9.
Jamal
I read the article Arche sent me, twice, before we got through explaining everything to the Cleveland cops. There was just no way to cause the amount of property damage we had—car flung through warehouse wall into street, lightning being hurled all over the place, even to an abandoned building—without someone getting the law involved. Besides, they were the ones who were paying us to get this Hercules under control, though admittedly we hadn’t known she was a Hercules going in. It would have been hard to tell that just from the security footage we’d seen. She’d never hulked out, after all. All we’d known was that we were dealing with a hoodied thief.
Well, now we’d caught her, and in the flurry of activity that accompanied her being taken into custody, I managed to pick through Arche’s reading material. I was sitting in the rental car thinking about it real hard when Augustus got back and slammed the door, pronouncing, “Boom. Done.” And then he started the car.
“I think you mean, ‘Boom. My big brother just got it done, and I nearly got him killed,’” I said.
“You ain’t been bigger than me since puberty, son.”
“And you haven’t been smarter than me, ever.”
“Somehow I’ve avoided murdering anyone, though,” Augustus said, a little gleam of pissed-off triumph in his eyes as he went low. “So there’s that.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, going even lower, “that’s because you haven’t lost Taneshia. If someone went after her like what happened to my girlfriend—I bet you’d go full Sienna on them.”
His eyes flared, and he started to say something, but then the fire died away in his big pupils like someone snuffed it down to coals. His desire to say whatever shitty thing he’d been about to faded, and he looked at the steering wheel, head a little bowed. “How do you suppose she’s doing?” he asked instead of hitting me with what I was sure was bound to be a hell of a snap.
“No idea,” I said, looking straight ahead at the field of cop cars, lights flashing red and blue all in front of me. “I don’t track her because I’m afraid someone from the government might hit on my searches.”
“Pffft, ain’t nobody from the government got the skills to do what you do,” he said, shifting the car into gear by virtue of a little knob that reminded me of the circular ones on our mother’s oven. It clicked into reverse, and he started to back us down the street, away from the still-ongoing operation and cleanup in front of us. They were parading some seriously strung-out people into paddy wagons.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” I said, picking up my phone and brandishing it, the screen lit so that he could see the article I’d been reading.
He stopped the car and peered at it. “What the …?”
“And that’s just the headline,” I said as he tilted his head to look at me.
“I read more than the headline, fool,” he said.
“Not that fast, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. You have no idea how fast I can read.”
I rolled my eyes and pulled the phone back. “Oh, yeah? How far’d you get?”
“Far enough to know there’s a family of metas with your power working for the government,” Augustus said, now clicking the car into drive and executing the second part of his intended three-point turn. “That the article you’re showing me is one of those new puff pieces about how ‘out’ metas are contributing to society in positive ways.” His eyes flashed as he finished the turn. “Like we didn’t know that. Gravity up in New York, the whole group of us—don’t people have some examples to look to by now?”
I shrugged. “I don’t mind. Especially given how much of the press goes to Sienna, and a hundred percent of it is negative.”
“You got a point,” Augustus said grudgingly, backing the car up again so that now we were facing the opposite direction, all set to leave the scene of our … uh … crime, sorta. “Still, this kinda shit drives me nuts.”
“You don’t like the headline?” I deadpanned.
“I told you I read more than the headline—”
“You didn’t read much beyond it—”
“I know what it’s going to say without reading more, okay?” Augustus snapped, then raised his voice to an annoying, childlike octave. “It’s another touching, aspirational story of a little meta who could. How this perfect little family with big dreams overcame all the obstacles thrown in their path by a hateful world and achieved everything they’ve set out to do … by becoming the head of IT for a shit-ton of congresspeople. Basically by becoming servants to the powerful.” He bobbed his head as he put the car in drive and started us away from all the flashing lights. “Big whoop de frigging do. I’m more impressed with Robb Foreman becoming an actual senator as a metahuman.”
I frowned. “He’s not in the Senate anymore, number one, and number two, he didn’t run as a meta. I don’t even think he’s technically ‘out’ at this point, and he’s retired.”
“Yeah, it probably wouldn’t go too well to tell everybody that the last presidential election was actually two metahumans running against each other,” Augustus breezed, getting a little chuckle out of that thought. “I don’t care how many aspirational articles get written, most humans ain’t ready for that one.”
“We don’t know even know if that’s the first time it happened,” I said, looking back at my phone’s screen. “I mean—”
“Yeah, I could imagine Abraham Lincoln as a—I don’t know, a laser-eyed destroyer with fire powers. He drops down in the middle of the Battle of Gettysburg and calls out, ‘I must destroy you!’ and then nukes off—”
“‘I must destroy’ you sounds like something a Rocky villain would say—”
“That’s ‘I must break you,’ fool. How are you older than me, lacking all this important wisdom?”
“Not sure Rocky IV counts as ‘important’ anything, let alone wisdom—”
“There you go again, showing yourself to be a ‘damnfool,’ as momma would say—”
“You’re missing the point,” I said, holding up the phone again. “This article—these people,” and I flashed down to the picture, “saccharine or not, this got flagged and sent to me by ArcheGrey—”
“Ooh, your girlfriend texted you?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Is this how you two interact? Because most couples text each other sexy pictures, not boring-ass puff pieces.”
“Yeah, well, being something of IT experts, I guess we know better than to send nudes into the cloud. Will you pay attention here for a sec? This is important.”
He glanced at my phone. “How is an article about people who work tech-weeny jobs for Congress in any way important to us?” I reached over and grabbed his phone out of his jacket pocket, to which he replied with a scalding, “Hey!”
I interfaced with the phone, running my fingers over the charging port, and accessed the programs within. Sure enough, there it was. “You got RAT’ted,” I said as I switched it off.
“Pfft, only one of us in this car is scrawny enough to look like a rat, and it ain’t me—”
“RAT,” I said again. “Remote Access Trojan.”
Augustus frowned. “I usually rely on Durex.”
I slapped myself in the forehead. “A Trojan is a program someone puts on your electronic device to grant them access, like the Trojan horse into the gates of Troy. In this case, someone’s been surveilling you through your GPS and your camera and microphone.”
Augustus’s eyes got wide. “Someone’s been watching me?” He paused, blinking. “And now that I think about it, Trojan is a terrible name for that product. It’s kinda like they’re saying, ‘Hey, we let the bad guys in,’ which you do not want—”
“Get your head in the game,” I said, trying to dig into the guts of the program. It was pretty simple, but lacked any of the signature that suggested Arche was responsible—even though it was entirely possible she was using my lunkhead brother’s phone to unknowingly surveil me. It could have been anyone, though—Cassidy Ellis was right at the top of that list since I knew she’d done something similar to various electronics in our office months ago, though this also lacked any hint of the programming triggers she’d suggested she’d placed in said program to flag her name. It could have been done on the server side, but—whatever.
“You weren’t serious about the cloud being vulnerable to hacking for like … pictures, were you?” Augustus asked, his voice a little off.
“Yeah, I was serious,” I said, still scanning my way through the Trojan on his phone and barely paying attention to his inquiry to give it any actual thought. “Don’t you remember when all those celebrities got hacked not that long ago?”
“Shit,” Augustus said quietly. “Taneshia’s going to kill me.”
That made its way through the semi-permeable barrier of concentration I was putting up as I worked. “What?” I asked, then shook my head. “Oh. You idiot. Delete that as soon as possible.”
“You aren’t looking, are you?” He nodded at his phone in my hand.
“I don’t want to look,” I said, “but I’ve been seeing your naked ass since you were a baby, and one of the happiest facts of my being an adult is I don’t have to see it anymore. So no, I’m not looking at your picture collection. No chance in hell.”
“Hey, man, it ain’t me I’m worried about you seeing naked in there.”
I left that one aside, too. “Ugh,” I said. “Taneshia’s like a sister to us.”
“Except she’s not,” Augustus said, “which is why I’m dating her and probably going to marry that girl.”
“Smart move,” I muttered under my breath as I traced the feed—where the Trojan was sending its data. It was, of course, an IP address that led to—where else? Of course. “Hmm.”
“What?” Augustus asked. Now that his ass—or photos thereof—was on the line, he was all ears.
“The Trojan in your phone is feeding its data to a server in Revelen,” I said. “Good firewall. I can’t just push past it.”
“Revelen?” Augustus asked. “Yo, is this your girlfriend’s doing?”
“Not necessarily,” I said, still picking at the firewall. No, it wasn’t going to be an easy task. Probably a little too Herculean for me, in fact. “Revelen’s a hotbed of IT meta activity and spying. Hell, this could be a VPN masking—”
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Augustus said. “Bottom line it for me.”
“Bottom line? I don’t know who did it.”
“What the hell is the point of you, then?” he asked, full-on crabby.
“Keeping your ass from getting crushed by a car you deserved to catch in the face, mostly.”
“Why did you grab my phone?” Augustus asked, looking more than a little beside himself. “How did you know there was one of those LifeStyles—”
“Trojans.”
“Right. How did you know one was on there?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “But I was about to tell you why Arche sent me that article, and I didn’t want anyone else to overhear it.” I regarded his phone carefully. Now that I’d deactivated the Trojan, there were only about a dozen more devices in this car that could potentially be hijacked. None of them carried a microphone, fortunately, so we were probably okay.
“Oh, yeah?” Augustus asked. “Why’d she send you that article, anyway? After—what? A year of radio silence?”
“Because,” I said, “she was pointing me in the right direction on something.”
“Oh, you trust her to do that, do you?” he asked, eyes wide, looking at me like I was an idiot. “She’s a super trustworthy person?”
“Not necessarily,” I said, trying to avoid getting into an argument about Arche’s honesty that I couldn’t possibly win, “but … she knows stuff. And this might be something she knows.”
“About what?”
“About … Sienna,” I said quietly. “About finding that evidence you mentioned. The kind that would exonerate her.”
Augustus didn’t freeze, exactly, but there was a definite moment of pause before he answered, and his tension ratcheted up another notch. “Oh?”
“Yeah,” I said, and pulled up the family photo on the article. “Because what Arche is saying … is that these folks?” I stared at the Custis family as I showed them to Augustus. There was an older man with greying hair, his wife of about the same age, and their grown kids all spread in front of them like some sort of grown-up family Christmas photo, “They’re the ones holding the lock and key on the evidence.”