When Kalif finally spoke, his voice was quiet. "It actually makes sense, if you think about it. There aren't that many shifters in the world. And my mom was willing to do whatever these people wanted."
"She's scared of them," I said. And for the first time, I wondered what kind of life Aida must have had before she met Mel, if she thought living with him was a preferable arrangement. "Have you ever met your grandparents?"
"Never," Kalif said. "On either side. You?"
"No," I said. I knew that Mom's parents were normal people, but Dad's were shifter spies. They taught him everything they knew, and he taught Mom. The job just seemed suited to our abilities. I wondered if it was passed down for generations, or if the fit was so obvious that many shifters arrived at it independently.
Kalif shook his head at the screen. "My grandparents were all shifters. I assumed my parents didn't know where they were. They never talk about them, and we move around so much, it would be easy to lose track."
These shifters looked pretty settled to me. "What happened to Hunter?" I asked.
Kalif scrolled down again. Other people posted for pages and pages, discussing the veracity of Hunter's claims, asking him questions.
But Hunter never posted in the forum again.
My pulse picked up. "If that's real, why is it still there? Couldn't the Carmines have gotten it taken down?"
"It's hard to remove an image once it's been online," Kalif said. "There'd always be a cached version, at least. Plus, making a fuss would lend legitimacy to Hunter's claim. The harder they fought, the more attention they'd draw."
I looked at the pictures of Wendy and Oliver again, both in their personas, and asleep. The resemblance to Aida was undeniable.
My voice shook as I spoke. "They've set up permanently like this, with well-known work personas, and they think we're the security threat?"
Kalif stared at their photos. "Tell me about it."
I shook myself. Here I was focused on me, when he just found out he had grandparents who were also murderers. I put a hand on his arm. "I'm sorry," I said. "Are you okay?"
Kalif's voice was clipped. "Fine."
"Really. If you want to talk about it—"
He snapped the laptop shut. "I don't. We need to get to your parents, before it's too late."
And while I wanted to talk him through this, I couldn't deny that he was right.
Twenty
While Kalif showered, I pulled up a light rail map and plotted a course that would take us to Systems Development. The overhead photos of the business complex showed a wooded area, with wide buildings spanning the spaces between the trees. Today was Sunday, so hopefully the complex wouldn't be too busy. The light rail would take us within a few blocks of it, by way of a strip mall where we could buy some cheap clothes.
Kalif came out of the bathroom smelling like lemons. He was already dressed, but had a towel tossed over his shoulders.
I wrapped my arms around him.
"Hey," he said.
I nuzzled my face into his neck. "Sorry about your family," I said.
"Yeah, well," he said. "Thanks for not kicking me out with the lot of them."
I ran my hands through his still-wet hair. "I guess they're just making it easier for you not to go home, yeah?"
He rolled his eyes. "Easier by the minute."
I held up my light rail directions. "We better get changed, so we can go."
Kalif nodded. "What should we wear?"
"We could go to the big and tall store, and go as those fat men. Or we could get you a bra."
Kalif smiled. "I'd probably hit on you either way. Don't get me too far out of my element."
"Loiterers in love again, then? You're good at it."
He rolled his eyes. "That's a backhanded compliment, if I've ever heard one."
I held up my palms. "Hey, I was cool with the fat guys."
Kalif kissed me, pushing me toward the door. "Fine. Teenagers it is. Different kids this time, though."
"Of course." I faced the mirror and changed my face and hair so I looked thinner and prettier than I normally did. I darkened my hair, and let it hang down my back in brown clumps, like it badly needed brushing. Mom always said that was a secret to good shifting. Plastic, magazine-cover people were always gorgeous and well-groomed, but real people were full of contradictions.
Kalif chose an unkempt haircut that hung into his eyes.
I flipped it with the back of my hand. "Won't that drive you crazy?"
"Nah," he said. "Why, does it look wrong?"
"It's fine," I said. "As long as you can manage not to fiddle with it constantly." On the other hand, he looked about sixteen, so maybe fidgeting would be appropriate. "What about me?"
His eyes slid up and down my body. "You need to put on some weight," he said. "Otherwise you're going to turn heads."
I puffed out my stomach and thighs a little, making sure I could still fit into my jeans, and added some padding to my cheeks and jaw line. I always felt bad for normal girls when I did that to go unnoticed. I didn't make the fat-phobic culture, but I still felt dirty when I used it to my advantage.
We packed everything into our bags to haul with us, and left the hotel without checking out to catch the light rail into Sunnyvale. When we got to the discount clothing store, I picked us out some new t-shirts and jeans, plus a blazer-skirt combo and some white collared shirts and slacks. We'd need extras for Mom and Dad, plus changes of clothes so we could slip away without being recognized as the same people who came in. I intentionally bought the clothes a few sizes bigger than we all normally were, so we could look tall and imposing, if we needed to, or overweight and unthreatening if we didn't. I also bought us four pairs of practical shoes. There was a very real possibility we were going to have to run in these, so I didn't waste time with fashion.
We paid cash for the clothes and a backpack to carry them in, and then Kalif and I both changed into different shirts and jeans in the bathroom.
We walked the last few blocks past a park, where manicured grass gave way to marshy reeds, and ducks congregated near picnic benches, waiting to be fed. On the far side of the park, marked only by a low curb, the public land ended and the industrial buildings began. We followed a trail that wound through enormous weepy trees, passing the occasional building hidden between the branches. The buildings had both numbers and addresses, but we had to wander past most of the park before we found Systems Development Limited—a sprawling building with four stories staggered over each other like they wished they'd been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
We cuddled up on a bench thirty yards away from the building and studied it. The architecture was trying hard to look casual, even haphazard, but every window to the building was mirrored. The landscaper had planted juniper shrubs under every window on the main floor, so anyone who wanted to get to the windows would have to climb through a web of sticky branches. Around the side was a loading dock entrance. The door was recessed under the overhang of the second floor, so there was no way to get close without walking by rows of those shrub-guarded first floor windows and a mess of security cameras.
I ran my lips over Kalif's earlobe, then whispered to him. "It doesn't exactly look like a prison."
Kalif shivered, which was probably only half an act. "It seems like this has a lot of what I'd be looking for if I wanted to hold people."
He was right. The building was secluded visually, but not in a way that would arouse suspicion, since it was part of a legitimate business community. They had a vehicle entrance, so they wouldn't have to haul prisoners in from the parking lot. "So where would they be keeping my parents, then? Do you think there's a basement?"
Kalif flipped his hair out of his eyes and looked back toward the park, where the bay lands crept into the city. "With the water table so high? If they do, then they've got some very good water pumps."
I nodded. "That's something we can look for." I took Kalif's hand and we walked around the back of the building, branche
s of a particularly large tree spanning overhead. And there, near the base of the tree, was a pipe sticking out of the ground. No water came from it at this moment, but the ground around it was wet, like it had discharged recently.
"Sump pump," I said, turning away from the building so cameras wouldn't catch me mouthing the words. "That means basement."
Kalif scanned the building again. "Let's keep walking. Their security is probably watching us already."
The next building over held the complex offices, a bank branch, and a little sandwich shop with booths and tables and a sign boasting free internet. "Let's get some lunch," Kalif said. We walked in and he sat down at a booth in the far corner and opened his laptop while I ordered for us both. Kalif didn't want to eat—he wanted to check out the local network security.
When I got back to Kalif, I offered him the sandwiches. "Tuna on white, or turkey on wheat?"
"I'll take the tuna," Kalif said. He unwrapped the sandwich with one hand while staring at his screen. I sat down across from him.
"What did you find?"
"I can see their wireless network from here," Kalif said. "They have a couple networks, actually. But they're encrypted, of course."
"Of course," I said. "So you can't hack in?"
"No, I can," Kalif said. "But I'm going to have to go all out on it. I can set up a DDOS attack so their security people will be busy worrying about that, and then work on the problem while they're distracted."
"And once you're in?"
"I'll get into their security workstations and see what it looks like in there."
"Perfect," I said. "And you can do that from here?"
Kalif frowned. "I'd rather be on the other side of the country, but it'll be easier from here."
I looked around the sandwich place. There were two men in suits eating in the opposite corner booth, and a woman in slacks eating a sandwich in front of her laptop. No one was paying a bit of attention to us.
"We better eat slowly," Kalif said. "This won't take forever, but I'll need an hour or two."
I still finished my sandwich long before Kalif was done. There was only so much staring at the back of his laptop I could do without interrupting him or being conspicuous. I started to fold a napkin, but I didn't want the cashier to remember me as the girl who did napkin origami. I didn't want her to remember me at all.
"I'm going to take a walk," I said. "Call if you need me."
Kalif gave me a look. "You're not going to do anything dangerous, are you?"
"No. I won't get any closer than we already did."
"Just be careful."
I squeezed his shoulder. "I will."
I got up from the table and walked out of the shop and back toward the Systems Development building. I traced the path back where Kalif and I had come, and then went past the building toward a little creek that ran under the walkway and toward the city park.
There in the side of the creek bed I found more drain pipes—one of them spitting out water this very minute. I was at least thirty yards from the building now, which meant that there was more area underground here than just a direct basement. I wondered how big the complex was; if Kalif couldn't find the floor plans on their network, maybe we could check with the city planning commission, or the fire department. Whatever was under there couldn't be too secret. It still had to be inspected, and it still had to be up to code.
Unless the Carmines were powerful or rich enough to avoid inspections.
As I walked back past the building, I watched my feet. Mom and Dad might be held somewhere else, or they might be dead. But I also might be walking over their heads right now, so close that if I dug down ten feet, I could reach them.
But if that was true, they were being held in a shifter facility, and clearly a well-funded one. The guards here might be checking palms, and I had no way to secure the palm codes of any of these shifters—at least not without kidnapping and torturing them, which, while not technically against the rules, was not something I was prepared to do.
I wandered farther through the complex, winding around other buildings. I found thick bushes on one end of the complex where I left some of our changes of clothes, and more bushes in the park on the other end, where I left others. The landscaping would offer us a place to change, if we could only get my parents out this far. Then we'd be able to become anyone, and slip away.
I kept more clothes tucked away in Kalif's messenger bag. Mom and Dad would need to change immediately, or they wouldn't make it out of the building unrecognized.
When I finally wandered back to Kalif, he was still staring intently at his laptop.
"Any luck?" I asked.
Kalif didn't even look up at me, he just closed the window where he was working and turned the computer so I could see. This was a security camera image, complete with timestamp at the bottom. The time was the same as the one on Kalif's laptop. This was live.
There, lying on a cot in the center of a closet-sized room, her back to the camera, was my mother. She wore a t-shirt and a pair of sweats, but no shoes.
I gripped Kalif's hand across the table. "She's there."
Kalif nodded eagerly. "She is. That's a room in the basement."
I studied the image. "That's her home body."
Kalif nodded. "She'd have fallen asleep long ago. No need to keep up the façade after that, I suppose."
"What about Dad?"
"Hang on." Kalif turned the screen away again, so that the other people in the shop couldn't see it. Not that anyone was looking. The two men in suits had left, and the woman a few tables away was still typing. He toggled through a few more images before finding Dad sitting against the wall of a room similar to Mom's, wearing identical clothes.
"Do you think they're decoys?" With the other missions, we'd thought we had a safety net in Aida and Mel. If I messed up this infiltration, we had no one to call to bail us out.
"Could be," Kalif said, "if they have enough shifters handy that they can spare two to sit around all day on the off chance someone comes to break your parents out."
"They know we're coming," I said. "Your mom will have alerted them. Do you think they can detect you in the system?"
Kalif shrugged. "I don't think so, but it's hard to tell from here."
I looked over his shoulder at the entrance to the shop. If they knew he was in the system, how long before they found us here?
"Can you check the security footage and see how long they've been there?"
"Yeah," Kalif said. "Give me a minute."
"Work fast," I said.
Kalif pulled up the feed to that room—but they were only keeping tape six hours back. That made sense if they were trying to operate in secret; they'd need enough footage to view themselves if something went wrong, but not so much that they'd leave long tracks for someone like us to follow.
Kalif put the tape on fast forward. Dad flew through the hours before our eyes. Even in the hours of the early morning, the lights in his cell stayed on, so he would lose track of the day and the night. At first he slept, his home face showing to the camera. He'd woken just an hour before we arrived, which made me wonder if they'd been interrogating him into the night.
"That looks real," I said. Now we just needed to check for recent anomalies, to make sure it was still him.
When Dad woke up, he paced the room. Shortly after, a pair of men came in, wearing the same identical faces. They came at him, one of them holding cuffs, the other wielding a Taser. They were taller than average—maybe six-four or six-five. They bound him to a chair and paced around and around him, mouths moving.
"Is there sound?" I asked.
Kalif shook his head.
I couldn't read lips, but I could tell that Dad was refusing and denying whatever they were saying, shaking his head vigorously and snapping at them. I physically jolted when one of them cuffed him across the back of his head.
Kalif turned the screen away from me. "I'll check it," he said. "You don't need to watch."
The tape ended where we began, with Dad sitting on the cot, staring at the wall. It didn't appear that they'd tortured him.
Yet.
"He didn't leave the room," I said. "It's him. Can you check my mother?"
Kalif pulled up the extent of her tape—also only six hours. She lay on the cot facing away from the camera, her breath even. The men didn't come into her room, and she never stirred.
Though my arms were shaking, I hugged Kalif around the waist. "Thank you."
He gave an exhausted sigh. "Don't thank me yet. That's just the good news."
"And the bad news?"
"The security in this place." He whistled.
I put my elbows on the table, leaning in. "It can't be worse than we expected."
"Whoever designed this was obviously a shifter. And he really knew what he was doing, too."
"All right," I said. "Spill. What are we up against?"
"The main floors have pretty standard enterprise class security. Palm scanners, eye scanners, card readers, point detection alarms. The usual."
"Okay," I said.
"But you were right about the basement. They've got most of the same devices down there—no card readers, but some biometric scanners, plus some deterrent devices, like fast-setting foam and fog barriers."
I raised my eyebrows. Most security was all about detecting and recording incidents, so that human guards could respond personally, or so there would be evidence for the police. But alarms could be set to trigger deluge water systems to flood areas, or guns to encase invaders in foam so they couldn't leave before the guards got there to cut them out.
I'd studied invasive deterrent technology, but I'd never been in a facility that used it—Mom and Dad would never send me into a situation that dangerous. "That's pretty intense."
Kalif's words came out in an eager rush. "But that's not even the genius part. The biometric scanners—they're obviously set up for shifters." He pointed to a line of data on the screen. "See this?"
[A Thousand Faces 01.0] A Thousand Faces Page 21
