Double Cross [2] (11 page)

But then I start wondering.
Why
is he offering to show me? What’s in it for him? I narrow my eyes. “What’s involved in this showing?”

“It’s nothing weird or complicated.” He runs his hand over his smooth head. “Just a little … sort of … something.”

Everything in me goes on red alert. I’ve heard this sort
of talk before—it’s how Packard tricked me into minionhood: he knew a technique I could use to get out of hypochondria attacks. He would just show me, that’s all. Never mind that it would enslave me for life. I shake my head. “No. Forget it.”

Marty pulls back in confusion. “Forget it?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Forget it.”

“You don’t want the power?”

“No, I don’t want it.”

A vertical furrow appears on his forehead. “It’s nothing to be scared of.”

“If it sounds too good to be true it probably
is
something to be scared of,” I say, wishing I’d thought of this when Packard offered me his cure.

“It’s a simple little thing.”

I fold my arms. “No way.”

“This is silly. I want you to have the power. I mean, I’m not giving you the … thing. You’d have to get your own. But you can see how they work.”

Thing? They?
“No, I don’t like it.”

The furrow deepens. “I’m doing you a favor!”

He wants this way too much—suspiciously so. “I’m not interested,” I say. “At all.”

“This is a way to
help
yourself. You won’t even help yourself? I’m your ally here. We’re allies!”

“How do I know it’s not a trap? Maybe I end up somehow beholden to you.”

“You are the most paranoid person I’ve ever met! What’s wrong? You don’t want to be immune to highcaps? You don’t want to be able to recognize them?”

“No,” I say.

“For Chrissake!” He removes his eyeglasses and slides them across the table to me. “Just put them on.”

“The glasses?”

“Go ahead, put them on.”

“No.”

“Don’t be an idiot. I’m trying to help you! You can take them off if you don’t like them.”

I stare at them. “What do they do?”

“They give you personal immunity to highcap powers. And let you see them.”

I touch the rim.

He says, “If I was a highcap, you’d see the blur around my head. Sort of like, you know on a hot day and you look at the sidewalk and see this blur above it? That’s how highcaps look when you wear the glasses. Slight blur around their heads—it’s the energy that their freak brains give off. At the same time, there’s a chip implanted in the frame, right here, that disrupts the waves or something.” He points to the area between the lenses, the part that rests above the nose.

“Do you make these?”

“No, they came from the Internet.”

“You can get these on the Internet?”

“Twenty-nine ninety-nine, baby. Paradigm Factory dot com.”

I sit up straight. Should I believe him?

“My brother buys all their conspiracy shit—lead-lined hats to guard against space rays, insoles for radiation from tectonic plates, you know.” He lowers his voice. “He bought me this pair. Just for the hell of it, I tried them out on this guy at my chess club who I’ve always suspected of being a highcap cheater. Sure enough, the blur’s coming off his head and suddenly he can’t beat me.”

“You’re sure nothing will happen?”

“Only that you’ll have the power.”

“I mean, will they alter my brain chemistry or anything?”

“Your brain chemistry?” He squints like I’m talking crazy. “No. Just try them.”

Now I’m totally suspicious, because I feel like he’s
pressuring me. “Forget it, I’m not touching them. I don’t want anything to do with these glasses.”

“What is wrong with you? Christ!” He bangs the table—really hard this time. “I’m trying to help you!”

Another bang behind me—the door. I spin around. Packard is staring beyond me. I turn just in time to see Marty shambling the glasses back on, but it’s too late.

“The glasses,” Packard says. “It’s the glasses.”

Marty holds them fast on his face as Packard closes the distance between them and looms tall over him, his hard, angular frame in soft plaid—browns and burnt reds that match his shaggy curls.

“Take them off or I’ll rip them off of you.”

“Fuck you.”

I back away from the table. I don’t need to see Packard’s expression to know it’s intense.

“Fine! Okay.” Marty pulls them off and places them in Packard’s palm.

Packard jerks his arm. “Ah!” The glasses clatter onto the floor. “What the hell?”

My heart jumps. “Are you okay?”

Packard’s inspecting his hand. “Yeah … just a kind of a bite. It’s okay. I’m okay.”

I glare at Marty, outraged.

“They wouldn’t have done anything to you,” Marty says, as though I’ve accused him of something. “They’re antihighcap glasses, and you’re not a highcap.”

“Well, they did something to
him
, didn’t they?” I snap. “They hurt his hand.”

“He’s a highcap!”

Packard stares at the glasses where they landed on the floor. Curiosity has made his features softer, more boyish. “Where’d they come from?”

Marty turns to me. “Don’t tell him. Don’t be a collaborator.”

“Of course I’m telling him,” I say.

Marty’s eyes go dark; there’s a rumbling in his throat, and then he spits—a longish goober that flies through the air, seemingly in slow motion, and lands in the center of my sweater, a shiny blob on gray cashmere, just above my belly button. I stare, dumbfounded. I’ve never had a person’s spit on my clothes.

Out the corner of my eye I see Packard fly at Marty, pin him against the wall. “You do not do that! You do not!” He jerks Marty with every
not
. “You do
not
disrespect that woman, you understand me?” Packard speaks through his teeth, as if to bite back his fury. “It was your goddamn
lucky
day she decided to come in here. And you would spit at her? You were
privileged
she came in here!”

“It’s okay,” I say, unable to take my eyes off the glistening wad. I’m vaguely aware of buzz-cut Greg entering the room.

“What’s up?” Greg asks.

I don’t know how to answer. Packard jerks Marty again. “You have proven that you don’t deserve her kindness, but she’ll give it anyway, and you know why? Because she has a nobility of spirit.”

I look up and see them struggling strangely; Packard’s wrestling Marty’s canvas jacket off, I realize. Greg goes over to help him. The next thing I know, Greg’s holding Marty and Packard’s coming to me with the jacket.

“So sorry, Justine.” He kneels in front of me. “You mind?”

I shake my head.

Packard pulls my sweater gently away from my stomach and scrubs from the inside and outside at the same time, with the interior quilting of Marty’s jacket. “You know, they say spitting is a legal form of assault, and there’s a reason.” He scrubs harder, getting every bit of
moisture out, knuckles lightly brushing my bare tummy. “Here we go,” he says.

“Thanks,” I whisper, wanting badly to touch his hair, at the very least.

“You did such a great job.” He looks up, gaze soft. “We would never have thought of the glasses.”

Our eyes lock. The feel of his hand is still alive on my stomach.

“It was luck and blundering—”

“Don’t discount it.” He stands. “This is information that will save lives.”

Behind me another of Packard’s guys has edged in the door.

Greg nods at the glasses with a distant look in his eyes. “You can touch them, Justine. They won’t hurt you. He wasn’t lying.”

I’m surprised Greg would know this until I realize he’s taking dictation from Marty’s mind.

I go pick up the glasses. All quite normal: plastic brownish rims, smooth, cool glass lenses.

Packard throws Marty’s jacket back at him.

“Girl’s paranoid of everything,” Marty says. “Doesn’t say much for whatever goes on around here.” He shakes it out. “Can I go now?”

“Where’d they come from?” Packard asks me.

“Off the Internet,” I say, meeting Marty’s gaze straight on. “Paradigm Factory dot com.”

Greg lets out a hiss. “How long have they been on the market?” he asks Marty.

Marty purses his lips.

Greg’s listening to Marty’s mind. “He got them around Halloween. First he heard.” Then, “Damn it!” He turns to me. “You told him the song trick?”

“Sorry.”

“Halloween,” Packard says. “That’s over two months they’ve been on the market at least.”

“The place makes conspiracy products,” I say. “Marty thought it was a joke until he tried these. Maybe they’re not so widespread.”

“Can I go?” Marty asks.

“No,” Packard says.

“You have your information,” Marty says. “You have your lead. You gonna kidnap everyone that has these glasses?”

“He does need medical attention for his finger,” I say.

“Come here.” Packard says. “But leave the glasses.”

I sort of want to keep them, but it’s not the time or place for that battle, so I set them on the table and grab my kit instead.

The door shuts behind us.

Some way down the hall, I stop and turn to him. “You’re not really going to keep him, are you?”

“Just for now.” Packard strides away.

I follow. “Why?”

We enter the little office at the end of the hall. I’m acutely aware that we’re alone now. He walks around to the other side of the chunky wooden desk and grabs his phone.

“The man did just help us,” I say. “The Dorks are Paradigm Factory customers. That’s huge.”

“I know,” Packard says. “And the minute we release him, he’s going to warn the people there that we’re coming for their customer database.”

“But it could take hours, even days to get that information. We keep him all that time?”

“No.”

“Well, what?”

He gives me a look. “Sophia.”

“No.”

“We can’t let Marty walk around knowing what he knows. Our faces. You. We have to use her.”

I sink into the chair on the other side of his desk.
Telekinetics may rob people, other highcaps may read people, Ez may make you do things in your sleep, but Sophia steals memory. She takes a little part of who you are. She’ll probably take the whole day from Marty. That’s as much as she can do: one waking day.

“And afterward he gets to go home,” he adds, then looks away. “Soph,” he says. “Whatcha doing?”

Helmut told me that when a highcap is a small child, the highcap mutation is blank possibility; like a stem cell, it can evolve into almost anything. At some point, a highcap child’s nature and personality determine what his or her highcap power will be. The child who wants things from outside his crib becomes a telekinetic. The child who yearns to know what others are thinking becomes a telepath—and telekinesis and telepathy are by far the most common powers. Then there are several oddball powers. As children, dream invaders wanted to interact with sleeping people. Helmut has speculated that Sophia had the impulse to hide the truth. Otto wanted to interact with buildings. And apparently Packard wanted to understand.

Leave it to Packard to turn understanding into a dangerous power.

G
ETTING THE ADDRESS
, phone number, or even a nonfake name associated with the Paradigm Factory is about as easy as finding the lost Lindbergh baby. All the website has is information on how to order, and a Yahoo email address. Even the ISP turns out to have false information on the firm. We end up having to get Otto on the phone, and Otto gives the job to the tech crimes unit of the police force.

We’re counting on the outfit being local, since Midcity is the only city with a significant highcap population. Highcaps hardly ever move away; when they do, they’re back within a year or two. Nobody knows why. I’ve heard people theorize that highcaps stay because they’re connected to the Midcity River, because the mineralogical deposits under the city give them energy, and even that they long to be near the tangle.

I’m in the front room texting Shelby when Sophia arrives. The revisionist wears her red hair in a stiff, old-fashioned Mary Tyler Moore do—Shelby and I have decided it involves extensive hair curler usage—and her eyebrows are the most sharply groomed I’ve ever seen, just this side of evil. She wears a beige pantsuit—a hot, tight safari number—and tooled blond boots. The boots, I think grudgingly, are really wonderful.

“Hey, Sophia,” I say. “Packard says to go right in.”

She breezes past me without a word. Acting like I’m beneath notice is part of her campaign to suggest my unfitness as a partner for Otto. She slaps the entry panel. The door doesn’t open. She slaps it again.

I smile. “If you ignore me and nobody’s there to see it, are you really ignoring me?” I ask.

But just then, Packard comes through.

She kisses him on the cheek. “We ready?”

“Wait. We’re bringing him out.”

“Am I taking the whole day?”

“Most of it. We picked him up outside a coffee shop. So if you can take from the coffee shop on—”

“But after he drank coffee?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she says. “Coffee’s the ideal separation point. Got someone ready to hold him?”