finally spoke. Small voice, small kid looking up at him. “We all saw the rats, Moses. We all saw them. If we’d been inside, what would have happened? If we hadn’t set everything up perfect…”

“But we did!”

“No way, boss,” Kook interjected. “That was not perfect. We barely got on the news. Nobody gives a shit. And if we keep going like this, we’re going to be just like those rats. Just a pile of dead kids. We’ll be on the news, all right, but it will be one of those ‘What’s Wrong With Teens These Days’ stories, right up there with the chicks on Girls Gone Wild.”

“So we can make them—”

“Moses,” Cynthia interrupted. “What’s the first rule of your uncle’s cons?”

“Trust…”

“No. It’s to make sure that you’re the one who’s running the con. Not the one who’s being conned. Don’t trick yourself into thinking people are different than they are. We’ve already been doing this a long time. Nothing changes people. Nothing.”

She looked sad. “I’m sorry, Moses. Maybe it’s time to grow up. We can’t fix things that people don’t want fixed. You can’t con someone who doesn’t want to be conned, and you can’t wake up someone who doesn’t want to wake up.”

“I just don’t want to end up like the rats,” Tank said.

28

IT STARTED AS AN EXPERIMENT. A quick test to see what would come back. Even though it felt disloyal to her father, Alix couldn’t shake off the need to test if any of it was real.

She started with aspirin. Moses had mentioned it in passing, during one of his screeds against the evils of industry.

It was just an experiment. A quick search on Google. Let’s see how crazypants 2.0 is. She typed:

Aspirin, Reye’s syndrome.

She almost immediately arrived at the Aspirin Foundation’s page—which had a clear link to a page about Reye’s syndrome.

Alix read over the page of material, scanning for something to hook onto. At the bottom of the page, it concluded: “There is a lack of convincing evidence that aspirin causes Reye’s syndrome: it may be one of many possible factors but many cases currently reported are probably due to inborn errors of metabolism. It is unclear whether restricting aspirin use by children has a favourable risk/benefit ratio.”

So much for that conspiracy theory, she thought.

She was about to close her laptop, but she could practically see Moses laughing at her.

“That’s it? That’s what Seitz research is? I thought they at least taught you rich kids how to work.”

“Oh, just shut up, why don’t you?” she muttered. But she could remember him in the warehouse, watching Tank skateboard. Him shaking his head and saying, “Whenever I think I’m cynical, I find out I’m nowhere near cynical enough.”

So what would a cynic do? Alix wondered. She immediately abbreviated the question to WWCD.

WWCD?

A cynic wouldn’t trust anyone. She went back to the top of the page and scanned for information on the Aspirin Foundation.

ABOUT THE FOUNDATION led to supporters, which led to:

Bayer HealthCare AG.

When she clicked through, Bayer’s tagline said, “Science for a Better Life.”

Alix’s eyes narrowed. Bayer, huh? She could feel her inner cynic suddenly engaging, despite herself.

Leaving her first window open, she opened and new tab, and searched again:

Aspirin, Reye’s Syndrome…

She hesitated, remembering Moses saying, “You know what they call your dad’s company? The Doubt Factory.”

With a hiss of anxiety, she added the word that the 2.0 crew were so obsessed with:

Doubt

Almost immediately a link to a website called defendingscience.org popped up. It wasn’t as slick as the Aspirin Foundation’s site, but it was interesting. It seemed to be electronic excerpts from a book called Doubt Is Their Product, which some guy had written for Oxford University Press.

Its opening pages began:

Since 1986 every bottle of aspirin sold in the United States has included a label advising parents that consumption by children with viral illnesses greatly increases their risk of developing Reye’s syndrome…

Alix kept reading, and as she did, she found herself becoming more and more appalled.

In the early 1980s, scientists discovered that aspirin was causing Reye’s syndrome in children. Immediately, the Centers for Disease Control notified doctors that children were in danger from the deadly illness that affected the brain and liver and appeared to be connected with taking aspirin when they had a viral infection like the flu or chicken pox.

So far, so good.

Then the government tried to notify the public. The Food and Drug Administration wanted to put a warning label on aspirin bottles. Even though doctors had been warned, aspirin was an over-the-counter medicine: It seemed to make sense that moms and dads should be warned that aspirin was a no-no for their little kids. The parents were the people buying the stuff, after all. There wasn’t a doctor standing in the supermarket aisle to warn them. A warning label made sense.

But then the aspirin industry got involved. They threw up barriers to labeling. They said that the government was being overly activist and that the science wasn’t settled. They fought—and the Food and Drug Administration backed down.

For two more years the government and doctors knew that an over-the-counter medicine millions of parents were buying for their kids was dangerous, but the parents weren’t being informed. It finally took a lawsuit by Public Citizen’s Health Research Group to force the FDA to act.

Eventually—finally—aspirin was labeled.

So who was this guy, this David Michaels, who had written the book? His bio said he was a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services… and it seemed that someone liked him, because he’d not only served in the government under President Clinton, years back, he was also now serving as the assistant secretary of labor for Occupational Safety and Health Administration, under the current liberal president.

Half of Alix’s friends would have called Michaels a liberal, socialist traitor for that… but she also noticed in his biography on OSHA’s website that the Senate had unanimously confirmed him. Unanimously? Alix was a little surprised at that. She couldn’t remember the last time Republicans and Democrats had agreed on anything. Either they were all asleep at his confirmation hearing or someone actually thought Michaels knew something.

Regardless, a few things seemed to be fairly undeniable.

Reye’s syndrome cases had started dropping from a high of more than 500 cases a year, as soon as the Centers for Disease Control started howling about how dangerous aspirin was for little kids.

After aspirin got its warning label, Reye’s syndrome cases collapsed to around thirty a year.

And, of course, there was one last thing:

3. The aspirin industry had fought against warning labels, tooth and nail. They’d used legal threats and obfuscation and political leverage to delay the process as long as possible.

Alix searched around some more and came up with a 1982 New York Times article. It was fascinating to see into the history of the fight. Right there, on the page, the aspirin industry was vowing to fight the labeling initiative. The Aspirin Foundation of America was quoted:

Dr. Joseph White, the foundation’s president, said studies purporting to link the syndrome and aspirin are “wholly inconclusive.” The foundation also released a statement in Washington saying that the Department of Health and Human Services “acted hastily and without scientific basis” in calling for the warning label. Dr. White has asked for the chance to present the industry’s views before the Food and Drug Administration takes further action.

It was fascinating to see the language White had used: The accusations of rushed judgment. The claims that the decision lacked scientific basis… It was exactly the playbook that Moses and the rest of the 2.0 crew had described.

Fascinating. And then, a little chilling, because the Aspirin Foundation of America had apparently succeeded. They’d kept a warning label off aspirin bottles for four years.

How much extra money did four extra years without a warning label get them?

Enough to justify killing a fair number of kids, apparently.

Alix did some quick math, based on the numbers she’d been reading. If 30% of the Reye’s syndrome cases typically ended in death, that meant that more than a hundred and fifty kids had died each year that aspirin labeling was delayed.

Four times one-fifty, conservatively. Six hundred bodies, so aspirin could make a little extra cash.

“Whenever I think I’m cynical, I find out I’m nowhere near cynical enough.”

“No shit,” Alix muttered.

She closed the computer, feeling unclean.

Aspirin. It seemed like such an innocuous thing.

Alix thought of her mom taking aspirin. She went down the hall to her parents’ bedroom. In the master bath, she found the aspirin right inside the medicine cabinet, along with Tylenol and Advil. Alix looked darkly at the two other painkillers. “I don’t have time for you, too.”

She plucked out the Bayer aspirin. She sat on the edge of the marble tub and turned the bottle over to study the warning label.

A simple box warning right in there with all the rest of the standard drug info. All it said was not to give it to children and teenagers if they had symptoms from flu or chicken pox. It seemed like such a small thing. And yet it had apparently sent executives at aspirin companies into a panic. Their product was under attack. They needed a defender.

And someone like her father had probably provided the product-defense playbook: the science wasn’t sound, don’t rush to judgment…

Delay = $$$

Alix sat on the edge of her parents’ whirlpool tub with the bottle of aspirin in her hand, thinking of her father, feeling more and more unclean.

29

“HOW MUCH LONGER TILL EVERYONE’S done packing?” Moses asked Cynthia. They were loading gear into a van that Kook had rented. Her hair was now red and she’d changed her earrings and piercings. Cyn’s hair was bobbed short, and she was wearing her makeup differently. Moses was amazed at how a few bits of blush or toner or eye shadow could totally change the impression of a person’s face.

Cynthia had bemoaned the loss of her lustrous hair, but she’d donated it to some wig maker that helped cancer victims, so she figured it wasn’t a total loss. Someone would like all that hair. Adam had shifted from hipster with his porkpie hat to an all-American athlete, as if he’d never left the fine Mormon confines of Utah. And Moses, well, he’d turned himself into a young Wall Street turk, full suit, leather briefcase. A suit and a briefcase carried so much authority in America that the only thing better was a police uniform.

Tank hadn’t bothered changing anything.

Skate rat’s a skate rat, was all he said. Nobody notices skate rats.

Cyn looked up from her packing. “This is almost everything. We’re totally cleared out.” She stared around the empty space. “I’m going to miss this place.”

“Yeah, well,” Moses shrugged. “What’s the point?”

All their work had come to nothing. All the money, all the planning, all the time. And it had disappeared so quickly.

Right back where we started.

Right back down in the hole with all the lunatic activists, everyone from the antiwar protesters, to the 9/11 conspiracists, to PETA, to the antivaccine weenies. Relegated to the nutjob end of the spectrum. Just one more bunch of radicals in a frothy soup of radicals.

“You okay with this?” Adam asked as he loaded more boxes.

“Yeah,” Moses said. “You’re right. It’s over. No way we’re going to win against these assholes.”

“Sorry your girl didn’t work out.”

Moses laughed and shook his head. “Yeah, well, I got too wrapped up in that, didn’t I?”

“I never did see what you saw in her.”

“Ass,” Cyn said, as she went to gather more of their gear. “She had a nice ass.”

Moses ignored her. “You going to be okay?” he asked Adam.

“Oh, sure.” Adam grinned. “I’m heading for Florida. There’s a guy down there, wants me to DJ at his club.”

“A good-looking Cuban boy,” Kook added. “Biceps like this.” She mimed the muscles. “Sexy as hell.”

Adam shot her a glare. “Would you please stay out of my e-mail?”

Kook batted her black lashes. “You’ll miss me when I’m not looking over your shoulder all the time. I’m the only one who will kick sense into you.”

Adam shook his head and grabbed up his gym bag. “I’m going to be so glad to have privacy.”

“Just you and the NSA,” Kook quipped.

Moses held out a hand to Adam. “Take care of yourself.”

Adam looked at him strangely, but he took the offered hand in a strong grip, and then pulled Moses into a hug. “Don’t do anything crazy,” he said, as he let Moses grow.

“Crazy?” Moses shook his head. “Nah. I still got some money left. Maybe I’ll go round the world on a trip or something. Kick it on a beach somewhere. Watch the world burn down with a piña colada, you know?”

“And then?”

“Can’t be bothered to worry about that. Maybe back out to Vegas. I hear there’s a guy out there knows how to pick pockets in public. Makes a show out of it. I always wanted to learn that.”

“Shit, I’ll bet you end up teaching him.”

“Maybe.” Moses laughed. “Maybe.”

Cyn came out hauling two more suitcases. Adam and Moses went and grabbed them from her. Moses grunted at the weight. “You got rocks in here?”

“They’re nice clothes,” Cyn defended herself. “I’m not wasting them.”

“You’ll blend right in at Stanford,” Kook said.

“It’s going to be weird to sit in classes that are actually new to me.”

They slung the suitcases into the back of the van. Cyn and Adam pulled out, waving. Tank came out of the warehouse, hauling grocery bags full of hard drives to Kook’s car. Moses helped carry out the flatscreens and slide them into the back of the station wagon, buffered by blankets.

When Kook finished and closed the hatch on the station wagon, she said, “Sorry it didn’t work out.”

Moses shrugged. “Shit happens.”

She handed him a USB stick. “This is for you.”

“What is it?”

“Her. Video. Her greatest hits. Case you want to relive the fun. A lot of shots of her eating cereal.”

Moses took the USB stick.

“It was a good run,” Kook said. She slapped him on the shoulder.

“Yeah. Too bad the world didn’t give a fuck.”

“The world’s give-a-fuck was broken a long time before any of us came along. Not your fault.” She turned. “Come on, Tank!”

“Where you headed?”

“I got an aunt in Colorado. Crazy hippie lady. Figure we’ll lie low with her. Let Tank get his driver’s license or something.” She turned and shouted toward the warehouse. “Tank!”

“I’m right here,” he said quietly. He’d been on the other side of the car.

“Would you quit lurking like that?” Kook waved him into the car. “Come on. Let’s get going.”

“Be there in a second.”

“Sure. Say good-bye.” She climbed into the car and started the engine. Tank sidled over to Moses.

“When are you heading out?” Tank asked.

Moses shrugged. “Soon.”

Tank was looking down at his shoes. “You never really said where you were going.”

The thing about Tank was, the kid paid attention. Most people, they were so busy chattering back and forth that they missed most of what was going on. And then there was Tank—always around, always paying attention, and so quiet that you forgot all about him.

“Hell. I don’t know. Probably going on the road,” Moses said, finally. “Vegas or something, eventually.” Even to himself, it sounded like he was talking a line.

Tank peered up from under his tangled black hair. “Uh-huh.”

Moses had the uncomfortable feeling the kid could see right through him. His uncle had been like that. You can’t con a con, his uncle liked to say whenever Moses was trying to be sneaky. Moses found himself avoiding Tank’s eyes. He made himself meet the boy’s gaze. “You don’t need to worry about me,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Just don’t do anything stupid,” Tank said.

“Stupid?” Moses gave the kid his best thousand-watt, trust-me smile. “Nah. I always make the smart move, don’t you know?” He waved toward the car. “Go on. Kook’s waiting.”

Tank looked like he was going to argue. “You could come with us, you know.”

“Crunchy-granola aunts aren’t my thing.”

“It’s near Boulder, I guess. The place is crazy white.” Tank sounded bummed.

“Better than juvie. Couple years, and you’re living wherever you want.” Moses nodded at the car. “Kook’s good people. No bullshit. Be glad she’s practicing mother hen on your ass.”

Tank smiled self-consciously. “Yeah.” He turned away, then stopped and looked back. “Thanks, Moses. Seriously.”

“Nothing to thank. I thought…” Moses shrugged. “Thought I’d make some kind of difference. Crazy, right?”

“Made a difference for me,” Tank said. He shrugged again and gave a little wave. “See you around.”

“Yeah. For sure.”

And then they were driving away, and Moses was alone. His throat felt tight as he watched them go.

He turned back to study the factory.

Have to get the lawyers to see if you can even unload this heap of junk.

And then?

He didn’t have any answers.

Inside, the factory gleamed with the scrub-down they’d done on it. No sign that they’d ever been there. Like they’d never existed. History hadn’t happened. No fights and no jokes and no scream of Sawzalls cutting iron, spitting sparks. No big bass beats while they tested paint squirt guns and control software. No coffee-and energy-drink-fueled plotting on how to bust into a testing lab and steal a whole eighteen-wheeler full of rats along with vats and vats of Azicort. No more rats. It was all scrubbed clean.

They’d done so much, and they’d done nothing.

Just like rats on an exercise wheel. You could sure look busy, but you didn’t get anywhere. You didn’t accomplish shit. All you did was sweat a while.

Moses’s throat felt tight.

“I tried,” he said to the empty space. He didn’t like how his voice echoed. He sat cross-legged in the middle of the warehouse, hard concrete against his ass. His chest constricted and his eyes burned.

He put his head in his hands. “I tried,” he said again, and, finally, with everyone gone and him alone with no one to watch or judge or give a damn if he showed how weak he felt, he let go of his control and cried.

I tried.

He went to where he’d collected his own belongings. He didn’t even want what was there. Just couldn’t muster the need to care.

I tried.

And what did you get? You didn’t manage shit. Not in the end. Didn’t put together a single thing.

It had been a fantasy—and fun for a while. A way to push back against the horror of being alone, to push back against the terror that had enveloped him ever since his parents had died. A kid game, playing pretend. Pretending he mattered. Pretending he could change things. Pretending he could do something people three times his age had never managed.

The machine was just too damn big.

Time to go. Way past time.

“It was a nice idea,” he muttered.

The machine was too damn big.

30

IT BECAME A SECRET VICE. Every night, after everyone went to bed, Alix would boot up her laptop and dig deeper into her father’s world. She wondered if Dad and Mom caught her if this would qualify as “Anything Inappropriate.” Would they rather catch her doing research like this, or would they be happier if they just caught her flashing someone on a live cam?

She kept digging, and the deeper she dug, the more dirt she seemed to find. At some point, she stopped feeling like she was digging and started feeling like she was slipping.

And then, at some point, she was falling.

Down the rabbit hole.

And she hadn’t felt it coming until it was too late.

She’d plummeted into a strange land where everything she’d known and understood was now strange and distorted, as though she’d been sucking on the hookah of the caterpillar among the toadstools in Alice in Wonderland. Everyday labels and brands she readily recognized now all started feeling like rocks that if she picked up, she’d find worms and centipedes and rot underneath.

A day after her trip down memory lane with the product defense of aspirin, she went spelunking again into painkillers, this time with Tylenol.

Tylenol had its own warning label. Overdoses from that one could kill you, apparently. Not just hurt you, but just kill you dead.

Oops, too much acetaminophen.

Dead.

That was what NPR said, though the label on Tylenol only warned of severe liver damage if you took over three thousand milligrams—which seemed like a little bit of an understatement, in comparison with THIS PRODUCT WILL KILL YOUR ASS IF YOU TAKE TOO MUCH. Apparently even the version of the label she was reading was relatively new. Before then, it had been even more vague. Tylenol had managed to avoid putting an explicit warning about death on the label for over thirty years.

Alix couldn’t help wondering if Dad had helped out with that. Moses said he was the best. Keeping a product from being labeled as a potential killer for thirty years would be a pretty good trick.

You’re being paranoid, Alix thought. Not everything is a plot.

Except, it was sort of starting to seem like everything really was a plot.

Everywhere she looked she found more household brands and more respected companies, and everywhere she looked, she found more disturbing things.

It was like in a horror movie when the pretty guy suddenly pulled off his rubber mask and revealed a rotten corpse. She started out on the computer and then started making note cards because she couldn’t keep all the files straight. She wanted to see the scope of what she was discovering.

There was Merck and Vioxx, the painkiller that turned out to cause heart attacks.

There was Philip Morris, fighting to claim that tobacco wasn’t all that bad, with the help of Hill & Knowlton and The Weinberg Group.

There was BASF and Dow Chemical and a chemical called bisphenol A, which also seemed to act like estrogen and had all kinds of interesting side effects, and that was in everything from tin cans to the ink on newsprint.

There was DuPont and 3M and a chemical compound called perfluorooctanoic acid, i.e., PFOA, i.e., C8. Also known as a key ingredient needed to manufacture Teflon.

That one kind of bummed her out. Alix liked 3M. It made sticky notes.

“How ironic,” she muttered as she noted down the information on PFOA on her own sticky notes.

How could the maker of sticky notes also have been involved in manufacturing a chemical that screwed up the liver and caused birth defects and cancer? Apparently, 3M had gotten out of the game after pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency, but DuPont had stuck with it, so to speak, to make their Teflon products.

Her lists just kept growing.

Every night Alix stayed up late, searching deeper and deeper. She found books in the library that helped jump-start new lines of questioning for her. It started with books like Doubt Is Their Product and Merchants of Doubt, but it quickly expanded to old newspaper articles and long-ago magazine exposés.

One night she stayed up all night reading what she came to think of as the tobacco files, a massive public archive of tobacco-industry documents kept by the University of California, San Francisco. It documented how Big Tobacco had managed to keep on selling its cancer sticks despite decades of challenges. She only stopped reading when the sun started poking in through her windows to tell her it was morning.

As her research deepened, Alix started finding more and more connections. But often she wasn’t sure if it was from her own work or things 2.0 had told her.

Deep in the middle of the night, Alix found herself working through the thick sheaves of notes that she had compiled, hunting for a connection that was just at the edge of her conscious brain. Something about one of the doubt companies, as she was coming to think of these PR specialists. Something important… Exponent, maybe? Or was it The Weinberg Group again? Some connection to her father? Or maybe George?

Alix couldn’t help thinking of Moses and 2.0 as she laid out another row of stickies on the floor.

“I should have taken some photos of those banners,” she muttered. “I’m reinventing the whole frigging wheel, just to catch up to everything they already knew.” She frowned at her arrays of information. If only she had access to what 2.0 had already researched…

Maybe the TV crews had the footage. Could she get that?

She sat back, surveying the arrayed notes. Something important was here, she just couldn’t quite pick it out…

“Um, Alix?”

Jonah was standing in the doorway in his sweats, squinting in the light, with tousled hair. “Do you know it’s, like, 3 AM?” he asked blearily.

“Why, am I making too much noise?” she asked.

Jonah shook his head, started to leave, then came into the room instead. He was still blinking in the light but seemed to be waking up. He sat down on the floor with her and surveyed her work. “Are you doing okay?”

“Sure,” Alix said shortly. She wished he’d leave so that she could get back to the puzzle, but Jonah wasn’t leaving. He picked up a sticky note on beryllium. “So… what are you up to?”

“Oh, nothing… just… you know… research.”

But now, as she looked at her work spread out across the floor, her laptop open, printed website articles and news clippings with sticky notes attached to them, long lists of chemicals, companies, and product-defense firms (all in different color pens so she could keep track of where the pieces fit—pink, blue, green, red)… Alix swallowed, suddenly seeing her work through Jonah’s eyes

Wow. You really are nuts, she realized. You have completely lost it.

Jonah was watching her warily. “You’re kind of acting strange, Alix.”

“I’m fine,” Alix said shortly, but as she said it, even she wasn’t completely convinced. “I mean,” she amended, “I’m crazy, but I’m starting to figure some things out.”

“This is about 2.0, isn’t it? They got in your head somehow.”

Alix frowned, looking around at the sweep of papers and sticky notes and printed-out documents, along with some plates that she’d brought up from the kitchen and a surprising number of venti-sized coffee cups that had been accumulating in the room.

“Does Dad know?” she asked.

“Well, you’re not exactly acting normal. We’re all kind of talking about it. Mom and Dad keep asking about you.” He lowered his voice to a serious, parental-caring tone. “ ‘How is Alix doing?’ ” He shrugged. “That kind of thing.”

“Shit. I have to hide this stuff.” She’d been so involved in the search that she hadn’t realized what it would look like if Dad saw it. “Help me clean up.”

“Um. Okay. Now?”

“Yes, now! I shouldn’t have all this out.”

“Okay…” He started stacking the papers.

“No!” Alix stopped him. “Those are product-defense companies. They’re coded red. These ones”—she took the papers out Jonah’s hands—“are client companies. They’re green. Put all the green inks together.”

Jonah looked at her quizzically. “You’re really getting into this.” He picked up another note and started reading a list of acronyms that Alix had collected. “OMB. FDA. EPA. OSHA. NIOSH. CIAR. OMFG. STFU.”

“Cut it out. Those are serious.” She took the list back.

Jonah let her take it, frowning thoughtfully. “You know how you’re always telling me there’s a fine line between clever and stupid?”

Alix eyed him warily. “Yeah. Why? Are you going to tell me that I’ve crossed that line?”

“Actually, I was just thinking there might be another line: the fine line between brilliant and crazy.”

“I know I’m crazy,” she said as she continued sweeping her papers and notes into piles. “You don’t need to rub it in.”

“I was actually leaning toward brilliant.”

Alix glanced up at her brother, surprised.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” Jonah rushed on, “you’re acting weird as hell, but this is actually kind of brilliant.”

Alix flushed and looked down. “I’m not, really.” For some reason, she felt embarrassed at the compliment. She stared at the papers spread around her. “I mean, it’s just research. You start doing it, and you get all this information. Mostly, it’s just about focusing and doing the work. Anyone could do it.”

“Yeah, but most people don’t. Most people don’t worry about what…” he picked up the sticky note of acronyms again “… CIAR is.”

“Center for Indoor Air Research,” Alix said promptly. “That was a front group for Big Tobacco. There are a ton of front groups.” She cast about, irritated that all her files weren’t spread out for easy searching. “I’ve got a list just of front organizations somewhere…” she started hunting again.

“Front organizations?”

“Sure. It works better if someone like CIAR funds research that says secondhand smoke is safe. And then it looks even better if they can get some legitimate news organization or scientific journal to report their results. It makes it look like there’s more perspectives on the debate, and it keeps your brand out of the fight. So you make up some kind of neutral-sounding nonprofit like CIAR or The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, and you have them do the dirty work…”

She trailed off as she realized Jonah was still looking at her.

“What now?”

“Just remember the line, Alix. Brilliant or crazy. It’s a superfine line.”

But he was smiling as he said it.

Alix grinned back. “Okay, yeah.”

They started gathering up the rest of her papers and putting them in stacks, with Jonah being surprisingly good about taking her directions as they put everything together. Alix yawned. 3:30 AM. She really was tired.

Jonah paused on the way out the door.

“Are you okay? I mean otherwise?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.” She made herself nod definitively. “I’m good.” She hesitated. “Don’t tell Dad, though, okay?”

“Are you kidding? He’d lose it. Just don’t go running off to join the resistance without telling me, okay?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not that brilliant.”

“Well, at least stick around until tomorrow night.”

“Why? What’s happening?”

Jonah gave her an annoyed look. “The party? The stupid company party Dad’s making us go to? The Kimball-Geier shindig? The one on the ginormous boat that Mom’s been talking about for the last week, about how I have to be on good behavior and not do anything inappropriate that would embarrass Dad? Any of this ringing a bell?”

Alix looked at him blankly. “I don’t remember…”

“Gah!” Jonah threw up his hands. “You really are as bad as Dad, now. You act like you’re listening, but you aren’t. Everyone hassles me about all this—Jonah do this, Jonah don’t do that—but at least I listen to people when I’m looking right at them—”

Alix stopped listening. Kimball-Geier. Why did that name ring a bell? She started digging back through her notes. Kimball-Geier…

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Sure, I’m listening.” She lifted up a venti Starbucks cup. No. Not there. She lifted a plate. God, I really do need to clean up—Ha! There you are!

“Kimball-Geier!” She shook crumbs off the sticky note and held it up to Jonah, grinning triumphantly. “I knew I had something!” It had a coffee ring on it, but the ink was still legible. “Kimball-Geier Pharmaceuticals,” she read, feeling pleased. “They make Azicort, the asthma drug. They’re one of Dad’s clients. Dad and George work with Kimball-Geier.” She frowned. “They actually do a lot of work with Kimball-Geier.”

“I take it back,” Jonah said. “You are nuts.”

“Alix! Are you ready?” Mom called from downstairs. “Alix!”

“Coming!”

Kimball-Geier Pharmaceuticals was throwing a party with the CEO, board of directors, major shareholders, and other important colleagues and their families, and Alix’s parents expected her and Jonah to attend. She stood in front of her closet, trying to choose a dress and not think about the skate rat, Tank. Funny name for such a little kid…

They were going to be on the ocean. She chose a Rag & Bone flared dress, letting it slip over her shoulders. Fun Jimmy Choo heels. A Michael Kors shrug, because, really, it was still spring, and the ocean would probably still be cool.

She turned sideways in the mirror, smoothing the dress over her hips. Well, at least the outside is nicely packaged.

Inside, though? Her mind was a tangle of chemicals and products and government acronyms. EPA, C8, FDA, PCB, BPA… her brain wouldn’t stop working.

Alix started applying her lipstick. NARS. She looked down at the tube and was struck by the purple bruise color she’d been about to apply. Who lobbied for lipstick? Was there a Cosmetic Beauty Lobby? Probably. Only they wouldn’t call themselves a lobby. They’d probably call themselves the Consumer Beauty Resource Council. Or the Cosmetic Color Association, or something equally friendly and neutral. For sure, there was some group that made sure they could keep selling lipstick and that nobody looked too closely at where their colors came from or how they kept lipstick from melting.

Alix rummaged through the rest of her beauty products, the blushes and the sparkling washes and the glycerine soap with the fragrance of green tea and rose. She dug into her medicine cabinet, looking at the ingredients. Potassium this, sodium lauryl sulphate, propylene glycol that… she couldn’t really parse most of the chemical names, even with her AP Chem.

What the hell was in it? Who tested it? How did they test it? Had her father helped—Alix looked at the label of the small soap packet she was holding—had her father helped Tiptree & Soames put some balding guy on an advisory panel somewhere to make sure that soap wasn’t tested too much and didn’t have too many warning labels on it?

She put the soap down, feeling a little like she’d put down a snake. It’s just soap. Get a grip. She picked up her lipstick again and considered her half-done lips in the mirror. She studied the lipstick once more.

So? Is this stuff safe or not?

There was no way of knowing. She had a creepy feeling that if she even started to research this new topic, it would take her places she wouldn’t like.

“Alix!” Mom called from downstairs. “We’re going to be late!”

Alix gripped the bathroom sink, staring at herself in the mirror.

“Alix!”

She picked up the lipstick again and deliberately finished the job. Smearing color onto her lips. Marking herself with whatever NARS decided to stick in their cosmetics. She dropped the lipstick tube into her clutch. Turned her head this way and that, admiring herself in the mirror.

Perfect.

Not a single sign that something was rotten inside her.

31

THE LIMO SWEPT SOUTH AND toward the water, carrying Alix and her family toward the Kimball-Geier party. She sat next to Jonah and peered out through the tinted windows as darkness fell. Taillights and traffic, office buildings standing out against the blush of sunset sky. Manhattan rising as they got closer to the water.

“I don’t even see why we have to do this,” Jonah complained.

“Because Mr. Geier is your father’s client.”

“But he’s not my client,” Jonah groused. “It’s not like I’m in business with him.”

“Maybe you should be,” Alix said. “I hear they’re making a drug for impulse control.”

Dad glanced over at Alix, his expression surprised and pleased. “I didn’t know you paid that much attention.”

“You mean they’re going to turn me into a zombie,” Jonah said.

“It’s actually for appetite suppression,” Alix said, “so you’re safe for now.”

Dad was looking so approvingly at Alix that she felt ill. She couldn’t look at Dad without experiencing double vision. It felt like she was riding in an alternate, decayed version of the limo, while everyone else lived in the regular world.

For Jonah and Mom, Dad was still Dad.

For Alix, he was a sticky note that had become an index card that had become a computer file, and then a folder.

Simon Banks. Born 1962. Graduated from Princeton. Majored in economics and government. Went to work with Hill & Knowlton in the mid-eighties, where it seemed he’d come in contact with its client Philip Morris, the tobacco giant. He moved from Hill & Knowlton to The Weinberg Group and continued to work with Philip Morris. From there, Simon Banks departed Weinberg for a brief and unhappy stint at ChemRisk, another product-defense company. And then, in 2002, he’d started Banks Strategy Partners, with him as the PR lead and George Saamsi as the chief science liaison.

Alix hazily remembered that period of time. Dad worked more hours, and sometime after that, they’d moved into a newer, bigger house.

From there, BSP became the story. Banks Strategy Partners. They didn’t list their clients publicly, but they did list industries. GM crops. Pesticides and herbicides. Pharmaceuticals. Consumer products. Energy and petroleum.

Dad was on his cell, texting someone, as Jonah continued to grouse about the event.

“It’s on a yacht, Jonah.”

“I’ve been on yachts.”

Dad smiled knowingly. “Not one like this, you haven’t.”

“Who else is going?” Alix asked, staring out the window. She was still thinking about all the things she’d been reading. She couldn’t look at her father. He appeared the same as before: same tall man, same hair just receding a little bit, a tiny bit of gray—but not like George, who had gone round and bald. Dad was vital from CrossFit, tanned from sailing. Alix had his eyes, people said.

“Your friends should be there. I know Tim and Maya are coming, so Denise should be there. The Patels should be there. I know you like Ritika and Mona.”

“Sounds like half of Seitz is going to be there,” Jonah groaned.

“Oh stop it,” Mom said. “I don’t think you hate the school nearly as much as you say. I even heard from your biology teacher that you’re doing well all of a sudden.”

Jonah grinned. “We’re cutting open cow hearts.”

Mom made a face. “Then why not say you’re enjoying it? It’s okay to enjoy things once in a while, Jonah.”

The coastline came into view, and then the marina. “Wow,” Alix said, surprised. “That’s a big boat.”

Jonah crowded beside her, peering out. “What is that thing?”

“State of the art,” Dad said. “It’s the new design from Merseir Group.”

“That thing is insane!”

Alix couldn’t help but feel a little surprised at how beautiful it looked. The yacht was huge and sleek, and with party lights strung on it, it looked festive and welcoming.

“Are those sails?” she asked.

Her father nodded. “Fixed wing sails. She’s a hybrid. Very efficient. She can sail, or she can run on three Rolls Royce gas turbines and two MAN diesel engines. She’s green when she wants to be, and she’s one of the fastest things on the ocean when she decides she wants that. The only other person who has one is a prince in Dubai.” He had his own face pressed to glass, looking almost as wonderstruck as Jonah at the sight. “I spoke with Mr. Geier. He said he’ll have the captain give you a tour, Jonah.”

For once, Jonah was completely silent. Looking at the two of them, staring out at the boat, Alix was struck at how similar they were. Two kids delighted by the sight of a high-tech toy.

The limo dropped them off, and they joined the line of people being checked against security lists as they boarded the ship.

Alix spied Sophie and Kala waving at her from the starboard rail.

Mr. and Mrs. Geier were welcoming people aboard. Alix smiled on cue and shook their hands while her hijacked brain tagged Geier with all the information she’d dug up before she went to the party.

Kimball-Geier Pharmaceuticals, trading publicly on the NYSE, stock price around 20…

Kimball-Geier’s last blockbuster drug had been Ventipren, another asthma medication. Azicort was the follow-up, a slight chemical variation that passed through FDA approvals without comment and replaced Ventipren because clinical trials showed it worked better. Kimball-Geier was a survivor. It had had one class action about Ventipren settled and sealed. But Kimball-Geier outright won another lawsuit related to its plant emissions’ impact on a neighboring town. Yet another lawsuit had been thrown out by a lower court for lack of scientific evidence. That was the one Tank had apparently been part of. The one that claimed Azicort caused comas and sometimes death, depending on the dosage.

But that case got thrown out.

She realized Mr. Geier had said something to her. Alix smiled and nodded.

“I love it,” she gushed, and walked off, wondering what he’d been talking to her about.

She made her way to the upper deck, snagging a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter. She leaned against the rail, taking in the view of the city. Below her, she glimpsed Mr. Geier and her father and Jonah walking away from the main group, gesturing and laughing and pointing at features on the boat. They looked so comfortable and normal that Alix felt uncharitable for entertaining doubts about them.

Sophie interrupted her thoughts. “You’ve been scarce.” She jostled Alix affectionately as she leaned against the rail. She had a glass of champagne of her own.

“Busy. Yeah.” Alix shrugged. “I don’t know.”

They both sipped their champagne. Sophie tried again, “You’ve been a little off, ever since…” she trailed off uncomfortably.

“Since Cynthia?” Alix supplied.

“Yeah. And that whole kidnapping thing.” She shook her head. “You’re lucky they didn’t murder you or something.”

“Or something,” Alix agreed.

Sophie’s father was a partner in a big law firm. Galen & Tate. Alix tried to remember if the firm was one that had shown up in her research. The name sounded familiar, but it was probably a coincidence. They can’t all be rotten, she thought. Sometimes a law firm is a just a law firm.

“So how come you’re here?” Sophie asked.

“Kimball-Geier is my dad’s client.”

“Same here,” Sophie said.

“Oh.”

Alix suddenly remembered where she’d seen the name. Galen & Tate was the law firm that had gotten the Azicort class action suit thrown out for lack of scientific evidence. Alix’s skin crawled.

Maybe there really wasn’t any evidence.

The yacht cast off, easing away from the dock. The skyline of Manhattan slowly revealed itself as they slipped toward open ocean. It was warmer than she’d expected, considering the season. As the yacht picked up speed and pulled away from shore, she enjoyed the feeling of the wind. It was beautiful.

She looked down on the lower deck, where most of the adults were gathering. Her father was still talking to Mr. Geier. What are you two talking about? Alix felt dirty and uncharitable, thinking it, but she couldn’t scrub the question out of her head.

She didn’t fit here. Everyone was drinking and laughing and having a good time, and yet to her, it all felt somehow claustrophobic. As if her world had become an impossibly tight straitjacket. She couldn’t escape, she couldn’t breathe, and the more she watched the party, the worse it got. Alix forced herself to grip the rail and sip her champagne and exchange small talk with Sophie.

This is what normal people do. Why can’t you just be normal?

A couple of men Alix didn’t recognize joined her dad and Mr. Geier, and they all shook hands. Dad talked a moment longer, and then he was on the move, working his way through the crowd. Shaking hands with men, giving women hugs, clapping the occasional close friend on the back, exchanging words with lawyers and CEOs, inheritors of old corporate money.

Alix was surrounded by the cream of her society, living the good life with a champagne glass and a phenomenal view of the Manhattan skyline, and yet all she wanted to do was unzip the straitjacket of her unclean skin and leap off the yacht into the water. Anything to get away from this feeling.

George Saamsi was working his way through the crowd, making his own rounds of handshakes and back slaps.

George Saamsi. BA in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago. Hired by the tobacco company Philip Morris, eventually rising to a title of senior researcher. She’d read an actual transcript of George being deposed on the topic of secondhand smoke, where she’d first seen the term “environmental tobacco smoke” used.

It had been interesting to read George’s deposition transcripts because he was always careful to never make any conclusions. He only spoke of unknowns and uncertainties that needed more study. He’d spent time researching how people felt about their smoking habits and how that might skew data when they reported whether or not they had been harmed by secondhand smoke. He spent time trying to decide how much secondhand smoke affected SIDS deaths versus how much smoking during pregnancy affected it. Even back in the nineties, he’d been focused on always finding as many questions as possible, while avoiding coming up with answers. Anything that might lead to more doubt, more research, more delay.

Alix assumed that the secondhand smoke work was where her father and George had met. There were overlaps with Philip Morris and The Weinberg Group around that subject, so it made sense. In the years following, George left Philip Morris but kept up the doubt work. He showed up in a lot of testimony at a lot of trials. He showed up in cases related to asbestos and beryllium. He testified regarding a chemical called diacetyl, which had been used in butter flavoring for microwave popcorn until it turned out it was destroying workers’ lungs and was phased out, at least from popcorn, around 2007. And as 2.0 had said, he showed up testifying for Kimball-Geier Pharmaceuticals, saying that no definitive study had concluded that Azicort could be traced to any instance of sudden coma. According to George, a number of other factors were likely to blame and required additional study.

In George’s work outside the courtroom, he showed up as a science advisor on the board of the Household Products Safety Advisory Board, an organization that appeared to get its funding from companies that manufactured cleaning supplies. He made regular appearances in Congress, testifying on the dangers of overzealous regulation. He was senior research fellow at the Center for Study of Indoor Air Quality.

The chief science liaison at Banks Strategy Partners was everywhere. Nice, Santa-like Uncle George seemed to pop up whenever a new chemical or substance needed defending. As Alix watched him work the crowd, she wondered if he could really be as amoral as the circumstantial evidence indicated. He seemed way too nice to actually be that awful.

She remembered how badly Moses and his crew wanted to see what files Banks Strategy Partners held.

Alix remembered the USB stick that Kook had given her with the virus.

“Stuxnet, baby. DoD-certified badass wormtastic. You just plug it in, and I’ll do the rest.”

Alix suddenly wished she had it now.

Is that really what I’m thinking about doing? Hacking my own dad’s company?

But it was a fantasy. She didn’t have the virus. Williams & Crowe had taken the thing away and she’d never seen it again.

She did have one thing, though, and it made Alix feel traitorous to realize that she might take advantage of it.

She had her father’s complete trust.

You’re the good girl. The responsible girl. The levelheaded girl.

The levelheaded girl knocked back her champagne glass and headed down to the lower deck. She wove through the press of cocktail dresses and suits, zeroing in on George Saamsi, snagging another champagne on the way.

“George!”

BSP’s chief science liaison turned at her call, looking surprised, but when he saw it was Alix, he smiled warmly. “Alix! I wasn’t sure you’d come.” He looked around. “Where are your friends?”

“Oh, they’re around.”

How to change the topic?

Alix tried to look troubled and let her smile slip a little. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “It’s not…” She shrugged. “It’s not the same hanging out with them… since…” She shrugged again, helpless. “You know. Since the 2.0 thing.”

George’s expression immediately became concerned and sympathetic. “I’m so sorry to hear that. It must have been horrible.”

Alix tried to look like someone who was bravely hiding her pain. “The doctor says I’ll get over it, eventually. It’s like PTSD, I guess. Iraq and Afghanistan soldiers mostly get over it, too. And they had it so much worse than I did. 2.0 didn’t do anything to me…” She shook her head. “But still, it bothers me. I know it’s a small thing, but I hate it. That cage—” She broke off.

“Don’t minimize it, Alix. You went through something terrible. They took away your freedom. They made you feel powerless. That’s not easy for anyone to take. Just because you weren’t physically hurt doesn’t mean there wasn’t trauma.”

Alix took a long hard swig from her champagne and peered at George from over the rim of the glass, making sure he saw her doing it.

He bit, just like she knew he would. Good old Uncle George, keeping an eye out for his best friend’s child.

“That’s…” He paused. “That’s a lot of alcohol, Alix.”

Alix drained the glass and handed the empty off to a waiter. “What? This?” She snagged another fresh glass before the waiter could escape. “Chill, Uncle George. It’s just to relax.” It was some kind of sparkling rosé that looked gross and tasted worse when she lifted it to her lips.

George gripped her arm, stopping her from taking another drink. “Alix. Seriously. I think you’ve had enough.”

Alix yanked her arm away and raised her voice. “Why? Because I’m such a good girl?” A couple of people glanced over at them now. Perfect. A scene. Except she really was getting drunk.

George held up his hands, soothing. “What’s going on, Alix? What do you want me to say?”

“Nothing,” Alix snapped. “I don’t want you to say anything. Some kind of crazy terrorists put me in a cage because of your business, and you and Dad don’t have anything to say.”

“We didn’t do that to you, Alix.”

“You know I hurt him?” Alix said sharply.

“Your father?”

“No. The jackass who grabbed me.” Moses. “He stuck his hand into my cage, and I grabbed him. I almost broke his arm.”

“That was incredibly brave.”

“No. I was pissed. He was saying all kinds of things about you and Dad.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.” She took another swig of champagne. “You wouldn’t believe all the things he was saying. All about you and Dad killing families and fooling people into taking drugs and s-selling lies.” Her words were slurring now, but she kept her eyes on George’s expression. “He wanted me to write things. To say you were doing those things. He wanted me to write down everything that they were saying and put my name on it.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that. The Chinese in Korea did something similar with American GIs. It’s a form of brainwashing—”

Brainwashing? Alix felt sick with the new thought, and she didn’t think it was the liquor. Am I brainwashed? Is that why I’m taking all this so seriously now? Because 2.0 got inside my head and brainwashed me?

George was still talking. “—You should talk to your therapist about it. Anything that you felt or did while they had you locked up.” He gripped her shoulder, hard, looking her in the eye. “It wasn’t your fault, Alix. Remember that.”

Alix struggled to get back into her role. “It—it was all insane. They were saying they were going to do something to expose Dad.”

“Their stunt with the warehouse,” George nodded knowingly.

“Nooo…” Alix didn’t even have to pretend to be drunk anymore. She was flying. The champagne had made it through her blood and straight into her head. “It was something else. It sounded big. About asthma medicine or something. Some drug killing kids or something.” She tossed back the rest of the rosé and stared around drunkenly. “I’ve got to tell Dad. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It was when 2.0 had me in the cage. 2.0 said he was going to make some company pay.” She scanned the crowds again. “I can’t believe I forgot. Dad needs to know they’re still planning something!”

She lurched off, pretending to seek her father. George caught her before she toppled off her Jimmy Choos. “It’s all right, Alix. I’ll speak with him,” he said soothingly. “I’ll let him know. Now probably isn’t the time.”

“Do you think it’s true?” she asked, making her eyes go wide and drunk and Bambi innocent. “About the asthma drug? Do you think it could be killing people?”

George laughed and shook his head kindly. “No, Alix. It couldn’t. People will say almost anything if it will win them a lawsuit. They’ll try to spread a lie that a certain medicine kills just to make a buck off the jury award. It doesn’t matter how many studies show something is safe, because if you can force a jury into a hysterical conclusion, instead taking a measured approach and letting sound science dictate what’s true, a trial lawyer can get a huge payday from a class action lawsuit.” He snorted. “People will say or do all kinds of horrible things for money, unfortunately.”

Alix forced herself to smile. “That’s what I told them.”

As quickly as she could, she separated from him and went to the rail. The feeling of being surrounded by unclean things was almost overwhelming. Talking to George, she felt as if he was using a part of the Doubt Factory playbook on her. Around the time he’d said “sound science” she’d started suspecting that he knew exactly what he was doing.

How much was a breakthrough asthma drug worth?

Alix leaned against the rail, sweating and hating the feeling of alcohol that she’d drunk for George’s benefit. Knocking back those glasses to make herself seem harmless to him had seemed like a good idea at the time. But now she felt blearily drunk and wanted it to stop, and now she’d just have to wait it out….

Except she still had more to do. She still had to see if the seed she’d planted—

George was cutting through the crowds toward her father and Mr. Geier.

Alix took a deep breath and pushed off from the rail. Stay sober. Which was a total laugh, because she was feeling more and more hammered by the minute.

Suck it up, Alix. You’re not getting another shot at this.

She stumbled after the trio of men, keeping her eye on them. They ducked through a door into the boat’s interior cabins. Alix pressed through the crowd, hurrying to catch up. It couldn’t be a coincidence. She’d poked them, and they’d reacted.

Alix slipped through the door. She found herself in the yacht’s media center, the walls lined with flatscreen TVs, eight feet across. She slipped off her heels and stole across the parquet floors. She padded down a hallway, pausing at each door to listen.

At last, she found them in what Alix decided was a library. At least, the room had a ton of books on the wall. She wondered if Geier had read any of them at all. Maybe his wife read. Or maybe the books were just for guests.

The men’s voices filtered dimly through the door. Alix leaned against the oak, trying to hear, then, holding her breath, she eased the sliding panel slightly wider, blessing the Dutch for their silent precision. Not a click, not a slide, just voices wafting louder out into the corridor.

“—where else could they hit you?” George was asking Geier. “They like getting on the news. Are you planning any press events?”

Geier’s voice sounded puzzled as he went through possibilities. “We’ve got our quarterly call with investors. The FDA came back with a ruling that Azicort doesn’t require a second look. Would it be that?”

“No, 2.0 likes public events,” her father said. “They’ll go after something big and public. Something they can prank. Something that will cause embarrassment.”

“This party is about as public as Kimball-Geier is going to be for a while.”

“You don’t think they’re on the yacht?” George asked.

“They’re kids, not miracle workers,” Dad said.

“Did you hear what Williams & Crowe said about that virus Alix brought back? That would have been a serious problem if it had gotten into our servers.”

“It didn’t,” Dad said sharply. There was a pause, and then he said, “So where else are we vulnerable? Public events. Think about public places that will attract news attention.”

“We’ve got depositions scheduled for the Romano class action down in Louisiana. We’ve got a presser…”

“No. They’re not like that. What if they went after Sammons?”

“The man’s solid. He won’t say anything. He knows he’s got a job waiting for him as soon as he steps down from the FDA.”

“What about our science witnesses for the appeal? Would they go after them?” George asked. “2.0 spends an awful lot of time worrying about science testimony. You saw what they had up on the walls with that last stunt.”

“I just don’t see it. We’ve got Renner. I mean, sure, he’s a hack, but he’s happy to say whatever we want. And I think with Hsu, we’ve got someone a jury will like. His credentials look good, given all his papers that we’ve published.”

“Would they go after our respiratory journal?”

“They can’t do anything more to us than what opposing counsel will already try. It won’t affect the trial. We got most of the credentialing issues excluded by the judge. It won’t be a problem until they try another appeal, and that will be years…”

Delay = $$$

Alix didn’t want to listen anymore. She padded away, as quietly as her drunken state would allow, and made her way back into the fresh sea air. She leaned against the rail, trying to force herself to breathe.

Just breathe. Don’t think about it.

She wasn’t sure how long she stood at the rail, staring out at the city lights reflecting on the waters, but it must have been for a long time because the next thing she was aware of was Dad joining her.

“Alix?”

Not him. Anyone but him. Alix couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. She made herself smile, but it felt fake, and yet it was all she could muster. At least you’re drunk.

“Hi, Dad.”

“George told me you were drinking?”

“Yeah,” she looked out at the city lights again. Now that he was leaning on the rail, too, she didn’t have to look straight at him. She could just act like the view was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen.

“I don’t mind if you have a glass,” Dad said. “You’re very nearly an adult. But getting drunk, Alix?”

“Yeah.” She made herself laugh. “That was stupid, I know.”

“I’m worried about you.”

I’m starting to think I might hate you.

She couldn’t look at him. She was terrified that he’d be able to see what she was thinking. “I know,” she said, finally. She kept her eyes on the skyline. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot. Everything that happened before, it really got to me for a while. But I think it’s actually going to be okay now.”

“It doesn’t look like things are okay.”

Alix shrugged. “I think it’s like AA.”

“Do you think you’re an alcoholic?” Dad sounded so worried that Alix almost laughed.

“No!” She paused. “I didn’t mean it like that. I mean that first you have to admit you’ve got a problem. After that, it’s a lot easier to decide what you need to do.” She shrugged again. “I just couldn’t admit how much the whole kidnapping thing got to me.” She made herself smile at him, feeling like a bitch for lying and doing it anyway. “You were right. I was burying it.”

Dad wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Alix’s skin crawled as he gave her a comforting hug, but she forced herself not to draw away.

“It would be hard for anyone,” Dad said. “I’m sorry you had to go through it.”

“It’s okay. I’m fine. I mean, I will be. I’ll be fine.” She made herself smile, and suddenly it was real for her. She could lie to him, because she wasn’t lying at all. Suddenly she could smile radiantly. “I have a feeling it’s going to get better from now on.”

“Oh?”

“I realized that I was having a hard time because they were trying to fuck with my mind. I mean, sorry. I mean…”

Dad was too cool to worry about the language. He just nodded.

Alix plunged on. “Anyway, that’s what it was. They were trying to make me believe in their crazy world instead of me believing in my own….” she trailed off. “But I’m not an idiot. I can trust myself. Just because I get fooled once by someone, it doesn’t mean I’m always going to be fooled by them.”

“We only learn from our mistakes.”

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “In a weird way, if it hadn’t been for 2.0, I would never have figured out how important it is to have honest people around you.”

“I’m glad, Alix.”

“Yeah, well.” She shrugged again. “Being surrounded by liars will do that to you.”

32

SURROUNDED BY LIARS, ALIX FOUND herself becoming one. She forced herself to smile, she made herself be the good girl that Mom and Dad wanted her to be, and at night she did more and more research. After Jonah’s intruding on her and her scattered notes, she became more careful about her research.

She created new filing systems and password-protected her laptop, she bought a little key safe at the mall and stuck it under her bed to keep her papers in, and she laid a few of her hairs on top just to make sure that no one messed with it without her knowing.

She regarded the two strands of hair that she’d carefully laid across the locking case. “Nice, Alix. You’re a real superspy,” she muttered to herself. It felt silly, but it still felt better to her than doing nothing.

Eventually, though, the research dead-ended. There was all the information that was out there in the public view, and then there was whatever was tucked away inside the Doubt Factory. It was possible to speculate endlessly about what Dad and Uncle George were up to, but without being able to see their client files, that’s all it was: speculation.

No wonder 2.0 had wanted her to help them. They’d run into the same brick wall that she had.

She sighed and shoved her research case back under her bed. “I am so sick of liars,” she muttered.

So go find some people who aren’t.

Unbidden, a memory of Moses and his crew popped into her head. All of them doing whatever they wanted, skating or programming or feeding rats or talking politics. Looking back on it, it felt amazingly free to her. Just thinking about it banished some of the claustrophobic constriction that she’d been feeling for the last few weeks.

So go find them, a voice in her mind suggested again.

Yeah, right. Like you could. The FBI couldn’t find them. Neither could Williams & Crowe. What makes you think you’re so special?

You were there.

Alix paused, considering. She’d been there. She’d been right there. She’d seen that whole factory. She just hadn’t seen enough of the outside. But she’d been there. She’d been at the rave factory, with it’s giant hamster wheel and many dance cages that had become Williams & Crowe cages, but then there had been the other factory, call it the bat cave, the place where 2.0 laired and lived. She’d lived in their bat cave.

Alix grabbed her keys. Jonah saw her heading out the door.

“Where you headed?”

Alix scowled at him. “Nowhere.”

“Great! I’ll come, too.”

“Are you still spying on me?” she asked him pointedly.

“Spying?” Jonah looked hurt, but Alix didn’t really buy it.

“Screw it,” she said, giving up. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Memory lane.”

The rave factory looked pretty much the way she’d seen it the last time, except that someone had cleaned up all the dead rats and taken down 2.0’s banners.

“So is this some kind of getting-over-trauma assignment or something?” Jonah asked.

Alix was sort of regretting bringing Jonah with her, given how little he could take anything seriously. But she’d decided he was more likely to protect her privacy if he was included than if she shut him out, so now he was wandering around the empty building like a tourist at a freak exhibit.

“Check out the smoke stains!” Jonah called, pointing at the ceiling of the factory, smeared with vibrant soot residue of burning saltpeter and sugar and whatever chemicals 2.0 had used to create the colors.

“Yep,” Alix sighed. “Those are smoke stains.”

“They pretty much snowed you, didn’t they?”

“Pretty much.” Alix went outside to survey the empty warehouse. She’d wanted to believe that the place would tell her something, give her a clue about where she’d been taken next, but the truth was they’d drugged the hell out of her, and then she’d woken up… wherever. In the bat cave.

Lisa had exhaustively debriefed Alix after the kidnapping, dragging out every single detail Alix could recall. What kind of sinks had been in the factory? Old porcelain. Two faucets, with silver rubbing off, showing what might be brass underneath. Four little spokes coming off the water faucet’s handles, old-style. Restoration Hardware, like that. What kind of lockers? Orange. With little vents at the top and bottom. How many lockers? Hundreds. At least a couple of hundred. A big changing room. What kind of windows? How many panes? How high were they from the floor? How high were you from the ground outside? How big was the building? How long did it take you to walk across it?

Again and again and again.

Alix had described it perfectly, and yet no one could find it, and as much as she wanted this factory to lead to that factory, it felt like a dead end.

“Are you seriously trying to find 2.0?” Jonah asked. “Is it because of Dad?”

“He’s not all sweetness and light, you know.”

“So what? Who is?” Jonah asked. His voice sounded so knowing and cynical that it brought Alix up short.

She wanted to have some answer to that, but it sort of mirrored her own sentiments. The more she’d researched the shenanigans of the companies that made their living by manufacturing doubt, the more depressed and hopeless she’d felt.

However cynical you think you are, you’re never cynical enough. That was Moses’s perspective.

Except he hadn’t been cynical. None of the 2.0 crew had been. They’d been cynical about other people. But when it came to themselves, they were practically starry-eyed idealists. They’d actually thought they could change the world.

Alix thought of Cynthia. She’d apparently walked away from a pretty good future to run with 2.0. That was some crazy idealism right there. It was almost comic book idealism. Fighting the good fight against an overwhelming evil.

She thought of Cynthia’s clothes in those industrial lockers in the bat cave. And all those toothbrushes, all lined up at the sinks. She could practically play the theme music in her head, imagining all of them getting up the morning, brushing their teeth, and heading off to do battle.

She laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Jonah asked.

“Idealists.” Alix took a last look around the empty warehouse. “Let’s get out of here.”

“You’re done?”

“Yeah. No one ever lived here. It was silly to come.”

They hadn’t lived here. They hadn’t brushed their teeth here or kept their clothes here. They hadn’t slept here or gotten ready for school here, or woken to the smell of…

Alix stopped short. “Fresh bread.”

Jonah looked at her like she was nuts. Alix was starting to get used to that expression.

Fresh bread. Bread manufacture. Bread Baking…

Cynthia said she had been sick of smelling bread because her parents lived near a bakery. She’d made the comment in the lunchroom. The smell was like smothering in yeast, she’d said. And in the morning, Cynthia had smelled bread when the wind was wrong. She hated bread, and she always wrinkled her nose at the smell.

Bread factories, bread production…

As soon as Alix got home, she started doing map searches for bakeries on her computer, but all she came up with were custom cake shops and coffeehouses, which would have been really helpful if she’d wanted a nice chocolate Grenache tart and a sip of espresso.

Bread distribution, Bread warehouse…

“Is there such a thing as a bread warehouse?” Alix wondered to herself. It didn’t seem to matter. She still wasn’t finding what she wanted.

She gave up on map searches and started doing news searches instead. Looking for stories about bread factories…

“Well, well, well…”

There was an old news story about a Hostess factory going out of business but the building being bought by another company, Maple Confections. One of its big products was Harvest Health Bread. The story was all about how a bunch of baking jobs were going to still stay in the area…

Alix searched Maple Confections. She got a hit in northern New Jersey.

Jersey?

She measured the distances, and was surprised to discover that Haverport was as close to Northern New Jersey as it was to Hartford. They were in opposite directions, but the distances matched almost perfectly.

Could that really be?

Alix switched to satellite view and started looking over the entire area where Maple Confections was housed. All she could see were a lot of huge buildings that all looked alike from above.

She tried Google street view and was surprised to find that the area was documented. With the street view, she could roam back and forth between each of the huge buildings, as if she were walking. But it felt wrong to her. This wasn’t an industrial area. It seemed to be mostly foods that were produced here. There were a lot of abandoned food-storage and grain elevators.

She stopped and scrolled back.

Gotcha.

One building in particular had the style of windows that she remembered from 2.0’s locker room, and for sure the building was huge.

On the outside it said, “New Jersey Canning Systems” in letters so faint she could barely make them out.

It was strange to drive out to the place where she had been held captive. Was she insane to be seeking out the people who had kidnapped her? Was she crazy to be tracking down Moses?

He put you in a cage.

And yet here she was, crossing into Jersey.

She’d left a note to her family not to expect her for dinner, that she was going out with Sophie, and now she was crossing state lines.

Alix wondered if she should have done something to protect herself. Set up some kind of fail-safe, maybe. 2.0 had let her go the last time, but that had been part of the plan. What would happen when she showed up on the doorstep?

She found her exit and followed an eighteen-wheeler that was also exiting into the warehouse district. She wound between the factories and warehouses, following the blue arrow on her phone’s GPS. More eighteen-wheelers were parked at loading docks, and big rigs were on all the roads, driving in and out of the area, looming over her tiny car.

She bumped over train tracks, making her way into quieter and more abandoned areas. As she got closer to her target, her heart began to thud, and she noticed that her palms were slick on the steering wheel. Nervous energy ticked under skin.

“You’re okay,” she muttered to herself, and then hated that she had to say it out loud. “You’re stalking them this time.”

There.

She pulled to a stop in the shadow of a wrecked warehouse and shut off the car, staring up at the building. New Jersey Canning Systems. They’d fooled a lot of people, but this was it. This was the real factory. She was sure of it. This was the place she’d first met the rebellious tribe that had shaken her world.

You can still turn around. Go home and call the FBI…

“Who are you kidding?” Alix muttered. She wanted to see them again. She wanted them to know that she’d tracked them down. To show them that even though they were smart, she was smarter.

Hell yes, she wanted this confrontation.

Alix grabbed her purse and climbed out of the car. In case things went badly, she kept her phone in hand. They wouldn’t catch her off guard this time. She’d see them coming. She made her way over to the factory.

Weeds grew green between cracks in the pavement. Not far off, the Maple Confections factory puffed steam, but the winds weren’t blowing her way today. She hadn’t smelled bread when she’d been held captive, but there was the evidence. With the winds coming in the right direction, she could imagine the factory blanketed with the scent of baking bread.

This is the place. This is really the place. You did it. You found them.

Slowly, Alix circled the huge building, wary for signs of movement.

Nothing seemed to be happening. No cars were parked nearby. She crept up to a door and rattled it. Locked.

She went around the corner, feeling exposed and out of place in the industrial zone. Half of her expected some workman to yell at her to get out of where she didn’t belong. Her little red MINI stood out like a sore thumb where she’d parked it in the weeds. It looked cute and small and vulnerable among the looming factory buildings.

The next door Alix came to was also locked. She kept working her way around the building and, finally, came to a pair of wide double-bay doors. She yanked, expecting them to be locked as well, but, to her surprise, they opened immediately, sliding aside easily on well-oiled tracks.

The factory was empty.

At first, she thought she had the wrong building.

How could it be empty?

She walked through the echoing factory, trying to match the layout to her memories. Her heels clicked loudly on the concrete, the only sound in the cavernous space.

It seemed bigger now, without anyone in it, and lonely. She remembered Tank skating across the concrete expanse. She remembered a heavy bag for some kind of training. She remembered weights. It was all gone. She opened doors and found old hunks of machinery that might have once been stamps or presses, stored in silent rows.

She paused, listening. Were those footsteps?

“Hello?”

No response.

Was she even in the right place, she wondered? If it she was, 2.0 had left it completely pristine. There was no history here except her own memories, and as she walked through the cavernous rooms, she even began to doubt those. It was too clean. She pushed open another door and found a kitchen and felt a surge of relief and recognition.

It was definitely the same place. The steel table was still in the center of the room. The steel counters had the right layout. She’d definitely been here. She walked around the table, running her hand across its surface, and pulled out a chair.

This is where they made me sit. Cynthia there. Tank there. Adam there. Kook on that counter over there.

And Moses, of course, the one they all looked to and trusted, right there across from her. Right there.

But they were gone, just like their pizza boxes and rounds of raw milk goat cheddar.

She left the kitchen and strode out across the open space, her heels clicking and echoing. The map felt right now. With the kitchen to orient her, it all felt exactly right. Here were the floor-to-ceiling storage racks, and there were the conveyor lines. It was all here.

She was walking faster and faster, recognizing all of it now. In the locker room, she found all six sinks, still in a line. Of course the toothbrushes were gone, and the lockers were scoured clean, without even a cashmere thread to indicate that Cynthia had installed an entire high-end wardrobe there.

“I was here.” Just knowing that the place existed felt like giant Alix Has Not In Fact Lost Her Shit kind of affirmation. 2.0 had lived here. They’d showered here. They’d skated here. They’d plotted here.

And now, even though she remembered being frightened and angry and lost and alone when she’d been trapped, Alix was suddenly struck by how disappointed she was that they were gone. Suddenly, absurdly, intensely, Alix wished that 2.0 had never released her.

When Alix had returned to Seitz after the kidnapping, Sophie had asked her what would have happened if 2.0 had kept her; Alix knew that what she was really asking was, Would you have ended up chopped into a million little pieces? But now Alix wondered if the real danger was being trapped at Seitz.

Stifling her disappointment, Alix headed back to the open factory floor and scanned it one last time.

Of course they were gone. It made perfect sense. She’d just been so wrapped up in the puzzle of it all that she hadn’t thought that 2.0 might have lives and plans and agendas of their own.

The world doesn’t revolve around you, Alix.

Moses had even said they were in town for only a little while. So of course they were gone. Their business was finished here. They’d humiliated her and her father, and they’d made fools of Williams & Crowe. By now they were off on some other Don Quixote mission. They were probably terrorizing some CEO in California by now. Filling some guy’s Santa Barbara mansion with ocean water and turning it into a giant aquarium or something.

She turned in a circle one last time, trying to take it in. It was getting dark now, and it made the building gloomy.

Whatever she’d been hoping to find was gone. Closure? Some kind of conversation? People to hang out with who didn’t feel morally bankrupt?

Moses. She’d at least wanted to find Moses. She’d wanted to look him in the eye and say that she understood. She’d put all the pieces together. She’d figured it all out. And to top it off, she’d tracked him down. Which meant she’d beaten him. For once, she’d beaten him. For once, she’d surprised him, instead of the other way around.

Why do you even care? What do you have to prove to him?

She remembered chasing him after his first prank. With rats running everywhere, and more mayhem to come, she’d grabbed his sleeve and called for him to wait. And he’d whirled on her, and, in that moment, she’d seen herself in the lenses of his glasses, her Seitz schoolgirl uniform and her tidy French braid, and she’d felt painfully naive.

God, she’d hated that feeling.

She wasn’t used to anyone looking down on her, and there he was, looking smug, because he knew more than she did. She’d wanted to be strong in that moment, to be able to stand up to him.

“You don’t need him,” Alix said to herself. She took a deep breath. “You don’t need any of them anymore. You answered all the questions yourself. You figured it all out on your own.”

So what now?

And she found, to her surprise, that she had an answer for that as well.

The Doubt Factory.

Alix started to smile. She didn’t need Moses to answer questions, and she didn’t need 2.0 to give her a direction. She’d already chosen her direction. Sometime between reading about aspirin and listening to her father’s plotting, she’d chosen a direction on her own. This was just a detour. A sentimental detour on the way to her actual destination.

With a new spring in her step, she strode out of the factory’s bay doors and slid them closed.

Full dark was coming on. She could see the lights of New York City far in the distance, lighting the skyline. Much closer, a neon Maple Confection’s sign illuminated the bread factory, glazing the area reddish. Already Alix’s mind was at work, trying to solve the puzzle of how she’d crack the Doubt Factory.

Her father made his living helping companies tell their side of the story, and yet every time he did, it seemed he kept a portion of their stories to himself. But somewhere deep inside Banks Strategy Partners, the rest of those stories were hidden.

She just needed to find a way to pry them out.

Alix made her way across the weedy lot to her car, listening to the distant rumblings and beeps and groans of shipping and manufacturing, the music of things being made and moved. Her MINI sat like a toy amid the warehouses. All of it was so big. Bigger than any one person.

Out on the water, she could see a container ship, its lights glowing, giant freight cranes crouching over it, starting to unload.

It’s all so big, she thought, and for a second she felt overwhelmed and small. But then she banished the feeling. Sometimes big things fall hard.

She liked that thought better.

Smiling, Alix climbed into the MINI and revved its engine.

As she put the car in drive, a hand wrapped around her neck and jerked her back against her seat. Alix gasped and tried to break free, but she was pinned.

A voice murmured in her ear. “Didn’t expect to see you again.”

33

“MOSES.” ALIX SWALLOWED AT THE pressure on her throat. Her heart was pounding and adrenaline was ripping through her.

Stay calm.

She had one hand on the wheel, one on the gear shift. She swallowed again. “I can drive us straight into a wall if you don’t let go of my neck, Moses. All I have to do is step on the gas.”

The pressure eased off a little. “That probably wouldn’t go well for either of us, would it?” His voice was so familiar. So confident. He was always so damn confident.

“I’ve got a seat belt,” Alix pointed out. “A crash will work out better for me than you.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Moses said. “I’ll take my chances. This just feels safer, you know.” He gave her throat a squeeze. “I’d rather have some leverage.”

“Leverage for what?”

“Good behavior.”

“Good behavior?” Alix laughed out loud. “Are you serious? After what you did to me?” She knew she was hideously vulnerable, but she couldn’t help firing back. “You’re the one who drugged me and stuck me in a cage! I should probably drive you into the wall just on principle!”

Moses laughed. “Well, there you go—just another reason not to trust you.”

“The feeling’s mutual, then,” Alix replied.

“Seriously?” Moses sounded almost hurt.

“What do you think?”

The sense of play faded from Moses voice, replaced by a surprising earnestness. “If I wanted to hurt you, Alix, you’d already be hurt. It would’ve been easy with you snooping around my place.”

“So why didn’t you? If you don’t trust me so much, why didn’t you just do something?”

There was a long pause. He seemed caught off guard at the question. “Maybe I wanted to know what your game was,” he said, finally.

“I don’t play games,” Alix retorted. “That’s what you do, remember?”

Moses laughed harshly. “Don’t sell yourself short. You played me. When I let you go, I was so sure you were telling the truth. You made me believe, Alix, and it’s not often that I get played like that. I mean, I really believed. Hasn’t happened in a long time. But I got to hand it to you, you played me perfectly.”

“Would you please let me go? Your hand is starting to make me uncomfortable.”

“Yeah, sorry, but no. I don’t trust you.”

Alix let the engine rev slightly. The MINI was begging to lunge forward. “Let me go, Moses. Or I put us both into the wall, and then I scrape you off the windshield.”

“You think I’m afraid of dying?” He laughed. “Try again, Alix.”

Alix clenched her jaw with irritation. “Just so you know, I didn’t play you.”

“So Williams & Crowe just happened to show up on my doorstep? That was a strange coincidence. I let you go, and then Williams & Crowe came knocking with tear gas.”

“That wasn’t really your doorstep.”

“Bet you were disappointed to find out I was one step ahead of you.”

Alix remembered the tear gas rounds crashing in through the upper windows, believing that everyone inside was going to be choking and collapsing.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t want that.” She could still feel the horror of that moment. Seeing what she had set in motion and knowing she was powerless to stop it. She swallowed, feeling sick at the memory. “I didn’t know they’d do that.”

“If I didn’t have a backup plan, Tank would be dead by now,” Moses said quietly. “We’d all be in jail, and Tank would be dead.”

At first, Alix thought he was accusing her, but the way he said it, it felt more like he was barely even talking to her. Almost as if he were reminding himself of something.

He feels guilty, she realized, surprised.

“I didn’t know they’d be like that,” she said again. “It wasn’t what I wanted. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about that.”

Moses was quiet in the car’s darkness. Finally, he said, “Yeah, well, I guess we did drug you and put you in a cage. I hear that annoys people.”

“Payback is a bitch,” Alix agreed.

They both laughed darkly at that. An oddly companionable silence settled between them. Two people, each holding a threat over the other. Neither one quite with the upper hand. The MINI idled smoothly. Moses’s hand was warm on her neck.

“Truce?” Alix suggested hopefully.

“Truce?” Moses laughed. “I like you, Alix. But I don’t trust you.”

“You like me?” she asked. “And this is how you show it?”

“What’s not to like?”

“Didn’t I chip a tooth of yours?”

“That just made me respect you.”

“So what would make you trust me? A punch in the nose?”

Moses blew out his breath. “We’re past trusting, Alix. We’ve got too much water under the bridge for that.”

“You mean because of what I did to you,” Alix said. “Because of Williams & Crowe.”

“Or maybe because of what I did to you. We’ve got history now, that’s all.”

“What if I said I forgave you?”

“I’d say that sounds real nice.”

“But you still wouldn’t trust me.”

“Fool me once, shame on you,” Moses said. “Fool me twice…” he trailed off. Alix saw his shadow shrug in her rearview mirror. “I thought I knew what was going on inside your head, but I was wrong. I don’t need to go down that road again.”

“What about when you came to my house?” she asked. “You trusted me then. I could have called Williams & Crowe, but I didn’t. Why did you risk that?”

“Maybe I wanted to trust you.”

“Well, maybe I wanted to trust you, too.”

There was a pregnant pause. Alix could almost hear Moses considering the angles.

Come on, she thought. Just let me go. Just let us talk. Why can’t we just talk?

“No,” he said, finally. “That wasn’t real. You could make up any story you wanted about me in your head, and maybe that made you open your door to a stranger. And I could make up any story I wanted about you and think you could be all kinds of things you weren’t. But that wasn’t real. I could pretend you were different from those other Seitz girls. I could pretend that you were just asleep. I could pretend that if you woke up, you’d be…” he trailed off. “Anyway, that was just me making things up.”

“I’d be what?” Alix pressed. “Snow White or something?”

He laughed quietly. “Actually, I thought you’d be dangerous.”

“Maybe I am.”

“I don’t have any doubt about that now.”

Doubt. He had no doubt that she was dangerous. But he didn’t believe she could be trusted. Alix remembered a long-ago conversation with him. Moses describing his world:

I don’t believe in anything, he said. I test.

He’s testing you, she realized. He might not even know it, but he’s testing you.

Alix took a deep breath and turned the key off in the ignition. The MINI went silent.

“What are you doing?” Moses asked. He almost sounded alarmed.

Alix didn’t answer, just pulled the keys out of the ignition and held them up for him. They dangled in the darkness, glinting.

“Trust me,” she said. “I already trust you.”

34

“YOU ARE CRAZY.”

“Are you going to take my keys or not?”

“You don’t have any reason to trust me!”

Alix laughed. “I thought we were worried about you trusting me, not the other way around.”

“This isn’t a game, Alix.”

“I know.” She let the keys drop into the passenger seat. “There they are, if you want them.”

“Alix, don’t do this.”

“Don’t trust you?” Alix asked. “Why not? Why wouldn’t I trust the guy who goes off and rescues kids from evil foster homes? Why wouldn’t I trust a guy who spends his time trying to stop bad people from doing bad things in the world? Why wouldn’t I trust a guy who seems to have the trust and respect of probably the smartest girl I ever met? Why wouldn’t I trust the—”

“—the guy who stalked you and put you in a cage,” Moses interrupted vehemently.

Alix reached up and touched his hand where it rested on her throat. She could feel him shaking. Could feel his whole body shaking. She swallowed. “Yeah. That. Why wouldn’t I trust that guy?” She felt him start to draw away, but she tightened her hand around his, holding him there. She pressed his hand against her throat. “Why wouldn’t I trust that guy, too?”

“Alix…” On his lips, her name sounded so soft and full of regret that Alix almost wanted to cry. Instead, she pressed his hand against her throat. “I trust you,” she said. “I’m not afraid of you anymore. I know you.”

“That’s not true.”

“No,” Alix said. “It is true.” She lifted his hand from her throat and twined her fingers in his. “I didn’t know you before. Now, I do. And you know me. And neither of us is the same as we were before.” She squeezed his hand gently. “Neither of us is the same.”

“Alix…” he said again, his voice ragged with emotion.

“I trust you,” she said again, and his hand tightened on hers.

She was fascinated by their hands. Two people, interlocked. Tightening their connection to each other.

“How do you know?” he whispered. “How do you know you can trust?”

“You can’t know,” she said. “That’s what trust is.”

Slowly, she drew him forward, so that she could finally see him. Their faces were inches apart. He’s beautiful, she thought. He has beautiful eyes. She reached up to touch his cheek, wanting him. Wanting to see herself in those eyes, hoping that he saw something beautiful in turn.

“You’re shaking,” he said.

“So are you.”

“Do you want me to let you go?” he asked.

“No.”

“That’s good,” he said seriously. “I don’t want to let you go.”

And then they were kissing, and all Alix could think was that she was home.

“Truce?”

“Truce.”

They lay together in his bed, entangled and comfortable. Alix rolled over and looked at Moses. God, he was beautiful. She ran her hand down his chest, amazed at his skin, at his body, at his muscles. It felt so surreal. She kept trying to figure out how it had happened, if it was real. She wondered if he was going to suddenly realize that he’d made a mistake.

He was looking at her, amused.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing. I was going to ask you the same thing. What’s going on inside that big brain of yours?”

She shrugged. “Nothing.”

He nodded, but he didn’t look away or let her off the hook. He just waited. She laughed and rolled away, feeling self-conscious.

“Nothing. I was just thinking you’re like some kind of weird black Batman.”

As soon as she said it, she was afraid she’d offended him, but he just laughed.

“That is so not what I was expecting you to say,” he said, still chuckling.

“What did you think I’d say?”

He looked serious. “That you wanted to go home.”

“No.”

As soon as she said it, she realized it was true. She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to lie here in his arms forever. For a million years. She wanted time to stop. She didn’t feel like she was wearing some other skin with Moses. She was who she was. Some rich girl from Seitz who didn’t quite fit there. But fit just fine, right here.

“Black Batman, huh?” He nudged her.

“Well, sure.” She snuggled into his body, lying close as she ticked off points on her fingers. “Dubious morality? Check. Comes and goes like the wind? Check. Lives in a bat cave? Check.”

“It used to be a rat cave,” he said, pinching her hip.

“Shut up.” She slapped his hand away. “You’re distracting me.”

“Is that bad?” His hand ran up her skin. Alix laughed and pretended to be trying to squirm away, before letting him capture her and kiss her.

When they came up for air, she said, “The only thing that isn’t like Batman is that you actually have friends.”

He froze at that. He stopped tickling her and let her go.

“What?” She turned to see his face, suddenly worried. “What did I say?”

His expression had turned serious. “Nothing,” he said. “I’m on my own, that’s all.”

“On your own…” She sat up, looking at him. “You mean you’re not doing anything now? I thought you all had left to go do some other… thing.”

He shook his head. “That was just kid stuff. It was bullshit.”

“No.” She shook him. “It was good. It was cool.”

“It didn’t make any difference. None of it does. I finally wised up about it.”

“And everyone else left?”

“It’s dangerous, Alix. If I wasn’t right on my game, Tank would have died. It wasn’t fair to keep them around here, taking risks for no reason.”

“So you just… gave up?” Alix stared at him. “But I came all this way.”

“Why do you care? It didn’t make any difference. We brought all those news cameras in, and you know what people focused on? SWAT guys in cages. You couldn’t even see all the banners. It was all there, laid out. Williams & Crowe. The Doubt Factory. All of them right there, and the cameras didn’t even care. It was just another freaky thing protesters do. Occupy Wall Street shit. The freaks getting covered ’cause they’re freaky.”

“But…”

“We took big risks on you. Game-changing risks. Some of us are over eighteen. Shit gets serious, then. And the bad guys, they’re good. We can’t stay encrypted all the time. You can’t stay off every single surveillance camera. Not every time. I know the FBI’s got an angle on my face. They’ve got Cyn, too, from Seitz records we had to match.” He shook his head. “We were gambling that they were dumb and divided and weren’t paying attention, but that lasts only so long. Eventually, your luck runs out. We hit that research lab for the rats. That was a huge heist. Kook had tabs on a bunch of animal rights groups, and the FBI was all over them right after we pulled it.”

He paused, smiling slightly. “That was actually kind of funny. Watching the FBI come down on PETA and the Animal Liberation Front, and come up with nothing.” He looked at Alix. “Sobering, too, though. Seriously sobering. When they rain down on someone, they don’t screw around.”

“But they didn’t get you,” Alix said. “You did it right.”

“Sure. But then we did your school. And then we grabbed you. And then the bait-and-switch with the cages. Our luck was already too good. That last one…” he shook his head. “We were a little too clear about who we were, that time. Some dude in a cubicle probably is spending every waking minute trying to match up every single person the Doubt Factory has ever screwed. Every company they’ve worked for. Cyn…” he shook his head. “They’ll be trying to pattern match her for sure.”

“And you…?”

He grinned. “I’m a dead trail. Have been for years. I’m a ghost.” He shrugged. “But it can’t last forever. If the feds weren’t so busy looking under rocks for the next Al-Qaida, they’d probably have bagged us already.”

“Maybe you’re just that good.”

Moses grinned, a flash of ego. “Maybe I am.” He sobered. “Even really smart people get nailed eventually. My uncle was the best, and he’s in prison doing fifteen years. And that man was seriously good. Eventually, you make a mistake.” He gestured at her. “I mean, hell, you figured it out. You found the bat cave, right? FBI’s probably right behind you.”

“Bread,” Alix said. “Cynthia said she smelled bread a lot, at home.”

Moses grimaced. “There you go. Bread. One wrong question from the feds and you would have led them right to us. I don’t really care, for myself. No one’s going to mind one more black kid in prison. Nobody gives a shit about me—”

“I care!” Alix interjected angrily.

“Okay, but aside from you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? What am I? Just, like, chopped liver?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Well, then listen to what I’m saying. I care.” She gave him a hard look, driving it home.

Moses grinned. “Okay. Okay. Point taken. But Cyn? She’s a serious genius, and she’s up to her neck in this. Probably going to start the next Google if she doesn’t end up in jail. And Tank? That boy would never survive in juvie. It would eat that little freak alive. Adam? Kook?” He shook his head. “Nah. I couldn’t keep risking them. Not to get nothing.”

Alix looked up sharply. “But you didn’t get nothing. You got me. I’m here. I want to help.”

“You want to help.”

“Actually, I want you to help me.” She grinned. “I’m thinking about hitting the Doubt Factory.”

35

SO THIS IS WHAT IT’S like to have a secret, Alix thought.

She’d been such a good girl, and she’d kept so little from her parents, that it felt like she was a completely new person. As if she’d dragged all the cloying membranes of childhood off her body and she’d emerged.

There was Old Alix, the Alix who had gone from home to school and back again. Who’d done her good homework and gotten her good grades and been such a good girl that she’d always known she could call Mom and Dad for help if she strayed a little.

And now there was New Alix.

New Alix had secrets. New Alix slipped away in the afternoons and met Moses on walking trails in various state parks that Moses selected at random to keep their patterns broken up. New Alix persuaded Sophie to cover for her on the weekends while she slipped down to Jersey and slept with Moses in his empty factory.

But more than that, New Alix saw the world differently. She did all the same things she’d always done, and yet nothing was the same. Every morning she put on her school uniform: white blouse, plaid skirt, white kneesocks, black shoes… and even though all the movements were the same, she was different.

New Alix watched the things that Old Alix had done, and laughed.

So this is what it’s like to have a secret.

Alix shrugged into her Seitz blazer and checked herself in the mirror. Smirked. Cocked her head. Raised an eyebrow.

No sign of a secret. Not even a hint that at night she rifled the filing cabinets of her father’s study, hunting for names and details that she and Moses could use to create a clearer picture of what the Doubt Factory did. No sign that she took photos on her camera phone of everything from Christmas cards from Doubt Factory clients to the tiny doodles that her father put on sticky pads and then stuffed into file folders that he always forgot to sort out later.

The filing cabinets had been easy: the key was on Dad’s key ring, right there on the kitchen island the first night Alix had crept down the stairs to snoop. It was almost ridiculously easy to snoop through her father’s papers.

The computer was another matter. She’d suggested putting a keystroke logger on the computer, to maybe grab Dad’s password, but Moses had vetoed the idea.

“No. I don’t want you getting nailed. He might see the USB key, and when he does, there aren’t enough other people to blame. You’d get caught for sure.”

“I would not.”

“Well, I don’t want to risk it.”

“You were willing to risk me before.”

Moses had the grace to look embarrassed. “Yeah, well, now I’m not,” he said. “So don’t do anything stupid. I don’t want to risk you. I like you too much to lose you.”

“You like me?” she goaded. “You like me?”

Moses rewarded her with an even more embarrassed grin. “Quit hassling me. I’m a guy. Guys don’t talk about this stuff.”

“I think that’s just dudebros. Real men talk about their feelings.”

Moses shook his head and blushed. “Just don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

He likes me, Alix thought as she stared at herself in the mirror.

Downstairs, she found Jonah complaining to Mom about how his Trig teacher hated him. Alix found a nonfat yogurt in the fridge, watching with amused distance as Mom and Jonah went back and forth.

“Jonah,” Mom said, finally. “It would be a lot easier for me to take you seriously if Ms. Scheibler didn’t like you as much as she does.”

“That woman hates me.”

“Nah.” Alix dipped a spoonful of yogurt. “She’s a sucker for bad boys like Jonah.”

“I’m a bad boy?” Jonah perked up at that.

Mom gave Alix an exasperated glance. “Please don’t encourage him.” She paused, studying Alix more closely.

“What are you smiling about?”

“Who? Me?”

“Who? Me?” Mom mimicked.

Bad boys, Alix thought. I was thinking about bad boys. Bad boys like Moses Cruz—

“Batman,” Alix said. She rinsed the empty yogurt container in the sink. “I was thinking about Batman.”

36

“I WISH YOU’D QUIT CALLING me that,” Moses said.

“Batman? Why?”

“I’m not a superhero.”

“I don’t know.” Alix laughed. “You are kind of unbelievable.”

They were on a walking trail by the river. They’d met on the turnpike and then driven into the Connecticut greenery to find a walking trail. It was far enough away from Alix’s normal haunts that she felt safe from anyone she knew seeing her, and it was still close enough that she could pick up Jonah at Sirius Comix within an hour.

“I’m serious,” Moses said. “My uncle could pull off amazing things, too. And then he teamed up with the wrong person, and it all went sidewise so fast he didn’t even see it coming.”

“You were with him a long time?”

“Since I was eleven.” Moses shrugged. “I’ve been orphaned twice. Once after my parents died, then after Uncle Ty got himself arrested.” Moses kicked a rock ahead of him. “Maybe that’s why I’ve gotten so lucky recently. Universe is trying to balance me out.”

Alix didn’t know how to answer. There was a hole of loss there that she didn’t really know how to fill. “I’ve got more files from my dad,” she said, fishing in her purse and handing over an SD card. “It’s a good one.”

“Yeah?”

“His latest idea is to create a cheap news-syndication service. He actually wants to sell slanted news, instead of worrying about trying to make journalists take his quotes. I took some pictures of the mock-ups he had in his briefcase.”

“Alix—”

“There’s one other thing in there, too. He’s got a whole notebook with a hiring plan to put a bunch of sock puppets out to monitor news articles for keywords. It’s like a whole professional trolling operation to get the first comment on online news articles—he’s calling it BSP Lightning Response Services. The whole pitch is that the first comment gets almost as much reader impact as the news article itself…”

“So you just piggyback on the news story and refute from comments.” Moses was nodding.

“And it doesn’t even look like a PR company’s doing it,” Alix added. “Just Bernard Henderson from Indianapolis.”

Moses stopped walking. Alix had already taken a few steps before she realized he’d stopped. She turned back to him. “What’s wrong?”

Moses had the memory card in his hand but didn’t pocket it. He seemed to be weighing it. “You know you don’t need to bring me this stuff, right? That’s not why I’m with you.”

“I know that. It was my idea to do it in the first place.”

“Still, it’s not your fight.”

“This from the guy who told me it was on me if another kid died from Azicort?” Alix looked at him incredulously. “Of course it’s my fight.”

“When I said that before, I was just trying to manipulate you.”

“Yeah, I know…. But still, you were right.” Alix went back over to him and looped her arm into his. Frustratingly, he was looking away from her, and she couldn’t get a read on his face. When she could see his eyes, she had a better sense of what Moses was thinking. “So… what are you trying to do now?”

Moses made a noise of frustration and, finally, met her gaze. Alix was surprised at the emotion she saw there. “I’m trying to make sure you don’t do something stupid and get yourself caught,” he said.

The words were so genuine that Alix felt her heart warm. She reached up and patted his cheek affectionately.

“You’re worried about me?”

“This is serious stuff, Alix.”

Alix laughed. “I think I can snoop my dad without getting caught.”

A guy with six dogs on leashes came down the path. The guy was sweating, running after the panting pack. They got out of the way of the stampede.

“That’s not what I’m saying. You’ve got a good life. Your parents…” Moses trailed off. “They’re good to you.”

“But bad to everyone else, right?”

Moses shook his head, his brow furrowed with frustration. “How did we end up on the opposite sides of this argument? I’m the one who’s supposed to be all crazy, and you’re supposed to be the one who doesn’t want to make waves.”

“Relax, Batman.” Alix grinned. “Just enjoy it.”

“Seriously, Alix. Cut out the superhero stuff. That’s the kind of thinking that gets people nailed. Don’t get cocky.”

Alix sobered and reached out to him. “I get it.” She held his eyes, trying to let him know that she wasn’t crazy, that she wasn’t reckless. “I’m careful. I’m really careful. You can trust me on that.”

That seemed to get through to him. “I just don’t want to lose you.”

They started walking again, their arms interlinked. Alix leaned against him, enjoying the stolen time together. Moses still didn’t seem totally relaxed, though. Alix glanced up at him again. “You’re not going to lose me,” she said. “Okay?”

He blew out his breath. “I know.”

“But you don’t believe me.”

“Sometimes things get under your skin. You watch two parents die. You see your uncle locked up…” he trailed off, looking troubled.

“Moses?”

“Yeah?”

Alix swallowed, unsure of how to ask the question. “What were your parents like?”

“You really want to know?”

She slipped her hand into his and squeezed tightly. “I just want to know whatever you feel like telling me.”

As she said it, she was surprised how true it felt. She just liked being with him. She liked the way it felt to have Moses holding her hand, and she liked the easy way he gave her room to stand aside when a jogger zipped past them. Everything she did with him felt right. She didn’t even have to think about it.

When she’d dated Brad Summers in her sophomore year, she’d always felt self-conscious, trying to figure out even the simple mechanics of holding hands, let alone kissing. Let alone anything more. It had all been something she had to think about. She worried what Brad would think when she held his hand, or when she didn’t. When they kissed, she worried about what he was thinking when she let her tongue slip into his mouth…. It had all been so much work. Watching herself from the outside, and trying to do everything right.

With Moses, Alix didn’t think about any of that. She just was. She walked beside him because she liked it, held his hand because she wanted to, kissed him how she liked, and liked what he did to her in turn.

Alix caught him looking at her. “What?”

“Beats me. You were the one smiling.”

Alix felt herself blush. She looked away. Okay. Maybe still a little self-conscious.

Out on the river, a man was sculling downstream. Strong strokes, silent and smooth. They stepped off the trail to watch.

“Watch out for the poison ivy,” Alix warned.

“Which one’s that?”

“Seriously? There’s something you don’t know?” Alix asked. “I thought you knew everything.” She pointed out the shiny leaves. “Those ones. Three-leaf clusters.”

Moses frowned, staring at the plants for a serious moment, seeming to lock it into his mind. “Never needed to learn about plants. I’m a city boy.”

“And what city was that?”

“Chicago. Then Vegas. After I started living with my uncle.”

“Chicago?” she prompted.

“You’re the inquisition today, aren’t you?”

Alix felt a little annoyed at the implication. “You know, you stalked me for like eight months and did background checks on all my friends and family, I’m still catching up here. Help me out, will you?”

Moses laughed. “All right. I hear you. I’m not used to talking about this stuff. My uncle always said it was smarter not to tell too much real stuff. It’s better to separate… different parts of your life.”

“Like targets and friends.”

Moses blew out his breath. “Yeah. So, with my family… I don’t know. It was a long time ago. My dad worked for the city. He was an engineer. Built overpasses and stuff. My mom was an actress before they got married. She was in plays, little parts, though. Nothing big. Later on, she was an office manager for a company.” He shrugged again. “Middle-class life, all that.”

“Were they nice?”

“I know I liked being with them. I liked my dad when he came home from work, and we’d do these puzzles together when I was real little…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. They didn’t really get a chance to screw me up much. My uncle did all that.”

“They sound nice.” Alix tried to remember what she’d been like when she was that age. Wondering what her life would feel like if it were suddenly snapped into pieces the way Moses’s had been. She mostly remembered Zoe Van Nuys and Kala Whitmore starting a rumor that she stuffed her bra.

Alix cast her mind back, trying to pin down more details from that time. Birthday parties, sure. Her ninth, she remembered because it had been a German chocolate cake with five layers, and Dad kept saying that the slice he was giving her was as big as her head…. She remembered Mom and Dad’s anniversary—their twentieth?—the two of them going out dressed in black while Alix and annoying baby Jonah were stuck at home with a sitter Alix nicknamed Milkface. That was before they’d moved to Connecticut and gotten the bigger house. Before Seitz. Right around the time Dad had started Banks Strategy Partners. Alix was disturbed to find that her memories were so fragmented.

The rower passed out of sight, and they started walking again, arm in arm. “My mom and dad took me to Disney World,” Moses said. “I remember that. My dad let me go on whatever ride I wanted. I went to SeaWorld, too. Saw Shamu. My dad got me a stuffed Shamu, even though Mom said it was expensive. He got me one that was so big…” Moses stretched out his arms.

Alix was struck by how soft Moses’s expression became when he let down his guard. “I remember carrying this big orca around, and it was about as long as I was. Shamu’s tail kept dragging on the ground.” He was smiling at the memory, and his words were coming faster. “And I remember there was a hot dog stand outside Dad’s office building. Sometimes, if I was off school, he’d take me to work. I had to stay in his cubicle and stay quiet and color or read, but at lunch, we’d go out and have hot dogs…” he trailed off. The softness left his face and his expression closed up again. “It’s all stupid stuff. I don’t know why I remember the things I remember.”

Alix swallowed and looked away, trying not to show him how much it affected her, but the sadness she felt was almost overwhelming. Listening to him hunt for memories of something good, and knowing how much he’d been robbed of.

“It sounds nice,” she said, and was glad her voice sounded almost unaffected. “They sound nice.”

Moses shrugged. “I can’t remember their faces unless I look at a photo, you know? It’s weird. But I remember my dad had calluses on his hands because he’d lift weights in the basement. Sometimes I try to remember more, but mostly I remember finding Dad in the bathroom on the floor. Him trying to get up and not being able to. And then Mom—” He broke off.

“And you ended up in Las Vegas.”

“Yeah.” Moses’s voice hardened. “Uncle Ty. Tyrone Cruz. He always said Ty was short for Typhoon. Man was in the Army and got kicked out. That man…” He shook his head. “My Uncle Ty knew how to smile. That man could smile himself out of anything. Smile himself into anything, too.” Abruptly, Moses deepened his voice, mimicking, becoming someone else entirely. “ ‘We don’t do the nine-to-five, Mo. We too good for that ant work. We be grasshoppers. Smaaaart grasshoppers. Let the ants do all the work.’ ” He shrugged. “I didn’t figure out until a lot later that there was a name for his racket.”

“He was a con man, wasn’t he?”

“Taught me everything I know. Taught me the long con and short con. Taught me to pick the marks and rope them. Taught me how to talk just the way you knew the mark wanted to hear. Taught me body language. How to read people. How to keep my fingers fast. Taught me how to fool the eye. Taught me how to slip a watch off a man’s wrist and chase after him and get a reward. Simple shit like that, but he taught me to fool the person behind the eye, too. Taught me how wearing a uniform will make someone trust you. Put on hotel livery, you ain’t just some stranger anymore. Wear a suit with a conference badge on it and people think they know you, even when they don’t. How to talk, how to look, how to be. He taught me all that. Hacking is what he called it. Just like Kook does on computers, but I hacked people. I hacked conversation. Mostly, though, I did a lot of roping people into rigged poker games.” He shook his head.

“Was that good money?”

“When Uncle Ty wanted to work, it was. We’d make a big score and live for weeks on it.” He glanced over at Alix. “I mean, this is small money in comparison with Seitz life, but plenty to pay rent and eat steaks and for Uncle Ty to go out with his ladies.”

“Sounds surreal.”

“Looking back, I think it was. But I was young. It was just different. At first, I think I thought it was strange, but then I just got used to it. Uncle Ty taught me different scams, we’d make a score, and he’d go out and party. And I’d read books in his apartment until he came back. It was life.”

“Did you go to school?”

Moses smirked. “Homeschool.”

“I’m serious.”

“Sometimes. Mostly it just turned out that I could always do whatever they wanted me to do, but I could do it faster alone. Uncle Ty didn’t really care.” Moses deepened his voice again. “ ‘Long as you can read and do numbers, you’re good, son.’ ” Moses laughed. “Mostly by that he meant he wanted to make sure I could count cards and figure odds. The rest of it was all just grind and rules for sheep. Uncle Ty always thought my dad was a fool, the way he went to college and got a job with the city and all that. ‘Working for the man,’ he called it. My dad believed in rules: play by the rules, work hard, get ahead, American dream, all that. Uncle Ty wanted to play only if he could rig the rules. If he couldn’t rig the game, he wouldn’t play. He said all that rules and obedience and college crap was for sheep.”

“Do you think I’m a sheep, too?”

“What?” Moses looked over, surprised.

“I mean, my whole life, it’s been rules. Get good grades. Stay in school. Don’t be late for class. Get an SAT tutor. Have at least three extracurriculars. Keep your grades above 3.9. Volunteer for two charities. Get into an Ivy League school. Get a job that people can brag about, maybe in an investment bank. Then get a husband who’s even richer than you so you can get a baby and then quit your job, or maybe become a supermom and do it all and rule the universe….”

She trailed off, thinking of all the obedient Seitz boys and girls streaming across the quad in their school uniforms, heads down, cramming hard for the next round of exams, sweating hard for their 4.0.

“So, like I said, do you think I’m a sheep, too?”

“That was my uncle. Not me.”

“But that’s what I do. I go to school. I get good grades.”

“So? My dad built bridges. You don’t do that without going to college. I don’t think you’re some kind of Seitz robot girl.”

Alix wasn’t sure what kind of assurance she was looking for, but that wasn’t exactly it.

“Gee, thanks,” she said drily.

“Alix.” Moses stopped walking. “Seriously. Neither of us has to be whatever our people were. Maybe we’re outliers, right? Data scatter. Maybe we don’t show up as normal at all. You don’t end up in an investment bank, and I don’t end up in jail with my dumb uncle. You’re not like those other Seitz girls.”

“But I kind of am,” Alix pushed back. “That’s where I come from, right? Rich. White. All that.”

Moses laughed. “Well, you’re definitely white and you’re definitely rich. But no, you’re not the same. First time I saw you, I could tell.”

“What did you think you saw?”

“Something was just real screwy with you.”

Alix slugged him in the arm. Moses fended her off, laughing as she came after him again. He finally trapped her hands in his, leaving them both staring at each other, breathing hard.

“I’m serious,” he said. “As soon as I started watching you, I had a feeling about you. All the other girls you ran with… they were like perfect little dolls. Heads down, doing their little tests, going to their little parties, buying their little cars. Kook called you all cogs, but it was more than that. It was like you were the shiniest, prettiest, most expensive, high-tech cogs you’ve ever seen. I mean, you were all perfect, right?”

“And I wasn’t?”

Moses started walking again. “You know what I mean. It just looked like all the rest of your friends were going to find a nice, expensive slot to fit into… and you weren’t. I just kept looking at you and thinking your shape was wrong. Like if we bumped you right, you’d pop out. And then you’d be seriously dangerous.”

“You said that before, about my being dangerous. But I’m not.”

“Quit it,” Moses said.

“Quit what?”

“Quit it with the thing where you cut yourself down. You’re going to one of the best private schools in the country. You’re dangerous already. And that’s before you’re… you.”

“And I am…?”

“Okay.” Moses stopped. “How long did it take for you to put all the connections together about the Doubt Factory?”

“I don’t know. A couple of weeks.”

“It took me years.”

“But you told me where to start. It was easy with a jump start.”

“How late did you stay up doing all your research?”

“Late, I guess. I had classes, too.”

“3 AM? 4 AM?”

“Sure. When else was I going to do it?”

Moses laughed. “You know a lot of your friends who spend their spare time rooting around in government acronyms? Trying to keep NIOSH and OSHA separate?”

“No, but—”

“What’s the Donors Capital Fund?”

Alix cast her mind back to her research, recalling her notes. “It’s a money anonymizer. There’s also Donors Trust, which is pretty much the same. Same address, anyway. Companies funnel money through it, and then Donors Capital Fund passes it on. Donors Fund spends a lot on climate doubt, but you can’t tell who’s giving the money to them. They’re funneling millions, these days.”

“You see?” Moses was grinning at her. “You’re interested in the world, Alix. You might not know that, but it’s kind of rare. Someone throws a puzzle at you, and you start working it, and you start putting all these interesting pieces together while you work it. And, boy, do you work it. Next thing I know, I’ve got this Seitz girl wandering around in my factory, uninvited.”

“Well…”

“Seitz preps people to take a test, or go to college, or get a job, but it doesn’t want them to do anything important or new or risky or dangerous,” he said. “You’re not like them. You don’t want to be on a shelf.”

“So you think I was just waiting for you to come along?”

“I think there are some people who want to bite into something and just chew it to pieces. Not just take a little bite, but just mash the whole thing up and keep chewing. If I didn’t come along, you’d have stayed on track, for a while, and then, at some point, I think you would have jumped. I don’t think you were ever going to end up as an investment banker. You were never going to be a sheep.”

“I might have ended up working at BSP.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Definitely not.”

“No?”

“You would have ended up running BSP. You would have ended up turning BSP into a global company with offices in sixteen countries, but you wouldn’t have ended up just working there. Don’t sell yourself short, Alix. You’re dangerous.”

“I feel nauseated and complimented at the same time.”

“Just saying you’re not a sheep.”

“My boyfriend’s full of compliments today.”

Moses looked at her seriously. “Is that what I am? Your boyfriend?”

“What, you think I just sleep with anyone?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Of course you’re my boyfriend…” Alix faltered, suddenly feeling presumptuous and unsure of what Moses really felt for her. “I mean, if you want…”

Maybe he doesn’t like you that way.

“I mean,” Alix stumbled, “if you think I’m your girlfriend…” She felt like she’d stepped off a cliff and found open air under her feet. She threw up her hands. “Will you help me out here? I’m dying! What do you think we are?” She could feel herself blushing horribly.

Moses burst out laughing and pulled her close. “I think you’re cute when you’re blushing,” he said.

“You’re a jerk,” she said, her words muffled against his chest.

“Good thing you like me, then.” He pulled her in tighter.

“So this is serious, right?”

“Boyfriend, girlfriend, going steady, whatever you want to call it, I’m good with it.”

It felt almost criminal how much she liked being wrapped inside his arms.

37

BY THE TIME SHE PICKED up Jonah at Sirius Comix, Alix was sweaty and happy, enjoying the fact of her secret life with Moses. She looked at her little brother affectionately. Life was good, the brother was good, all was good—

“You’re late,” Jonah complained.

“Sorry.” Alix grinned unrepentantly. “I got held up. You could have called.”

“I left my phone in your car,” he groused. He reached around on the floor and came up with it. He gave her another glare. “You used to be on time.”

Alix nodded absently and pulled out into traffic. “I said I was sorry already.”

“It’s okay.” He was fiddling with the phone, staring at it. “I know why you’re late. I get it.”

Alix glanced over at him, feeling a twinge of worry. She suppressed it. First rule of getting away with things was to deny deny deny. “Get what?”

“I know where you’re going,” Jonah said. “I know what you’re hiding from Mom and Dad.”

Deny deny deny. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do.” Jonah held up his phone and grinned. “I tracked you.”

“You… what?” Alix spluttered.

“I put a tracker app on my phone. See?” He showed her the screen. “It wasn’t even hard. Just left my phone in your car a couple times.” He started fiddling with the screen, tapping.

“At first, it was weird because you kept going to the river, and that didn’t make any sense because you never used to do that, but then I got you on the weekend, and I had you in Jersey.”

He held up the screen again for her, an aerial view of industrial buildings, train tracks, and roads. “It’s your factory, right? The one where 2.0 put you in that cage.”

Alix almost drove off the road. “No! That’s not what that is!”

“Watch the road, will you?” Jonah braced as Alix got the car straightened out.

“Get out of my private life!” She was trying not to panic, but she could feel herself starting to hyperventilate.

I need to warn Moses.

She tried to force herself to be calm. “That’s not what you think—”

“Oh come on, Alix! I know what you’re doing. You’re not going over to Sophie’s every weekend, and you’re not doing college-application prep or whatever the heck it is that you tell Mom and Dad you’re doing after school.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“This is me we’re talking about! I’ve been recording you. I’ll bet if I go through this last track a little, I’ll have you and your boyfriend sucking face.” He started fiddling with the screen. “Here let’s try this…”

Moses’s voice crackled from the phone’s speaker. “—here, just lean the seat back—”

“Who’s this talking, Alix? Sure doesn’t sound like Sophie.”

Alix stared straight ahead, keeping her eyes on the road, trying to keep her voice steady. “This isn’t any of your business.”

“Not even when the guy you’re hooking up with is wanted by the FBI?”

Alix tried not to show her panic, but inside, she was furiously working the angles, trying to figure out how she could warn Moses. Trying to figure out how quickly she could pack.

“It’s more complicated than that, Jonah.”

I’m leaving, she suddenly realized.

Alix was surprised at how certain she felt. Moses was going to have to leave, and she was going to run with him. There wasn’t any question.

Jonah intruded on her thoughts. “How is being wanted by the FBI complicated, exactly? I’m just trying to get this straight in my head.”

Alix glared at him. “They only want him because he kidnapped me.”

“Whoa.” Jonah shook his head pityingly. “You don’t make it sound any better when you admit you’re hooking up with your kidnapper.”

“You know what, Jonah? My love life isn’t your business. And he’s not my kidnapper. I stalked him this last time.”

“Aaaand still sounding crazypants.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with you!”

“What about when you get arrested?”

Alix tried to keep her voice controlled. “Who did you tell about him?”

“I just don’t get it. What is it with this guy? He was totally stalking you, and then he kidnapped you, and now… what? You just decide you’ve got to hook up with him?”

“Who did you tell?” Alix pressed. Her heart was pounding with fear. “This is important.”

“I’m just saying you never used to lie. Now you do. All the time—”

“Who knows about this, Jonah?”

Jonah continued prattling, undeterred. “Not that you’re any good at it. You’re a total amateur. Actually, amateur’s too kind. I mean, it’s like, how can such a smart girl be such a dumb liar?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jonah gave her a self-satisfied smile. “Mom and Dad would’ve already caught you if I hadn’t been covering for you.”

Alix almost slammed on the brakes. “What?”

“I told you. You’re an amateur. They’ve been asking where you were, what you were up to. I promised I’d keep an eye on you. They were worried you were doing some kind of PTSD thing.” He shrugged. “I’ve been covering for you for weeks. They still think you’re their good girl.” He looked over at her. “I’m not a rat.”

Alix didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She was so relieved to hear that Jonah had kept the information to himself that she felt like she’d been given a death-sentence reprieve.

She pulled over to the curb and turned off the car, giving Jonah her full attention. He was smiling at her, like he knew just how much leverage he had. “Okay,” she said. “You got me. So why are pushing on me now?”

Jonah’s smile disappeared. “I want to know what you’re doing.”

“And I already told you it’s none of your business what I do with my boyfriend.”

“Not that!” Jonah waved a hand dismissively. “I’ve got, like, hours of audio already.”

“You little—”

“I want to know about the other stuff. You’re giving him something. I heard it on my recordings.”

“No.” Alix shook her head. “Just. No. This isn’t up for discussion.”

“You think you can Mom-voice me?” Jonah laughed. “I could call Williams & Crowe, you know. Your friend Death Barbie would be inside that factory of your boyfriend’s like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Williams & Crowe SWAT goons looked superbadass the last time. I bet they’d do a whole lot better if they were hitting the right place.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Jonah shrugged. “Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. I want to know. It’s something to do with all that stuff you were obsessed about before, isn’t it? All the work Dad does. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

Alix cast about, trying to find another solution, any other solution than trusting Jonah. “You really want to know?”

“I already said I did.”

So much for secrets.

“Okay,” Alix relented, “but not now. Tonight. After Mom and Dad go to sleep, we’ll talk.”

By the time Alix finished explaining everything that she’d been researching, and describing her hunt for Moses, Jonah was staring at her, wide-eyed.

“This is so nuts.”

They were both sitting on his bed. Jonah’s iPod clock read 2 AM. Alix’s mouth was dry and sticky, and her throat was hoarse. “It’s the truth. Real truth. Not the back-and-forth smoke and mirrors Dad does. Facts.”

“Yeah, but…” Jonah shook his head, frowning. “Alix…” He shook his head again. “I covered for you because I thought it was kind of hilarious that you were rebelling. But this is serious. You can’t just go mess everything up for Dad. This is our life. You can’t mess all that up.”

“Not even if we’re getting our money from hurting other people. Killing them, even?”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

Alix climbed off the bed. “Come on then, I’ll show you.”

“Show me what?”

“You want proof, don’t you?”

She peeked out Jonah’s bedroom door and motioned him to follow. “Come on, daredevil. And be quiet. I don’t want us caught.”

To Alix, Jonah sounded horribly noisy as they stole down the stairs to Dad’s study. Even his breathing was loud.

“Would you be quiet?” she whispered fiercely.

“I am!” Jonah whispered back. “When did you become such an expert at sneaking around?”

The question gave Alix pause. When did that happen, exactly? At some point, she’d become a spy in her own family’s house. Some kind of screwed-up mole, planted in deep cover. Alix couldn’t help but be reminded of Cynthia—the perfect friend whom Moses had planted right beside her. She remembered how betrayed she’d felt when she found out.

And now you’re doing the same thing to Dad.

It hadn’t seemed so clear-cut as that before. But with Jonah trailing right behind her as she found Dad’s keys on the kitchen island and then began opening his filing cabinets in his study, she suddenly felt weirdly exposed. With Jonah watching her do this, it wasn’t just a game anymore. It was real.

Alix forced down her rising anxiety. “Here. Check this out. This is a whole file on how Dad has a rapid-response group for negative articles about his clients on the Internet. They’ve got searches that help them catch bad news, and then they pay people to swarm the comments using sock-puppet names.” She rifled through more files. “This one is all about a plan to put news releases into small-town newspapers. Ones that don’t have good editorial controls. Cost estimates. Number of readers.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t evil, Alix.”

“Read it,” Alix said. “Wait till you get to the part where he and George are practically salivating over the weak fact-checking. They keep saying it. It’s a pitch they’re putting together for their clients. Weak fact-checking is a plus for them.”

“Still…”

Alix kept rifling through the familiar files. She’d been through all of them before. “These are just some of the things they work on. I’ve done searches on client names—” She broke off, frowning.

“Kimball-Geier…”

She pulled the sheet. It was a legal opinion. She went back into the files looking for more, but all she had was the single sheet. She checked the date. It was recent, but there wasn’t anything else.

“See if you can find any more sheets like this,” she whispered to Jonah, then she went and checked Dad’s briefcase as well. Nothing. She went back and studied the paper again.

“What is it?” Jonah asked.

“Azicort. It’s an asthma drug. I heard Dad and George and Mr. Geier talking about it on that yacht a while back.”

“You were spying on Dad all the way back then? You’re like that Russian spy… what’s her name? The superhot one who grew up pretending to be an American and then got caught?”

“I just got tired of people lying to me, okay?”

Jonah held up his hands. “I’m not judging.”

Alix went back to the memo. “It looks like they’re going to settle another lawsuit. They’ve got this asthma drug, Azicort. Moses told me it was killing people…. The kid… Tank. It puts people into comas. Sometimes it kills them if a doctor doesn’t figure it out fast enough.” She read over the letter again.

“Dad wants them to settle this case…” She frowned. “The people who were suing are giving up.” She remembered the members of 2.0 comparing monetary settlements.

“Geier was the guy with the fancy yacht, right?”

“The CEO,” Alix said absently, as she read more. The papers were dense with legal jargon, but from the look of it… “It looks like they’re talking about studies they did on rats, and that they knew there were dangers. Coma. Death. Dosages.” She shuffled through her dad’s files, frustrated. “There should be more, but I’m not finding it. I think Dad’s advising them to settle because there’s a new, more definitive study about to come out, and it’s bad for Azicort. He thinks it’s better for them to settle and then get the FDA to reapprove them for a different respiratory use. They’ve gotten friendly hearings at the FDA…” She looked up from the paper, frowning. “I wish I could see what he keeps on his computer. If I could get on his client files, this would be clear.”

“You don’t already know?” Jonah snarked.

“We don’t have the girl, Kook. The hacker,” Alix explained. “She wrote a program to break Dad’s laptop open. If we could get on that…”

“You wouldn’t get anything at all,” Jonah said.

“How would you know?”

Jonah smirked. “Because I happen to know that Dad doesn’t keep anything valuable on it. All his important files are stored on servers at his offices down in DC. They’ve got it completely hived off from the Internet for security. Even his laptop doesn’t connect to that other network.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m serious! Lisa was making Dad and George game out different ways that 2.0 might try to hurt them and their clients. I was right there. I heard them talking.”

“So how do you know about Dad’s laptop?”

“Lisa got worried once they figured out that 2.0 had hackers working for them, and she started asking about data theft. Dad and George said they keep all their sensitive client data off the Internet, so it can’t be accessed by anyone who doesn’t work inside the actual BSP offices. Maybe they’ve got a couple files with them on their laptops, but mostly it’s at BSP, and there’s all kinds of check-in, check-out trackers. Dad and George kept saying you’d have to be inside the actual offices to get anything.”

“What happened then?”

“Not much. Lisa got paranoid that 2.0 would try to hold you hostage, maybe make Dad release his client files that way. She was real uptight about the client files.”

“What did Dad say?”

“Beats me. They closed the door on me when they started talking about…” Jonah lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “hostage scenarios.” He shrugged. “Lisa was freaking about that idea, though. She didn’t want any of Dad’s clients getting exposed.”

“I’ll bet she didn’t.” Alix stared at the legal memo, thinking about the strange crew that Moses had once assembled. “The kid’s name was Tank,” she said. “The one who took Azicort.”

“You told me that already.”

“Yeah. I know. It’s just…” Alix trailed off. “It was kind of a joke name, right? Like the kid was big and tough, even though he wasn’t. I think Azicort maybe did something to him. I never got a chance to ask, though.” She frowned, tapping the file on the table thoughtfully. “Moses would know.” She snapped a pic of the memo with her phone and then carefully put the paper back where she’d found it. “I’ll bet the lawyers in this class action would give a lot to know what’s in Dad’s files.”

“You’d seriously sabotage Dad like that?” Jonah asked.

Alix didn’t know how to respond.

Jonah looked pained. “Come on. You can’t be serious.”

“What would you do if you were walking past someone on the sidewalk who was bleeding, and you were the only person in the world with a bandage? Would you let them bleed out?”

“What kind of a screwed-up question is that?”

Abruptly, Alix realized she’d said too much. Don’t get him more involved. Get him out. Make him forget about all this. She made herself smile. “It’s nothing. I was just thinking.”

“Oh no you don’t. You’re planning something, aren’t you?”

“I think we’re done for the night. It’s 3 AM.”

“I’m your brother.”

“You’re my little brother.” She patted him on the shoulder. “Seriously. Let it go, Jonah.”

“I could still tell Dad,” he threatened.

“You could,” she admitted. “But you won’t.”

“How do you know?”

Alix grinned. “Because if you do, I’ll let everyone know that you’re the one who called in the bomb threat last fall.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Shhhh.” She put her fingers to her lips. “I’ve got some things I need to do, that’s all. It’s probably better if you don’t know what they are. It’s no big deal. I promise. Just be good for a while, until I get back.”

Jonah was frowning, his brow knitted. “You’re going down to DC,” he said. “You’re going down to DC and you’re not going to take me.”

38

A WEEK LATER ALIX WAS on the Acela with Moses, cruising south. The Acela ran smooth and fast, down through Connecticut countryside before plunging into the heart of New York City. Minutes later the train emerged, rushing for Philadelphia, Baltimore, and, as Jonah had guessed, Washington, DC.

“Are you sure Jonah isn’t going to rat us out?”

“Will you calm down about that? I know him. He’s mostly just pissed I’m not bringing him along.”

“How did you persuade him to stay?”

“I told him that if he kept his mouth shut, I wouldn’t turn him in for his bomb-threat prank on Seitz last fall.”

Moses warned, “You know this is just a scouting trip, right? We aren’t going to try anything this time.”

“I know.”

“It probably won’t work,” Moses said. “A lot of these things, they’re just about trying different approaches. Learning about the people involved. Learning how their systems work.”

“I know.”

“We tried this before, you know. We never got past the front desks.”

Alix grinned. “I know.”

“You act like you’re listening to me, but I don’t think a word I’ve said has actually stuck inside that head of yours.”

Alix leaned back in her seat, watching the greenery and buildings rush past. “I heard you.”

“What did I say?”

“The program you’ve got isn’t as good as the one Kook wanted to use before. This is only a keystroke logger. We need to get it installed on Dad’s computer, which is basically impossible, because it’s inside all these layers of security that you can’t get past without someone like Kook doing the hacking, and even if she was she wouldn’t have access to their main servers, and blah blah blah…”

“I’m serious, Alix.”

Alix patted his hand reassuringly. “I know you are. But we’ve got Dad’s swipe card already, and I’ve got the key to his corner office. I think that counts for something.”

“Yeah, well, just because you can grab his wallet off the kitchen counter—”

“And clone his key card. I did that, too.”

“Only because I gave you the machine to do it! Don’t get cocky, Alix. Sneaking around and snooping your dad’s stuff at home isn’t the same as this. This is real. We’re talking about real—” He broke off, leaned close, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “We’re talking about real breaking and entering.”

She leaned over and kissed him. “You’re cute when you worry.”

“Why are you so calm about this? When Kook and Cyn and Adam and Tank and I were doing this, we never figured out how to crack the Doubt Factory. Never. We figured out how we might have gotten inside, but after that Kook needed some way to get on the network, and for that we needed security keys…. It was a mess.”

“But we’re already further along than that,” Alix pointed out. “Anyway, I’m sure we’ll work it out. Dad knows I’m coming down to DC for vacation with Denise and Sophie, seeing the nation’s center of political gridlock and all that, and letting Denise check out Georgetown for the millionth time. He’s not going to even see this coming.”

Moses scowled. “You know what the problem with amateurs is?”

“Too much confidence?” Alix asked brightly.

“That’s right. Too much confidence.”

“You told me that last week.” She kissed him again. “I think you’re forgetting something, though.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“This time, you’ve got me.” She smiled so dazzlingly that Moses was almost fooled into believing their scheme would work.

“Mr. Banks? Your daughter is here to see you.”

Alix waited at the front reception, tapping her fingers on stainless steel. In her head, Moses’s instructions kept repeating themselves.

“Look at the tags for the security people. Pay attention to their uniforms. Watch how they make your visitor pass.”

The man smiled at her and said, “Elevator four.”

She went in and the doors closed. She’d never thought about how infuriating it was to have no buttons on the elevator, but right now it felt like a serious crimp. She could only swipe a building pass and then get on an assigned elevator and finally ride up to the pre-programmed floor.

So the first hurdle was to get inside the building, which was owned by some other company. Then to get access to the elevators, then to ride up to where Banks Strategy Partners was located on the tenth floor. Alix had grabbed Dad’s swipe card and office key at home, but they had no way of grabbing his computer password. Hence the keystroke logger.

“I can get us into the main office building, but after that it’s all on you. You’re the one who has to get passes for the elevators and keys for your dad’s offices,” Moses had said.

“How, exactly, do you break into an office building where you aren’t invited?”

“Don’t worry about it. I just need to bump into the right worker.”

“How is it that easy?”

Moses had grinned and held up her keys. Somehow, he’d gotten them out of her purse, while it was on her shoulder…

“That’s amazing!”

“Here, let me see your bra…”

That had led to a pleasant distraction.

Focus, Alix.

She rose up through the levels, fighting a feeling of claustrophobia in the button-less elevator.

This can work. This isn’t crazy. This can work.

She had the USB key in her pocket, loaded with the little virus. A simple keystroke logger. Nothing fancy. Not like the Stuxnet-modified worm that Kook had created before and taken with her when she left. Just something simple and innocuous that most anyone could use with a little training. All Alix needed to do was get the logger onto the computer. Just a few mouse clicks on the right computer and she’d be done.

“Will it set off an alarm?”

“Kook wrote it before she left. It’s not something that’s out in the wild, so it’s got a good chance of sliding past their alarms.”

“How good is a ‘good chance’?”

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want.”

“I’m just asking.”

“It doesn’t report to anywhere else. It doesn’t try to get access to networks. It just wants to sit and listen right on the computer. It’s pretty innocuous, as far as viruses go. It’s the best chance we’ve got.”

“It just wants to listen,” Alix muttered to herself, trying to master the jittery energy that was popping just beneath her skin. “No one will notice.”

The elevator door slid aside and Dad came out to greet her, pushing through BSP’s emblazoned doors.

“Alix! Great to see you!”

He won’t see it coming from me. He won’t even know it’s happening.

Alix went into his arms and let him hug her while she checked for where the swipe cards unlocked the main office doors.

Hug him back, idiot.

Alix made her arms tighten around him, remembering how it had used to feel to be hugged by him, how safe and happy she’d felt. Now it felt more like being hugged by rose thorns. It was all she could do not to show how her skin crawled.

I know what you do.

She grinned up at him. “I thought I’d surprise you. You want to go out for lunch?”

“I’d love to! Just let me finish up an e-mail.”

He sounded so pleased and happy that Alix felt herself faltering, even as she followed past reception and down the hall, past conference rooms and offices to his own corner office, looking out across DC toward the Washington Monument. She couldn’t really do this, could she?

The next kid like Tank is on you, she reminded herself.

She steeled herself for the next step.

“Oh, Dad, I almost forgot! Denise needed to print out some essays for her Georgetown interview. I told her I could print them here and get them to her. Is that okay? It’s just a PDF.”

“Sure, Alix.”

Alix hugged him and gushed. “Oh my God, you’re a lifesaver! Denise is going to love you forever.”

She fished the USB key out of her pocket. Smiled innocently. “Can you just print it?”

He didn’t even blink. He took the key and popped it into his computer.

Of course he did. He trusted her.

The file opened up.

Political Innovations in Cluny, France.

“Looks dry,” Dad commented.

Alix’s mouth sure felt dry. “Yeah. That’s the one.” She suddenly felt horribly and completely transparent, standing next to him, staring at the computer’s flatscreen, wondering if Kook’s virus would work.

“Just one copy?” he asked.

“Um… I think she wanted two.”

Alix was sure he could hear her heart beating out drum warnings of betrayal. She stared at the screen, trying not to look suspicious and feeling flagrantly so.

Nothing telltale happened. Which was good, Alix hoped. The virus was supposed to be stealthy. While they were looking at medieval European power in the church, Kook’s program was slicing through Dad’s computer defenses and setting up shop.

As least, that was the idea.

Either that or it was all a fantasy, and Kook wasn’t the hacker who had successfully rewritten a Stuxnet virus, and she wasn’t the girl who spent her late-night hours hacking Chase Manhattan for Eastern European credit card thieves. Maybe she was just a crazy girl in over her head, with a boy who wasn’t all he was cracked up to be, and Alix was about to set off every single alarm in the whole damn building.

Alix licked her lips, waiting for alarms and red flags. Sirens. Security guards. German shepherds. SWAT.

The printer began spitting out paper.

“I’ll just print out one more,” Dad said. “Just in case Denise spills coffee or anything.”

Alix looked up at her father, her heart thudding with wonder as everything went exactly as planned.

“You’re the best, Dad. Thanks.”

When she came out of her father’s building after lunch, she saw Moses. He was in jogging clothes with an ostentatious Bluetooth headset on his ear, and he was stalking back and forth on the far side of the street, doing stretches and pretending to be one of those pretentious people who liked to believe that everyone wanted a sampling of their oh-so-important conversation.

Alix crossed the street. He looked different. He’d done something with makeup to make himself look older. Small lines. A bit of gray at his close-cropped temples. It was amazing how makeup reshaped a person. It was a trick Adam had known how to do, Moses had said. That boy could make anyone look like anything. Give him a wig, a uniform, a little greasepaint, and a little foundation, and people’s faces changed.

And that was without even adding any latex. None of the real makeup craft of the theater. Adam had made Moses look legitimate enough as a driver of an eighteen-wheeler that they’d been able to hijack an entire shipment of rats, and drive it right out of a testing facility without raising alarms.

And now Moses was using Adam’s tricks again. Moses looked almost distinguished, except that he’d pulled his socks up on his calves, making himself look almost intentionally dorky. And that headband. Alix shook her head. Nothing like the Secret Service–style agent of cool who had whispered in her ear outside of Widener Hall when they’d first met. Nothing like the boy she was falling in love with.

Slow down, girl.

Moses turned away from her as she passed, ignoring her entirely, saying something into his headset—“don’t care who you have to get on the wheat-subsidies study group”—and then she was past him.

Amazing. His whole body language was different.

Alix kept walking. Moses would stay a little longer, making sure she wasn’t followed. She’d protested that it wasn’t necessary, but Moses had just given her a bored look. “How about you trust the experts on this, huh?” and she’d subsided.

If everything went well, he’d be joining her soon. She abruptly turned around and flagged a cab. Another thing Moses had told her to do. Do something surprising, see if anyone gets startled.

A few minutes later she was sipping a skinny latte on the steps of the Library of Congress, looking across at the arrogant rise of the Capitol. The white dome stood against the blue sky. It was hot. She kept an eye out to see if anyone seemed to care about her, but, of course, no one did.

A half hour later, Moses ambled down the street and joined her. Relaxed in a suit jacket, no tie, looking like any one of a million other government workers.

“Well?” He leaned against the concrete wall. “How did it go? Did you figure out which computers we’ll need to install this on?”

Alix grinned and tossed him the USB key. Moses grabbed for it and barely caught it.

“It’s already done,” she said.

She couldn’t help laughing as Moses gaped in surprise.

“I told you. I’m your secret weapon.”

39

IN THE HEART OF THE Doubt Factory, a series of alerts began popping up on the company’s central servers.

One by one, notifications appeared on cell phones and workstations in a variety of offices around DC, and people whose job it was to pay attention began paying attention.

At Williams & Crowe’s regional office, a nondescript building in Arlington, Lisa Price checked her phone as a message arrived.

Five minutes later she was pushing through glass doors emblazoned with the words Data Integrity Monitoring. A Williams & Crowe computer-security technician was staring at a slew of warnings and alarm messages.

“What do we have?”

“Not sure yet. Something running on the servers at BSP. Cerberus flagged it and sent the alert.”

“Do we know who did it?”

“Cerberus diagnostics says it came from… a Mr. Simon Banks’s workstation. It’s also under his login.” He pointed as a new window opened up. “Now Portcullis just flagged it, too.”

“Call and get me a rundown of everyone who’s in the building.”

The technician picked up his phone and started making calls as Lisa scrutinized the rest of the diagnostic information their security alert had sent.

“This is a pretty sleek virus,” Lisa said.

The tech hung up from his calls. “Sneaky as hell, for sure. We’re running pattern matching now. It looks a little like code that was used to go after online commerce sites a couple years ago. Estonian, we think.”

“What did we ever do to Estonia?”

The tech smirked. “Decided not to use the chip-and-pin system?” He popped open another screen. “And here we go… Beltway Properties is sending us their K Street building’s access data now. Let’s see who went up to Banks Strategy Partners… tenth floor.”

They both scanned the names. Lisa frowned. Under VISITORS…

“Oh, Alix,” Lisa murmured. “What have you gotten yourself involved in?”

“Do you want me to shut this down?”

“Yeah. Kill it.”

The tech nodded. “We don’t have remote access, all we’re getting is the radio SOS from the system. I’ll have to send a team to go over everything.”

“No! Wait!” Lisa gripped his shoulder. “Don’t do anything yet. Let it run. Send someone over to pull a copy, but let it run for now. There’s no way Alix is working on her own. Maybe there’s a way we can use this to our advantage.”

“What about BSP?”

“Get a team to analyze just how bad this is. After that, I’ll talk to Banks myself. With his daughter involved, he’ll need some convincing.” She grimaced. “But call George Saamsi. He’ll understand the client situation. Bring him up to speed on everything. After that, I’ll decide how to talk to Banks.”

Lisa wasn’t looking forward to the conversation. Banks would have to be notified that he had a serious breach and that his daughter was the source. And that there were more interests involved than just his personal family issues. He’d be in denial.

Why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone, Alix? Lisa thought. You had such a bright future.

“You’re sure we should let this run?” the tech asked.

“The system’s cut off from the outside, right?”

He nodded reluctantly.

“Then it’s harmless as is. I want to talk to people up higher, first. Until we have a strategy to protect our clients permanently, I don’t want to frighten off our little secret mole. Let her think she’s succeeding. If we play this right, we have a chance to wrap up 2.0 once and for all.”

Tonight, she’d need to talk to Mr. Banks and explain to him the situation with his daughter. Maybe Saamsi could help him understand the gravity of the situation.

Lisa paused. Or was it Banks himself? Could he be compromised as well? She considered the possibility, because she was trained to follow paranoia down to the worst possible outcomes, but she decided it was unlikely.

Banks wouldn’t need a sneaky little Estonian program to grab anything he wanted. The man could do anything he liked and cover his tracks, easily. No, it was his daughter who was the security threat. And behind her…

“Hello, 2.0,” Lisa murmured. “This time, I’m not going to miss.”

40

“JUST FOLLOW MY LEAD,” MOSES murmured as they rode the elevator from the parking garage level.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Alix asked as she tried to keep her mop and yellow bucket from banging against the elevator doors. They were both dressed in good approximations of the gray jumpsuit uniforms that Beltway Properties cleaning staff wore, purchased at a supply store in the city that afternoon. “This seems risky.”

Moses grinned at her, and for a second the seriousness that he’d been carrying lightened. “Trust a uniform, Alix. People love to trust uniforms.”

“Then they shouldn’t make them so easy to buy.”

Moses lifted the security badge that he’d pickpocketed off another custodian in the parking garage. “They also trust badges.”

“Well, they better not look too closely, or someone’s going to notice you’re not the same black dude as the one on the tag.”

“They won’t look,” Moses said. “They’ll know they can trust me.”

“I hope you’re right.”

The elevator doors opened, revealing the polished lobby of 609 K Street. Across the lobby, a security guy was sitting behind the central desk pulling his own night shift.

They pushed their mops and buckets across the open lobby, ignoring the guy. Alix suppressed an urge to whistle innocently.

Just two custodians pushing their mop buckets, just two people getting their job done and heading home. No need to think about us. No need to worry.

As they got close to the elevators, Alix had a horrible urge to look over at the security guy.

Moses seemed to read her mind. “Try looking sleepy and bored and like you wish you weren’t here. And keep your head low. You don’t want the cameras to see your face,” he advised.

“I know,” Alix whispered back. “I’m the one who told you where the cameras are.”

“My girlfriend thinks she knows about surveillance.”

“Your girlfriend knows how to study up.”

She realized what he’d done as they reached the elevators. He’d completely distracted her as they made their way across the lobby. Forcing her to forget the audaciousness of what they were doing.

She swiped her father’s key card in the elevator, and the doors opened. “Floor ten,” she breathed. “Going up.”

To Moses, it felt claustrophobic, standing in the elevator without any buttons or controls. Just polished stainless steel, a little prison box like the one his uncle had ended up in. Their reflections were distorted, both of them looking bloated and alien in their uniforms, with their yellow plastic mop buckets. He reached to hold Alix’s hand and felt a jolt of comfort from the contact. He stared at their polished steel reflections, trying to calm himself and stay focused on the job.

As the elevator rose, carrying them to the place that had become his obsession, Moses wondered if he was making a mistake by risking Alix in this way.

Is that where this ends? Moses wondered. Am I ending up in jail?

Even if it worked, what was supposed to happen next? Another heist? Was he supposed to go all WikiLeaks and end up as a hunted whistle-blower? The FBI already wanted him. How long before the wrong people decided to devote real energy to finding him?

Or maybe he was just going to end up in a box, six feet under. Another number in all the statistics of black men that his father had warned him about and that his mother had feared. Don’t end up like your cousin. Don’t end up like so-and-so’s nephew—

Don’t end up in a coffin.

He remembered each of his parents in their coffins, each of their smooth faces beyond pain, even though when they’d died he’d seen the terror in their eyes.

He remembered those funerals. First Dad, with Mom to stand beside him. Then Mom, and only Uncle Ty to take care of him. He remembered standing there, not knowing how to cry and not knowing how to let go, with his stiff-faced uncle holding his hand. Don’t worry, boy. I got you. Your Uncle Ty’s got you.

The elevator opened, revealing an antechamber with locked glass doors. Beyond the doors BANKS STRATEGY PARTNERS gleamed on a wall over a secretarial desk.

“Welcome to the Doubt Factory,” Alix said.

Moses found he couldn’t move.

“You okay?” Alix asked.

Alix tugged him, and he let himself be pulled off the elevator. Moses swallowed. “I’ve spent the last three years wanting to get into here. Cruising by outside, looking for some way…” He trailed off. This was where all his pain had come from.

His father lying on the bathroom floor, gasping. Trying to get up and failing. And then his mother, a year later, collapsing under the stress of loss. Her collapsing to the floor of the grocery store, cans rolling, bottles shattering, lettuce spilling out onto the linoleum tiles while everyone turned and stared. And him standing there, stupid with shock. Seeing the thing he’d feared the most, happening right in front of him. He remembered trying to make his body move, to run to her, and instead finding himself frozen and unable to do anything at all.

It had all started here.

All those years living with his uncle, the man not knowing how to do anything except teach a young boy about the con…

And now, at last, Moses had come full circle. A business office, just like all the other polished business offices. It was infuriating that the place looked so normal.

“It feels like…” He hesitated. “It should be bigger. I don’t know. More…”

“Like Mordor?”

He nodded. “Maybe. Yeah. This is the place that did it to us. Me. Adam. Cynthia. Kook. Tank. All of us. Someone inside here came up with a plan and made sure that we all ended up where we did.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

It should have been filled with bats, Moses thought. Bats and the sulfurous stink of evil. Instead, it was sterile AC air and a tenth-floor view of other buildings that were just the same size. Modern evil. It didn’t look like anything except another office building.

If you wanted to look at evil, it was just a bunch of suits and ties, a bunch of cubicles and computers, the quiet whirring of commerce. Evil wasn’t anything. It was just business as usual.

“Moses?” Alix asked. She was looking at him, and her tone was worried. “Are you okay?”

He turned to look at Alix. The girl who had risked everything to join him on this Don Quixote quest, standing there in her custodial uniform, looking concerned.

You’re not alone, anymore, he realized. She’s with you. She cares about you.

The Doubt Factory had stolen so much from him, and yet it had also given him Alix. The thing that had destroyed his past had given him the girl who made him want a future. He wanted a future with her.

So let’s put the Doubt Factory in the past.

Suddenly Moses felt a weight lifting off him.

It was all going to work. He’d finally made it here. And thanks to Alix, he was going to make it through to the other side.

“I’m good,” he said, and couldn’t help smiling. “Let’s go dig some secrets.”

Alix booted up her father’s computer. Her face lit blue as it glowed alive with its security challenges.

“Okay,” she said, “This is where we see if Kook’s programs are as good as she thought.”

“Oh, they’re good all right.”

Moses plugged his slate into the computer’s USB drive and held his breath. A second later the retrieval program kicked back the answer they were looking for. The password was as long and as bad as a software-license code.

“Damn. Your dad’s serious about security.” He started reading off numbers and letters, letting Alix type, with her confirming each letter and number out loud as he worked through the sequence.

Alix hit Enter.

They held their breaths.

The computer continued with its boot sequence and opened to a familiar desktop layout.

“I’ll be damned,” Alix whispered.

Moses couldn’t help grinning. “I told you Kook was good!”

“Yeah, she’s a genius. What do you want to get?”

“Let’s see if we can look at some client files.”

It took a little bit of rooting around in the server’s file structure, but eventually Alix found what she was looking for and popped open a database search window. One of the fields said Company.

Alix typed * in the window and hit Enter.

Corporate names started spooling:

The list just kept going.

And going and going….

“This can’t be right,” Moses said. “It’s like every major company in the world. BSP can’t have done doubt work for all of them. I mean, BSP is good, but they’re not this big.”

Alix frowned and started opening files, checking the contents under individual company names.

“Some of this looks like standard PR,” she said. “Totally legit work. Crisis communications, that kind of thing. Some of it looks like it’s more like ad campaign stuff… just general image polishing.”

Fighting a feeling of disappointment, Alix went back to the main search screen and started checking pull-down menus. “The database is broken down by industry type, but it’s obviously not organized by ‘unethical business work’ or anything like that.”

“Okay, that makes sense. So what do we have?”

“I don’t know. There’s a ton of stuff in here. Some of this looks like they’re consulting with other PR firms. Some of it’s just letters and stuff. Just really basic correspondence.” She popped open a file. “This one’s just a pitch letter. I don’t think Google hired BSP, but I guess Dad thought they had an image problem that he could help with.”

Alix popped open another file, trying to get a feel for what she was seeing. She laughed out loud. “This is interesting. Some of the company names are connected to potential campaigns that Dad’s got ready to roll, just in case… Like BSP expects something bad to happen and wants to be able to pitch as soon as it does. They’ve got a whole section here for environmental disasters: chemical-plant explosions, toxic leaks, pipeline breaks, drilling platforms exploding…”

Moses leaned close. “Did they do the BP oil spill?”

“I don’t think so,” Alix said. “My dad was making jokes about them when the Gulf thing happened. I think he was pissed that they hired someone else instead of him.”

She looked up at Moses. “This is too big. It’s like the tobacco files. There’s millions and millions of documents, but a lot of them look totally legit. It’ll take time for us to comb through it all. Is there someplace you want to start? Some way you want me sort all of this? Start alphabetically? Go after Big Oil? Big Pharma? Big Ag?”

Moses nodded seriously. “Let’s start with Kimball-Geier. Let’s find out what’s up with Azicort.”

“Well?” Lisa said, leaning back from her laptop and turning to Mr. Banks. “I told you they’d try something like this.”

They were in Williams & Crowe’s Data Integrity Monitoring Center, watching red flags pop up as the kids started accessing files.

“Well?”

Mr. Banks’s jaw was clenched, holding back an ocean of roiling emotions as he watched the pair poking around in the BSP central file servers.

Lisa waited patiently for the man to come to the conclusion that was inevitable.

Frustratingly, he seemed unable to make the call. A minute ticked by.

Lisa pressed gently. “We’re going to need to shut them down. You have clients who are at risk. Williams & Crowe has clients at risk…”

“I want him gone,” Banks said through clenched teeth. “I want him away from my daughter.”

Lisa nodded, pleased. “Once we have them, we can arrange for him to disappear.”

“I don’t care how you handle it. I just don’t want him near my daughter ever again. Make it happen.”

Lisa hesitated, then pressed again. “We’ll need to address your daughter at some point as well.”

“I’ll deal with her.”

“We have clients who will need assurance…”

He gave her a cold stare. “I’ll take care of Alix.”

You’re in denial, Lisa thought, but all she said was, “Of course.”

Lisa pulled her encrypted phone and dialed through to the response team. “Timmons? We’re on. Targets are in the building. Tenth floor. Mr. Banks’s private office. No. You don’t need to be that careful. We just want the girl. It doesn’t matter what happens to the other one, but nothing can happen to the girl. The other one… we don’t want to hear from him again. And we don’t want news. Just silence, understood?”

She waited, listening for the response. She turned back to Banks, who was still staring transfixed, watching as his daughter and the boy who had turned her against him rummaged through his files, one by one.

“We’re up and running,” Lisa said.

“How long?”

She shrugged. “Not long. Our people are very good. We’ll secure the building, then lock down the tenth floor. Then we’ll move in.”

Banks nodded sharply. “And it will be quiet?”

“By the time they’re done, there won’t be a trace of him. It will be like he never existed. None of this will have happened at all.”

“Don’t do anything to the boy in front of Alix.”

“The team understands.” She stood up. “We have a car waiting. You can be near the offices in fifteen minutes. You’ll want to be there when they bring out Alix.”

41

MOSES WHISTLED. “I NEED ANOTHER hard drive,” he said.

Alix handed another terabyte drive across. Moses swapped out the one that he’d just filled, and Alix dumped it into the duffel bag. It was more than she’d expected. Huge amounts of information, and they were still going.

“I think we ought to be going soon,” she said. “We’ve already been here for half an hour.”

Moses shook his head. “We’ve still got a lot here. You wouldn’t believe the stuff they have just on Azicort. Kimball-Geier has reams of studies that say Azicort causes comas if body-weight dosage goes off by much. And sometimes it happens anyway, and they still can’t figure out why it is. They’ve even got transcripts of emergency room interviews that they had investigators do. They know that this is happening. This is how Tank ended up in the hospital! They’ve known there were problems for years. They’ve been putting out studies blaming other drugs and patient diets—”

Alix interrupted. “We don’t have time for this, Moses. Just get all the info.”

“This isn’t just the smoking gun,” Moses protested. “It’s the whole smoking arsenal! Just the Azicort information is worth millions maybe even billions in class action lawsuits. I mean, you should see the nondisclosure agreements on this stuff. It’s amazing. Tank’s alive, but his sister died because they were hiding this….”

Moses went on, scanning documents. “It’s worse than I thought,” he kept murmuring. “They’re insane. When we broke into the safety-testing labs and stole Kimball-Geier’s rats, the thing we should have stolen was their test data. Azicort’s just a straight-up coma drug. That is, if it doesn’t just stop your heart completely…”

“That’s great, Moses, but let’s get this done and get out.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t know.” Alix rubbed her arms. “I just don’t like being here. I thought we were going to get in and get out. Fifteen minutes, a half hour, tops. Time’s up.”

She went to the window and looked down, hoping that no one could see what was going on. That no one would think the glow of a computer screen was suspicious at 3 AM.

You’re being paranoid, she told herself. Lots of people work late in DC.

“Just hurry up,” she said to Moses.

“Okay, okay, but there’s terabytes here. BSP went full digital. All their old files are scanned. Everything. It’s a paper trail that goes back to tobacco.” He popped open a file. “Check this out. It’s like a treasure trove. I’ve got CEOs signing off on things that they’ve denied for years. It’s Eldorado. People could go to prison. There’s a ton of stuff on Marcea in here. With this, I might be able to file a civil suit. Wrongful death or something, and go after a CEO. I might be able to go after the actual people!”

“Not if we get busted trying to get it out,” Alix said. “So hurry it up, will you?”

Moses looked back at the computer. “This just takes time. I’d hook up more drives, but they’ve got only two USB ports on this computer. If I had Kook, maybe we could rig something faster…”

Alix wasn’t really listening as Moses rambled on about what Kook and the rest of the crew would have been able to do. She stared down at the street.

Were those shadows moving?

She squinted, trying to tell if she was seeing human forms down in the darkness, moving along the edges of the building. They didn’t look like regular pedestrians. She blinked and stared more closely. Maybe she was imagining them.

Or maybe not?

“Seriously,” she said, turning back to Moses. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

“Why are you so jittery all of a sudden?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling.”

Moses popped another hard drive in. “We’re good.”

Alix peered out the windows again, trying to see. The hair on her arms was standing up.

“I don’t like this,” she murmured. “I don’t like this at all.” She made a snap decision. “Okay, we’re wrapping up. It’s time. We’re going.”

“But I’ve only got half of it!”

“Better than none,” Alix said grimly. She yanked the hard drive out of the computer.

“Alix!”

“We’re going.”

She tossed the hard drive into the duffel. Moses looked like he was still going to protest, so she yanked the power plug out of the wall, too.

The computer’s screen went black.

“What are you doing?”

“Making sure we get out in one piece.” She zipped up the duffel and grabbed Moses’s arm. “Come on!”

“Why are you so paranoid all of a sudden?”

“Like I said, I’ve got a bad feeling,” she said as she dragged him out of her dad’s office.

“You’ve got a bad feeling? You know how long it’s taken me to get here, and now you want to leave just because you’ve got a bad feeling?” His voice was rising, even as he followed her down the hall to the reception area.

Alix didn’t answer. All she could think was that something was terribly wrong. They’d done it wrong. They’d set it up wrong. Something…

By the time she shoved out through BSP’s main doors, she was practically running. She hit the Down button on the elevator. “Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, come on.”

Nothing happened.

Frowning, she hit the Down button again, then stared up at the glowing floor numbers.

L stayed stubbornly lit.

Alix pushed the button again.

Nothing changed.

Moses stood beside her, staring up at the unchanging floor number. “What was that you were saying about a bad feeling?”

From Alix’s perch by the windows, she could see more shadows converging. Moses joined her, watching as more stealthy forms filtered toward the building. The elevators weren’t working anymore, and, to their dismay, they’d found that the building’s fire stairwells were also locked down. They’d hammered on the doors, at first thinking they were stuck, and dashed around the entire floor of the building, hoping there might be some other escape, but now the reality of the situation was sinking in, and Alix found herself filled with an almost unnatural calm.

“Williams & Crowe, for sure,” Moses said.

“Yeah.” Alix wondered if Lisa was down there somewhere. Death Barbie incarnate. Coming for them.

“I must say I hate those guys,” Moses said with a sigh. “Well, we might as well make it a big event.” He picked up the office phone and dialed.

“What are you doing?”

“You remember how Williams & Crowe came in for me the last time? The only thing that keeps us safe right now is if this turns into something public.” He turned his attention back to the phone.

“911? This is Simon Banks. I’m at Banks Strategy Partners on K Street, and I’m seeing what look like gangbangers on the street.”

“What are you doing?” Alix hissed.

Moses shrugged. “Confusing the issue.” He went back to talking into the phone. “They’ve got… It looks like they’ve got automatic weapons of some kind. I don’t know who they are or what they’re doing, but we need the cops here, right now! Send SWAT! Hurry! It looks like they’re trying to break in!”

Alix peered out the window. Vehicles were converging around the building now. Moses rolled his chair over and peered down. “Looks like Williams & Crowe isn’t worried about us noticing them now.”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll need to watch out for snipers,” Moses said. His voice was oddly flat as he pointed at the buildings across the street from them. “Once they get set up, they’ll be looking to shoot inside for sure.”

“They aren’t actually going to shoot us! Who would authorize that?”

Moses gave her a look. “Williams & Crowe would probably do anything to get a clean shot at me.”

He peered out the window again. “Sure wish the cops would get here.”

Alix didn’t like how calm he sounded. No, not calm—resigned.

Alix pulled out her phone.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to try to buy us some more time.”

The phone started ringing. “Pick up,” Alix whispered. “Go on. Pick up. You always have your phone.”

She peered down at the increasing activity as Williams & Crowe set themselves up around the building. “This is real, isn’t it?”

Moses glanced down at the lights as well. “Getting more and more that way.” He glanced over at her. “Not like the last time we threw a shindig like this.”

Alix swallowed. “No. The bad guys have the right address, this time.”

The phone picked up.

“Alix?”

Dad’s voice.

“Alix?”

Lisa turned. Mr. Banks had his cell pressed to his ear.

“Mr. Banks?”

He cupped his palm over the phone’s receiver. “It’s Alix!”

Lisa held out her hand. “Let me speak to her.”

Banks ignored her and turned away. “Are you okay, honey? What are you doing?” Lisa pressed close, listening in. When he tried to shake her off, she glared at him. Finally, he relented and let her listen.

“I’m fine, Dad.”

“You’re in my office, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Alix. I don’t know what that boy’s been telling you—”

“How you could you, Dad?”

“How could I what?”

“You killed people, Dad.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s true, Dad. I’m looking at the files. All the companies you’ve worked for have been letting innocent people die. The drug companies and the asbestos companies. The lead companies. The chemical companies. It’s like every big name is here.”

“Alix—”

“They knew people would be dying, Dad. Kimball-Geier knew. You knew. You helped them with their strategy. People are dead because you helped them!”

“It’s not like that, Alix.”

“Dad, if Williams & Crowe tries to come in here, I’m going to make sure this goes on the news. I can send things out that only you would believe. You know what I’m looking at.”

Banks waved at Lisa. “You need to back off! She’s threatening to release client files!”

Lisa tried to get her hand on the phone. “Let me talk to her.”

Banks shook her off again. “I’ll handle this!’ he whispered fiercely. “You just figure out how to get her out of there.”

Lisa didn’t back down. “Your phone isn’t secure. You don’t know who else is listening. We have clients—”

Banks brushed her off. “I know my business. Take care of yours. Get Alix out now. We don’t want to be the story here.”

Lisa spun away, scowling. George Saamsi joined her as she strode across the lawn to her teams.

“Do we have a problem?” he murmured.

“Banks’s daughter is up to her neck in this. She’s not a kidnap victim this time. She’s the one who’s driving this.”

Saamsi’s gaze went from Banks to Lisa, then to the response team.

“She’s threatening to release client files,” Lisa said.

In the distance, sirens wailed. Saamsi swore. “They’re going to try to turn this into a media circus. This is exactly what they love to do. In about ten minutes we’re going to be front-page news.”

“Banks is trying to talk to her, but…” Lisa made a gesture of frustation. “I think we’ve got ten minutes before everything goes wrong. Our best bet is to hit them now. The longer we wait—”

Saamsi cut her off. “I understand. It’s time to cut our losses.”

“And that means…?”

Saamsi looked at her fiercely. “Protect our clients.”

The sirens were growing louder.

“And Alix?”

“You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved. Just make sure our clients stay out of the news. I don’t want a single whisper of our clients leaking out.”

The first police department squad cars were arriving, along with ambulances.

“This is going to turn into a jurisdictional nightmare in about two minutes,” Lisa warned.

“So get it done.” Saamsi turned and started striding toward the police and rescue vehicles, holding up his hands with authority. “I’ll handle the cops,” he called back. “You just handle those kids.”

Lisa was already jogging for her team, thinking about how it needed to happen. She crouched down with Timmons, her strike leader. “What’s our situation?”

Timmons said, “We’ve got all exits blocked. Elevator locked. Stairwells locked. We’ve got them bottled.”

“I want you to go in.”

“I’ve got thirty split in three go-teams—”

“No.” She pulled Timmons closer. “This has to be quiet. Quick and fast and quiet.”

Timmons frowned. “There are risks.”

“There are more risks if you’ve got a lot of witnesses.”

Timmons eyes widened. He hesitated. “These people armed?”

Lisa gave him a hard look. “That’s the assumption. We’re proceeding under the assumption that these are unstable terrorists with knowledge of explosives, and we need to stop them, fast. We’re sure a fast resolution will save lives.”

“A fast resolution,” Timmons repeated.

“You understand?”

He nodded sharply. “Elam and Mint and me, then. We can do it.”

“Quietly.”

He gave her a look of irritation. “I know my job.” He glanced over at Simon Banks. “The boss okay with this?”

Lisa glanced back to where Banks was still on the phone, pleading with his daughter. Still under the impression that he could use all his persuasive skills to get her to undo decisions that had already been made.

“He’s not the most important consideration anymore,” Lisa said. “As far as we’re concerned, we’ve got two armed intruders on BSP property who intend domestic terrorism. For all we know, they could have a suicide device. The next time I see them, I want body bags.”

Two seconds after Alix hung up with her dad, lights went out. Williams & Crowe had cut the electricity, and they were in the dark now, illuminated only by emergency battery lights that apparently even Williams & Crowe couldn’t get access to.

“We need to hide!” Alix said.

Moses looked up at her, his expression somber. “Where do you think we can hide?”

“In—” Alix thought furiously, trying to think of a way to escape.

Moses smiled tightly at her lack of an answer. “I don’t have any more tricks up my sleeve, Alix. I should have had a backup plan for this, but I let myself rush. I screwed this up.”

“No. It was my fault. I pushed too fast.”

There had to be some way to hide, or sneak past, to get down from the tenth floor… Alix’s mind kept racing, but a more rational part of her knew that Moses was right. She was just still trying to believe. Making up fantasies that weren’t real. A little kid fantasy that kept her hoping, even though there was no hope left. The fantasy that if you were doing something for good, you were supposed to be rewarded for it.

“It’s over,” Moses said. He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to her. “It’s over.” He looked up, his expression firming. “This doesn’t have to be you,” he said. “I can give myself up.”

“No!”

“Just hear me out! We can hide the drives.” He held up the duffel. “I can give myself up. I can tell them it was me who dragged you into this. I can convince them that you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I won’t do that, Moses.”

“Why not? You could even come back later and get the drives. We can hide the drives, we can save the data—”

“I’m not leaving you!”

Moses glared at her with frustration. “Why not? You know they’re going to gas us! Maybe even shoot me if they get a chance. You need to get as far away from me as possible.” He put the bag down and started striding back toward the elevators, waving at her not to follow. “You stay back. Once they get me—”

Alix stormed after him. “The hell I will!”

“You don’t need to do this!” Moses said. “It’s not your fight! You can say I forced you. Say I brainwashed you! It’s me they want. So let me take the heat.” He reached the elevators and turned to face her. “Try to keep one of the drives and put it out later, maybe.” His voice turned pleading. Cajoling. “I can take the heat. We can’t hide, but you can hide the drives. You can maybe come back later and get one. You don’t have to go down for this.”

Alix swallowed. It was so tempting. Just run away. Pretend it hadn’t happened…

“No.”

“But it’s not your fight!”

“The hell it isn’t! If they’re taking you, they’re taking me, too. I’m not leaving you, and I’m not saying it was your idea. I got us into this. This was my fault. I got us into this.”

“But—”

“And it is my fight!” Alix fought back tears. “Don’t you dare ever say that it isn’t my fight!”

Moses paused, taken aback at her outburst. All the argument went out of him. He wrapped her in his arms and pulled her close. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“It is my fight,” she said with her face muffled in his chest. “We’re together.”

“I know. I get it.”

The number indicator on the elevator began changing.

L… 1… 2…

Alix dried her tears on the back of her hand. “Here they come.”

3…

4…

Moses was staring into her eyes. “I…”

Alix could feel her heart starting to pound. Williams & Crowe was coming, and all she cared about was Moses’s gaze. She pulled him down to kiss her. Kissed him again.

6…

“I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“No, I’m sorry I got you into this.”

He smiled at that.

7…

They both took an instinctive step back from the elevator.

“Get ready,” Moses said.

Alix felt him gripping her hand hard as she watched their fate count upward. She wanted to run. She wanted to believe there was an escape, even though she knew there wasn’t.

“We need to get back,” she whispered. “We’re too close.”

His hand was holding hers so hard it felt like it was going to break.

9…

Moses looked over at her one last time, and his eyes were filled with sadness and wonder and regret.

10…

“I love you,” he whispered.

The elevator chimed.

They were still holding hands as smoke enveloped them.

42

GUNFIRE RATCHETED FROM THE UPPER stories, distant, pop-gun sounds. Glass shattered and spilled from a window, crashing to the street below. The gunfire cracked louder. Smoke began billowing out. Confused shouts echoed from the fire team in Lisa’s radio.

“What’s our status?” Lisa demanded. “What’s our status? Did we get them?”

More gunfire. A confused flurry of shouts.

“Smoke bomb!… A-squad?… A-squad? Timmons? Door’s jammed! Ram it!”

“What’s going on?” Lisa demanded.

The squad com crackled alive with someone coughing. “No worries. We’ve got it under control. Our friends had a little surprise for us. We’ve got a couple people down. We sucked something nasty. We’ll need paramedics.”

“What about our targets?”

A small hesitation. “Looks like they’re going to need medics, too.”

“What?” Lisa demanded. “They’re still alive? I’m going to have your ass—” She glanced over her shoulder at the street. FBI units were rolling up now. Nothing happened in DC without their taking interest.

Worse and worse.

She spun away and cupped her mouth to her com. “What the hell did I tell you?” she whispered fiercely.

“Come on,” Timmons protested. “We got them already. They’re just kids.”

Simon Banks was striding over, his face white.

Lisa snagged George Saamsi. “They’re still alive,” she hissed.

Saamsi’s eyes went from her to Banks. “Finish it,” he growled as he went to intercept his partner.

“Clean up the mess,” Lisa murmured into her radio. “Do you understand? Clean it up.”

News trucks were showing up now. The situation was turning into a goddamn media bloodbath. Worse, the FBI’s badges had gotten past her people’s blockades. Cops and FBI were swarming toward the building.

“Cops are coming your way,” she said. “Finalize this.”

“Is that an order?”

“Yes, it’s a goddamn order, Timmons! Get rid of those kids!”

Lisa waited, holding her breath. Come on, Timmons. Get it together.

Gunfire cracked in her earpiece.

Once. Twice.

On the streets, everyone panicked and scattered for cover, but Lisa sagged with relief.

Her com crackled alive again.

“It’s done.”

“Good,” she snapped. “Now clean up the scene and get the hell out of there.”

All around her, the crime scene was crumbling into disarray. Cops and FBI and EMS and Williams & Crowe personnel all sorting through the confusion. Lisa watched with satisfaction as her people made themselves helpfully obstructionist.

Just a few more minutes.

Med-tech people went in, but her strike teams managed to bog down the cops who had been trying to go in with them. Lisa suppressed a grin. There wouldn’t be much left for the cops to reconstruct by the time her people got done in there. It would pass. Timmons’s people knew how to clean up a crime scene.

Lisa grabbed Saamsi. “It’s done. We’re clear.” She jerked her head toward the cops and FBI agents. “We’re going to need some political cover. Let your clients know. We need this to be forgotten.”

“It’s clean?”

“Just a couple of crazy activists with guns.” Lisa shrugged.

George got on his cell and started working through his contacts. Soon, phones would be ringing all over the city. Congressional offices, DC police headquarters, and the FBI would all be hearing from patrons and friends. The investigation would die. Someone in George’s contact list would take control of the investigation.

And really, what was there to investigate? Tragedies happened all the time. This was just one more example of the radicalization of America. Some lunatic fringe who had drunk the Kool-Aid of Occupy Wall Street rhetoric and gone astray.

An ambulance worker emerged from the building pushing a body bag on a stretcher. Another body followed. The cops started freaking about bodies being moved, which started a larger argument between Williams & Crowe, the cops, and the FBI. Simon Banks saw the body bags and gave a howl of anguish. He fought through the crowd. “Is that my daughter? Is that my daughter?”

He lunged for a body bag, fumbling at the zipper.

“Sir! Sir! Don’t!”

Lisa reached the crowd just as Banks got the bag open. He collapsed, sobbing. Alix Banks lay disheveled and blood-soaked inside the black body bag. Pale and gone. An empty husk. Lisa felt a moment of regret.

Sorry, kid. It didn’t have to be this way.

Banks was clawing at his daughter’s body.

“Alix!”

His hands scrabbled in his daughter’s blood. He clutched at her corpse, trying to hold her to him. Lisa was afraid he was going to knock over the stretcher with his wild grief. She grabbed him and tried to hold him, but he shook her off with a wild strength. It took her and George Saamsi to finally pull him away.

“Simon! Simon! Let them do their work,” George soothed.

News cameras were snapping pictures. We don’t need to be the story. Lisa waved frantically for the EMS people to keep going.

“I’m sorry. Mr. Banks?” She tugged at his shoulder. “There are news cameras. This is starting to turn into an even bigger problem.”

Banks wheeled on her. “What did you do to my daughter?” He took a wild swing, and Lisa leaped back. She could practically feel the flashes of the photojournalists as they caught the scene.

George managed to drag him back. “Alix had a gun, Simon!” His voice was urgent. “It’s a terrible, terrible tragedy, I know. I’m so sorry about your daughter, but there’s nothing Lisa—or anyone—could do.” His voice turned soothing. “What were they supposed to do? She was with a wanted terrorist, and they were armed…” And then, following up, using the words a fellow PR man would understand. “There are cameras running, Simon. We can’t become the story here. We need to be going. You need to grieve in private.”

Lisa had to hand it to him, George Saamsi was good. She left him to the shattered father and went to see what else she could do to cover the damage.

The FBI agent in charge snagged her. “What the hell happened here?” the man asked. “Why can’t anyone get access to a crime scene?”

Lisa shook her head. “Call your boss. I heard it’s a national-security thing. We’re supposed to keep things clear until we get an okay from higher up.”

“Goddamn private armies,” the man muttered, but he got on the phone.

Not a bad operation, overall, Lisa decided. The bodies were disappearing into ambulances, and the crime scene was becoming more and more muddied. In just a little while, all the events that had happened here would be gone. Swept away and forgotten. A small, personal family tragedy among the many larger tragedies that pummeled the nation every day. Not news at all. Maybe a few lines in the Metro section, and then gone for good.

She watched as Saamsi finally managed to get Simon Banks stuffed into a black town car and sent away.

That’s right. Nothing to see here. Move along, folks.

Saamsi was coming back across the lawn to her. He was frowning.

“Lisa?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is that man standing in the lobby in his underwear?”

“What?” Lisa whirled.

Timmons was stumbling out of the building, stripped down to his tightie-whities.

“What the…?”

“Gas.” He choked.

“What gas?” Lisa asked.

He knelt down and retched. “Didn’t… get up to the tenth.”

“What do you mean you didn’t make it up to the tenth? You were there. I talked to you!” She grabbed him and pulled him close. “You said you took care of it!”

“Not me.” He put his hands on his knees and gagged.

“What’s going on here?” George asked.

A cold finger of fear skittered up Lisa’s spine as pieces started clicking into place. “Where’s the ambulance?” she shouted, casting about wildly.

“What ambulance?”

“The one with the goddamn bodies in it! The one with the goddamn bodies!” She started pushing through the crowd. There!

The ambulance was driving slowly toward the curb. Lisa shouted, but in the confusion, no one was listening.

Lisa put her head down and ran.

For a second she thought she’d catch up. The ambulance slowed as it bumped down off the curb and into the street, and Lisa put on a burst of speed. The ambulance made a clumsy turn into its lane and Lisa caught a glimpse of the driver.

A kid?

It was a goddamn kid, barely tall enough to see over the steering wheel. An unruly mop of black curly hair puffed out from beneath the blue uniform cap of an EMT.

He was grinning at her.

“Stop that ambulance!” Lisa shouted, but it was no use. The kid flicked on the lights and sirens, and her words were drowned in a flood of emergency noise.

43

“HEADS UP, PEOPLE! DEATH BARBIE’S onto us,” Tank shouted into the back of the ambulance.

Cynthia cursed. “Already?” She was unzipping her EMS jacket, revealing a flak jacket that read SWAT. “Get them out of their bags,” Cynthia said to Kook.

“Kinda of busy saving our asses here,” Kook murmured. She was still in her own EMS gear with her laptop propped on her bloody knees. Her fingers left slick dark stains on the keys as she typed.

Cynthia cursed again. Everything was happening too fast. She went to unzip the pair of body bags, revealing the bloody visages of Alix and Moses.

“Romeo and fucking Juliet,” she scowled.

Kook shot her a dirty look. “Let’s have a little optimism here, all right? I’m trying to work.”

“Yeah. Optimism. Got it.” She started digging in her raid kit for syringes.

Optimism optimism optimism.

The ambulance was slowing. The front door opened and Adam piled into the cab, still wearing his Williams & Crowe SWAT gear, and hauling a duffel bag. The ambulance accelerated again. Adam grabbed for support, nearly falling over as Tank gunned the engine.

“We’ve got Shortstuff driving?” he complained.

“I’ve got my license,” Tank shot back. “Quit whining.”

“Only because Kook hacked DMV,” Adam muttered as he stumbled into the back of the ambulance. They bounced over another curb and everyone grabbed for handholds.

“Watch it!” Cynthia shouted. “I’m trying to work back here!’

“Sorry!” Tank called back.

“What’s the rush?” Adam asked. “I thought you or Kook was going to be driving.”

“Death Barbie’s sending her troops after us any second,” Cynthia said.

“Already?”

“Can’t expect everything to go perfectly,” Kook muttered.

Optimism optimism optimism.

Moses’s zipper was jammed. Cynthia swore. “I don’t have time for this! Adam, get this open.” She turned and went back to rummaging in her raid kit while Adam fumbled and fought with the zipper. “Jeez, he looks terrible.”

“Just get him out of the bag more. I need a shoulder.” She finally found her syringe and uncapped it. Squirted clear fluid into the air. She took a deep breath.

You can do this.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Adam asked.

Cynthia paused with the needle in her hand. “You’re asking now?”

“I’m just the muscle here. You’re the one who read all the drug studies.”

The ambulance squealed around another corner, and they all scrambled for support.

“Sorry!” Tank called before they had a chance to complain. “We’re almost to the Beltway!”

“Is it going to work?” Adam asked again.

“Just hold Moses still,” Cynthia ordered. “I don’t want him bouncing around while I stick him.”

Adam gripped Moses’s bloody shoulders. “Your hands are shaking,” he observed.

Cynthia shot him a glare. “No,” she said. “They’re not.”

She slid the syringe into Moses’s arm. Nice and easy. She pressed the plunger, and fluid flowed out of the syringe.

“How long is it going to take?” Adam asked.

“I don’t know. Probably a couple of minutes.”

“You don’t know? I thought you were the doctor here.”

“I’m pre-med, asshole. Anyway, no one would know. It’s all in the drug interactions and dose.” She was already fumbling for another syringe and popping the cap.

“Get Alix ready.”

Adam unzipped Alix’s body bag the rest of the way and got a shoulder exposed.

Cynthia paused on the verge of sticking her. It was horrifying to see Alix inert and smeared with blood this way. Nothing like the girl she’d known at Seitz. She looked like some kind of corpse bride. So pale.

“Snow White,” Adam murmured.

“Cyn was thinking more Romeo and Juliet,” Kook said.

“Talk about pessimistic.”

“That’s what I said.”

Optimistic, optimistic, optimistic.

“Okay,” Cynthia said. “Let’s see if we can make Snow White wake up.” She buried the needle into Alix’s flesh and shot her full of drugs. She knelt back, waiting. In Cynthia’s mind, all she could see were long biochemical chains interacting. It should work, she thought.

Nothing happened. She checked Moses. No change. She pressed her fingers to his cheek.

Did he feel colder?

“Give them another shot,” Adam said.

“I don’t have any other shots.”

They waited, staring at the two inert and bloody bodies, peeled out of black bags.

Two more casualties they could lay at the feet of the Doubt Factory.

44

ALIX CAME AWAKE RETCHING. SHE rolled over and nearly fell off the stretcher and then retched again. She blinked in the light. She was swaying. No, everything was swaying.

And swerving.

She was dimly aware of someone else gagging and coughing. The sound made her retch again. She blinked in the light and found Cynthia and Adam peering over her.

“What the—?” Alix recoiled.

Cynthia straightened, smiling. “Welcome back from the dead, girlfriend.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We thought we’d kidnap you again,” Adam said. “You know, for old time’s sake.”

A sudden terror made her lurch upright. “Moses! Where’s Moses?”

“Here,” a voice croaked.

Alix whirled to find Moses lying beside her on a stretcher, looking wasted and covered with blood.

“Oh my God, what happened to you?” Alix ran her hands frantically over his body. “Where are you hurt?”

“It’s fake blood,” Cynthia said.

“For effect,” Adam added helpfully. “Needed to make you look good and dead.”

“But… but…”

Alix tried to take it all in. She was in an ambulance, half-zipped into a body bag, and she was covered with sticky blood. Her hands, her arms. Her hair was matted with it.

She stared around herself, trying to put everything together. Cynthia and Adam and Kook, everyone was wearing SWAT and EMS gear. Makeup made them look older.

Cynthia and Adam and Kook cracked up. “You should see your face,” Kook said.

“What am I missing?” someone called from up front. Tank?

“Nothing. We’re all good,” Moses called forward.

Alix whirled on Moses. “Is this another one of your damn pranks? Did you set me up again?”

“Whoa! Not me. Not this time.” Moses was slowly dragging himself out of his body bag. Unzipping it and then crawling unsteadily onto the ambulance’s bench. “This wasn’t my gig.”

“It was mostly Tank,” Kook said from where she was perched with her laptop and a pair of DJ headphones around her neck. “He was worried that Wonderboy here was going to do something stupid.” She looked up briefly from her laptop, frowning. “None of us expected you to be the stupid one, though. You about got the two of you killed.”

“You were following us?”

“What am I, an amateur?” Kook made a scornful face. “We bugged the factory before we left. Just had to listen in every once in a while. Sure enough, the stupid came up, just like Tank thought it would.”

“You were listening to us?”

“You and your sexytime.” Kook glanced up from her keyboard. “It would have saved me a lot of late nights if you would have just gotten to the talking instead of all that grunting and groaning.”

Alix could feel herself blushing. Moses looked uncomfortable as well.

Adam clapped her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. I mostly made them fast-forward through the embarrassing parts. Straight people getting it on…” He made a face. “I mean, I guess it’s fine. If you’re into that kind of thing. But it would have made our lives a lot easier if you’d actually talked more about your plans while you were at the factory. We couldn’t get all the details we needed. We didn’t have time.”

“So… how did you know we’d be here now?”

They all exchanged glances. “Your brother.”

“Jonah?”

“We heard you saying to Moses that he knew about you both. We got the rest of the details we needed out of him.”

“But… he wouldn’t have…”

“Oh, he was a pain in the ass about it. He wouldn’t help unless he could come along.”

“He’s here?”

“God, no. Waiting in the van, as soon as we switch vehicles. He’s too useful to let anyone see him. As soon as we wrap this up, he’s going right back home to keep an eye on your dad and George Saamsi for us. That kid is a piece of work.”

Alix leaned back, stunned. Jonah. Of course. She should have known that he would never stay put. “I can’t believe…”

“Believe it, girl.” Cynthia was smiling. She gave Adam a shove and said, “Go up and drive before Tank gets us killed.”

Adam went forward. A second later the ambulance swayed as he took the wheel. Tank came back to join them.

The boy’s expression turned solemn when he saw their condition. “You made it,” he said to Moses.

“Thanks to you, I hear.”

Alix looked uncertainly from Moses to the small boy. They weren’t anything alike, and yet some part of them seemed almost as if they were twins. Older and younger versions of an experience she knew she would never fully understand.

Two orphans who had lost everything.

Tank scuffed the floor with a shoe. “Knew you were going to try something stupid.”

“I thought you were done with me.”

“Still family,” Tank said. He looked up. “You’re the only family I got.” His face looked stony solemn, and then, abruptly, the facade cracked and he lunged into Moses’s arms, wracked with terrified sobs. “I can’t lose any more family,” Tank said. “I can’t.”

Moses was taken aback. He wrapped his arms about the boy, feeling Tank’s shaking. “Hey, bro, I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, bro. Didn’t mean to scare you. Didn’t mean to scare you at all.”

Tank wiped his eyes. “Can’t lose any more, you know?”

“I know,” Moses said solemnly. “I get it. I won’t do anything stupid. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I still don’t get it,” Alix said. “How did you get us here? The elevator opened and—”

“We gassed you,” Cynthia said apologetically. “We gassed the Williams & Crowe guys who were coming up to get you, and then Adam took their place, and we came up and gassed you, too. After that, it was just about staging and calling up the reinforcements.”

“I got to shoot off some sweet guns, too,” Adam called back. “Don’t forget that!”

Cynthia pressed on. “By the time everyone else had got up there, you were dead and they were focusing on cleaning up the scene. The only tense moment was when Adam had to meet up with the rest of the Williams & Crowe people who were stuck hiking up the stairwells. We were afraid someone would make him take off his SWAT helmet and get a good look at him before we could get your bodies out. But everyone was so freaked out by the other guys that we gassed that it was just a matter of wrapping you in body bags and pretending to be the friendly neighborhood ambulance association wheeling you out.”

“That was actually nerve-racking,” Kook said. “I wasn’t expecting your dad to be right at the doors when we came out with you. Lucky he was so focused on you. I thought he’d recognize Cynthia, even with medical glasses.”

“My dad was there?”

Cynthia nodded, “Yeah. I was just glad you looked as dead as you did. He was all over you. You never could have faked through that.”

“Was he mad?”

Cynthia looked at her incredulously. “He thought you were dead, Alix. He was a wreck. Crying and yelling at George Saamsi and Death Barbie. It was a mess.”

Alix swallowed at the thought, trying to decide how she felt about the news. Her father was stricken with grief at the thought that she’d died. Some part of her felt for his distress, but she couldn’t quite make herself feel sorry. He’d helped kill so many people, and he only felt bad now? Simon Banks only cared when the person dying was his own child. He didn’t feel bad about Moses’s parents or Tank and Azicort. Dad only felt bad when it was personal to him. Alix was interested to discover that she didn’t have much sympathy for him. Mostly, it felt right to her. Maybe now you understand, she thought.

“Where did you get the gas?” Moses was asking.

Kook smirked. “It’s Azicort.”

Cynthia was nodding. “When you absolutely positively want to give someone a near-fatal coma, most doctors choose Azicort. We had a whole vat of the stuff from the rat raid. Tank rigged a blower. The only real problem was not knowing how much we were dosing you with.” She peered closely at them. “You seem okay, though.”

“The more I hear, the less I want to know,” Moses groaned.

A new fear gripped Alix. “What about the files? We left the files!”

“No! I got them!” Adam called from up front. “You can thank Williams and Crowe for that. I would have missed the bag, but it turned up while we were waiting for the bodies to get cleaned out. And seeing as I was so helpful, I volunteered to take it down to Death Barbie.”

Alix slumped back, relieved. “It worked then. We did it.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Kook said. She had her headphones pinched between ear and shoulder, and she was typing madly on her blood-smeared laptop. “Our friends just put our description out on the police bands.”

Cynthia hurried over to listen in. “Hell.” Her face turned hard. “I didn’t think Williams and Croew would risk involving outsiders.”

Kook motioned for Alix. “You got your phone on you?”

“I don’t…” she felt her pockets. “Yeah. Here.”

“You want to call Death Barbie?”

Alix’s skin crawled. “Why?”

“I’ve got an idea.” Kook’s eyes were positively glowing. “And it’ll be way better if she gets a call from the dead.”

“Okay.” Alix dialed.

Lisa picked up almost instantly. “Who is this?” Her voice was breathless.

“You don’t recognize my voice?”

“Alix?”

Her words were suddenly hesitant.

“Tell her to call off the goons or you go public,” Cynthia whispered. She and Kook were messing with the laptop.

“Go public with what?”

“Just tell her!”

When Alix relayed the message, Lisa laughed contemptuously. “You’re just kids.”

“Now play this,” Kook said, and held up her laptop.

“Hang on. I’ve got something for you,” Alix said.

Kook pressed play. Alix heard a voice that sounded a lot like Adam’s issuing from the speakers.

A conversation back and forth.

“Come on. They’re just kids!”

And then Lisa’s clipped tones.

“Finish it. Clean up the mess.”

A pair of gunshots echoed.

Alix flinched involuntarily.

“It’s done.”

“Good. Now clean up the scene and get the hell out of there.”

Alix felt a sudden, cold rage.

She took the phone back. “Call off your dogs, Lisa, or I’ll send this to every single cop and every single news organization in the city. You might know how to bury some things, but I can make this go viral. If you keep messing with us, I guarantee I can make you famous, at least until someone who’s more important than you decides you need to disappear. It sounds like you people know a lot about trying to keep people out of the news. Your choice. Either you back off or I make you front-page news.”

She hung up without waiting for an answer.

“How long to our car switch?” Cynthia called up to Adam.

“Van’s waiting in a parking garage at the next exit.”

They all waited in tense silence. Kook was listening to her headphones. Abruptly she broke into a wide grin.

“False alarm. They’re sending out a new description. The emergency vehicle is a false alarm.”

A spontaneous cheer erupted in the back of the ambulance. Alix slumped against Moses, relieved.

“Nice,” he murmured. “You sounded downright dangerous.”

“That’s because I am.”

Moses laughed and wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close. Their blood stuck together.

“Yuck,” Cynthia said. “You two really are a mess.”

She was right. Blood had soaked their clothes, smeared their skins, and matted their hair, but as Alix let her head rest on Moses’s sticky, bloody shoulder, she thought that she had never felt so clean.