Kalif hesitated.
I looked up at him. "What?" I asked. "They have to help us once we show them the footage."
"Do you think so?" he asked. "Because what my mom said before still makes sense. They've been kidnapped, but the cleanest way to get them out is for them to do it themselves, from the inside."
I took a step back. "But you saw what happened. They were tied up and gagged. How would they get out of that?"
"Your parents are shifters, and they have lots of experience. My parents will trust that implicitly, even though you don't."
I tried not to take offense to that. "So you don't think we should tell them."
He sighed. "I think we should find a lead, first."
I squared my feet to face him. "So we should start working on that. We begin with Megaware."
Kalif nodded slowly, like he was afraid to make sudden movements. "After you sleep."
I crossed my arms over my chest, Andrea's sleeves draping at my elbows. "I know what you're saying makes sense. But I hate it."
Kalif smiled. "Your parents aren't helpless. They're better at this than us. If they've been caught by someone who doesn't know they're shifters, they'll get out on their own."
"If that were the case," I said, "they'd be out by now, wouldn't they?"
"And maybe they are. They might have called my mom after we left. You don't know."
I pulled out my phone and checked it. No messages.
"If you need me to stay," Kalif said, "I will."
But he was right. He should get home before his parents figured out he was gone—of, if they'd already discovered that, before they figured out where he went.
"No," I said. "That's okay."
As he walked to the door, I chewed my lower lip. I shouldn't blame him for what he was saying. The fact that I wanted to was a testament that he was right; I needed sleep.
No doubt my parents did, too. I could see them, now, locked in a closet, whispering to each other to stay awake, even in the darkness. I could go upstairs and go to sleep, clearing my mind to search smarter in the morning. But they couldn't do the same, so they would be functioning at lower and lower capacity the longer it took me to find them.
And I'd wasted almost a whole day, debating.
"Text me if you need me," he said. "I'm not far away."
Then he slipped out, and as he did, an alternate image intruded—my parents slumped in that same closet, their bodies twisted with a stranger's dead and staring features.
I shut the door behind him and leaned against it.
Kalif was right. I had to believe that they were alive. I had to let that be real enough to me that it fueled my search efforts, until I found them. Until I knew, one way or the other, what had happened to them.
At least then, I'd know the truth.
Eight
My body must have been stretched to the point of exhaustion, because I did fall asleep that night, almost as soon as I turned out my light. But I woke up early in the morning, before Kalif texted or knocked on my door.
I glanced at the clock. If yesterday was an indication, it would probably be another hour before Aida came to get me. I couldn't wait that long. Kalif and I needed to get to work.
Now.
I dressed quickly in jeans and a t-shirt and ran down to Kalif's. When I knocked on the door, Mel answered in his bare feet, and he took my hand.
After we exchanged signals, he raised his eyebrows at me. "Have you heard anything?"
Time to get my lie on. "No," I said. "Have you?"
He shook his head regretfully. "The situation at Eravision is too hot."
I stepped into the house, relaxing my face and evening out the tone of my voice, even though I badly wanted to rub it in his face that Kalif and I had done better than he had. With the risks we'd taken, he wouldn't have been impressed. "You must have learned something."
"We've found out they did the job," Mel said. "But, unfortunately, they botched it."
I kept my cheeks the same color, even as blood rushed toward them. I hardly thought kidnapping constituted a botched job.
Mel kept going. "Art Cambrian was supposed to go home and watch a baseball game. Instead, he met some friends at a sports bar. There are a dozen witnesses. I haven't been able to see the tape they're all buzzing about, but the security at Eravision is sure that the break-in was faked."
They would be, since Art and Nick had clearly not been kidnapped. "So if my parents finished the job, what happened to them?"
"I don't know," Mel said. "But we're cutting loose from the client, just in case. Aida's already gotten rid of the phones she was using to talk to him. The best scenario now is that your parents decided not to come back because they didn't want to tell us what happened."
It was a good thing I'd slept, because if I'd been up all night, I might have slapped Mel right across the face. Was he completely incompetent?
No. Mel and my parents had been working together for six months. If he wasn't a capable spy, we wouldn't have stuck around half that long. Mel might be wrong about how difficult the Eravision situation was—Kalif and I got in easily enough—but he was right about the general circumstances. If someone grabbed my parents, they probably knew they were shifters. And that made things perilous for all of us.
I needed to convince him to get on the same page. "Maybe you'd learn something more if you saw the security tapes," I said.
Mel nodded. "Aida's out seeing what she can glean from one of the security guards who's off duty today. I'm going to join her in an hour. But I don't think we'll be able to get into Eravision today. We want to give things some time to calm down."
I stared at him. I couldn't imagine that Mel would be this frightened to go in if he hadn't seen what I'd seen. He probably had seen it, but was hiding it from me. Made sense, if he didn't want me panicking, running off, and getting myself caught. "I understand," I said. I wondered how long he was planning to keep the whole truth from me. He had to know that I'd do my own poking around eventually. "Is Kalif up yet?"
Mel nodded. "He grabbed a waffle already. Something about having a lot of server maintenance to do."
I nodded. We were going to have to work on that excuse—I didn't know anything about servers, but if they needed as much maintenance as Kalif supposedly gave his, they'd be prohibitively expensive to run.
It was only after I started downstairs that I realized I should have argued more with Mel. I was being too calm about this whole thing, and the only reason I was able to manage that was because I had a lead to work on. Hopefully Mel didn't know me well enough to pick up on that.
Kalif's door was closed. I paused on the last step, staring at the handle.
I'd kissed him last night. In a moment of desperation and panic, I'd broken all my rules and kissed the boy I needed to help me find my parents. On my list of all-time greatest decisions, that ranked pretty low. What if he didn't want to see me today? What if he did, but he just wanted to make out? What if he didn't even bring it up, and our friendship devolved into chronic awkwardness?
Ugh. Living the awkwardness couldn't be that much worse than thinking about it. Could it? I took a deep breath and knocked on the door.
"Come in," Kalif said. I closed my eyes, hoping he didn't think I was one of his parents, half-afraid he'd be sitting on his bed in nothing but his underwear. But when I opened the door, I found him dressed in jeans and a hoodie, sitting on one of the stools in front of his desk. Like a guy who might be doing server maintenance.
"Hey," I said.
He looked up at me. "Hey," he said back. "My mom already left, but there's waffles on the counter upstairs, if you want some."
I fidgeted with the top seam of my pockets. Was he trying to get rid of me? No. Sending me up for waffles would only buy him a few minutes, so that couldn't be the master plan.
Please, I thought. Get a grip. "I'll eat later," I said. And I walked around and sat down on the stool next to him. The program up on his screen was something I didn't
recognize. We checked hands, and then he released mine right away, like he didn't want to hold onto it.
I tried not to read anything into that, but I failed. Hard.
"Are you sure?" he asked. "You should probably eat."
I took a deep breath. According to the clock on Kalif's monitor, it had been twenty-eight hours since Mom and Dad left, which meant that they might still be awake, but they wouldn't be able to keep it up forever.
"No," I said. "We need to get to work."
Kalif looked down at my hands, which were shaking, though more from nerves than from lack of food.
I rested my elbows on his desk. "Really. I'm fine."
Kalif watched me, like he was trying to figure me out.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing." He turned away, opening the mission files on his computer. "I'll pull up everything we have on Megaware."
His face shifted slightly, his eyes sinking millimeters back into his head, their shine dulling.
I closed my own eyes. Clearly this was not about waffles. I had screwed everything up, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do to make it better. "I'm sorry," I said.
He held up a hand. "Don't. It's fine."
"It's not," I said. "Obviously it's not."
He sighed, and took his hands off the keyboard, turning toward me. "You were a mess last night. Let's just forget about it and find your parents."
I could feel my own face shifting in ways similar to his—my features sinking and deflating. I might not be able to identify the emotion in him, but I could identify it in myself.
Disappointment.
Kalif watched me. He was waiting for me to agree with him.
"Is that really what you want?" I asked. "To forget about it?"
He turned back to the computer. I could sense a question hanging unanswered between us. Did I want him? Or was I just using him to deal with the stress of my parents?
If he didn't want me, I couldn't fathom what he was upset about. I watched his mouth, his lips parted just slightly as he searched the files for references to Megaware.
We needed to work. But I had to clear the air before we did, or I'd never be able to focus. I put a hand on his arm. "Hey," I said.
He sighed and turned back to me. "Really. You don't have to—"
But I kissed him before he could finish. His mouth hesitated on mine, but only for a moment before he leaned in.
I wasn't ready for how different it was to kiss Kalif in his own body. It shouldn't have mattered. He was the same person. But his skin felt softer against my face, and our noses touched like they were made to fit together. I kept my eyes open, staying aware of the curve of his forehead, the length of his eyelashes. Kalif's arms tightened around me, pulling me in. When we broke apart, I lay my head back on his shoulder, and he held me close.
His breath blew warm against my ear. "I thought you were going to blame this on temporary insanity."
I laughed, burrowing into him. "If it's insanity, I haven't come to my senses yet."
He stiffened and pulled back slightly.
Crap. That was exactly what he was worried about. "I'm just joking."
"Are you? Because the timing's suspicious."
"Oh, please. You had to know I liked you before."
"Mmm," he said, burying his nose in my neck. "The kissing is new."
"Maybe I was scared."
"So now I'm ugly and scary."
I giggled despite myself. "Terrifying. But come on. There's no way you didn't know."
"Ha," he said, his lips barely grazing my jaw, "you underestimate how hard you are to read."
I leaned away. "I'm hard to read? Please. My mom said I was totally obvious."
His eyes widened, and I wished I could snatch the words back. His face curved up in a smile. "So, wait. You were talking to your mom about me?"
I pointed to the computer. "So about Megaware—"
Kalif's hands curled around my waist. "You're not getting out of this that easily."
I groaned, plopping my head on his shoulder. "If we don't get to work, I really am going to go insane. And then who knows what I'll do with you."
Kalif glanced over at the computer, and then down at me. "Wait, was that supposed to convince me?"
I smacked him in the arm, and he laughed.
"At least you haven't lost your sense of humor," he said.
I turned back to the computer, shifting my stool closer so our legs rested against each other from hip to knee. "We need to work fast."
"I know. But we can't rush."
I sighed. Our parents didn't do rush jobs. They always figured out what needed to happen and proceeded forward at a careful, calculated pace. We would be wise to do the same.
Kalif brushed my hair back over my ear. "You know I'm right."
My resolve crumbled. "Okay," I said. "I'll go slow. But let's work the problem."
The first thing Kalif pulled up was Dad's report about getting caught at Megaware. Dad had impersonated one of their employees, but then the mark showed up halfway through Dad's job. Dad had thought he made it out of the building okay, but the cameras caught the employee in two places at once. Dad got into his car in persona and shifted on the way home, ditching the car at a junkyard later that day.
People had wild imaginations; they should have blamed the incident on make up, or prosthetics. They shouldn't have been able to trace it back to Dad. But those slow black vans passed the house twice a day after that, until we skipped town.
"There's nothing here to work with," I said. "If we're going to trace them this way, we're going to need to get into the company communications."
Kalif nodded. "If we can get through their network security, I could search through their company emails, billing, you name it. If there's any suspicious funding or communication, we'd be able to find it."
I rubbed my temples. That wasn't a job I could do. "How long will that take?"
"Depends on their security." Kalif pulled up the workup Dad did before he ran the original job. I put my palms on the desk and studied it. The first thing I gathered was that Megaware had spent a truckload of money on their original security system.
"This is intense," I said. "If their network security is half as good as this, I gather it's going to take forever to hack them."
Kalif held up a finger. "If that's the only way in, almost certainly. But if we had someone inside, they could let me on the network from one of their work stations."
I perked up. "Breaking in is something I can do."
Kalif smiled. "I thought you'd like that part."
I took a look over the security schematics again. "Looks like they only have biometric scanners for the sensitive areas. I should be able to get in and use a computer with just a persona and a door code."
"We don't want to use your dad's profiles," Kalif said. "Since his work was compromised, they might be looking for those personas."
I nodded. "I'll need to pick a persona close to my own size." We didn't actually change mass when we shifted—our bodies could look like a person in every detail, but our weight would be our own. Dad had told me that the few people who knew about shifters sometimes had fancy detection systems that analyzed a person's likely weight based on their body type and triggered alarms if there was a large discrepancy, like there might be if a two-hundred pound man decided to take on the persona of a fifteen-year-old girl. This was one reason our secret was important. If everyone knew about shifters, that kind of security would be everywhere.
Kalif scrolled through Dad's workup on Megaware. "How do you want to go about building a profile?"
I tapped my fingers on the desk. "Let's start with the internet."
Megaware was a publicly traded software company, which meant finding the details of their company hierarchy only required a simple search.
Kalif typed some keywords into the search engine, and scanned over the results. "There's the CEO," Kalif said. "A man, so probably not him."
High level officials
would draw more attention anyway. "Right."
Kalif opened a page with profiles of some department heads. "There are three senior engineers, two men and a woman."
The fewer variables I had to reach for, the better off I'd be on short notice. "Tell me about the woman."
"Susan Aftland," Kalif said. He pulled up a picture from a social media account. She wore the barest of makeup, and had teased up her blond hair to cover its thinning. She looked close enough to my weight to be a safe candidate, and she didn't have obvious scars, braces, unnatural hair dye or tattoos in visible places. "Forty-seven years old. Husband, two kids. Address out in Tracy, so she must commute to the city."
Tracy to San Jose was a long commute, but people did it, as evidenced by the morning traffic. I squinted at her company bio. "You'd think with a job like that, she'd be able to afford to move closer."
Kalif ran another search. "It's been eight months. Maybe she has. But the White Pages still has her listed there."
I shrugged. "That means that once she leaves for the day, she won't be dropping back in."
Another quick search yielded a social media account with a few public pictures of Susan, and a video of a press conference where she announced a new product. As she spoke, I practiced her voice and mannerisms.
"We can't count on her driving the same car she was eight months ago," I said. "And we don't have access to the security footage, either, correct?"
"Right," Kalif said. "Not without hacking through their firewall, which I can do . . ."
"But not quickly," I said. "That's fine. But it means the fastest way to figure out if she's at work would be to get into the garage and run license plates. Then we can tag her car so we know when she leaves work."
Kalif nodded. "Garage security shouldn't be that bad. We can walk up the driveway if we need to. But what's our cover?"
I wavered for a moment. "Loiterers," I said. "I think we can pull that off."
Kalif's knee pressed harder against mine. "Loiterers in love. It'll be adorable."
I tried to look serious, but the muscles of my mouth bent sharply upward into a grin. "We have a job to do."
Kalif leaned toward me and kissed my neck, directly under my jawline. "I know," he said in my ear. "I'll pay attention, I promise."
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