Paolo Bacigalupi - The Doubt Factory

“Black Batman, huh?” He nudged her.

“Well, sure.” She snuggled into his body, lying close as she ticked off points on her fingers. “Dubious morality? Check. Comes and goes like the wind? Check. Lives in a bat cave? Check.”

“It used to be a rat cave,” he said, pinching her hip.

“Shut up.” She slapped his hand away. “You’re distracting me.”

“Is that bad?” His hand ran up her skin. Alix laughed and pretended to be trying to squirm away, before letting him capture her and kiss her.

When they came up for air, she said, “The only thing that isn’t like Batman is that you actually have friends.”

He froze at that. He stopped tickling her and let her go.

“What?” She turned to see his face, suddenly worried. “What did I say?”

His expression had turned serious. “Nothing,” he said. “I’m on my own, that’s all.”

“On your own…” She sat up, looking at him. “You mean you’re not doing anything now? I thought you all had left to go do some other… thing.”

He shook his head. “That was just kid stuff. It was bullshit.”

“No.” She shook him. “It was good. It was cool.”

“It didn’t make any difference. None of it does. I finally wised up about it.”

“And everyone else left?”

“It’s dangerous, Alix. If I wasn’t right on my game, Tank would have died. It wasn’t fair to keep them around here, taking risks for no reason.”

“So you just… gave up?” Alix stared at him. “But I came all this way.”

“Why do you care? It didn’t make any difference. We brought all those news cameras in, and you know what people focused on? SWAT guys in cages. You couldn’t even see all the banners. It was all there, laid out. Williams and Crowe. The Doubt Factory. All of them right there, and the cameras didn’t even care. It was just another freaky thing protesters do. Occupy Wall Street shit. The freaks getting covered ’cause they’re freaky.”

“But…”

“We took big risks on you. Game-changing risks. Some of us are over eighteen. Shit gets serious then. And the bad guys, they’re good. We can’t stay encrypted all the time. You can’t stay off every single surveillance camera. Not every time. I know the FBI’s got an angle on my face. They’ve got Cyn, too, from Seitz records we had to match.” He shook his head. “We were gambling that they were dumb and divided and weren’t paying attention, but that lasts only so long. Eventually, your luck runs out. We hit that research lab for the rats. That was a huge heist. Kook had tabs on a bunch of animal rights groups, and the FBI was all over them right after we pulled it.”

He paused, smiling slightly. “That was actually kind of funny. Watching the FBI come down on PETA and the Animal Liberation Front, and come up with nothing.” He looked at Alix. “Sobering, too, though. Seriously sobering. When they rain down on someone, they don’t screw around.”

“But they didn’t get you,” Alix said. “You did it right.”

“Sure. But then we did your school. And then we grabbed you. And then the bait-and-switch with the cages. Our luck was already too good. That last one…” He shook his head. “We were a little too clear about who we were, that time. Some dude in a cubicle probably is spending every waking minute trying to match up every single person the Doubt Factory has ever screwed. Every company they’ve worked for. Cyn…” He shook his head again. “They’ll be trying to pattern match her for sure.”

“And you…?”

“I’m a dead trail. Have been for years. I’m a ghost.” He looked at her pointedly. “But it can’t last forever. If the feds weren’t so busy looking under rocks for the next al-Qaida, they’d probably have bagged us already.”

“Maybe you’re just that good.”

Moses grinned, a flash of ego. “Maybe I am.” He sobered. “Even really smart people get nailed eventually. My uncle was the best, and he’s in prison doing fifteen years. And that man was seriously good. Eventually, you make a mistake.” He gestured at her. “I mean, hell, you figured it out. You found the bat cave, right? FBI’s probably right behind you.”

“Bread,” Alix said. “Cynthia said she smelled bread a lot at home.”

Moses grimaced. “There you go. Bread. One wrong question from the feds and you would have led them right to us. I don’t really care, for myself. No one’s going to mind one more black kid in prison. Nobody gives a shit about me—”

“I care!” Alix interjected angrily.

“Okay, but aside from you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? What am I? Just, like, chopped liver?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Well, then listen to what I’m saying. I care.” She gave him a hard look, driving it home.

Moses smiled. “Okay. Okay. Point taken. But Cyn? She’s a serious genius, and she’s up to her neck in this. Probably going to start the next Google if she doesn’t end up in jail. And Tank? That boy would never survive in juvie. It would eat that little freak alive. Adam? Kook?” He shook his head. “Nah. I couldn’t keep risking them. Not to get nothing.”

Alix looked up sharply. “But you didn’t get nothing. You got me. I’m here. I want to help.”

“You want to help.”

“Actually, I want you to help me.” She smiled. “I’m thinking about hitting the Doubt Factory.”

SO THIS IS WHAT IT’Slike to have a secret , Alix thought.

She’d been such a good girl, and she’d kept so little from her parents, that it felt like she was a completely new person. As if she’d dragged all the cloying membranes of childhood off her body and she’d emerged.

There was Old Alix, the Alix who had gone from home to school and back again. Who’d done her good homework and gotten her good grades and been such a good girl that she’d always known she could call Mom and Dad for help if she strayed a little.

And now there was New Alix.

New Alix had secrets. New Alix slipped away in the afternoons and met Moses on walking trails in various state parks that Moses selected at random to keep their patterns broken up. New Alix persuaded Sophie to cover for her on the weekends while she slipped down to Jersey and slept with Moses in his empty factory.

But more than that, New Alix saw the world differently. She did all the same things she’d always done, and yet nothing was the same. Every morning she put on her school uniform: white blouse, plaid skirt, white kneesocks, black shoes… and even though all the movements were the same, she was different.

New Alix watched the things that Old Alix had done, and laughed.

So this is what it’s like to have a secret .

Alix shrugged into her Seitz blazer and checked herself in the mirror. Smirked. Cocked her head. Raised an eyebrow.

No sign of a secret. Not even a hint that at night she rifled through the filing cabinets of her father’s study, hunting for names and details that she and Moses could use to create a clearer picture of what the Doubt Factory did. No sign that she took photos on her camera phone of everything from Christmas cards from Doubt Factory clients to the tiny doodles that her father put on sticky pads and then stuffed into file folders that he always forgot to sort out later.

The filing cabinets had been easy: the key was on Dad’s key ring, right there on the kitchen island the first night Alix had crept down the stairs to snoop. It was almost ridiculously easy to go through her father’s papers.

The computer was another matter. She’d suggested putting a keystroke logger on the computer, to maybe grab Dad’s password, but Moses had vetoed the idea.