“What would you like to say to him?” Gil asked.
“Tell him to call me—now—or I will tell the world about his printers. And you and your god will never get out of jail.”
* * *
Within twenty-four hours, a message appeared on my pen:
1 White Mesa Drive, Los Lunas, New Mexico. Gate code: 7221. Do not come until after Saturday.—Your old friend, E.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Since the time she was very small, on the days that Grandpop was coming home she would wait in the hallway, out of sight, listening for the sound of the door. (If it was only Eduard and Suzette returning, she would stay in her room with her music on loud and pretend to hear nothing.) Grandpop would step inside and yell, “Where’s that little girl who lives here?” Sasha would launch herself across the room and crash into his legs. This giant man would stumble back in a show of how strong and fast she was, and then scoop her into his arms. She would direct him around the house, pointing out all the things she’d painted and made while he was gone.
She was older now, and too big for Hello Tackles. She waited with Esperanza in the foyer, and when the maid opened the door Grandpop looked at Sasha in mock confusion. “I’m sorry. Where’s that little girl who used to live here?”
She could not help herself; she threw herself into him and hugged him tight. He laughed and said, “Ah! There she is.”
Eduard and Suzette stepped around them. Suzette handed her coat to Esperanza, and Eduard gave her his briefcase. Sasha released her grandfather and presented herself to her parents. Eduard said, “Hello, Sasha.” Suzette patted her on the back as if she’d seen this greeting behavior on a nature documentary.
Sasha knew that she was adopted, and she knew that it was Edo who wanted her, who loved her. Eduard and Suzette did not have to say a word; they deferred to Grandpop for all decisions about her. It didn’t occur to her that this was unusual; stories were full of children who were unloved by their False Parents, and had to search for their True ones. She felt lucky that the search had ended before it had begun. She had Grandpop, and she didn’t need anyone else.
He was tired tonight, but still glad to be home. They ate together in the big dining room, and Grandpop cried only once, when Suzette mentioned seeing homeless people in Chicago, but quickly recovered. Afterward, Eduard went upstairs to his office. Later Sasha heard him yelling at someone over the phone.
Suzette, as usual, went out to the patio. Sasha did not know what her mother did by the pool at night; she didn’t swim, didn’t look at any of the screens, and didn’t even look at the stars. The few times Sasha had interrupted her mother out there she found her staring at the water with a tablet of paper on her lap. The top page of the tablet was always blank, but with some portion of it torn away, as if she’d written something there and then destroyed it. Sasha imagined that Suzette was writing an invisible diary; each day, once recorded, could be disposed of. No one could ever steal her thoughts.
Even though he was tired, Grandpop made sure to tuck Sasha in. The tutors were coming in the morning, he said, and she needed to be in bed on time. He sat down on the floor beside her bed and made up stories about haunted hotels and terrible room service. “I ordered breakfast in London and they brought me antlers. They did! I opened the silver lid and there was nothing on the plate but reindeer antlers. And a bottle of hot sauce.”
She knew it was an effort for him to make up funny stories, and not just tonight. Eduard said Grandpop “carried the weight of the world.” Sasha knew it was the weight of his god. Every day, he’d told her, God reminded him that most people in the world were suffering terribly.
“It’s a wicked world out there,” he said to her as he tucked her in. “We all have to do our part to make it better. But what? That’s the question.”
She didn’t answer. But when he left her room, she sent a text to his bedroom wall that said, We’ll figure something out, GP! Love you.
A minute later (Grandpop was slow at working the house interface) he sent back: I know we will. Now go to sleep!
* * *
Two hours after midnight, Bucko shook her awake. “Time to get our raid on.” Sasha retrieved a few items from her black bag, and then the bear climbed onto her back.
Eduard’s office was on the second floor. To get there they had to walk past the master bedroom. “They’re probably having sex,” Bucko said into her ear. “You know they do it all the time.” She did not want to think about what Eduard and Suzette did in their bedroom. She’d seen enough sex online to know that she didn’t want to see it in person, especially not between her parents.
The office door sensed the key fob in her pocket and unlocked itself before she touched the knob. She closed the door behind her but did not turn on the light. She did not know this room as well as she knew the other rooms in the house—Eduard did not like her in here, and it was one of the few rooms that the house did not let her see—but the gap in the drapes allowed enough moonlight to make out the desk, the armchair, the bookcases. Leaning against one of the walls was a stack of paintings wrapped in brown paper, each one much taller than Sasha and wider than she could span with her hands outstretched.
“Blimey, more paintings?” Bucko asked. “Since when does Eduard like art? He sure doesn’t like yours.”
She’d discovered the first painting on a raid months ago. And now there were four, no, five paintings. Eduard hadn’t unwrapped any of them.
“Forget that,” Sasha said. “It’s the briefcase we’re after.”
“I’m on it,” Bucko said. He hopped down from her back and ran over to the desk, where the briefcase lay. “Let’s pop the lock on this dead man’s chest.”
Sasha climbed onto the chair beside the bear. She ran her hands over the lock like a safecracker. She’d found the combination two years ago, written on a piece of paper in Eduard’s desk, and Tinker had memorized it for her. Eduard had never bothered to change it. She worked the wheels, and it popped open.
“Avast!” Bucko said.
Inside the briefcase, the slate was in its usual holder. She turned it on and unlocked it with the same four-digit code he used on all his devices. Why was he so lazy about security?
The messages she wanted to look at were in the Vik Group network storage. She didn’t have the latest password for that, because it was the one password Eduard was forced to change regularly—and that’s why she needed his slate. Eduard never logged off the device.
She searched for all messages addressed to Edo Anderssen Vik, or that mentioned him in the body. There were thousands. Many messages she’d seen before, but there were hundreds of new ones since the last time she’d broken into his slate. She transferred them all to her own storage on the house’s network. Then she put everything back where it belonged, and Bucko remembered to give the slate a wipe with his furry paw to erase any of her fingerprints.
She wondered, not for the first time, if she was a bad person. There seemed to be something in her that wanted to sneak and steal. It was this bad thing, she was sure, that had caused her real parents to leave her at the orphanage. It was this bad thing that had made her listen to the Wander Man. And it was this bad thing that had made her try to kill Mr. Paniccia when she was five years old.
She wasn’t like Grandpop. He was a good person, and his IF was God himself. Sasha’s friends, on the other hand, could be so … immature.
“Let’s roll,” Bucko said. “Mission fucking accomplished.”
“Wait.” There was something new on the floor near the desk, a package about two feet square. Did Eduard bring that into the house with the latest paintings?
The box was marked up with shipping stickers, and the flaps had been opened. Sasha squinted to make out the label in the dim light. It was addressed to Grandpop. The “from” address was a series of numbers. She should have brought Tinker with her to remember it for her.