by Lori Bond
“I wouldn’t count on that,” said Arthur with a rather pointed look at Will’s hand holding mine. Will dropped my hand faster than a live grenade.
“Besides,” I said as sweetly and as piously as a person shaking from the effects of full on adrenaline poisoning can manage, “you do assign him here. I Saw it.” I smiled and fluttered my eyelashes at him demurely.
Stormfield ground his teeth. I’d caught him, and he knew it. If he agreed to my vision, then I stayed here with the Keeps and Will. If he denied my vision, then he would be denying me as a Seer. If I wasn’t a Seer, then he couldn’t take me to the Tool Shed. The only thing to do was to agree. Besides, Ginny was right. It was a decent compromise for everyone except Will. I hadn’t asked Will if he wanted to move into the Rook for an indefinite amount of time.
Arthur rubbed his hands over his face as if the stress was getting at him too, but when he pulled his hands back down, he wore a triumphant grin like he knew I had won.
“Fine,” Stormfield said. “But there will be some serious contingency plans put into place.”
“Of course,” said Ginny, standing. She took Stormfield by the arm and led him over to the couch. “We have many, many details to work out. But Elaine appears to be suffering from shock. She has been the focus of a Dreki attack and nearly forcibly removed from her home for the second time this week. Perhaps, we should let her rest?”
Stormfield waved me away as if shooing at an obnoxious gnat. Considering this entire fuss had been entirely about me, it felt anticlimactic.
“Percival,” yelled Arthur.
“At once, my lord,” said Percival. The door to the entry flew open and eight of Arthur’s knights marched in the room. The LANCE team shifted uneasily. I couldn’t blame them. The robots were intimidating in their matching armor.
“Sir Dinidan and Sir Gareth will escort Lady Elaine to her new room,” said Percival. “I have taken the liberty to select the beige room as it is the least damaged of the guest suites.”
“Fine,” said Arthur. “And have the couple dozen knights outside continue circling the building in Grail Defensive Pattern four. If there’s a Dreki within ten miles of this building I want it exterminated like the vermin it is.”
“Of course, my lord,” said Percival.
One of the knights gently picked me up and carried me like a child, a twitching, adrenaline fueled, scared out of her mind child, toward my new room. Will tried to follow me, but Arthur called him back.
“Your guard duty hasn’t started yet,” he growled. “I don’t know how I feel about this,” he said to Ginny.
“You’ll get used to it,” she said.
Once in my new room, Dinidan or Gareth—unlike Ginny and Arthur, I couldn’t tell the knights apart—left me on my bed. For a moment, I tried meditating to calm myself down. It didn’t work. What I needed was to go for a run or to take up karate. Basically, I needed to put my flight or fight response into action. In the end, I did about a thousand jumping jacks to bleed off my adrenaline. When I had stopped twitching, I threw myself back on the bed.
“Oh, sweetie,” said a voice out of thin air.
“Mom?” I rolled over onto my stomach. One of Arthur’s ubiquitous mid-room screens had appeared a few feet from the bed. On the screen sat my mother, biting on her lower lip.
“Ginny has been trying to get us to call for the last few days, and when we saw the Dreki attack, we decided we’d better check in. I am so, so sorry about all of this,” she said. “We watched that horrifying little scene in the living room. I never dreamed you’d forgotten about Arthur. We saw him so often before we had to go into hiding when you were four.”
“You mean it’s true?” Until now I hadn’t accepted this whole Father/Daughter situation with Arthur. Half of me found it too far-fetched to be real, and the other half of me thought this was some kind of clever dodge Ginny had made up to keep me with them.
“We had already broken up before I even realized I was pregnant,” said my mother. “We had some,” she paused for a moment, chewing on her lip while she thought out her words, “ethical disagreements on my methods.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Well, Arthur supports my goal of helping the poor. He does not support my methods.”
“You mean hacking?” I couldn’t believe everything I’d heard was turning out to be true.
Mom waved that away. “Oh no, dear. He has no issue with that. He and Ginny hack into things all the time. They’ve probably decrypted the entire LANCE computer system for fun. I know I have.”
I stared at this stranger wearing my mother’s face.
“No, for example, he wouldn’t have liked how I published all those emails from those bank executives. You know, the emails that brought all those embezzlement indictments last year.”
“That was you?”
“Of course, dear. You didn’t really believe a rogue third world country with no online infrastructure that’s lost even its single IP access point because of sanctions could have hacked a complex banking system, did you?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. That was wise. It would have been a long wait.
“No, and your father would have objected when I redistributed a good deal of those banks’ and the bankers’ wealth back to the masses. He would have preferred presenting the evidence to the police or just rounding them all up himself. You know.”
“No, I really don’t,” I said. “I’ve known the man three days. Three days, Mom. I don’t even know what to say.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. We never realized you’d forgotten him. I mean, who did you think I was talking about all of those times I mentioned your father?” My mother sounded sincere, but she was making too much eye contact, like she realized looking away would give away the lie. Considering this was a trick she’d taught me for getting out of trouble, I couldn’t believe she was trying to use it on me now.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe when you mentioned my father I assumed you were talking about Dad?”
“Hi, Pumpkin.” Dad popped onto the screen like he’d been waiting off camera for the right moment to appear. My mouth fell open. Sometime in the last two days, my dad’s hair had turned snow white, and he’d grown a full matching beard like some sort of hipster Santa. Even his eyes had changed color from blue to brown. “What do you think of the new look?” he asked.
I thought there was a one hundred percent chance I was about to throw up on my new bed. “You really are master criminals skilled at disappearing.”
“Hacktivists, Pumpkin. Your mom and I have taken down many corrupt people and institutions, all for a tidy profit. I’m not the world’s best forensic accountant for nothing.”
Mom gave Dad a squeeze around the waist. “He finds me all of our targets. We’re so glad you know now. It’s been so hard pretending to be normal parents all these years.”
I rubbed my face like Arthur had earlier in the great room. I wondered if the stress with LANCE had given him the same tension headache my parents were giving me. “Why didn’t you tell me about any of this—Arthur, the hacking, that we were hiding?”
My mother looked at me like I was the one that had been hiding a secret life this whole time. “There never was a good opportunity.” She turned to Dad. “I mean when do you tell the kids you’re wanted by everyone from INTERPOL on down? When they turn eighteen?”
“You know what would have been a good time? Before Arthur blurted it out in front of a room of LANCE troopers. Like any time, say, my entire life.”
Mom nodded. “Well, hindsight being 20/20 and all. But I have every faith in you, dear. You can trust Arthur and Ginny. They’re good people even if they are too law-abiding and obsessed with ethics and morals for our taste. Civil disobedience never hurt anyone.”
“I’m not sure stealing billions is civil disobedience,” I said.
“We only kept twenty percent,” said Mom.
My mouth fell open. “And I got a used car for my birthday?” In my rather shell-shock
ed state, I was clearly latching on to the important details of the conversation.
An alarm beeped on Mom’s end. Her fingers clicked keys and swiped at things.
“I have to go, sweetie. Someone has noticed my little patch into Ginny’s system. It’s probably just Ginny, but I better go in case it’s someone else. We’ll arrange a visit as soon as this little fuss dies down.”
Little fuss? I didn’t get to object though. My parents’ faces disappeared before I could even tell them I loved them. I burrowed my face into the cover on my bed. I badly wished I could go to sleep and wake up from this nightmare back into my real life. Except, apparently, that life had never been real either.
7
WHERE I LEARN THAT MAYBE THIS ISN’T ALL ARTHUR’S FAULT
NOBODY BOTHERED ME FOR THE REST OF THE NIGHT. I’M SURE THAT Arthur and Ginny monitored me through whatever sensors they had hidden in the room, but no one, not even some LANCE operative, invaded. I was immeasurably grateful.
After a sleepless night of tossing and turning and the occasional light nap, I dragged myself out of bed. I couldn’t put it off forever, so I trudged down the hall in my pajamas to the breakfast room. To my surprise, the room appeared empty—at least empty of humans. Several of Arthur’s silent robot servants milled around. One of them brought me over a bowl of cereal as soon as I sat down.
“There it is.” Ginny’s head popped up from under the table holding a ball-point pen.
I screamed, spraying milk and cereal all over the place as my spoon went flying.
Ginny spun around, looking concerned, and four knights ran into the room.
“Sorry,” I choked out, hacking up the marshmallow that had gotten stuck in my throat when I screamed. “I thought I was alone. I must be kind of jumpy.”
“Understandable,” said Ginny. She sat at the table and fiddled with some papers next to her plate. I really needed to pay attention when I entered a room. I hadn’t even noticed the other place setting on the otherwise empty table.
One of the robots handed me another spoon, and I went back to shoveling cereal in my mouth. I wasn’t hungry, but eating gave me something to do.
With a sigh, Ginny stopped rearranging her papers. “I am so sorry about all of yesterday, Elaine.”
I stopped mid-chew, unsure what to say.
“We should have done a better job of protecting you from the Dreki attack. They never should have been able to breach the building, much less access this floor.”
I swallowed, but I still didn’t know what to say. Yesterday had sucked, and I probably would be in a Dreki jail cell now if it hadn’t been for Will, but I didn’t blame the Keeps. It wasn’t like they had known they would be hacked and attacked.
Ginny must have misread some look on my face. “Don’t worry.” She reached over and patted the sleeve of my pajamas. “We’ve taken every precaution. Arthur and I were up all night reprogramming and retooling the defenses. The next Dreki attack won’t be anywhere near as close.”
“The next one?” I sputtered out, my voice rising at least an octave and a half. I rubbed my hands across my face. Of course, there would be a next one. The Dreki had already tried twice to grab me. They wouldn’t give up now when they’d been so close.
“Don’t worry,” she said again with another gentle pat. “We’ll battle that dragon when it comes to us.”
Awesome.
“But I am so very sorry about the way you found out about …” Ginny paused, struggling for the right words. There weren’t any, so I broke in with the wrong ones.
“About how my parents have been lying my entire life? How my dad is my step-dad and my biological father is, well, Arthur?”
“That sums it up,” said Ginny with a smile. “I must tell you though that I genuinely had no idea you didn’t remember Arthur. From the familial way you two have sparred since the moment of your arrival, I assumed you were picking up where your relationship had left off. I didn’t realize that for you the first time you two had ever come face to face was when he slammed into the foyer’s floor.” She frowned for a moment and scribbled in a notebook. “I have got to find a better material for that floor before he ruins it again.”
Ginny looked back up at me. “I apologize. I sometimes get distracted by random thoughts, and I must write them down before I forget them.”
“Mom says that’s the calling card of a highly creative mind,” I said, the doubt creeping into my voice. Could I trust anything my mother ever said, even something as innocuous as that?
“Well, your mother would know. She has one of the most creative minds I’ve ever seen.”
“You really are friends with my mom?” Even though I now knew my mother had been leading a double life, I still had trouble picturing her as BFFs with someone as glamorous and brilliant and amazing as Ginny.
“We were roommates in college sophomore year and the only girls our year in the computer engineering program at FTSU. We’ve stayed in touch ever since. You’re a lot like her.”
“That’s what Dad always said. My dad, you know, I mean.” I stumbled on my words not sure how to avoid insulting either Arthur or Dad.
“Not Arthur,” said Ginny. She smiled at me. “You mean your dad, not the sperm donor. That’s what your mother used to call Arthur when he annoyed her.”
I snorted. That sounded like Mom.
Ginny’s smile faded. “But I’ve never agreed with your other parents’ insistence on cutting all contact between you and Arthur. If I could chat with you mother, I saw no reason why Arthur couldn’t stay in touch with you.”
“What happened? Why does everyone think I should remember Arthur? Even Mom acted shocked when she realized I had no idea she didn’t mean Dad when she referred to my father.”
Ginny waved her hand to summon one of the mid-air screens. She did something with her tablet, and the window she had opened there appeared on the screen. She pulled up a folder with the uninspiring name “Untitled-4.” Inside was a list of .jpg files with eight-digit numbers for names.
Ginny ran her finger down the list until she came to the one she was looking for. I realized with a small start that the file names were dates without the dashes and that she had just picked a picture of my fourth birthday.
The file opened showing a picture from my actual birthday, not the birthday party we’d had the week before. I remembered that party because it was bigger than any of the other parties I’ve ever had since. There had been pony rides for my friends and a bouncy castle.
This picture though, I didn’t remember this scene at all. The cake had four lit candles, and I was leaning down to blow them out. Arthur held me in his arms while my arms hugged his neck. Arthur. He held me, pure joy radiating from his face. Ginny and Mom stood in the background, so Dad must have been taking the picture. I didn’t look uncomfortable or like I was being held by a stranger. I didn’t have that tense expression kids get when they’re having to put up with hugs from distant relatives. My face was intent on the candles, not half worried about the man holding me. The scene was easy, a picture of laughter and a great deal of love.
I pulled the screen toward me so I could see the small details of the image even better. “Why don’t I remember this?” I turned to Ginny. “How can I not remember any of this?”
Ginny looked sad and embarrassed, and I realized with horror that I had forgotten her, too. She was standing in the picture, so she and Arthur must have been together even back then. I knew if my parents had forgotten me, I’d be mortified. It was one thing to not recognize a stranger, but this was my father and stepmother, and I appeared to have known them well enough to be comfortable around them. And I was four years old in the picture, old enough to remember things. It’s not like they disappeared when I was four months old.
“Memory is a tricky thing,” said Arthur. He passed Ginny and dropped an absent-minded kiss on the top of her head before sitting down on the other side of me. “No one knows how or why some things fade away. Although how you forgot
my astounding genius?” Arthur pointed at his head. “That’s beyond me.” He grinned, but even I realized Arthur wasn’t as okay as he pretended.
Silence filled the room, and I looked down at my forgotten cereal, unable to look anyone in the eye. I knew it wasn’t my fault I’d lost Arthur and Ginny from my life, but I felt as guilty as if I’d chosen to exile them forever.
In his most chipper tone, Arthur broke the silence. “But that’s neither here nor there.” He slid a box in front of me. “I’ve come bearing gifts.” When I didn’t move, he prodded the box, so it wiggled a tiny bit.
I sighed and opened the box. Inside a next generation Keep smart phone sat on a little square of velvet. It was thinner than the last generation phone I’d had and lost when the Dreki attacked my school. My family had always exclusively used Keep Consolidated computers, tablets, and phones instead of some generic PC, and now I had a good idea why.
I turned the phone on, and my old cover picture popped up. It was my parents on their fifteenth wedding anniversary. They looked so happy and in love, and now I wasn’t even sure they were married.
“What is this?” I asked Arthur.
Arthur leaned over to glance at my screen. “Tori and Raul, I’m assuming.”
I shook my head. “Not the picture.” I was only distracted for a second by Arthur using what had to be my parents’ real names. It only beat home how little I knew. I would have said the picture on my phone was of Elsbet and Peter. “I mean the phone. What’s this for? I thought you wanted me to stay off the Internet.”
Arthur’s eyes narrowed like he was annoyed although I got the impression he wasn’t annoyed with me. “This is to avoid repeating past mistakes.” He tapped the phone twice, and it unlocked to the home screen. He tapped on another icon that looked like the normal phone icon except it was red with a black handset instead of blue and white.
