And for what?
Moses. The crazy prophet, leading his crazy crew right off the crazy cliff on the way to crazy town.
And because her father was dead, a voice reminded her.
So she said, Alix reminded herself. Cynthia’s father was dead from Marcea’s heart attack drug—if she could be believed.
“We’re all like that,” Cynthia had said.
Well, fuck you, Cynthia. Oh, and fuck you, too, Moses.
“What?” Jonah asked.
Alix realized that she’d been speaking out loud.
“Are you keeping an eye on me?” she asked Jonah suddenly. “Is that why you’re being so good all the time now? Did Mom and Dad put you up to this?”
Jonah looked offended. “Of course not!”
“Then how come you stopped running away?”
“I don’t know.” He made an uncomfortable shrug. “It was kid stuff.”
“You are a kid.”
He glanced over at her. “You seriously want to know?”
“I’m asking, aren’t I?”
Jonah glanced away, looking out the window at the bright green leaves of the birch trees along the curves of the turnpike.
“You didn’t see what it was like when you went missing,” he said. “You didn’t feel what it was like at home. Mom and Dad about went catatonic when you didn’t come home the next morning. They didn’t say it, but they were expecting to find your body. You took off, and then you just disappeared off the map. We were all just waiting for you to show up dead. Some rag girl dead in a Dumpster. Probably all chopped up.” He looked over at her then stared back out the window. “That was some sobering shit.”
“But I’m fine,” Alix pointed out. “Nothing happened to me.”
“Only because…” He shrugged. “2.0 wasn’t homicidal. They could have done anything with you. They just made you disappear. If they’d been different, the cops would have found you floating in the river or dumped out in the woods somewhere.” He swallowed.
“But they weren’t like that. They were never like that.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they’re still nerving up to doing something really crazy. Who knows what nutball activists will do? PETA? Occupy Wall Street? Jeffrey Dahmer? They’re all pretty much nuts.”
“No…”
Alix remembered Cynthia pulling her out of the cage. That had been real. Cynthia cared about her.
Unless it was staged, a cynical voice reminded her.
Alix slammed the steering wheel with her palm, frustrated. “How the hell would I know?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Had it just been some kind of good cop, bad cop routine? Moses acting all scary, and then Cynthia coming in to save her? How was she supposed to tell what was real? All the things 2.0 had said to her about her father? Or what her father said about 2.0? Truth. Lies. It was just a muddle of stories that exactly contradicted each other.
Either 2.0 was a crew of lunatic kids, or Dad was some kind of uberevil wizard, throwing dream dust into the eyes of the world, making sure that it stayed asleep while companies pillaged and maimed and killed.
It sounded absurd no matter how she sliced it.
Truth? Lies? Madness? Sanity? How the hell could she tell?
The news coverage sure hadn’t taken any of it seriously. The entire prank had become one of those thirty-second oddities at the end of the newscast. Activists Create Human-Sized Rat Cage. They’d really dug on the giant exercise wheel. There’d been a quick pan of the hanging murals, and that was all. Hilarious. Done in less than thirty seconds. Judging from the news, the only sane thing a watcher could conclude was, “Gosh, Diane, kids sure do wacky things these days! And now in Sports…”
2.0 had shot its wad, and the world had yawned. But still, Alix would sit at dinner and look across at her father and wonder.
According to Moses, he wasn’t just bad, he was practically the devil. Doing evil things for evil amounts of money and knowing it and loving doing it. Laughing while he danced on graves.
It made no sense. This was the man who forgot to eat dinner because he was texting. The husband who was cut off from caffeine because it raised his blood pressure and he couldn’t sleep at night and then would stay up in the kitchen eating ice cream out of the carton. The dad who had picked up her and Denise and drove them home in the middle of the night and never busted either of them for being drunk and stoned.
Seriously?
“He’s not a monster,” Alix muttered.
“Who?” Jonah asked.
“Nothing,” Alix shook her head. “Something 2.0 said about Dad. That he was doing bad things.”
Jonah glanced over at her. “Why would you even listen to them after all the stuff they did to you?”
“I don’t know. Some of the things they said…” She glanced over at her younger brother. “What if they’re true?”
“This is that Stockholm syndrome thing, right?”
“No, jerkwad, it’s not.”
“It kind of is. Seriously, Sis. Don’t go all Patty Hearst on me. I’ve read up on her. She totally joined up with the people who kidnapped her. Went all crazypants, robbing banks and shit.” He suddenly looked interested. “But if you wanted to rob a bank, I’d totally help. I’ve got an idea about how—”
“Will you shut up and listen to me for once?”
“Okay, okay, I’m just saying.”
Alix gave him a dirty look. “You’re the one who called in the bomb threat last fall, aren’t you?”
Jonah looked at her, surprised. “Duh.”
“I knew it!”
Jonah didn’t even look embarrassed. “I needed to break into the admin office. I couldn’t clear people out, otherwise. I was going to fail English and Trig and World Civ.”
“I don’t want to know.” Alix tried to collect her thoughts. “Look, I’m just asking, but what if some of the things they said about Dad are true?”
Jonah looked at her, confused. “Like what? He’s an ax murderer or something?”
“No. Like he gets paid to…”
To what? To make people confused about some company’s report about some drug? To take over the government?
It all sounded so silly. The cartoons of her dad on the factory walls…
Alix heard her father’s voice. “Sometimes people need to make someone into an enemy just so they can make themselves feel important.”
Alix thought of conspiracy theorists like the 9/11 truthers. Or the people who still thought NASA hadn’t put a man on the moon. It was like they needed to know something that was special. Needed to be unique somehow, by being smarter and more clued-in to the secrets of the universe.
“They kept telling me that Dad was the worst thing in the world, basically. And all these companies, they talked like all the companies were practically satanic. Like they’d do anything for money. People we know, even. Like everyone was just a bunch of moneygrubbing psychopaths.”
Jonah laughed. “I thought everybody was moneygrubbing. Rich people just do it better.”
“My little cynic brother.”
“I’m just saying.” Jonah spread his hands, laughing still. “Anyway, whatever those people say, it’s only one side of a story. These crazies always want to make it sound like some company’s completely evil. You’ve got to talk to both sides—”
Alix picked up the quote, “—and you shouldn’t rush to judgment, because that’s how you end up being wrong…”
Alix broke off.
Son of a bitch.
She could practically see Moses laughing at her, wagging a finger as she quoted her father encouraging her to see both sides to every story.