“Morning, Ayers,” says Cash with a nod.
“Where did you come from, Wes?” I ask.
He tips his head back down the sidewalk.
“What, no fancy car?” I tease.
“Ferrari’s in the shop,” he shoots back without missing a beat.
“And the Lexus?” chirps Cash.
Wesley rolls his eyes and shifts his attention to me. “Is this one giving you trouble?”
“On the contrary,” I say, “he’s been a perfect gentleman. One might even say a knight.”
“In shining armor,” adds Cash, gesturing to his gold stripes.
“He brought me coffee,” I say, holding up my cup.
Wes runs a hand through his black hair and sighs dramatically. “You never bring me coffee, Cassius.”
And then, out of nowhere, a girl swings her arm around Wesley from behind. He doesn’t even tense at the contact—I do—only smiles as she puts her manicured hands over his eyes.
“Morning, Elle,” he says cheerfully.
Elle—a pretty little thing, bird-thin with bottle-blond hair—actually giggles as she pulls away.
“How did you know?” she squeaks.
Because of your noise, I think drily.
Wesley shrugs. “What can I say? It’s a gift.”
“All the cool powers were taken,” mutters Cash, half into his coffee.
The girl is still hanging on Wesley. Perching on him. Like a bird on a branch. She’s chirping on about some fall dance when the bell finally rings, and I realize I’ve never been so happy to go to class.
It’s a good thing I’ve had two coffees to go with my four hours of sleep, because Mr. Lowell kicks off the day with a documentary on revolutionaries. And whether it’s the healthy dose of caffeine or the strange way the subject sinks its nails in, I manage to stay awake.
“The thing to remember about revolutionaries,” says Lowell, killing the video and flicking on the lights, “is that, while they may be viewed as terrorists by their oppressors, in their own eyes, they are champions. Martyrs. People willing to do what others won’t, or can’t, for the sake of whatever it is they believe in. In a way, we can see them as the most extreme incarnations of a society’s discontent. But just as people elevate their revolutionaries to the station of gods, avenging angels, heroes, so those revolutionaries elevate themselves.…”
As he continues, I picture Owen Chris Clarke, eyes blazing on the Coronado roof as he spoke of monsters and freedom and betrayal. Of tearing down the Archive, one branch at a time.
“But the mark of a revolutionary,” continues Lowell, “is the fact that cause comes first. No matter how elevated the revolutionary becomes in the eyes of others—and in his own eyes—his life will always matter less than the cause. It is expendable.”
Owen jumped off a roof. Took his own life to make sure the Archive couldn’t take his mind, his memories. To make sure that if—when—his History woke, he would remember everything. I have no doubt that Owen would have given or taken his life a hundred times to see the Archive burn.
“Sadly,” adds Lowell, “revolutionaries often find the lives of others equally expendable.”
Expendable. I write the word in my notebook.
Owen definitely saw the lives of others as expendable. From those he murdered to keep his sister a secret, to those he tried to murder—Wesley bleeding out so Owen could make a point—to me. Owen gave me the chance to come with him instead of standing in his way. As soon as I refused, I was worthless to him. Nothing more than another obstacle.
If Owen was a revolutionary, then what does that make me? Part of the machine? The world isn’t that black-and-white, is it? It doesn’t all boil down to with or against. Some of us just want to stay alive.
TEN
AMBER’S LATE TO PHYSIOLOGY, so she has to snag a seat in the back and I have to spend the period studying the nervous system and trying to stay awake. As soon as the bell rings, I’m out of my chair and standing by hers.
“That eager to get to gym?” she asks, packing up her bag.
“Question,” I say casually. “Is your dad a cop?”
“Huh?” Amber’s strawberry eyebrows go up. “Oh, yeah. Detective.” She hoists the bag onto her shoulder and we head into the fray. “Why?”
“I just saw him on the news this morning.”
“Kind of sad, isn’t it?” she says. “I didn’t get to see my dad this morning.”
Treading dangerous waters, then. “He works a lot?”
Amber sighs. “On a light day. And the Phillip case is killing him.” She almost smiles. “My mom hates it when I use words like killing in casual conversation. She thinks I’m becoming desensitized to death. I hate to tell her she’s too late.”
“My grandfather was a detective, too.” Well, a private eye, and mostly under the table work at that, but close enough.
Her eyes light up. “Really?”
“Yeah. I grew up around it. Bound to make you a little morbid.” Amber smiles, and I take my shot. “Do they have any idea what happened to that guy, Mr. Phillip?”
Amber shakes her head and pushes the door open. “Dad won’t talk about it around me.” She squints into the late morning light. “But the walls in our house are pretty thin. From what I’ve heard him say, none of it adds up. You’ve got this one room, and it’s trashed, and the rest of the house is spotless. Nothing missing.”
“Except for Mr. Phillip.”
“Exactly,” she says, kicking a loose pebble down the path, “but nobody can figure out why. He was apparently one of the nicest guys around, and he was retired.”
“A judge, right? Do they think someone might have been angry with a sentence or something?”
“Then why not kill him?” says Amber, pushing open the gym doors. “I know that’s cold, but if you have a vendetta, you usually have a body. They don’t have one. They don’t have anything. He just vanished. So my question is, who would go to all the trouble to make someone disappear and then leave a mess like that? Why not make it look like he just walked away?”
She has a point. She has a lot of points.
“You’re really good at this,” I say, following her into the locker room.
She beams. “Crime dramas and years of eavesdropping.”
“What are you two going on about?” asks Safia, dropping her bag on the bench. I hesitate, but Amber surprises me by giving a nonchalant shrug and lying through her teeth. “Arteries and veins, mostly.”
Saf screws up her nose. “Ewww.” She keys in her locker code and starts to change, but Amber smiles and keeps going. “Did you know that veins move around beneath your skin?”
“Stop,” says Saf, paling.
“And did you know—” Amber continues.
“Amber, stop,” says Saf, tugging on her workout clothes.
“—that the brachial artery,” she says, poking Saf’s arm for emphasis, “is the first place blood goes after being pumped through your heart, so if you sever it, you could conceivably lose all five liters of blood in your body? Your heart would just pump it right out onto the floor—”
“Gross, gross, stop,” snaps Saf, slamming her locker and storming away toward the gym doors.
Amber looks back at me with a smile after Safia has stormed out. “She gets squeamish,” she says cheerfully.
“I can see that.” I’d be lying if I said it didn’t lighten my mood. “Hey, will you let me know if they find anything?”
She nods a little reluctantly. “Why so interested in the case?”