Skin Deep

by Brandon Sanderson

  “Have you noticed the beauty of the landscaping here?” Tobias said. “Those are tuberous begonia, challenging flowers to raise, particularly in this region. They require lots of light, but it can’t be direct, and are very sensitive to frost. Ah, I remember a story about them . . .”

  He talked on. The other aspects fell silent as we thought, collectively. I would not proceed, feeling I’d missed something. Something that one of us should have spotted. What was it?

  “Zen,” J.C. interrupted suddenly. “Her ambush.”

  “People are far less secure,” I whispered, opening my eyes, “than their security measures.” I reached up to my shoulder, where Zen had grabbed me in the alleyway to pull me away from the building, then I moved up to touch under my shirt collar.

  My fingers brushed metal.

  “Oh, holy hell!” J.C. said.

  Zen had bugged me. That was what the attack in the alleyway had been about. It hadn’t been nearly as reckless as she’d made it seem. My mind raced as J.C. explained to the other aspects what had happened. What had I said out loud? What did Zen know?

  She’d heard that I intended to break into Exeltec. But what about the instructions I’d sent Yol? Did she know about those?

  Sweating, I traced back through my memory. No. I’d only written that information down in the email. But she did know what I’d said to Mrs. Maheras. She knew that I was at a dead end.

  “I’m an idiot,” J.C. said. “We thought to have you scrub down after the restaurant, but not after actual physical contact with the assassin?”

  “She hid her intentions well,” Audrey replied. “Masked it as a frantic attempt to get the flash drive.”

  “At least now we probably don’t have to worry about her coming to hurt Mrs. Maheras.”

  Probably. I stared at my phone. How had we missed this?

  “Calm, Stephen,” Tobias said, resting a hand on my shoulder. “Everyone makes mistakes, even you. We can use this one—the assassin is listening to us, but she doesn’t know you’ve figured that out. We can manipulate her.”

  I nodded, taking a deep breath. Zen knew about the plan to infiltrate Exeltec, which meant I couldn’t go through with that. I needed something new, something better.

  That meant relying on the things I’d set in motion with Yol. Making Exeltec’s owners frantic, then playing upon that. Why did missions always go this way, lately? I looked up at my aspects, then made the decision, punching a number on my phone.

  Someone picked up. “Oh, honey,” a sultry voice said on the other end of the line, “I was hoping you’d call me today.”

  “Bianca,” I said.

  Tobias groaned. “Not her.”

  I ignored him. “I need information,” I said to the woman on the line.

  “Sure thing, sugar,” she said. How did she purr like that? I was half convinced she used some kind of sound effect machine. “What about? Your . . . date the other night? I can tell you the names of the people who set you up.”

  “It’s not about that,” I said. “There’s something going on with a company called I3 and their rival, Exeltec. I think they might have released a deadly virus into the wild. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Mmm . . . I can look,” Bianca said. “Might take some time.”

  “Anything you can get me on Exeltec would be heartily appreciated,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “And honey, next time you need a date, why not give me a call? I’m so offended that I wasn’t even considered!”

  “Like you’d show,” I said. Three years, and I’d never seen Bianca face-to-face.

  “I’d at least contemplate it,” she said. “Now, you’ve got to give me something for the newspapers. About your date?”

  “Get me information on Exeltec,” I said, “and we’ll trade.” I hung up, looking over my shoulder as Dion stepped up to me on the sidewalk, looking confused.

  “What are you hoping to find out?” the kid asked.

  “Nothing,” I replied, fully aware that Zen was listening to all this. “Bianca is a terrible informant. I’ve never gotten a drop of useful information out of her, and after I call her, most of what I say ends up on the internet within minutes.”

  “But—”

  I dialed another informant and initiated a similar, but more circumspect, line of inquiry. Then a third. Within a few minutes I’d ensured that very, very soon everyone who cared about Exeltec would be reading about how they’d been involved in a major public safety breach. With I3 being investigated and me being involved, the kernel of truth to the rumors I’d started would set off a media frenzy.

  “You’re pushing them up against the wall, Steve,” Ivy said as Wilson finally pulled up. “Zen’s employers were desperate before; they’ll be rabid once this hits.”

  “Hoping to make them ignore you and focus on damage control with the media?” J.C. asked. “Not smart. Whipping the tiger won’t distract it; the thing will just get angrier.”

  I couldn’t explain, not with Zen listening. Instead, I got out my note pad and scribbled a few instructions to Wilson, assuming the aspects would see and catch on.

  Surprisingly, Audrey seemed to get it first. She grinned. “Oooh . . .”

  “Dangerous,” Ivy said, folding her arms. “Very dangerous.”

  Wilson rolled down the passenger window. “Master Leeds?”

  I finished writing and leaned in through the window, handing him the message. “Some instructions,” I said. “I need you to stay here, Wilson, and watch Mrs. Maheras. I’m worried the assassin might try to get to her. In fact, you should probably get her to the nearest police station.”

  “But who will drive you?”

  “I can drive,” I said.

  Wilson looked skeptical.

  “Funny,” Audrey remarked, “how a man can trust you to save the world, but not to feed or drive yourself.”

  I smiled reassuringly at Wilson as he looked down at the instructions in his hand, then back at me with a worried expression.

  “Please,” I said to him.

  Wilson sighed and nodded, climbing out of the car.

  “You coming?” I said to Dion as I opened the side door of the SUV for my aspects and let them pile in.

  “You said that people could be in danger,” Dion said.

  “They are,” I replied, closing the door behind Audrey. “What your brother let out could cost the lives of millions.”

  “He said it wasn’t dangerous,” Dion said stubbornly.

  Damn. The kid was holding out on me. Did he have the key? Unfortunately, I didn’t want him to talk and let Zen hear. Well, either way, I needed him with me. I might need an extra pair of nonimaginary hands, now that I’d sent Wilson away.

  I settled into the driver’s seat, and Dion climbed into the front passenger seat. “Panos didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “And what did he do?” I asked, resigned. If I didn’t prod, it would look suspicious to Zen.

  “Something,” Dion said.

  “How pleasantly descriptive.”

  “He wouldn’t tell me. I don’t think he even actually finished it. But it wasn’t dangerous.”

  “I . . .” I trailed off, looking back as J.C.’s mobile phone went off. The ring tone was “America the Beautiful.” I shook my head, starting the car and pulling away—leaving an overwhelmed-looking Wilson on the curb—as J.C. answered his phone.

  “Yo, Achmed,” he said. “Yeah, I’ve got him here. Video? I can do that. Hey, you gonna fix that Chinese stuff for us again?”

  “It was Indian food,” Kalyani said, now on speaker. “Why would you assume it’s Chinese?”

  “Had rice, didn’t it?” J.C. said, kneeling beside the armrest between driver’s seat and passenger, then holding the phone out for me.

  “Coconut rice, and curry, and . . . Never mind. Mister Steve?”

  “Yeah?” I said, glancing at the phone. Kalyani waved happily, wearing a simple T-shirt and jeans. Her bindi was black today and shaped li
ke a little arrow between her eyebrows, rather than being the traditional red dot. I’d have to ask her about the significance.

  “We’ve been talking,” Kalyani said. “And Arnaud wants to tell you something.” She turned the phone to the punctilious little Frenchman. He leaned forward, blinking at the screen. I kept my time divided between him and the road.

  “Monsieur,” Arnaud said, “I have spoken with Clive and Mi Won. The three of us, you see, had some upper-level chemistry and biology courses as part of our schooling. We cannot dig too deeply, because . . . Well, you know.”

  “I do.” Ignacio. His death had ripped away most of my knowledge of chemistry.

  “Regardless,” Arnaud said, “we have been poring over the information given to us. Mi Won is insistent, and we have come to agree with her. It is our admittedly amateur opinion that I3 and the man named Yol are lying to you.”

  “About what specifically?”

  “About giving up on a viral delivery method into the body,” Arnaud said. “Monsieur, Panos had too many resources—was progressing too well—on his supposedly ‘secret’ project to have been cut off. They were investigating that line, no matter what they told you. In addition, we are not convinced that this cancer threat is as viable as it first seemed. Oh, that is theoretically where this research could lead, but from what we’ve gathered from the notes, I3 had not reached such a point yet.”

  “So they didn’t want to tell me what the real crisis was,” I said. “The rogue bacteria or virus that Panos spliced, whatever it is.”

  “That is for you to consider,” Arnaud said. “We are scientists. All we are saying is that there are layers here beyond what we are being told.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I suspected, but this confirmation is helpful. Is that everything?”

  “One more item,” Kalyani said, taking back the phone and turning it around toward her smiling face. “I wanted to introduce to you my husband, Rahul.” An Indian man with a round, mustached face stepped into view beside her, then waved at me.

  I felt a chill.

  “I told you that he is a good photographer,” Kalyani said, “but you do not need to use him that way. He is a very clever man. He can do all sorts of things! He knows computers well.”

  “I can see him,” I said. “Why can I see him?”

  “He’s joined us!” Kalyani said, excited. “Isn’t it wonderful!”

  “Very pleased to meet you, Mister Stephen,” Rahul said with a melodic Indian accent. “I will be very helpful, I can promise you.”

  “I . . .” I swallowed. “How . . . did you . . .”

  “This is bad,” Ivy said from the back seat. “Have you ever manifested an aspect unintentionally?”

  “Not since the early days,” I whispered. “And never without researching a new topic first.”

  “Man,” Audrey said. “Kalyani gets a husband and I can’t even have a gerbil? Totally unfair.”

  I pulled over immediately, not caring about the car that honked beside me as I swerved. As we lurched to a stop I yanked the phone from J.C.’s hand and stared at the new aspect. This was the first time any family member of one of my delusions had appeared to me. It seemed a very dangerous precedent. Another sign that I was losing control.

  I hung up, making their smiling faces wink out, then tossed the phone over my shoulder to J.C. Sweating, I pulled the car forward, earning a honk from another car. I took the first off-ramp I saw, veering down into the city.

  “You okay?” Dion asked.

  “Fine,” I snapped.

  I needed a place to go, a place to think. A place that would look natural, but where I could stall and wait for my plan to proceed without Zen getting suspicious. I pulled into a Denny’s. “Just need some food,” I lied. This would work, right? Even a man trying to save the world had to eat.

  Dion glanced at me. “You sure you’re—”

  “Yes. I just need an omelet.”

  17

  I held the restaurant door for my aspects, then walked in after them. The place smelled of coffee, and was occupied by the late-morning breakfast crowd, which was perfect. Zen was less likely to try something with so many witnesses. It took some work to get the waitress to give us a table for six; I had to lie and say we were expecting more people. Eventually, we settled down, Dion opposite me and two aspects on either side.

  I held up a menu, fingers sticking to syrup on one side, but didn’t read. Instead, I tried to calm my breathing. Sandra hadn’t prepared me for this. The family members of aspects appearing suddenly, without research being done?

  “You’re crazy,” a voice whispered across from me. “Like . . . actually crazy.”

  I lowered my menu which—I only now realized—I’d been holding upside down. The kid hadn’t touched his.

  “No I’m not,” I said. “I’ll give you, I might be a touch insane. But I’m not crazy.”

  “They’re the same thing.”

  “From your perspective, perhaps,” I said. “I see it differently—but even if we admit that the word applies to me, it applies to you too. The longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve realized everyone is neurotic in their own individual way. I have control of my psychoses. How about you?”

  Beside me, Ivy sniffed at my use of the word “control.”

  Dion chewed on this, leaning back in his chair. “What do they say my brother did?”

  “He claims to have released something. A virus or bacteria of some sort.”

  “He wouldn’t have done that,” Dion said immediately. “He wanted to help people. It was the others that were dangerous. They wanted to make weapons.”

  “He told you this?”

  “Well, no,” Dion admitted. “But, I mean, why else would they try to force him to give up his projects? Why would they watch him so closely? You should be investigating them, not my brother. Their secrets are the dangerous ones.”

  “Typical pseudo-intellectual teen liberal prattle,” J.C. said from my right, looking over his menu. “I’ll have the steak and eggs. Rare and runny.”

  I nodded absently as the others spoke up. At the very least, the server wouldn’t have reason to complain about us taking up so many seats—seeing as how I’d be ordering five meals. Part of me wished I could have them give the meals to others after I was done imagining my aspects cleaning their plates.

  I turned my attention to the menu, and found I wasn’t that hungry. I ordered an omelet anyway, talking to the waitress as the kid dug in his pocket, obviously determined not to let me pay for him. He came out with a few wadded-up bills and ordered a breakfast burrito.

  I kept waiting for a beep from my phone, telling me that Wilson had followed my instructions. Nothing came, and I felt myself growing increasingly anxious; I wiped the sweat from my temples with my napkin. My aspects tried to relax me, Tobias chatting about the origin of the pancake as a food, Ivy engaging him and acting very interested.

  “What’s that?” I asked, nodding at Dion, who was staring at a little slip of paper he’d found among the wadded-up bills.

  He blushed immediately, moving to tuck it away.

  I snatched his hand, moving with reflexes I didn’t know I had. Beside me, J.C. nodded appreciatively.

  “It’s nothing,” Dion snapped, opening his hand. “Fine. Take it. Idiot.”

  I suddenly felt foolish. Panos’s data key wouldn’t be a slip of paper; it would have to be on a flash drive or some other electronic storage medium. I pulled my hand back, reading the piece of paper. 1 Esd 4:41, it read.

  “Mom slips them into my pockets when she’s folding laundry,” Dion explained. “Reminders to give up my heathen ways.”

  I showed it to the others, frowning. “I don’t recognize that scripture.”

  “First Esdras,” Ivy said. “From the Orthodox Bible—it’s a book of Apocrypha that most other sects don’t use. I don’t know that particular verse offhand.”

  I looked it up on my phone. “Great is truth,” I read, “and strongest of all.”


  Dion shrugged. “I suppose I can agree with that. Even if Mom won’t accept what the truth really is . . .”

  I tapped my finger on the table. I felt as if I was close to something. An answer? Or maybe just the right questions to be asking? “Your brother had a data key,” I said, “which would unlock the information stored in his body. Would he have given it to your mother, do you think?”

  Ivy watched Dion carefully to see if he reacted to mention of the key. He didn’t have any reaction I could see, and Ivy shook her head. If he was surprised we knew about the key, he was hiding it very well.

  “A data key?” Dion asked. “Like what?”

  “A thumb drive or something similar.”

  “I doubt he’d give anything like that to Mom,” Dion said as our food arrived. “She hates technology and everything to do with it, particularly if she thinks it came from I3. If he’d handed her something like that, she’d have just destroyed it.”

  “She gave me quite the cold reception.”

  “Well, what did you expect? You’re employed by the company that turned her son away from God.” Dion shook his head. “Mom’s a good person—solid, salt-of-the-earth, Old World stock. But she doesn’t trust technology. To her, work is something you do with your hands. Not this idle staring at computer screens.” He looked away. “I think Panos did what he did to prove something to her, you know?”

  “Turning people into mass storage devices?” I asked.

  Dion blushed. “That’s just the setup, the work he had to do in order to do the work he wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  “I . . .”

  “Yeah,” Ivy said. “He knows something here. Man, this kid is not good at lying. Take a dominant position, Steve. Push him.”

  “Might as well tell me,” I said. “Someone needs to know, Dion. You don’t know that you can trust me, but you have to tell someone. What was your brother trying to do?”

  “Disease,” Dion said, looking at his burrito. “He wanted to cure it.”

  “Which one?”

  “All of it.”

  “Lofty goal.”

  “Yeah, Panos admitted as much to me. The actual curing wasn’t his job; he saw the delivery method as his part.”