"Glad she's safe," Frank said. "It's strange. The IT department says there's nothing wrong with your data. Leonard told them he saw it fail with his own eyes, but they said there shouldn't be an issue."
I edged toward the door. Getting caught by Frank would only be marginally better here in the open than inside the man trap. "Those IT guys," I said. "They never believe there's a problem."
Frank chuckled. "Ain't that the truth. Leonard'll meet you at the scanner when you get back. We'll find the issue if I have to call them down there myself."
My heart pounded. "That's not necessary," I said. "Let's see if the problem resurfaces before we bother them."
"Eh," Frank said. "It's their job to be bothered."
I forced a grateful smile, when really I wanted to beg him to forget about it. "Thanks," I said. And I turned and strode away from him, careful not to look like I was running even though that's exactly what I wanted to do.
Ugh. It would have been a clean job, if I just could have handled the eyes. Now when Emmeline returned she'd be more likely to talk to Frank about her dog problem, and discover that he'd already seen her this morning, even though she hadn't been in. That would raise her suspicions, so she might question Brooke if she implied that she'd asked her the question about the presentation already today.
I walked out through the revolving doors, around the back of the building, and found a car waiting for me by the Dumpster, out of sight of the back door security camera. In the front seat were two people I'd never seen before, a man and a woman. The woman sat behind the wheel. The man had a thick head of unfamiliar black hair, but I recognized his eyebrows. He'd used them before.
I tried not to physically trudge toward the car. Not only was that unprofessional, but someone might be watching. I paused at the driver's side window to take the woman's hand before I got in the car. It grew smooth and cool on the surface as she gripped mine, and I pushed mine to become warmer, just like Mom and I always did. Then I made my hand sweat a little while Mom chilled hers gradually, a degree at a time. This was shifter code—the only way we could make sure that we were really looking at each other and not a copy.
The man on the passenger side reached across, extending me his hand as well. I was pretty sure that this was Dad based on the eyebrows, but we couldn't be too careful, so I took it, checking that his palms grew softer at the edges as our grip tightened, and thinned my own, nearly to the bone. This was definitely my father. No one else knew the code—not even Mom. We had to take care to keep them private and complex, so they wouldn't be given away if we gave the first part of the code to the wrong person.
I climbed into the back seat. "Stop using those eyebrows," I told Dad. "I remember them."
Dad grimaced. "Will do."
I should have been happy that even a professional like him could make a mistake. But there was a big difference between using elements his shifter daughter would recognize and exposing us to security on the job.
As Mom pulled out of the alley and turned onto the busy street, I handed Dad the flash drive.
"You got the data?" he asked.
"Yup. And uploaded the files. Firewall should be dropping any minute now."
"Then it's all in the client's hands," Dad said. "Did you have any trouble?"
I slouched in my seat. "I failed the eye scan," I said. "Three times. But Leonard let me in anyway."
Dad groaned. "You practiced that for hours."
I kicked off Emmeline's punishing heels. I hadn't forgotten. "I must have lost the details. I'm sorry."
"It's okay," Mom said, mostly to him. "All that mattered for this job was that you get through, and you did that."
She didn't sound convinced, and from the look on Dad's face when he twisted around in his seat, I knew he wasn't, either.
"Did you play it off?" he asked.
I cringed. "Yes. He didn't suspect anything. But Frank's going to talk to Emmeline about it when she comes in, so there's basically no way they won't be confused about what happened."
Dad picked at the lint on the back of the seat. He always did that when he was upset, and trying not to take it out on Mom and me.
"How can I fix it?" I asked. "Should I go back in? Be a maintenance worker? Pretend to fix the scanner?"
Mom shook her head. "The client will want to cover our tracks. He'll make excuses for us. They'll be confused, but that doesn't mean they'll jump to the right conclusions."
Dad nodded, but when he turned around in his seat, he kept his eyes on the side mirror, watching behind us.
Mom put a hand on his arm. "It'll be fine," she said.
"Sure," Dad said. But he didn't relax.
I sat up straight and looked at the traffic behind us. There were lots of cars—the tail end of the morning rush. It was impossible to tell if any of those cars were following us specifically, but I knew that wasn't all Dad was looking for.
He was also searching for black vans.
Eight months ago, Dad had been on a job stealing a prototype from Megaware, and someone followed him home. The next night, a row black vans rolled down our street, slowing down, looking. We moved, of course. Dad wanted to leave the state, but Mom convinced him that one small slip didn't merit giving up all the profiling work and all the job leads they had in the Bay Area. Dad agreed, and they settled on a new apartment one city over, which, combined with our new names and ever changing faces, should have been enough. We'd moved again since then, but as much as Dad tried to cover it, he was still watching.
Mom put a hand on Dad's arm. "It's fine," she said again. "No one's following us."
Dad nodded at Mom and readjusted the side mirror, but then he leaned over to watch behind us out of the rearview.
I closed my eyes. Mom never wanted me to go out on jobs—Dad was the one who said that if they didn't give me a positive outlet for my abilities, I'd find ways to use them on my own. He was the one who'd taken me with him on small missions, working me up to this opportunity to try one on my own. But if working with me made him nervous now, he might agree with Mom that I shouldn't be in the field.
I ran my still-long nails over the seat upholstery. I didn't need them anymore, and no one outside the car could see them, so I let them slide down toward my normal shorter length. Mom was right—if my mistake was going to come down on anyone, it would be Emmeline. Mom and Dad regularly got people fired, or arrested, by pinning jobs on them. The only thing we didn't do was kill people—ever—no matter how much easier it might make our work. Legends told of dark, shape-changing assassins in the shadows, but that wasn't us. It was the first rule, and the only rule.
It always made me nervous that we didn't have more. Mom and Dad worked like a well-oiled machine—get in, get the job done, get out. I was too new at this, too green. I couldn't help but think about the people whose lives we were ruining.
Maybe that distraction was part of my problem. Like my parents always said, we were shifters. Fooling people was our life and our business. I hated that I wasn't perfect at it, because little slipups created suspicions, and suspicions caused rumors. If we were lucky, rumors became legends. If not, they grew into beliefs.
I shivered, tugging Emmeline's dress to cover more of my shoulders. At all costs, we had to avoid inspiring belief, because that would be followed by action, and, inevitably, violence.
Mom saw Dad peeking in the rearview and adjusted it so he couldn't see behind us anymore. She gave Dad's shoulder a squeeze, and Dad let out a long sigh, finally relaxing back into his seat.
I tried to relax as well. If I'd screwed this up, they'd fix it. Or, if they couldn't, we'd run, together.
At least I had my parents. Without them, I'd be entirely lost.
Two
On the way home, Mom pulled through an underground parking garage. When the car was angled lower, blocking us from view of any security, we all shifted back to our home bodies.
Instead of the deliberate flexing that turned me into Emmeline, to shift back I just needed to
relax. My home body was the one my body wanted to be—the one that was a reflection of my own self-image. When we drove out of the parking lot, we looked like a family. My hair was a shorter version of Mom's fluffy brown; my forehead a smaller, more feminine version of Dad's wide heart shape. I looked more like my parents than a regular person would, since my subconscious body literally made itself in their image.
The first order of business after any job was to go to the Johnson's townhouse to report. As Mom pulled into their driveway, I sank down in my seat. Telling Aida I messed the job up would be bad; listening to Mel razz me about it would be worse. But I really, really didn't want to fail in front of Kalif. He'd helped me train with the eye scanner; he was so sure I could do this. And then I went and messed it up. "I'll just wait in the car," I said.
Mom turned off the car and reached between the seats to pat me on the knee. "This was your job," she said, "and it's not done until you report."
My body shrank smaller against the seat. Little shifts like that were almost imperceptible—since people's bodies were always changing slightly due to mood, hygiene, and health, normal people wouldn't notice.
But my parents weren't normal. I could tell by the way Dad eyed me through the car window that he noticed. "Come on," he said. "You got the job done. You don't need to be ashamed of one little mistake."
Maybe not, but I'd wanted to excel, not just skate by.
I climbed out of the car, leaving Emmeline's shoes on the floor. I didn't understand why women wore shoes it took so much practice to walk in. In my mind, shoes were for making your feet more comfortable, not less. But since I dressed like other women as much as I dressed like myself, I was out of luck.
Mom knocked on the door, and Aida answered it. Her dark eyes and dark hair were a mirror image of Kalif's, or, I supposed, the reverse.
"Come in," Aida said. She stepped aside and we all wandered into her kitchen. Mel sat at the table, working on a laptop.
We exchanged hands all around, checking for the right palm codes. We all had separate ones for each other person, which could have gotten out of hand, except that our two families represented all five of the shifters I knew: my parents, and the three Johnsons.
Their last name wasn't really Johnson, of course. I would have been surprised to discover that their real names were really Mel and Aida, but that's what they called themselves, so that's what we called them. Mom and Dad had been working with them since Aida and Dad discovered each other while on assignment six months ago. Aida had the opportunity to pin her own job on Dad, but instead she covered for him and invited him to work with her.
Before the problem at Megaware, he would never have taken her up on it, but I think he was worried about what would happen to Mom and me if those black vans ever caught up to him. He and Mom spent a month following Mel and Aida around first, to make sure they were who they said they were. Even then, I knew Mom and Dad were always ready to bolt. That was the nature of our business. We could never really trust anybody.
When we finished the hand signals, Aida beamed at me. "I just got off the phone with the client. He told me the security glitch showed, and he has his people shutting it down. He had just enough time to gather evidence for his father, but not so much as to create a major security breach. He's thrilled."
Dad clapped me on the shoulder. "That's my girl," he said.
I smiled, shifting my shoulders into a more relaxed posture. Dad had my back. Now that we were standing in front of Aida, all traces of nervousness and disappointment were gone. Dad might be a mess these days, but he was also a fine actor. We all were. The job required it.
But full disclosure was part of the report. I caused a problem, so the whole team needed to be aware of it. Might as well get it over with. "I failed the eye scan," I said to Aida. "The security guard is planning to follow up."
Mel looked up from his computer screen. "I told you we should have sent Kalif."
I forced my body to stay loose. Kalif was awesome behind his computer, but he never did field work. Mel was just trying to get under my skin—and it was working.
Dad laughed. "I've seen Kalif's impression of a woman. He couldn't have gotten past the front door."
I glared at Dad. That was true, but uncalled for. "Hey," I said. "Quit it."
Dad was right, though, and I could tell by the gritted teeth that Mel knew it. His gaze softened as he turned to me. "You should work with him on that," he said. "We all know I've tried."
Finally. An excuse to get out of this conversation. "Is he downstairs?" I asked.
"Of course," Aida said. "Go on down."
I bounced out of that room even faster than I'd left Frank's lobby.
Kalif was almost always downstairs. His bedroom was in the basement, and doubled as the tech room. His parents had been letting him run their personal server for years, maintaining all their internet security and running their online surveillance.
As I headed down, I found the door to the basement open. Kalif sat behind his computer, his eyes glued to the screen. The rest of us looked Caucasian; Dad said it was because we lived in the States, where even in this day and age, white was the color of power. Kalif's skin was a shade darker, and his bone structure looked like he might be of Arab descent. I'd wondered why that was, but hadn't asked. Asking a shifter why he looked the way he did was like poking around in his psyche, and much as I might want to be, Kalif and I weren't that close.
It wasn't genetic, that was for sure. We couldn't truly shift until we were older, but even as babies, our newborn features formed in the likeness of the parent we bonded to at birth—usually our mothers. As we aged, we'd grow to look more like our fathers as well, but we couldn't know what our genetic selves looked like until we were dead.
When Kalif didn't look up, I hesitated. He was no doubt in the middle of hacking some computer to get important information for his parents, or mine. That was the difference between me and Kalif: I got to run errands occasionally, but he did vital work every day.
I walked into the room and took the stool beside him at his desk, waiting quietly for him to look up at me.
When he did, I slouched. "I failed that eye scan," I said. "Repeatedly."
He looked ruefully at his computer screen. "I failed this four gate."
I leaned over to look. His screen was full of images of soldiers destroying buildings with blue explosions.
Okay, so maybe not everything he did was vital.
I smacked his arm. "Yes," I said. "Your video game is totally as important as my mission."
"Obviously," Kalif said. "Goes without saying." He grinned at me, and his eyes caught on my clothing. He quickly looked away, and I swear his cheeks grew a little pinker before he corrected them.
It wasn't until then that I became fully aware of myself sitting there in my home body and Emmeline's clothes. My own body might not fill it out like Emmeline's did, but it was still more revealing than anything I usually wore in front of Kalif. Plus Emmeline's bra wasn't exactly offering support.
This time, I did tug at the neckline.
"You look great," he said. But he kept his eyes glued to his keyboard.
I tugged even harder on my blouse, and checked my bra straps. "Shut up," I said. "It's just a costume."
Kalif straightened his mouse pad. "I know. I was just saying you look nice in it. That's all."
He thought I looked nice? In Emmeline's clothes? "Well," I said, "you should have seen me as Emmeline. She's movie-star gorgeous."
Kalif shot me a skeptical look. "Maybe," he said. "But if your subconscious looked like that, you'd be unbearable to talk to."
I smiled, stretching my neck and torso into Emmeline's slender super-model build. "Please," I said. "Tell me this isn't an improvement."
Kalif shook his head. "Cut it out. You looked better before."
The room grew warmer. I snapped back to my home body. He thought I looked better this way?
He thought about how I looked . . . at all?
&
nbsp; My pulse picked up, and I focused on keeping my face from flushing. When I dared to look up again, I found Kalif staring at his hands.
If I could have, I would have shifted into the stool I sat on: plain, and unsexy. I should have just dropped it when he looked at me. He'd been embarrassed by the way I was dressed, and my dragging the moment on just embarrassed him further. He probably thought I was fishing—trying to get him to say I was beautiful.
Now, I just wanted to become the office furniture. But, alas. We couldn't turn into anything that wasn't human.
I stayed as myself.
Kalif cleared his throat. "So, did you get caught?"
"No. I covered."
Kalif looked impressed. "So you didn't fail."
I cringed. "Not technically. But I left a mess."
"Meh. I can match an eye scan, but I couldn't talk myself out if I didn't."
I smiled. It was sweet of him to try to make me feel better. "Yeah, well," I said. "The rest of us can run the missions, but none of us can handle the server."
Kalif patted the box on his desk. "I keep her company."
"Please," I said. "You've been keeping her company since you were thirteen. That makes you some kind of prodigy."
Kalif grinned. "It makes me a bored kid with no friends. But if you're going to call me a prodigy, I'm not going to argue."
He had more reason not to argue than he'd admit. Before my parents met the Johnsons, they kept all their records on paper, written in a cipher. It took Kalif's parents quite a while to convince them that keeping the information encrypted on a server was actually much safer and more reliable. I wasn't sure if the Johnsons knew, but my parents hired a guy to hack into the server before they handed Kalif a single one of their files, just to make sure that their information would be safe. The guy had a ton of experience, but he couldn't crack Kalif's security.
"Jory?" Dad called down from the top of the stairs.
I stepped into the basement doorway. "Yeah?"
Dad paused, giving me a strange look.
A Thousand Faces Page 2
