Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Acknowledgments
Also by Robin Benway
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.
BILLY COLLINS,
“On Turning Ten”
Going in circles, it’s a vicious cycle This is a crash course, this ain’t high school.
JAY-Z,
“American Dreamin’”
Prologue
In September 2004, French police discovered a hidden chamber in the catacombs under Paris. It contained a full-size movie screen, projection equipment, a bar, a pressure cooker for making couscous, a professionally installed electricity system, and at least three phone lines. Movies ranged from 1950s noir classics to recent thrillers.
When the police returned three days later, the phone and power lines had been cut and there was a note on the floor:
“Do not try to find us.”
— from www.futilitycloset.com/2005/03/14/underground-cinema/
Chapter 1
“Roux?”
Nothing.
“Roux?”
Still nothing.
“Roux!”
“Ssshh! I’m thinking!”
I glanced up from my lock and key to see my best friend, Roux, frowning at a tiny magnetic chessboard. “How long does it take to move one chess piece?” I asked her. “You’ve been sitting there for nearly an hour.”
“Did anyone ever ask Catherine the Great how long it took her to take over her husband’s army?” Roux asked, her eyes never leaving the board. “Or Elizabeth the First how long it took her to do … whatever she did? No. So sssshh.”
“But they were royalty. You—”
“I dare you to finish that sentence. Really. I dare you.”
I sighed and sat back in my desk, restless and ready to leave. We had been at an SAT prep class for most of the afternoon (Roux’s absentee parents had forced her to register because they read about it in New York magazine’s “What’s Right Right Now” issue while stuck on a plane to Milan; I enrolled because Roux threatened to end our friendship if I didn’t), but Roux was in no hurry to leave. We were in some lecture hall at NYU, where the one bright spot was the central air-conditioning. Manhattan had been engulfed in a late-August heat wave for nearly a week, and I was pretty sure that our prep class had a few stragglers that just wanted to escape the heat and had no interest in learning about analogies and test-taking secrets.
Roux was still bent over her chessboard, muttering to herself. Angelo, a family friend and pretty much my surrogate uncle, had taught Roux the rules of chess last spring, and they had been engaged in a summer-long game that seemed never ending. He refused to play online, though, which meant Roux had to keep the game going on her travel chess set.
“Roux seems to be quite good at scheming and masterminding,” Angelo had commented soon after their game started.
“And this surprises you how?” I replied.
“Touché.”
But Roux also had a soft, mushy side, and she was one of the most trustworthy people I knew. “You’re like a Cad-bury egg,” I had once tried to explain to her. “You’ve got this hard shell, but inside you’re all sweet and mushy and gooey.”
She waited a few seconds before socking me in the shoulder.
“Ow!”
“Can a Cadbury egg do that? That’s what I thought.”
Despite her prickly personality, we’d been friends from the moment we met last year. And she was one of only two people who knew my most secret of secrets, that Angelo, my parents, and I all worked as spies for a secret organization known as the Collective.
I guess you could describe the Collective as a sort of rogue, secretive Robin Hood organization. We try to right wrongs, return money to retirement accounts, expose the bad guys for who they are without ever revealing ourselves. This time last year, I was in Reykjavík with my parents, exposing a human trafficking ring. We’ve been all over the world, but after a near disaster last fall, we now call Manhattan home.
At least for now.
“Wait a minute,” Roux said, sitting up straight with an evil grin spreading across her face. “Waaaait a minute. Oh, you’re dead, Angelo. God save the queen because here she comes.” She expertly moved one of her pieces, keeping one finger on top of the figure until she was sure, then let go with a triumphant cry.
“He’s going to weep when he sees that genius move I just made!” she crowed. “You can tell him I said that.”
“Can’t wait,” I said. “Can we go now?” I gestured toward the lock in front of me. It was complicated, and I had made exactly zero progress on trying to pick it. “This is frustrating me and I want to throw it out the window.”
Roux peered down at the monstrosity. “What the hell is that?”
I sighed. “Annoying locks are annoying. I can’t crack it at all, but Angelo told me that I had to try and figure it out while he was gone.”
“He’s so irritating that way.” Roux nodded in sympathy. “When’s he coming back?”
“Dunno.” I flicked at the lock with my fingernail, but it refused to unlock itself. “He’s been gone almost two months, though. Too long.”
“I know, right? Do you know what it’s like to have to play travel chess with someone out of the country?” Roux sighed in what I’m sure she thought was solidarity. “But c’mon, you’re the best lock picker and safecracker that I know. You can do it. Rah, rah, rah and oh, screw it. I can’t fake enthusiasm in this heat. I need to save my energy.”
I glanced at her. “How many safecrackers do you know?”
She shrugged. “Hundreds, for all I know. You spies are a sneaky bunch.”
She had a point.
“C’mon, let’s go,” I said. “I’ll try to figure this out later.”
“So where is our assassin friend, anyway?” Roux asked as we got our bags together.
“For the millionth time,” I said with a sigh, “Angelo is not an assassin. He handles documents and currency. End of.”
“Suuuure he’s not an assassin,” Roux said. “You just can’t tell me because you’d be compromising my safety.” She gave me a huge, exaggerated wink and then nudged me in the ribs. “I get it.”
But I was telling her the truth about Angelo. He wasn’t an assassin; he handled the paper trail: phony passports and birth certificates, drivers’ licenses, and Social Security cards. Whatever documents my family needed, he provided.
My mom’s the computer hacker in our family. She can get into huge computer mainframes, pull up incriminating e-mails that most people would never be able to find, and hide her tracks without even breaking a sweat. My dad’s the linguist and statistician, which doesn’t sound awesome until you hear
him start shouting in German to create a distraction so my mom can drop a tracker into a corrupt businessman’s jacket pocket. (You haven’t lived until you’ve shouted German curse words with your dad in a Tokyo airport. It’s pretty great.)
I was, as Roux so nicely pointed out, an excellent lock picker and safecracker. Angelo had taught me some tricks of the trade when I was a toddler, but now I had surpassed even his talents. “Go fly, little Jedi,” he had said to me after I broke into the safe that he had given me for Christmas last year, which made me happy because it meant he had watched all the Star Wars DVDs I had given him.
My phone buzzed as Roux and I gathered up our bags and chess games, and I glanced at the screen to see two texts from my boyfriend, Jesse. I tucked my phone away without reading them. I don’t know why, but I like to read his texts in private. It makes them feel more special, more personal, more mine.
“Jesse?” Roux asked. “You have that dopey, love-struck look on your face.”
“Shut up some more.” I grinned. “You ready?”
“Ready to face that unrelenting, diabolical heat? No.”
“You should be a writer.”
She snorted out a laugh. “BOOOOR-RING! C’mon, let’s go so you can call your boyfriend and say a bunch of gooey, lovey things to him.”
“Yeah, because that really sounds like me.”
“Hey, you’re a spy. You have all sorts of secrets.”
“Yeah, and you know most of them.”
“Thanks, that makes me feel special.”
We went down the narrow staircase before getting to the set of double doors, but just as Roux used her hip to shove it open, two girls came through the other side and we all nearly bumped into one another.
“Hey, slut,” one of the girls said, and Roux froze, her hip still pressed against the door’s bar as they sauntered past, giggling to themselves.
“Rude much?” I yelled after them, but they didn’t turn around, and by the time I looked back at Roux, her face had smoothed out into its normal, “what-ever” expression. “Do you know them?” I asked her.
“Nope,” she replied. “They’re probably starting at Harper in September. A new set of ducklings ready to taunt me.”
When I first met Roux, she had been the outcast of Harper School, our private high school in the West Village. She had once been the Queen Bee, the Mean Girl, whatever you want to call it, but karma had reared its ugly head and Roux became a social leper. She rarely talks about it, but the whole experience really hurt her. I had thought things were a little better, but I knew she was nervous about the first day of school this year, and if those two strangers were any indication, she had every right to be.
But the slur was forgotten as soon as we stepped outside, greeted by a wall of hot and humid air. “Forget it,” Roux said, starting to step back inside the school. “I’m just going to stay here until Thanksgiving. Maybe Christmas.”
I grabbed her sleeve and tugged her outside. “It’s miserable, but we’re going to suffer together. And it’s only two blocks to the subway station.”
But we weren’t even four steps away from the building before I thought that maybe Roux’s idea had been better. “I can feel my hair melting.” I moaned.
“I think my skin is bubbling.” Roux held up her arm to check. “This has to be super aging, too, right? You can’t be exposed to this much heat and not get some serious frown lines.”
“I have no idea.” I tied my hair up into a messy bun and then fanned the back of my neck. “If I faint, promise me you’ll send someone back for my body.”
“If I don’t go insane from heatstroke first, then absolutely.”
“Thanks, you’re a true friend.”
Roux and I made our way across the street and up Broadway toward the subway with the rest of the end-of-summer zombies who were staggering around Manhattan. The city had been pretty empty for the past two weeks, as most everyone escaped the city and the heat for the last few days of summer. Even Jesse had bailed to visit his mom in Connecticut. When he and I first met, his parents had just split up, his mom had moved out of their downtown apartment, and Jesse had been barely speaking to her. Things were a lot better between them now, though, so I was super happy that he was visiting her.
“Jesse’s coming back tonight?” Roux asked me, slipping Ray-Bans over her eyes.
“Yep. He’s gonna call me when his train gets into Grand Central. He might come over later.”
“He better come over later,” she said. “It’s almost your first anniversary.”
I side-eyed her. “Our anniversary is technically on Halloween. It’s two months away.”
“Isn’t it sooner? You met in late September.”
“Yeah, but we weren’t dating-dating. He was still my assignment then.”
So … yeah. About that. There’s really no way to tell this story without making me sound like a terrible person, so I’ll keep it short.
Basically, I was assigned to get to know Jesse because his father runs Memorandum magazine, which is pretty big. They were going to run an in-depth article exposing the Collective and me, and it was my job to stop the article from running. Only I kinda maybe developed this huge crush on Jesse. And then he started crushing on me right back. And then we sort of made out a lot, and I never told anyone, including Jesse, that I had pretty much become a double agent until we found out that his dad wasn’t going to run the story after all. And then when I tried to tell my parents, they realized that I had fallen in love with him and they didn’t believe me.
That was sort of a crazy time. I haven’t even told you about the attempted kidnapping yet. Or how the bad guys ended up chasing us twenty blocks and Angelo had to fly in on a helicopter to save me and Roux and Jesse from almost being killed.
I don’t like to brag, but sometimes my life can be really exciting.
Anyway, Jesse and I are still together, and he’s forgiven me for lying to him in the beginning. We both figure that if our relationship can survive all that, then we’re pretty good at being together. And we are. He’s the only person besides Roux who knows that Angelo, my parents, and I are all spies, and he’s never once spilled the secret. (Probably because he also thinks that Angelo is an assassin. Roux can be very convincing.)
“Wanna come over?” I asked Roux as we tried to walk under as many awnings as possible, avoiding the sun. “I think my dad’s doing something involving barbecue tonight.”
“No, thanks, I have my tae kwon do class.”
“Ah, that’s right.” During our exciting near escape last year, Roux had managed to break the bad guy’s nose and now she’s all gung-ho on self-defense and putting up a good offense.
“And I think my parents are going to be home late tonight, anyway,” Roux continued, now examining her cuticles. “I should probably be around to guilt them about leaving for five weeks.”
“You could probably get a pony out of it,” I said.
“The last thing I need is something that neighs and craps all over the foyer.” She tossed her hair back over her shoulder and straightened her sunglasses. “Don’t worry, I’ll get my revenge when they’re old and it’s time to put them in nursing homes. They’ll spend their last days making macramé if I have anything to say about it.”
Roux’s parents are ridiculously wealthy. Like, how-are-you-even-a-real-person wealthy. It might sound amazing, but the real downside is that they’re never home. They live in this huge building on the Upper East Side and Roux always seems to have the place to herself. Her dad has meetings around the world, and her mom goes with him. “Someone has to see if all the luxury spas in the world are up to snuff,” Roux says, but it’s hard to miss the hurt in her eyes. And then there’s the Frieze Art Fair in London, Art Basel in Miami, antique auctions in Rome, getaway vacations in Bora Bora, and so on and so on.
It makes my parents insane because they like Roux and feel bad that she’s practically raising herself, but what can you do? “We could break into her parents’ online
accounts and siphon out their money into an account for Roux,” my mom answered when I asked that several months ago, and it took an hour for my dad and me to talk her out of the idea.
Once a computer hacker, always a computer hacker.
“Well, tell your parents I said hi,” I told Roux as we started to cross the street against the light. “Even though they’ve never met me.”
“Please,” Roux said. “I could tell them that you met last year at a black tie cocktail reception for famous chimpanzees and they’d believe me. And maybe I should get a pony. I could name it Consolation Prize.”
“Brilliant idea,” I replied. I had learned long ago that Roux’s schemes came and went with equal speed. And sure enough, she was already off on her next subject.
“Are you bored?”
“What? You mean, right now? Not really. I mean, nothing’s really happening but—”
“No, I just mean in general. Like, with your life.”
I sighed. I knew where this conversation was going and decided to cut to the chase. “No, Roux, I am not leaving on any new missions. I told you, I’m out. At least until after I graduate next year.”
“Well, what if you had to? Like, if national security was at stake?”
“The government doesn’t even know about us. I doubt they’d call my dad and be like, ‘Hey, you three busy? There’s this thing …’”
We stopped at the corner across from the subway station at Astor Place as Roux lowered her sunglasses to look at me. “You’re lying,” she finally said. “Your eyes are going up and to the left.”
“That means I’m lying?”
“Yes. I’ve been studying up on human facial tics.”
“Sounds riveting. And I am not lying. Are you getting on the subway with me or not?”
“No, I have to go home and get my stuff.” Roux stepped off the curb to hail a taxi just as a man cut in front of us. He was wearing an old suit and tie that clearly had not been washed for a few days, and he had a few weeks’ worth of whiskers lining his face.
“You!” he said to me, pointing right in my face. His nails were long and dirty, but I didn’t flinch. A lifetime of learning how to stay calm in stressful situations often came in handy in New York.