Duplicity (19 page)

“I'm going to try 69672,” I say.

The blocks flash green and disappear.

Red light blazes through the room.

“UNAUTHORIZED TRANSACTION,”
booms JENA overhead. The shadow room distorts like a bad TV picture, shifting between lines of red numbers and theater-room silhouettes.

“Too late, JENA,” Seb cackles.

Which is the exact moment I realize we didn't plan for one of us to swap without the other.

A siren blares and a knife-sharp jolt of electricity racks my body, much worse than The Trade, twisting and bending me in ways I wasn't meant to move. The code in the walls blurs. Speeds by like headlights on the night freeway. Thins out and explodes into nothingness, then hurls me on my back into a blinding room and I sit up and retch. My skin's hot enough to sweat, but it's the feel of rough carpet under my hands, the taste of battery-sour vomit in my mouth, that quickens my pulse. My
real
pulse, coursing through my temples, pushing blood down my fresh tattoo.

My stomach (my
real
stomach) doesn't like it when I sit up, but I ignore it and wipe my bloody arm on my polo.

I'm in my room.
In
it. I pull myself up using the frame of my bed, and the metal's cold under my palm. The game room can replicate sensation, but it's nothing to this—to touching real things and knowing they're real, to looking at my room and knowing JENA can't snatch me out of it. I'm … free? But this feels like the classroom “dream” I had when I leaked back, which means I could still wake to “session start” at any time.

I spin to the mirror.

“Seb?”

My reflection gazes back, wide-eyed.

“Seb, if you're there, I can't see you.”

No change. I move for the dresser and fight back a wave of dizziness. Feels like JENA's shutting me down, but I tell myself I'm free, and I fight it and slump against the heavy wood. I remove each drawer slowly, every one feeling like it's three hundred pounds, and finally, finally push the dresser away from the door. I don't bother putting the drawers back. I stumble to the bed and fall into it, and for the first time in weeks …

I sleep.

 

17. COLLATERAL DAMAGE

“YOU GETTING UP,
son? It's noon.”

I open my eyes to the dark. I can't call up my coding windows. Something's wrapped tight around me, and I freak and a flurry of navy-black sheets assaults me before I wrestle out of them, almost fall off the side of the bed, and jerk my head against the headboard. Dad blinks at me from the doorway, squinting behind his glasses.

“You don't have school today, if that's what you're thinking,” he says. “It's Saturday.” He points at my chest. “Is that blood?”

I rub my head and look down at my shirt, at the wine-dark stains crusted into the fabric and smeared on my arm. I feel like I've been dropped down an elevator shaft, but I
feel
, and suddenly I'm laughing.

“I think I'm sick,” I manage to say, and gag back my next laugh to keep down the bile.

“I can see that.” Dad looks at the carpet at the end of my bed. “I'll clean this up, but keep the trash can close. And what did … have you run out of cover-up for your tattoos? Are they getting infected? Because we'll pay for you to remove them, if that's what you want.”

“No, Dad. But thank you for talking to me today.”

He hesitates, then retreats into the hall. I swallow another surge of nausea and grab my phone off my desk. I want to text Emma, but I think of Seb and my promise, and I think of Jax joking about Duplicity. I pull up my e-mail. My encrypted account, that I'm really hoping Obran hasn't trashed.

He hasn't. There are three unread messages from Jax, the first two asking if I've got Socials for him yet, the third threatening our partnership will be over if I don't get in contact soon. Damn. I'll have to call him. I switch over to messaging as Dad returns with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of Resolve, and send a text to Emma.
CAN YOU COME OVER?

“Dad, are you working today?”

Stupid question, I know, but that's hardly the point. I need proof this is real, that weeks more haven't passed and everything I saw in the mirror actually happened.

“Yes,” Dad says. “I'd planned to work through lunch so we could go out tonight, but if you're not well enough—”

“I'm feeling better. I can go. It's just a stomach bug.”

Dad gives me a funny, and oddly genuine, smile. “Okay, son. Then we'll count on it.”

Emma's reply chirps on-screen:
Shopping w/Sam. I can come after?

The bed sinks next to me. Takes me a minute to figure out Dad isn't leaning across it to clean something, he's actually sitting. Sitting and looking at me. I'm not really sure what to do so I just watch him like he might drop those vomit-soaked paper towels in my lap.

“I know it's been a rough few years, Brandon,” he says. “I know we've said things'll change and they haven't. I'm sorry about that. Sometimes despite your best intentions, life takes you its own way.” He looks around my room that's not quite my room anymore. “Just want you to know I appreciate what you've been doing to help us out lately. You're a good kid, you know, when you put your head to it.”

“Okay, Dad,” I say, because it's getting weird and I don't want to look at those towels anymore.

“Okay.”

He smiles, nods, grabs his bottle of Resolve and thankfully leaves the room. I'm not sure what just happened, but I'm still thinking about it when I send another text to Emma:

Obran's gone.

Her reply comes within ten seconds.
Be there in 45.

The sun off the mirror catches my eye. I get up and turn it to the wall. If Obran opens a connection, he won't be able to see me. Then I wonder if he doesn't need to see me to make the swap. I put the mirror in the closet and close it.

I pace my room, catching whiffs of puke from my shirt, until I can't stand it anymore and I rummage under the bed for a wrinkled T-shirt and some jeans. I bundle everything together and choose my parent's bathroom—where the shower's out of view of the mirror—to clean myself up and scrub the blood from my tattoo. The water is heaven, but I don't have time to enjoy it. I'm out in five minutes and back in my room, thinking about Seb.

I power my laptop on and off at least five times, thinking I can't get to him from here, and then maybe I can, but then JENA might find me … would she delete him? Has she already? I don't like owing him like this, and a strong part of me wants to forget him, to pretend none of that ever happened and move on like I always have. Alone.

That's the smarter choice.

But I think of Mom, talking about me like I'm a lost cause, and Emma defending me. I want to be worth defending.

I have to get him out.

It's risky calling Jax from my cell phone—that's how you get caught by the Feds—but I don't have time to e-mail back and forth. If JENA swaps me again, I need someone on the outside to know what's going on. Someone who has the resources to take the Project down if he had the right information.

Jax answers on the fourth ring. “Pizza Hut. Takeout or delivery?”

“Jax. It's Fisher.” The hacker name he knows me by. I know, it sounded cooler when I made it up.

“You've been quiet, Fish.”

“I know. Ran into some trouble.”

Silence.

“Not the Feds,” I say. “The Project.”

He bursts out laughing. I've never heard Jax laugh, and I'm not sure I ever want to again.

“Are you stoned right now, kid? You drunk-dialing me?”

“It's real, Jax. Look up Vivien Meng—”

“Hey, call me when you're sober.”

Click.

I really saw that going better.

I'm about to call him back when my phone chirps.
I'm here,
come outside
.… Screw Jax, I'll have to try him later. I need time to think how I'm going to convince him it's real anyway. I drop the phone in my pocket and take the stairs two at a time.

“What time are we going to dinner?” I call as I pass the glass doors of Dad's office. I wait the usual twenty seconds, before Dad swivels his chair and drops the papers he was holding.

“Oh, going back to yourself, I see,” he says, sighing at my Alice in Chains shirt. He bends to retrieve his work. “Don't forget the list Mom left on the counter. We're leaving here at six, but be back by five, please.”

“Sure.” List? I detour through the kitchen, grab my jacket off the coatrack, and pluck a white notecard off the counter. Toilet paper, sponges, air filter refills, and at least twenty other things I make a habit of avoiding. I make a face and stuff it in my pocket.

“Bye, Dad,” I say, stepping out the front door.

I guess I was expecting things to have changed more than they did, but he doesn't answer.

Whatever.

Emma waits against her gold Camry in the driveway, typing something on her cell screen. And I wonder, not for the first time, how I ever convinced her to let me within ten feet of her. It's not just the delicious little outfit she has on—knee-high boots over tight jeans, V-neck blouse straining against a green and white sweater vest—that reminds me how far I've overreached, but the smile that lights her face when she sees me, like I've done anything that could make her happy. She pockets her phone and scans my outfit, lingering on my scorpions tat.

“Like what you see?” I ask.

“Yes.” Her grin vanishes. “I mean, no. I mean, I don't know!” She searches my face, anxious. “Brandon, I'm so sorry, when I said things were different between us, I didn't mean I wanted you to change again. I just, I felt like maybe you didn't like me anymore, and I want you to be whoever
you
want to be, not who you think I—”

I pull her against me and just hold her, and that's all I want, to know she's there. I press my face against her hair and breathe in peppermint. Her sweater is impossibly soft under my fingers. I hold her, and she's warm and her heart beats against mine and I almost believe things could be okay.

Emma curls against me and slides her hands up my arms.

“I've missed this,” she whispers, and we stand there. I behave myself and we just stand there, and the last person in the world I want to be thinking about right now is Seb—and no, I'm not thinking about him like
that
—but I can't, I can't waste any more time and wonder what—

“Emma, I have a lot to tell you. We can't talk here. Walk with me?”

“Okay.”

I take her hand and head south on the sidewalk toward the park. And find I have absolutely no clue how to say what I need to without sounding like a lunatic, which I'm pretty sure she already considers me. She'll hear it, sure, but I don't know if she'll listen.

“Um.” Yeah, off to a great start. “What is today?”

“Saturday?”

“No, like, the date.”

“It's the nineteenth.”

“Of what?”

She cocks her head at me. “November.”

“November?” I groan. “I've been gone two
months?
”

“You've been here, so I'm not sure what your definition of ‘gone' is.”

“I mean … I don't … did you go to homecoming with Jason?”

She stops and makes me turn to her.

“Amazing,” she says, studying my eyes like she expects me to pop out a “just kidding” at anytime. “You really don't remember?”

“No. I told you, Obran traded with me.”

“You went with me, Sam and her date, and Jenna Cross and her boyfriend. You were a perfect gentleman. You wore a black suit with a green shirt that matched your eyes.”

“A suit?” I feel my lip curl.

“Yeah, and Ginger cussed you out and threw a huge fit and got suspended. And you didn't say anything, just watched her, and threw the school into an uproar for a week.”

“Huh.”

“Did you say Obran's gone again? I thought he left months ago.”

My hand tightens on hers. “No, he … I don't know yet. They might find a way to swap me out again.”

“Swap you out? They who?”

Nothing I say from here is going to sound good. Emma knows nothing about my side job, save that I do programming stuff for some small-time marketing group. I think of her defending me to Mom, and wonder how much Mom knows about it, and my jaw tenses. But I have to tell her. If JENA takes me again, someone has to know.

“Have you ever heard of Project Duplicity?” I ask.

Long shot. As expected, Emma's answer is, “No. Actually, maybe. Is it a band?”

I snicker, trying to choke off the nerves in my voice. I walk a little faster and push my hand through my hair.

“No. I didn't really expect you to know. It's kind of a running joke on the Internet. Among programmers, that is. When a hacker brags about making a risky haul or says something stupid, people joke that Project Duplicity's going to snatch him out of his chair. The Project's supposed to be this all-seeing machine that knows what you're doing and traps you in a digital prison when it catches you. Poof, you disappear from the world, just like that.”

“Like a digital alien abduction?”

I make a face at her. “I guess.”

“And I needed to know this bit of nerd trivia because…?”

“Nerd?” I grunt. “You need to know because … because they caught me.”

She doesn't even miss a step. “You're a hacker?”

She doesn't understand, or she doesn't believe me. I doubt she knows exactly what I'm capable of. Probably thinks when I say “hacker,” that means I've stolen a few e-mail addresses and sent viruses to unsuspecting grandmas. That much becomes clear when she adds, “But you didn't disappear, you're here.”