The Whole Truth (The Supercharged Files Book 1) (9 page)

“That’s not very polite,” I
observed.

“I’m not very polite.”

No kidding. I was so shocked to
see no mask around him when he said that, I had to lean on the counter.

“Are you sure you aren’t the lab
assistant I keep asking for?”

“Positive.” I wanted to ask if I
looked like a lab assistant, but hey, I had on a white coat. I looked like a
lab assistant as much as he looked like a scientist.

“We’ll start by logging your DNA.
Basics first. That’s all our DNA equipment can handle without serious
adjustments.” He led me to a sink and had me wash my mouth with some horrible
antiseptic. Then he swabbed the inside of my cheek and popped the swab into a
test tube.

“I don’t know who my father was,”
I volunteered. “I’m pretty sure my mom didn’t have any special abilities.”
Except the ability to get drunk and stay that way on a limited income.

“A lot of suprasenses are
inherited.” Beau took the test tube to another counter and started futzing
around with it. “But a lot of sensors are made.”

“I can understand going blind or
deaf, but how could somebody get X-ray vision? The bite of a radioactive
spider?”

He didn’t so much as smirk. I
guess comic book jokes were old hat.

“It doesn’t have anything to do
with the organ doing the sensing, it has to do with connections in the brain.
If a person suffers a stroke, for example, the neural network is forced to
reconfigure. Sometimes a suprasense is the result.”

I thought about the recruiters
from Baumhauser. “Are there a lot of senior citizen supras?”

“Yes,” he said, but he didn’t
elaborate.

“Can you go blind if you have
suprasenses of the eyeball?”

“Yep.”

“Does it mean you lose your
suprasenses?”

“Pretty much.”

“Double whammy. What if you had
supra thigh muscles and lost a leg?”

“Motor skills don’t involve—”

“The neural network. Got it. So a
chameleon’s ability, like yours and mine, is based on the sense of touch.”

“As far as we can determine.”

I didn’t mention my suprasenses
of vision and hearing, neither of which were doing me any good with Beau. Maybe
I should ask, “Hey, are you a corporate mole?” so I could mark him off my list
and move on.

Instead I asked, “If a
chameleon’s skin was burned to an unrecognizable state in a fire but not bad
enough to die, would he lose his ability?”

“That’s sick.” Beau stopped what
he was doing to stare at me. “Where do you come up with these things?”

“I just want to know how I work.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know how I work?”

“I don’t know if a chameleon’s
suprasense would survive disfiguring burns.”

We continued that way for some
time as he processed the DNA. I asked questions about being a chameleon,
suprasenses in general, and whether he could morph his skin into camouflage if
he wore army pants (no). He didn’t lie much, nothing distinct enough for me to
read lips.

It was an exercise of mutual
pointlessness. I was wasting his time when he’d rather be scrawling crazed
mathematics on a clipboard. He was wasting my time when I’d rather be doing
just about anything else. Like shopping at the dollar store, a move of sheer
desperation. But I was on the clock now.

My fear was that I couldn’t learn
how to handle the jobs I’d been hired to do. First off, could I train to be a
management consultant in a matter of months? I had no business degree and
minimal grasp of economics. I was genius at office politics, for obvious reasons,
but it might not be enough.

This chameleon stuff—the stuff my
new peers expected me to master—I had no idea how to take advantage of it.

I only had their word I could do
it.

Then there was my secret whack-a-mole
assignment. Might as well get started. On Beau.

“I met one of Psytech’s employees
when Samantha and John took me to dinner. Then I met four Baumhausers when they
chased our car down and offered me a job. Do you know many supras in other
firms?” I asked him.

He and I had, at some point, seated
ourselves on tall stools next to a lab table, and I spun gently from side to
side. My seat squeaked like an old ceiling fan.

“I know a lot of people,” he
said. “The initial DNA analysis will be ready soon.”

Was he avoiding an answer or
stating a fact? “Did you guys steal the database of the human genome project to
find new supras?”

He looked at me as if I were the
crazy one. “No.”

“So how can you find people if
they don’t make themselves obvious?” Like I, apparently, had done, though how
they’d pinpointed my blog among all the cranky weirdoes on the Internet, I
couldn’t imagine. People in cyberspace were nuts.

“You’re going to have to quit
talking so much,” he commented, “if you want to be effective as a chameleon.”

I realized the man was a grinch,
but did he have to be bitchy too? “What does an effective chameleon do besides
bore people with a sad lack of conversational skills?”

“You can’t learn everything in
one day.” Beau returned to the machine where the DNA had been doing whatever
DNA has to do before people can make heads or tails of it.

“I’d like to come out of today
having learned at least a little something.”

“Why don’t you tell me about
yourself?” he suggested as he fiddled with the DNA machine. “How much do you
weigh?”

I couldn’t think of any reason
why I’d care to hide the truth from someone like Beau, so I didn’t expend the
effort. “One hundred thirty pounds, last time I checked. Why?”

“I need the information for the
tests. What’s your natural hair color?”

“Dirt brown. What you see is what
you get.” I hadn’t scheduled a salon color and highlighting session in a while.

“Do you fake orgasms?”

That was a highly unusual
question. Wasn’t it against corporate sexual harassment code? “Why do you need
to know that?”

“Just do.” He didn’t appear to be
concerned about my answer, though he scribbled on his clipboard after many of
the things I said. You’d think he’d have a laptop or a PDA.

“I don’t fake it. Why bother?”

He twisted some dials on the DNA
machine, and it whirred. “To make your partner feel successful.”

“Like they care,” I said with a
snicker, thinking about how so many men professed their desire to see you
satiated but their mask told a different story. “I could tell you stories.”

“I’m sure you could.”

“There was this one time,” I
began, intending to mock the last guy I’d slept with, but Beau waved me off.

“Let’s not go there.”

What a prude. Probably insulted
his masculine ego, not that he seemed the type to have an ego. Or sex. He’d
have to find a willing partner, and he was so drab, I couldn’t imagine that
happening.

A printer to the right of the DNA
machine spat out a long sheet with a bunch of lines and dots on it. “Here we
go,” he said. “This is your rough DNA chart. Here’s the section that indicates
you have suprasensor abilities. Well, I guess you really do have them. Hm.”

I looked at the white paper with
its ladder of lines, my personal UPC code. “Hm, what?”

“It’s not what I expected. Have
you ever had a stroke?”

“No.” I’d been really pissed, but
no stroke. “Would a stroke show up in DNA?”

“It wouldn’t. Head injury?”

“That wouldn’t show up on DNA
either.” I pointed at a section of the print out where the black markings were
erratic. “That part looks sketchy. Maybe that’s what my biological dad
contributed.”

“We’ll have to run it through our
version of CODIS to see if any matches come up. For now, this verifies you’re a
chameleon, with added traits. Not sure what.” He squinted at the paper, then
pulled his glasses out of his pocket and put them on.

If he blew my cover my first day
on the job, I hoped I wouldn’t get a pay cut. “Does it say whether or not I’m
going to go grey early?”

“Do you need glasses? Contact
lenses?”

“I have better than 20/20
vision.” He had no idea how much better. Unless he did know, by reading my DNA.

“Right. See here—“ He pointed at
part of the pattern “—we see these markings in someone who has a suprasense in
vision. But it’s different. We’ll know more after the computer at the Registry
has a chance to fully analyze you.”

Would the Registry computer identify
the fact I could see lies? Would Beau? Surely Yuri knew Beau would run my DNA
and send my tests to the Registry lab.

Not my problem. Exactly.

“Who’s going to teach me to be a
management consultant? I don’t have a business background.” Most of the
consultants did, but Yuri had explained they made exceptions for talents such
as myself. They were also going to pay my tuition for standard online business
classes if I was willing to take them.

“I don’t know who they’ll assign.
It won’t be me.”

“I can see why your skills as a
teacher wouldn’t be in great demand.” In fact, I had no idea why Yuri thought
Beau could teach me anything. I’d been forced to pry everything out of him
while he tinkered around his lab and tried to pretend I wasn’t there.

All in all, he was one of the
least interesting men I’d ever met, which is saying something. When so many
people lie about so many of the same things, it gets old. Beau hadn’t lied
much, but he was still dull. He seemed to have nothing to hide, not even dirty
thoughts.

“There are a lot of things I’d
rather do than keep teaching you,” he said.

“Keep teaching me? When did you
start?” I didn’t feel different now that I knew I had camouflage power. I
didn’t know how to activate it. I sure as hell didn’t know how to pass myself
off as a chameleon to my coworkers while I sorted through their secrets and
found the villain amongst them.

Beau took his glasses off and
looked at me. “This whole day has been educational.”

For whom? I had a sudden urge,
born of frustration, to tell Beau the truth. If he realized how crucial I was,
he’d take my training seriously.

The more I considered it, the
smarter it sounded. Beau was a lab geek, not the type who’d be a double agent.
I’d asked whether or not he was a spy and he’d said no without a mask, hadn’t
I? Pretty sure I had. He’d have to be privy to corporate secrets to steal them.
No way was he important enough at YuriCorp to know what was going on at the
top.

Beau seemed to read the myriad
thoughts in my head. “I’m a better teacher than you think.”

Something in his voice snapped my
spine straight and I studied him with new eyes. Or was it old eyes?

“How would I know? You refuse to
train me.”

“We’ve been training all morning,
Cleo. Tell me how you see me now. Tell me what you’re thinking of me.”

I couldn’t tell the man I thought
he was so unimportant there was no way he could be a secret agent. “No.”

“You had no problem describing me
earlier today.”

Those had been physical comments,
not character judgments. “I didn’t know you then.”

“And now? What stands out?”

There was nothing remarkable
about him. I couldn’t even trick the guy into lying about anything except how
old he was when he’d first had sex—an out of the blue question I’d thrown at
him as a test, and nearly everybody lies about it, anyway.

Beau slid off his stool and
spread his arms. “Come on, Cleo. Give it your best shot.”

I tried to concentrate on his
physical details. I squinted, but he was just...this guy in a white coat. Oh,
and he wasn’t very tall.

“You’re short and you’re wearing
a white coat.”

Beau laughed. “Look closer.”

I was two breaths away from
telling Beau there was nothing to look at, and I should know because I could
see lies and he was so boring he didn’t even tell them, when the air around him
shimmered.

It wasn’t like a lie. It was more
like a giant soap bubble. When it popped, Beau stood before me in all his
scruffy glory. That scouring pad hair, the sandals, the gnarly old clothes, all
the details I’d noticed this morning and couldn’t recall later when he asked me
to.

“You’ve got to admire a woman
who’ll admit what she weighs without blinking,” he said, followed by a mean
smirk. “You must be really self-confident.”

What the hell?

Weight, hair color, sex life. Why
would I share such things with this troll? Why would I want to tell him I could
see lies? I’d almost dropped my guard and spilled my fifteen bean soup.

Beau chuckled at the expression
on my face.

“I’m a chameleon. And that’s what
we can do, Cleo.”

Chapter 7

Cleopatra
Giancarlo, Management Consultant to the Stars

My training kicked it up more
than a notch after I learned to respect Beau’s skill. He promised not to use
his chameleonocity to incite my verbal diarrhea again. When I promised to do
the same, he laughed and said I couldn’t influence him.

He must not have been sure about
that, because a mask shimmered around him. He wasn’t much of a liar, all things
considered, so when he shimmered, I noticed.

Soon after, I formally quit my
old job and Alfonso accompanied me to Chicago on a clothing and car retrieval
trek. What did they think I was going to do, meet Samantha’s hot Psytech
boyfriend Alex and switch allegiances? I’d seen his lies, and it wasn’t worth
the money.

I was disappointed John wasn’t my
escort, but it was for the best. He flirted one minute and froze me out the
next. I’d confirmed his lack of interest in Sam, but I hadn’t confirmed whether
he had any interest in me.

He liked my breasts. Beyond that
I couldn’t tell.

Al was safe from my rampant
curiosity. He said ten sentences the entire time, the majority allocated to
explaining my suitcase limit. He was married to a nice interior decorator, I
wasn’t attracted to him, and I definitely knew where I stood with him.

In the middle of the street,
since that last suitcase had pushed me right out of the car. Or so Al had
threatened. Since he hadn’t been lying, the suitcase of shoes—okay, the second
suitcase of shoes—had remained behind for the movers to handle.

To ground my new my surreal new
life, I rented an apartment Lou helped me choose. Several Lampeys lived in the
complex. I liked Lou, and her recommendation was a lot more honest than the one
Samantha offered.

In order to develop my chameleon
skills and business acumen, I worked long hours and six-day weeks. Why not?
With John playing hard to get, I had nothing to do and no one to do it with.
Several YuriCorpers invited me to church, but churches weren’t my thing, not
even supra churches like Lou’s. I’d made a shopping buddy, a consultant named
Pavarti Singh, and a lunch buddy, another consultant named Ursula St. Marie,
but they were on the road a lot. I’d been asked to delete my blog, and I could
only watch so much TV. I spent half of each day fading with Beau and the other
half enduring a crash course in management consulting.

At all times, I was on alert
for...the mole. Cue dramatic music.

~ * ~

“Then what happened?” I asked
Sheila Hornbuckle, one of YuriCorp’s top trackers, and cringed when my voice
cracked. I was as tense as a first-time crossing guard. It wasn’t that Sheila’s
tale was riveting, but the information I needed wasn’t going to be simple to
get.

“Bob pulled out a pair of hockey
tickets.” Sheila unscrewed the lid on her Diet Snapple and swigged it with
disgust. We were alone in the break room, and Sheila was today’s victim. “I
don’t hate hockey, but when you tell the woman you’ve been seeing you’ve got a
huge question to ask her, it had better not be about season tickets.”

I slapped the table, ignoring her
lie about hockey. She loathed it with the intensity of a thousand disappointed
girlfriends who wanted engagement rings. “Men.”

“Men,” she echoed. Her Bob worked
at the downtown office as an accountant for some of our side businesses like
Pizza Man. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“I’m single.” I swallowed hard.
Now came the slimy part, and it wasn’t part of the mole hunt. Since I was
searching for a slimeball, it was easier to stomach that. Somewhat easier. No,
the slimy part was where I had to pass Beau’s latest stupid supra test—get
corporate information from Sheila she wasn’t allowed to share using my supposed
chameleon skills.

“I could introduce you to Bob’s
uncle,” she offered.

“And here I thought Bob was your
uncle.”

Sheila gave me a strange look.
She was a thin woman who subsisted low-cal microwave meals, had had a nose job
when she was twenty-three, and thought her sister was an uptight prude. She
didn’t have a sense of humor. “Bob’s uncle is with Baumhauser. But don’t
worry,” she lied, “he’s spry for his age.”

“I’ll get back to you on that.”
Would it satisfy Beau to know Bob’s uncle was about as spry as a coat rack? I
concentrated on my chameleon fade and had no idea if it was working. Luckily I
had other resources. “I’m still so new here. What is it you do again?”

“I’m a tracker.” She capped her
bottle. “We find and indentify potential supras, skill sets, start up companies
and public rumors concerning supra-abled individuals, among other things.”

“How does that work?”

“Every tracker has a different
approach.” Using a lot of techno jargon, she described a generalized mishmash
of internet search variables, telephone solicitations, cross referencing
medical records and site visits. I managed to read a technique or two I
suspected I wasn’t supposed to know, since I got them from her mask, not her
mouth.

I smiled encouragingly. “Did you
find me?”

“You’re not one of mine.” That
would have been too easy. It would also have meant she suspected what I could
do, but it was obvious she had no idea.

“Who did? I’d like to thank her.”
Yuri hadn’t mentioned it, but it seems like that person would be automatically
in the inner circle. Lou couldn’t have erased my ID from my tracker’s brain,
because then who would have erased Lou?

Sheila tapped the bottle against
her hand, liquid sloshing. “I don’t know. Sometimes the consultants moonlight
as trackers. It could have been any number of people.”

“Does management ever erase names
from your head to keep them hidden?”

“What? No!” Sheila exclaimed. A
spot of dishonesty futzed around her face, not enough to read. “Not at this
company.”

“Wouldn’t it be funny if you’d
been the one to find Bob and that’s how you met?”

“I’m not supposed to talk about
supra identities or my specific techniques,” she said repressively, which I
already knew. “It’s proprietary information.”

“Sorry, I forgot.” I was supposed
to find names of a few potentials, but I didn’t want Sheila to get fed up with
me before I could do my own fieldwork in the mole situation. Two birds, one gun
full of buck shot. “What do you think about the employee burnouts?”

“These are hard economic times.
Statistically speaking, more burnouts happen when everyone’s stressed.” She
glanced around, as if there might be somebody in the room with us when clearly
there wasn’t. “I’m not doing site visits until they figure out what’s going
on.”

She was the first person to
express a reluctance to do her job aloud, but I doubted she’d be the last.
Rumors about the burnouts cropped up every day. “You think they’ll figure it
out?”

“Oh, yes,” she said with utter
confidence—the confidence of somebody who was not a corporate mole. “YuriCorp’s
the best.”

“Have you worked anywhere besides
here?” If she still did, her mask ought to reveal the fact she was employed as
a corporate spy.

“Just here. But I don’t have to
compare.” She sniffed.

I was ninety-five percent sure
Sheila wasn’t our mole. That last five percent was the kicker. “Why do you
think they’re picking on YuriCorp?”

“It’s obvious.” She inspected me
dubiously. “YuriCorp has the best ratings and the most elite staff in the
business. Psytech and the others would love it if we went under. Yuri doesn’t
hire just anyone to be a consultant.”

Like you
, added her mask.

“I sure wouldn’t want to work at
Psytech,” I said, trying not to feel hurt. Most YuriCorpers shared her view of
the burnouts, if not of me. I could only imagine what they’d think if they
found out I dissected their secrets on a daily basis. If Yuri hadn’t required
that I keep my lie detecting under wraps, I would have been begging for a supra
witness protection program by now. Gossip aside, my fellow mutants were zealously
private people. “How do you think they’re causing the burnouts?”

“I’m not a scientist. How should
I know?”

Nobody had theories, not even the
lab techs. Conspiracy theories yes, but no rational ones. “Seems like if we put
our heads together we could—”

“Gosh.” She glanced at her watch
and stood. “I’ve got to get back to work. So nice talking to you.”

Her mask said,
She won’t make
friends asking so many questions. Nobody likes a nosy supra.

“You’re welcome.” I bared my
teeth in a fake smile and crossed Sheila off my list of potential friends, mole
suspects and people who’d be good references for blind dates. Hopefully I’d
gotten enough out of her to satisfy my task master I could be sneaky and yet
effective.

~ * ~

Fat chance. I’d only gotten
techniques, not names. After dogging me for how long I’d taken, Beau pointed
out I’d once again failed to activate my chameleon powers.

“Do you even bother to try?” he
asked in disgust, wiping his glasses with the edge of his lab coat before
sliding them on his face.

“I got it to work after you
left,” I assured him. He often popped up on some fictitious errand but couldn’t
stick to my ass the entire time or it negated the trial. Supras with similar
skill sets enhanced each other as well as cancelled each other out. It was
easier for a chameleon to fade if another chameleon was present, but it was
also easier for us to see each other.

“Sure you did.”

I pointed at him and then myself.
“Pair cancellation. See, I paid attention to your lecture. My fading didn’t
work on you but it worked on the victim. I mean, the test subject.”

“You didn’t fade,” he said in a
very annoyed voice.

“How can you so sure?”

He pointed at the microscope
where he’d put a speck of my skin. “There’s not enough residue in your sample.”
Use of chameleonocity triggered a chemical in the skin. It sounded gross, but
not if you thought about it like lactate in the muscles and blood
post-exercise. “Since I know you didn’t fade, how did you get any information
from your target? Sheila Hornbuckle’s a tight ass.”

“I’m that good.” Beau hadn’t
gotten suspicious of me—yet. I’d failed on purpose a few times, though he was
right that I never faded. My chameleon ability was buried deeper inside me than
the mole was buried in YuriCorp’s staff.

“No, you’re not that good,” he
countered. “You’re not good at all.”

“Maybe there’s not much residue
because I’m energy efficient.” Maybe there’s no residue because I read lies
instead of fading.

He gestured rudely. “Bah.”

“I’m not comfortable manipulating
my coworkers.” He sent me out daily to trick information out of somebody—when
he wasn’t sending me for his lunch. Could chameleons uncover secrets as readily
as Beau seemed to expect me to do? Was a chameleon our spy? I’d questioned most
of the ones at YuriCorp without success. As far as I knew, they couldn’t lizard
out of my lie sight.

“If you can’t handle this, how
are you going to deal with consulting?” He was convinced I’d never be able to
do what I’d been hired to do. I myself was reserving judgment. “You have to
find out everything about everybody and use it to get them fired half the time.
This is why they call it a job. Sometimes it’s not a happy-skippy day at the
mall.”

“Like I have time to go to the
mall.”

“Sit over there and think about
disappearing.” Beau pointed at the stool beside the door of the lab.

I dragged myself to the indicated
spot. “Do I have to write ‘I will fade like cheap jeans’ one hundred times on
the chalk board?”

“Just do it, Cleo.”

I slumped on the naughty stool
and closed my eyes. The few times I’d faded on purpose, I’d been so aggravated
with Beau I’d wanted to be anywhere but the lab.

I guess he hadn’t frustrated me
enough today because it wasn’t working. Beau gave a disgusted snort. “Try
harder.”

Instead, I started thinking about
John. Yesterday at lunch, I was positive we’d made a connection. He’d asked how
I was adjusting, and I’d described my past difficulties maintaining friendships
with people. How difficult it still was with coworkers like Pavarti and Ursula,
since I couldn’t tell them everything. Wasn’t it great I had a few people in my
life who knew?

Normally he didn’t acknowledge
the mole project, but when I’d said that, he’d patted my shoulder. Voluntary
contact! I should step up my hints that we spend time together outside of work.
I hadn’t been alone with him since the tour. I might have to develop a leaky
faucet.

Beau interrupted my pleasant
daydream. “You’re not concentrating.”

I made a “Hulk is mad” face. “I
am, too.”

“A chameleon is conscious of the
moment. Conscious of every detail of a scene. It’s the moment itself you need
to concentrate on, not escaping it. Then you can move to the next level. If all
you do is blend in, you’re not much use.”

“That’s not what I’ve been
doing,” I lied. I felt my face heat. How did he know?

“That’s what all noobs do. They
can’t tell when they’re faded, so they think it’s about hiding. But it isn’t,
not beyond the elementary stages.” Beau paced with standard irritation and
slammed a clipboard around. “You were born into this, not made. You’ve had this
ability your whole life. It should come easily.”

“Were you born with it?”

“Yes,” he said testily. “YuriCorp
hires born supras. Made ones are inconsistent and hardly ever get past stage
two.”

“What’s past stage two?
Invisibility? Shape shifting?”

“Chameleons aren’t invisible, and
they sure as hell can’t change into other shapes.” A mask flickered around him.
“You have to get past this stupid comic book obsession.”

“Hey, it’s movies and television,
too,” I said, “or do you not indulge in pop culture?” Why was he lying about
chameleon stages if he was supposed to be training me?