by Matt Carter
Kevin knew me better than that. The real Kevin knew enough to do a rudimentary bug sweep if he felt the inclination, and if he had been replaced . . . I’d heard Splinters regurgitate memories that could only have been made by the human. A Splinter Kevin might do the same thing. In fact, if Kevin had been taken, the Splinters might know a whole lot more about me than I wanted them to. I hadn’t known about the memory transfer when I’d promised not to watch Kevin, and afterward, I hadn’t really wanted to acknowledge the problem, not with the promise already made. Maybe I’d even liked having that security risk, taking the information the Splinters weren’t acting on against me as evidence that Kevin was still safe, although that seemed like an absurd arrangement in retrospect.
I could have planted the essentials myself and come back with the rest later. Instead I’d brought Ben in, outside his area of expertise because cutting him out of his own plan had felt . . . what? Rude? Cold? Because I’d been sheltering his ego, or trying to impress him with my capacity for trust, or something else as ridiculous as that? And as a result, Kevin had the old yearbook back, the last of my stockpiled excuses to visit him, my computer power cord and my two best cell phones were locked in my mother’s briefcase, and Dad was dropping in to call down the stairs to me at least once every two hours, making it impossible for me to download the feeds from any of my equipment or to call or find Ben to apologize. And those things would continue to be impossible for the next two weeks, or until Aldo could get his hands on the right obsolete replacement cord, whichever came first.
Two weeks.
A few weeks, a few hours.
I might not even get to talk to Ben again before he’d be reading my messages from his own desk, five hundred miles to the south, or from a new one in whatever town struck his mother’s fancy next. I wondered if Mom would let him drop off my bag on his way out of town. I already felt naked from being without it.
I’d known it would be this way when I’d selected him, of course. The kind of hands-on work we’d been doing together was never going to be permanent, certainly not until he was old enough to go where he chose, probably not until after college, and maybe not even then. That had been part of the appeal, to have someone I’d personally trained in the basics too far away for them to take; someone I could turn my back on for two hours at a time and still trust; someone to talk to on the outside, to remind me of a whole world to protect beyond the borders of my festering little town; someone who would remember to fear and fight the Splinters even if they someday took me and all the other local human minds away. But it was getting more and more difficult to remind myself what a beneficial arrangement this would be.
I wasn’t experiencing this difficulty for dangerous reasons, I was sure of that. I was finished with those. What the sensible reasons were, I hadn’t been able to identify yet.
My one remaining phone was a prepaid with no minutes and only one text message left on it. I needed that to tell Aldo to watch my spare emergency tracker, which I attached to my bra to reduce the risk of being separated from it. Aldo responded only with assurance that he would watch both Ben’s tracker and mine and keep himself in safety contact with Billy, followed with sympathies made brief by the prepaid’s ruthless character limit.
After that, there was nothing to do but toss a new experimental stimulus in the specimen containment chamber with the half-rat Splinter every hour or so and wait for something to happen. Waiting meant hours of aimless brain exercises, which brought the thoughts into focus, both the good ones and the bad ones. Since there was nothing I could actually accomplish with them, I switched back and forth a few times, turning my keyboard on and off, opening and closing my newest Sudoku book, letting events cycle past, blurry, sharp, blurry, sharp, trying to decide which was better.
“Trespassing.” My mother had repeated the word several times over, calmly, deliberately, as if that would change its meaning. “Trespassing. Twice in one day?”
I’d had no answer for that. There was never a useful one when she was reiterating the facts.
“How do you think this makes me look?”
There was rarely an answer for that either.
“How many times will I have to tell you to leave that family alone? Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage yet?”
That one I answered, sort of.
“What damage would that be?”
She didn’t answer me back, but she didn’t break her calm, deliberate composure either, her lawyer’s method of expressing rage. We both knew what damage she meant. It was on the long list of things we didn’t speak about. She’d already reminded me, and that hurt enough.
“What were you doing?” she asked instead.
I’d tried to mention the yearbook again, my admittedly cheap excuse, but she’d waved it away.
“In the forest. With that boy?”
The edge to her voice when she mentioned Ben had stunned me for a moment.
“I thought you wanted me to meet a nice boy my own age.” The way I’d pointed this out sounded very reasonable in my head, but I couldn’t be sure how much my memory had altered it.
“Not if this is what you’re going to do with him. Did the police scare him away, or was he just hiding better the second time?”
I didn’t answer that one, didn’t blink or look away.
“Honey . . .” Even in replay it made me shudder when she called me that. It was even worse than a term of endearment from Dad, like being patronized by a cold, digital smartphone personal assistant. “You know you don’t have the best judgment around boys your age.” That made me shudder harder. “And that’s okay. You’re young. But it does mean I have to be concerned about the ones who might be dangerous.”
It was at around this point in the argument when I’d given up all hope of getting out of any trouble. There was only one reason I could think of that she wouldn’t be overjoyed at the prospect of having me seen in public with someone as normal as Ben, and I couldn’t even debate it with her without crossing our unspoken line.
“Dangerous because he’s living with her?” I’d asked this very ferociously. “Or are you just afraid he’ll stab me with one of his merit badges?” At the time I hadn’t cared how much my rhetorical style of spite took after hers, but the resemblance sickened me afterward. “How long do you expect to have it both ways? I know exactly how much you care about what happens to the Brundles! Why won’t you just say this is all about keeping me away from Ben? And how can you tell me he’s dangerous if you won’t admit what she is?”
Mom had stopped pretending to reason with me then. I tried to make my brain fast forward over her exhaustive inventory of all the things I was not to do for the next two weeks, but it skipped around and repeated that part in even more excessive detail than the rest. When it had finally temporarily tired of those few minutes and skipped further back to the debacle at the Brundle house itself, I spent a while trying to figure out when, exactly, in those critical, disastrous seconds, had something been tapping on the window . . . before I realized that the tapping wasn’t in my memory, and it wasn’t on one of Kevin’s windows, it was on mine.
First there was a rush of that mad, unfocused, gut-deep sort of fear I still sometimes felt, the fear of all the inhuman things that window left me partially exposed to, the fear that made me want to set up the barricade and never touch it again.
Then it faded into the ordinary fear of a more probable human caller being spotted from the outside by one of my parents, which made me slide the window wide open so the visitor could roll down onto the couch inside.
It wasn’t Aldo, and he wasn’t carrying a power cord or a phone.
It was Ben, with my bag slung securely over his shoulder. He carried a six-pack of Monster and a round leather case about the size of a small birthday cake, which rattled with a very non-electronic resonance when he moved.
Mysteriously, I wasn’t at all disappointed.
At least I’d get the chance to apologize, but I wasn’t even quick en
ough to be the first one to do it.
“I saw him leave,” Ben said, presumably about Dad after his last check-in. “I’m so sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes, it was.”
I could have contradicted him again, though I decided he might learn faster for the next time if I refrained.
“I’m sorry, too,” I said instead. “I should have explained the plan better.”
He handed me my bag, and I put it on, even though I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon. I needed the weight of it.
He held out the six-pack, and I broke open the cardboard and the nearest can and took a sip, less for the fuel than for something to do with my mouth since I couldn’t think of anything useful to say.
Ben waited silently for me to finish, as if drinking and listening were an uncommon set of activities to combine.
“Sorry,” I said again, for a new reason. “I don’t have anything to tell you.” I pointed at the darkened computer monitor. “I don’t have access to anything here. We can’t even do background research.”
“I didn’t come to work,” Ben said as he put the rest of the six-pack on the arm of the couch, and opened the leather case.
Inside was a deck of cards, surrounded by carefully arranged stacks of plastic, colored chips.
“No one should have to risk joining the Borg without getting to play a few rounds of poker first.”
“What’s the Borg?”
He stopped halfway through taking the cards out of the pack to think about that for a few seconds. “Okay, we’ll tackle that one next time.”
With the cards all the way in hand, he looked from my cluttered floor to my more cluttered desk uncertainly, leaving me a final few seconds to back out.
I had that terrible knot of nerves I get in my stomach whenever someone expects me to do something that normal people find easy. The simple, compulsive multiplication it took to calculate the number of chips in the case and raise it to the number of cards in the deck didn’t do much to loosen it. I could already imagine myself trying to remember and make sense of a handful of cards, the simple markings on them fluttering around the empty cavern in my head with nothing to hold them down, as obscured and inaccessible as if I hadn’t put them in there at all.
It wasn’t exactly as if I had anything better to do.
I scooped some clothes and instruction manuals off the floor so I could sit with the Monster propped securely in the carpet at my side and leave Ben enough room to sit across from me.
“I’m not taking my clothes off,” I warned him.
Ben froze for just as long as he had after the Borg question and got a lot paler. “Uh . . . okay.”
“That does happen in poker, right?” I hoped I’d remembered correctly what little I’d heard.
“Well, yeah, but you only have to do it if you run out of chips.”
I took stock of the few small stacks of chips he set in front of me. “Seriously?”
“No.”
It took me a couple of seconds, but when my diaphragm did seize up to laugh, I had to struggle to make myself do it at a safe volume.
The reel of events Mom had left me with skipped off its track entirely, taking with it the crushing effort of keeping it all straight and orderly. Ben grinned, and something about that movement, even though it didn’t increase the complexity of his appearance, made him spread out into a lot of my head, the way he had when I’d stitched him up.
There was no reason it should have been, but just watching him write up a list of terminology for me was enough to make me able to read the two cards in my hand easily. Jack of hearts, ten of spades. I remembered enough of childhood “Go Fish,” “Snap,” and “War” to know that they were consecutive and that this was likely to be significant.
“Okay, this version is called ‘Texas Hold’em,’ but the hands are the same in every variation. You can only count five cards as your hand at a time, and you have to include the two that are actually in your hand.”
He went on to explain how and when which cards were revealed and what the different hand configurations were called and spent quite a bit more time than seemed necessary on the list he’d made of the hands’ hierarchy of desirability. Other than the arbitrary order of individual card and suit values, the value of any hand on the list simply correlated inversely with its probability. That was easy enough to remember.
“So, how’s the tongue?” he asked when he’d apparently run out of rules to explain. It took me a couple of seconds to figure out that he was talking about our last specimen.
“Still alive,” I said, pointing to the containment chamber in the corner of the room. The tongue limply scrabbled against the glass wall, trying to fight its way out.
“Find anything about a weakness yet?” Ben asked.
“Not yet,” I replied. “So far no individual item in this room has affected it in any way, so I need to start working on combinations. There are likely more permutations than it has hours to live.”
“Yeah, looks like he’s on his last legs,” Ben said. “Too bad. I was almost getting attached to that ugly little bastard.”
I was almost certain he wasn’t serious. “It certainly attached itself to you,” I reminded him, and the way he smiled before picking up his cards made me wish I had another joke ready to make him do it again.
Between that smile and predicting all the possible combinations the next three cards might give me, I couldn’t pretend it was lack of mental packing peanuts that made me ask, after my first bet, what was probably a very stupid question.
“Why are you here?”
Ben didn’t move his chips or set his cards aside even though, as he’d explained it, it was his turn to do one or the other.
“I’m . . . teaching you poker?” he explained again with less certainty.
“You don’t like breaking rules,” I noted. “Teaching me poker is urgently important enough to you to visit while I’m not supposed to have visitors?” I tried to sum things up. I didn’t mention the other problem with his presence, the one whose call he’d had to cut short to plant cameras with me.
Without my equipment, I didn’t know if she’d still been waiting for him when he’d gotten back to the Perkins’s house or what new, urgent bit of intrigue she might have fed him to keep him believing she was human.
Finally, he looked down to flip over the first three cards.
Jack of spades. Queen of clubs. Six of hearts.
A pair.
“My dad taught me poker,” he blurted out.
“That means yes?” I tried to guess. He hadn’t answered my question, and normally I would simply have pointed this out, but, for once, I actually knew part of what he was thinking without being told. A whole, specific thought, not just the general lines of thinking, I could guess at based on the micro-expressions in the facial muscles that I’d worked so hard to learn to recognize.
He remembered what it was like to have two loving parents to trust unconditionally.
So did I.
I wanted an answer, but I was having some sentimental difficulty bringing myself to interrupt that kind of memory.
“I guess . . . yes. No, not exactly.”
“Why then?”
He bet again. I did the same. Three of clubs.
“Because you’re in here because of me. My plans, my bad timing—”
“So this is . . . what, penance?”
“No! Jeez, you make it sound like I shouldn’t want to see you.”
I calculated a 4.3 percent chance left of a third Jack, a 26.1 percent chance of two pair, and still I couldn’t think of anything to say.
Well, I could think of one thing. That was the problem. It was crowding out all the more sensible ideas of things to say.
Why would you want to?
I wanted to know the answer, and I didn’t want him to know I wanted to know—not on top of all the other normal things he knew I didn’t know.
The contradiction rolle
d around the securely packed workspace of my head, and the desire to know had almost won when the opportunity passed.
“Look.” He threw another chip onto the carpet between us. “I came up with the Miracle Mine idea, and the Kevin idea, and you didn’t even like them, but that didn’t stop you from breaking, and I quote, ‘a lot of laws’ to get them done without even thinking about it.”
“I think about everything I do,” I corrected him.
“Okay, fine, but you did it anyway. And when I was going to get in trouble for going for the bike, even though we should have run, even though I was the one who didn’t think far enough ahead—”
“You will next time.”
“What I’m trying to say is that I’m prepared to do the same things you’d do. Or I’m trying to be.”
“Oh.” I threw in a chip. Ace of clubs. No help, just a pair. “So, this is practice?”
Ben pushed his hair back the way he always seemed to when he was at a loss, so I thought at first I’d gotten it wrong again.
“Sure. Yeah,” he finally said.
“Oh. Well, good. You could use some.”
The resolution of confusion into order in my head usually felt a lot better than it did that time.
Ben dropped an extra three chips into the pot. With the cards on the floor, there was an 18.8 percent chance he’d been able to construct a better hand than mine. That probability was made immeasurably higher, I assumed, by this action.
I folded my cards, and Ben dropped his in favor of the modest pile of chips between us.
Two of hearts, seven of diamonds.
I looked back at the list to check that I hadn’t forgotten a combination.
“You knew three betting rounds ago that you could only form one of the bottom three hands, and you had less than a thirty-two percent chance of that!”
