Skin Deep Page 9

  Dion hung his coat beside the door. The only coat there; the rest were stored neatly inside an open coat closet. He walked down the hallway, calling for his mother.

  I lingered, stepping into the living room, with its rug on top of carpet and its easy chair with worn armrests. My aspects fanned out. I stepped up beside the hearth, inspecting a beautiful wall cross made from glass.

  “Catholic?” I asked, noticing Ivy’s reverence.

  “Close,” she said. “Greek Orthodox. That’s a depiction of Emperor Constantine.”

  “Very religious,” I said, noting the candles, the paintings, the cross.

  “Or just very fond of decoration,” she said. “What are we looking for?”

  “The decryption code,” I said, turning. “Audrey? Any idea what it might look like.”

  “It’s digital,” she said. “For a one-time pad, the key is going to be as long as the data being stored. That’s why Zen was after the flash drive.”

  I looked around the room. With all of this stuff, a flash drive could be hidden practically anywhere. Tobias, Audrey, and J.C. started looking. Ivy remained beside me.

  “Needle in a haystack?” I asked her softly.

  “Possibly,” she said, folding her arms, tapping one finger against the opposite forearm. “Let’s go look at pictures of the family. Maybe we can determine something from them.”

  I nodded, walking over to the hallway that led to the kitchen, where I’d spotted pictures of the family. Four in a row were formal photos of each member of the family. The picture of the father was old, from the seventies; he’d died when the boys were children. The mother’s picture and Dion’s picture had what appeared to be pictures of saints hanging beneath them.

  No saint beneath Panos. “A symbol that he’d given up on his faith?” I asked, pointing to the empty spot.

  “Nothing so dramatic,” Ivy said. “When a member of the Greek Orthodox Church is buried, a picture of Christ or their patron saint is buried with them. That picture would have been taken down in preparation for his funeral.”

  I nodded, walking on a little further, searching for pictures of the family interacting. I paused beside one that showed a smiling Panos from not too long ago. He was holding up a fish while his mother—in sunglasses—hugged him from the side.

  “Open and friendly, by all accounts,” Ivy said. “An idealist who joined with friends from college to start their own company. ‘If this works,’ he wrote on a forum a few months back, ‘then any person in any country could have access to powerful computing. Their own body supplies the energy, the storage, even the processing.’ Others on the forum warned about the dangers of wetware. Panos argued with them. He saw all of this as some kind of information revolution, a step forward for humankind.”

  “Is there anything about those posts of his that doesn’t add up?”

  “Ask Audrey about that,” Ivy said. “I’m focused on Panos the man. Who was he? How would he act?”

  “He was working on something,” I said. “Curing diseases, is that what Dion said? I’ll bet he was really annoyed when the others pulled him off of his virus research because of the cancer scare.”

  “Yol knows that Panos got further in his research than he let on. It’s clear to me. Yol was spying on Panos and is really, really worried about all of this. That implies he’s worried about a danger even more catastrophic than their little cancer scare. That’s why Yol brought you in, and why he’s so desperate for you to destroy the body.”

  I nodded slowly. “So what about Panos? What can you guess about him and the key?”

  “If he even used one,” Ivy said, “I suspect he’d give it to a family member.”

  “Agreed,” I said as Dion finally headed out the back doors, calling for his mother in the backyard.

  I felt a moment of concern. Had Zen been here before us? But no. Stepping into the kitchen, I was able to see the mother outside pruning a tree. Dion walked out to her.

  I delayed a moment, stepping up to Audrey and J.C.

  “So,” Audrey was saying, “in the future, do we have flying cars?”

  “I’m not from your future,” J.C. said. “I’m from a parallel dimension, and you’re from another one.”

  “And does yours have flying cars?”

  “That’s classified,” J.C. said. “So far as I can tell you, my dimension is basically like this one—only, I exist there.”

  “In other words, that one is way, way worse.”

  “I should shoot you, woman.”

  “Try it.”

  I stopped between them, but J.C. just grunted. “Don’t tempt me,” he growled at Audrey.

  “No, really,” Audrey said. “Shoot me. Go ahead. Then, when it doesn’t do anything because we’re both imaginary, you’ll have to admit the truth: That you’re crazy, even for a figment of a deranged man’s psyche. That he imagined you as a repository for information. That, in truth, you’re just a flash drive yourself, J.C.”

  He glared at her, then stalked away, head down.

  “And,” Audrey shouted after him, “you—”

  I took her by the arm. “Enough.”

  “It’s good for someone to bring him down a notch or two, Steve-O,” she said. “Can’t have pieces of your brain getting too uppity, can we?”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m different,” she said.

  “Oh? And you’d be fine if I just stopped imagining you?”

  “You don’t know how to do that,” she said, uncomfortably.

  “I’m pretty sure that if J.C. did shoot you, my mind would follow through accordingly. You’d die, Audrey. So be careful what you ask for.”

  She glanced to the side, then shuffled from one foot to the other. “So . . . uh . . . what did you want?”

  “You’re the closest thing I’ve got to a data analyst right now,” I said. “The information that Yol gave us. Think about the emails, forum posts, and personal information from Panos’s computer. I need to know what he isn’t saying.”

  “What he isn’t saying?”

  “What’s hidden, Audrey. Inconsistencies. Clues. I need to know what he was really working on—his secret projects. There’s a good chance he hinted at this online somewhere.”

  “Okay . . . I’ll think about it.” She’d gone from a niche expertise—handwriting analysis—to something broader. Hopefully this was the start of a trend. I was running out of space for aspects; it was getting harder and harder to contain them, manage them, imagine them all at once. I suspected that was why Audrey had insisted on coming on this mission—deep down, part of me knew that I needed my aspects to begin doubling up on skills.

  She looked at me, eyes focusing. “Actually, as I consider it, I might have something for you right now. Viruses.”

  “What about them?

  “Panos spent a lot of time on immunology forums, talking about disease, getting into very technical discussions with people who study bacteria and viruses. None of what he said is revelatory, but when you look at the whole . . .”

  “His history was in microbial gene splicing,” I said. “Makes sense for him to be there.”

  “But Garvas said they’d abandoned viruses as a method of data delivery,” Audrey said. “However, Panos’s forum posts on these subjects increased once I3 abandoned that part of the project.” She looked at me, then grinned. “I figured that out!”

  “Nice.”

  “Well, I mean, I guess you figured that out.” She folded her arms. “Being an imaginary person makes it difficult to feel any real sense of accomplishment.”

  “Just imagine your sense of accomplishment,” I said. “You’re imaginary, so imaginary accomplishment should work for you.”

  “But if I’m imaginary, and I imagine something, it’s doubly unreal. Like using a copy machine to copy something that’s just been copied.”

  “Actually,” Tobias said, strolling up, “theoretically the imaginary sense of accomplishment would have to be imagined by the primary
imaginer, so it wouldn’t be an iteration as you suggest.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Audrey said. “Trust me, I’m the expert on being imaginary.”

  “But . . . If we are all aspects . . .”

  “Yeah, but I’m more imaginary than you,” she said. “Or, well, less. Since I know all about it.” She grinned at him, triumphant as he rubbed his chin, trying to sort through that.

  “You’re crazy,” I said softly, looking at Audrey.

  “Huh?”

  It had just struck me. Audrey was insane.

  Each of my aspects were. I barely noticed Tobias’s schizophrenia anymore, let alone Ivy’s trypophobia. But the madness was there, lurking. Each aspect had one, whether it be fear of germs, technophobia, or megalomania. I’d never realized what Audrey’s was until now.

  “You think you’re imaginary,” I told her.

  “Duh.”

  “But it’s not because you’re actually imaginary. It’s because you have a psychosis that makes you think you’re imaginary. You’d think this even if you happened to be real.”

  It was hard to see. Many of the aspects accepted their lot, but few confronted it. Even Ivy did that with difficulty. But Audrey flaunted it; she reveled in it. That was because, in her brain, she was a real person who was crazy and therefore thought she wasn’t real. I’d assumed she was self-aware, but that wasn’t it at all. She was as crazy as the others. Her insanity just happened to align with reality.

  She glanced at me, then shrugged, and immediately tried to deflect the conversation by asking Tobias about the weather. He, of course, referenced his delusion who lived in the satellite far above. I shook my head, then turned.

  And found Dion standing in the doorway, a distinctly uncomfortable look on his face. How much had he watched? He gave me a look like one might give an unfamiliar dog that had just been barking frantically but now seemed calm. Through that whole exchange, I’d been a crazy man, stalking around and talking to himself.

  No. I’m not crazy. I have it under control.

  Maybe that was my only real madness. Thinking I could handle all of this.

  “You found your mother?” I asked.

  “In the backyard,” Dion said, thumbing over his shoulder.

  “Let’s go talk to her,” I said, brushing past him.

  15

  I found Ivy and J.C. outside, sitting on the steps. She was rubbing his back as he sat with hands hanging before him, gun in one of them, staring at a beetle crossing the ground. Ivy gave me a glance and shook her head. Not a good time to talk to him.

  I headed across the well-tended lawn with Audrey and Tobias in tow. Mrs. Maheras had finished pruning and was now inspecting her tomato plants, pulling off bugs, pulling weeds.

  She didn’t look up as I approached. “Stephen Leeds,” she said. Her voice bore a distinct Greek accent. “You’re famous, I hear.”

  “Only among people who like gossip,” I said, kneeling down. “The tomatoes look nice. Growing well.”

  “I started them inside,” she said, lifting one of the plump, green fruits. “Tomatoes do better after the late frosts are past, but I can’t help wanting to get an early start.”

  I waited for Ivy to give me a prompt on what to say, but she was still on the steps. Idiot, I thought at myself. “So . . . you like to garden a lot?”

  Mrs. Maheras looked up and met my eyes. “I appreciate people who make decisions and act on them, Mister Leeds. Not people who try to make small talk about things in which they obviously have no interest.”

  “Several pieces of me are very interested in gardening,” I said. “I just didn’t bring them along.”

  She regarded me, waiting.

  I sighed. “Mrs. Maheras, what do you know of your son’s research?”

  “Almost nothing,” she said. “Ghastly business.”

  I frowned.

  “She thinks it took him away from the church,” Dion said behind me, kicking at a clump of dirt. “All of that science and questioning. Heaven help us if a man spends his time thinking.”

  “Dion,” she said, “don’t speak stupidity.”

  He folded his arms and met her gaze, defiant.

  “You work for the people who employed my son,” Mrs. Maheras said, looking at me.

  “I just want to find his body,” I said. “Before anything dangerous happens. What can you tell me of your priest?”

  “Father Frangos?” she asked. “Why ever would you want to know about him?”

  “He was the last person to see the body,” I said. “He visited the coroner on the night before your son’s corpse vanished.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Mrs. Maheras said. “He did nothing of the sort—he was here. I requested a house blessing, and he visited.”

  To the side, Tobias and Audrey shared a glance. So we had a witness that Father Frangos had not gone in to see the body. Proof an impostor was involved. But what good did that knowledge do us?

  “Did Panos give you anything, before he passed away?” I asked her.

  “No.”

  “It might have been something trivial,” I said. “Are you sure? There’s nothing you can think of?”

  She turned back to her plants. “No.”

  “Did he spend time with anyone in particular during the last few months?”

  “Just the men from that ghastly laboratory.”

  I knelt beside her. “Mrs. Maheras,” I said softly. “Lives are at stake because of your son’s research. Many lives. If you are hiding something, you could well cause a national disaster. You don’t need to give it to me. The police—or, better, the FBI—would work just fine. Just don’t gamble with this. Please.”

  She glanced at me, lips pursed. Then, her expression hardened. “I have nothing for you.”

  I sighed and rose. “Thank you.” I walked away from her, back toward the steps, where J.C. had perked up a little at Ivy’s prodding.

  “Well?” he asked me.

  “Stonewalled,” I said. “If he did give the key to her, she wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Coming here was a mistake,” J.C. said. “A distraction from what we need to do.”

  I glanced at the mother, who had continued to regard me, trowel in her hand.

  “Admit it, Skinny,” J.C. continued. “If we don’t do something soon, the world is going to get cancer.” He hesitated. “Smet, it sounds stupid when I say it like that.”

  “. . . ‘Smet’?” I asked.

  “Future curse.”

  “Why does it sound so much like—”

  “Future curses always sound like our curses,” J.C. said, rolling his eyes. “But they’re not, so it’s okay to say them when prudes are around.” He thumbed at Ivy, still sitting beside him.

  “Wait,” Ivy said. “I thought you were from another dimension, not from the future.”

  “Nonsense. I’ve always been from the future.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since two days from now,” J.C. said. “Look, Skinny, do I need to repeat myself? You know what our next move is.”

  I sighed, then nodded. “Yes. It’s time to break into Exeltec.”

  Part Three

  16

  “Are you sure about this?” Ivy said, rushing along beside me as I strode out of the front of the house.

  “It’s our best lead, Ivy,” J.C. said. “We don’t have time to investigate new threads. Exeltec has the body. We need to find out where it is and steal it back from them.”

  I nodded. “Panos’s key could be almost anywhere, but if we destroy the corpse, then the key doesn’t matter.” I raised my phone, noticing that I’d missed a call from Yol. I nodded for J.C. to watch the perimeter as I texted Wilson for a pick-up, then dialed Yol back.

  Yol picked up the line.

  “Hey,” I said. “I—”

  “I don’t have much time,” Yol interrupted, voice muffled. “This is bad, Legion. Seriously bad.”

  I grew cold. “What happened?”

  “Pa
nos,” Yol said, talking quickly, his accent growing thicker in his haste. “He let something out. Damn it. It’s—” He cut off.

  “Yol?” I said, growing tense as Ivy and Tobias crowded in, trying to hear what was being said. “Yol!”

  I heard voices on the other end of the line, followed by rasping. “I’m being arrested,” Yol said a moment later. “No more information in or out. They’re going to take my phone.”

  “What did Panos let out, Yol?” I asked.

  “We don’t know. The feds tripped a hidden file on his computer. It erased the damn thing and popped up a screen that taunted us, saying he’d already released his infection. They’re freaking out. I don’t know anything else.”

  “And the things I asked you to do?”

  “Did some. Set others in motion. Don’t know if I’ll be able to finish.”

  “Yol, my life could depend on whether or not—”

  “All of our lives are in danger,” Yol snapped. “Didn’t you hear me? This is a disaster. Hell! They’re here. Find that body. Find out what that man did!”

  The phone rustled again, and the line went dead. I had the distinct impression that Yol hadn’t hung up—someone had taken the phone from him. The feds now likely knew I was involved.

  I lowered the phone and looked at my aspects as Wilson pulled up. Behind us, Dion trailed out of the house, hands in his pockets. He looked troubled.

  “We need to get moving,” J.C. said, rushing back from watching the perimeter. “Zen could show up here at any moment.”

  “If she does,” I said, “Mrs. Maheras is in danger. I’m surprised Zen hasn’t been here already—if not her, then another Exeltec flunky.” I frowned. “I feel like we’re a step behind. I do not like that sensation.”

  I ignored the car waiting for us, and I barely noticed Dion as he walked up. Instead, I closed my eyes. “Tobias,” I whispered.