Perfect Lies

“Finally,” Adam says, his voice desperate with relief. I bite my lip guiltily. He lost his parents, his schooling, his apparently brilliant future. And it’s my fault. I put him on Keane’s radar.

Cole surprises me by talking. Once again I didn’t realize he was in the room. “Settles that, then. We’ll go to the California house and make reintegration plans for our two corpses.”

“Actually, we’re headed to Georgia.”

Cole’s voice is suddenly cold. “Why Georgia? I don’t see any reason to involve them further.”

“We need help, Cole. We can’t do this on our own.”

“We’ve been doing fine.”

“Did you even hear what Annie was telling us? He has women in the White House! This is so much bigger than we can fight, and if working with Rafael is what we need, then—”

“You don’t know enough about him.”

“I haven’t seen anything that makes me worried.”

“You don’t see everything.”

A door slams. Judging by Sarah’s sigh, I assume Cole is gone. “What was that about?” I ask.

Sarah sounds falsely bright. “Nothing. Cole likes being independent. Lerner has always been a really loosely connected network, to keep us safer. But we’re starting to organize and get funding, and it makes him nervous. I’ll go pack your things and we’ll head out!”

“I’m already packed,” Adam says. Sarah leaves, but he stays on the couch next to me. “So much research data all around me, and I can’t do a thing to study it. I need to work before I go crazy.”

“You can’t!” I blush, embarrassed at my outburst. “I mean, you can’t keep pursuing it, right? That’s how they found you.” I’m how they found him, but the vision still swirls in my head, unsettling me.

He sounds thoughtful. “Sarah thinks we can manage it. And she feels like it’s really important, like it might finally give us an advantage against Keane.”

My thoughts are scattered, my nerves frayed. What if it did? What if that’s what my vision meant? That we’d find the women and then help them disappear? Maybe I’m interpreting it wrong. It wouldn’t be the first vision I was wrong about.

Probably won’t be the last, either.

The car slams to a stop, my seat belt digging into my collarbone. “What is he doing here?” Cole snaps.

“Who?” Sarah asks. “Oh. I didn’t know he was coming.”

The car eases forward and then stops again. I hear doors open, so I unbuckle my seat belt and climb out, kicking my foot to find the curb.

“Cole,” a man calls from nearby. He sounds older than Cole and Adam. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

“Nathan,” Cole says, his voice icy. “Why are you here?”

“Permanent security detail with the boss.”

“Right.” Cole’s voice is edged with tension and anger. He must have a headache all the time if he carries as much tension in his neck as he does in his voice. “The boss. Great.”

Sarah takes my arm. “Don’t worry,” she whispers in my ear. “Cole’s just PMSing.”

I snort, instantly more at ease. I don’t think Cole will stick around any longer than he has to, which is a bit of a relief. He stresses me out.

“Come on in,” Nathan says as we walk up three steps. “And who is this?”

I don’t like the shift in tone of Nathan’s voice that indicates he’s talking about me. It’s as though he’s no longer addressing an equal but a child or a plaything.

“None of your business,” Cole snaps.

I frown in his direction. I don’t need him defending me, but I’m surprised that he’d sound so … protective on my behalf.

We walk past Nathan, who wears a spicy aftershave that clears out my sinuses. I instantly decide I don’t trust men who wear too much cologne. What is he covering up?

The air shifts as we enter the house, less heavy with humidity and cooler. “Rafael!” Sarah says, sounding happy.

“Sarah! So good to see you again. And this must be Adam, which makes you Annie.” The speaker has a soft, musical accent that makes it harder for me to get much from his tone. It also makes me wish I could see his face, because his voice is very, very hot. A cheek brushes mine and I start, surprised, as he kisses the air next to my face.

He backs away, laughing. “I hate shaking hands. Don’t look so frightened, Adam, I promise not to kiss you. Where are you from, Annie?”

I smile nervously. “Colorado, originally. Lately of Chicago. I’m dead, though. Just for the record.”

“Naturally.” Rafael sounds amused, and I want him to like me so I can hear him talk more. “So you’re Fia’s sister.”

The way he states it gives me pause. “Do you know her?”

He laughs again, a laugh that holds secrets. “We’ve met, yes.”

“Did she stab you, too?”

This time the laugh is easy and loud. “No, nothing so dramatic.”

“Good. She has a habit of doing that apparently.”

“She destroyed my knee,” Nathan grumbles from behind us. I’m not sure if I should apologize. I didn’t to Cole for his stab wound, so I opt not to.

“Any word from our charmingly violent Fia?” Rafael asks.

Sarah answers. “We have a phone she gave Annie, but there hasn’t been any contact.”

“Hmm. Here, sit, I’ll have Nathan get coffee.” Rafael takes my arm and guides me to a leather couch in a carpeted room. “You know your sister better than anyone. Do you have an idea what she might be planning?”

I shake my head, then lean back against the couch. For what feels like the millionth time I rack my brains, trying to think of anything Fia said or did, any indication she might have given me about what her plan was.

I want to be with her, to hear her. I don’t want my last memories of her to be the vision where I thought she killed me, or our tear-filled exchange under the arch.

And then I see her. It rushes in, slamming into my eyes. Fia, wearing a tank top and long, loose, patterned pants. Pajamas. The room is nearly dark, with a pool of warm yellow light drifting out from a single lamp. Fia walks toward it, then pauses, looks down.

At James. I’ve seen him before, and he hasn’t changed, though in sleep he looks far more peaceful than I could have imagined. He’s sprawled on the couch, glasses askew on his face.

She’s going to kill him, I think. I don’t want to see, don’t want to watch her do this, but I can’t avoid what the vision wants to show me.

She reaches down and gently pulls the glasses off his face, closing them and setting them on the floor. Then she leans over, brushes her lips against his forehead, and turns off the lamp.

With the sweetest, most content smile on her face I could ever have imagined.

Darkness reclaims my eyes, and for once I am grateful to be back where I belong, back where life makes sense. She smiled. Not the dead-girl, hollow smile I’d seen in visions past. She looked … whole. With him.

“Are you okay?” Cole asks.

“I saw her,” I whisper.

“Who?” I can feel Rafael leaning in close to me.

“Fia. She was with James.” I cover my face, sick to my stomach. Because now I finally realize, I finally get it.

Fia saved me. She set me free.

But she also abandoned me.

“Fia’s not coming.”

FIA

Four Days Before

I WAKE UP JUST BEFORE DAWN, AND I CAN’T—I can’t—I can’t—I can’t do this, I can’t feel this, I can’t be me right now. Clarice’s face, her ruined face, then blood on my sister’s hand. I thought I’d have the good dream tonight. Not this.

I stumble down the hall, into James’s room. Crawl into his bed. He wakes up with a start. He is not like me: his first instinct is not to fight but to pull me close. He holds me until I can breathe again.

“It’s okay.” His voice is soft and sweet with sleep as he strokes my hair. “It’s okay.” His arms keep me from shaking apart. Sleep is okay when James is anchoring me, and here, now, there are no lies between us.

Whatever else he is, James is my one safe place in the world.

“Where did you go last night?” James asks, leaning against the wall as I finish flinging clothes into my suitcase.

“Hmm?”

“You sneaked out last night. I woke up at four and you were gone again.”

“Didn’t I tell you? I’m having an affair. With an accountant. He reads tax code aloud by candlelight; it drives me wild.”

“Fia.”

I shrug, shoving my clothes down so I can get the suitcase shut. I wonder if I should be sad to leave this city, if I’ll ever come back. I don’t care about taking anything with me. Nothing here is mine.

I remember the quilt on my bed when I was little. It was blue with white clouds, worn threadbare, warm but light enough to burrow under without feeling like I was suffocating. I remember the knotted rug by my parents’ bed, beneath a battered wood chest my mom kept our memory boxes in. (My mom, my mom, I don’t even remember what she sounded like anymore. She is a picture, a home movie clip, a ghost of a person in my memories that are so small they wouldn’t even fill the box anymore.)

“Are you going to answer me?”

I look up, startled that James is still here. No, I will not miss this city. A place is a place is a place. I don’t care. James and I together, that’s what matters. We’re on our way to destroy his father, dismantle Keane Enterprises, and then be free. I am sharp and ready. “You’re the one who told me it’s good to keep secrets.”

“Not from me.”

I grin, pointing a finger at him. “Especially from you.”

He sighs and rubs his forehead. “Anything illegal?”

“Me? Never.” I woke up and his arms weren’t around me anymore and he was asleep and so far away, and the emptiness was too big, too scary, the waiting too much, so I went running.

He walks into the room and sits on the couch, pulling me into his lap. “Just how many secrets are you keeping from me?”

“I’d tell you, but it’s a secret.” I lean my forehead against his, letting myself feel quiet, looking for the thing inside me that tells me what we’re doing is right. It’s been so hard to find since I gave up Annie. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is what everything has been for.”

“Of course. This is the biggest vote of confidence my dad has ever given me. We’re finally sliding into place.” His eyes get distant, and something nervous twists in the pit of my stomach.

“You’re having second thoughts.”

He shakes his head, focuses on me. “No. You and me, that’s the way it has to be. We do what we’re supposed to and no one will see what’s coming until it’s too late.”

I scratch a finger under his jaw, my nail catching on his stubble. “Not even us.”

“Not even us.”

“What do you mean, I can’t go in to see Mr. Keane?” I sing the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” in my head over and over again, because I can’t think about what I need to think about, which is not a what but a who. The girl behind the desk glares at me.

“He wants you to get a feel for the receptionist. She’s too good for the Feelers or other Readers to figure out,” James had said, looking past me as we rode the elevator up up up up to where he would disappear past locked doors to his father, leaving me behind.

Babysitting.

I’m babysitting a freaking Reader.

She pops her gum, bored. “You aren’t cleared to go back to the offices.”

Hey, I think. On a scale of one to ten, how fond are you of an intact spinal cord?

Her eyes widen and I laugh. “Just kidding. Probably you should stay out of my head. It’s not a friendly place.”

“Clearly.” She has short hair, bleached white, with choppy bangs hanging over her kohl-rimmed eyes. From the looks of her she’s maybe sixteen, pixie features and tiny frame; her feet hang a few inches above the floor. She’s wearing metal almost everywhere metal can go—ears, nose, fingers, wrists, even studs on her black heels. It doesn’t compensate for how small she is. Fragile. Fingers like twigs, equally snappable.

“Aren’t you a little young to be Keane’s personal assistant?” I ask, leaning against the rosewood desk she’s slouching at.

She doesn’t break eye contact. “Aren’t you a little psychotic to be Keane’s employee?”

I like her. The pixie is going to be my friend. I know it like I know I’m not going to see Mr. Keane today. I will be her friend, while plotting to either betray her if she’s untrustworthy for the company, or be betrayed by her if I slip up and she sees thoughts she shouldn’t.

Best friends.

“When is James getting out of his meeting?”

“Quit thinking of me as a pixie. It pisses me off.”

Magic magic pixie dust! Tinker Bell! Tiny pixies with sharp teeth, stealing children and horses! I start humming the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” under my breath.

“You really are as obnoxious as everyone thinks you are.” She sighs heavily, slides off her chair, and walks around the desk. Even in four-inch heels she barely comes up to my chin. “Let’s go get dinner.”

I let my eyes travel down the hall behind her. Mr. Keane is there somewhere. Mr. Keane who—nope not gonna think about it, not gonna think about anything at all. I can be patient. Pixies. Pixie haircuts. Pixie sticks. Drumsticks. Music. Dancing. I want to go dancing! Ache for it.

“You know what?” she says. “I changed my mind. Go ahead and snap my neck. It’s gotta be better than listening to you free-associate to try and scramble me.”

I laugh and wrap my arm through hers, steering her past the security guard and toward the gleaming elevators. “Your mistake is in assuming my brain doesn’t work like this all the time.”

We ride down the elevator in relative silence, except when Pixie asks me to please think the lyrics to a song she wouldn’t mind having stuck in her head. I settle on Queen in my head and pizza for dinner.

“So,” I say around a thin and drooping slice. “Turns out I do miss something about Chicago. What the crap is this crust?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m a vegan.”

I reach out and tug the collar of her leather jacket. “And this cow died of natural causes?”

She shrugs defensively. “My grandma gave it to me for my thirteenth birthday. It was hers. The cows would have been dead of old age by now, anyway. Besides, eggs are disgusting, and have you ever actually thought about what dairy is? You are eating the product of liquid squirted from the nipples of a cow.”

“Mmmm …” I stick my tongue out to catch a stray strand of goopy cheese. Pixie rolls her eyes, and I free-associate cow nipples in my thoughts to entertain her and keep my brain safe as I sit back and look out the window at the busy sidewalk. It’s dark and bitterly cold, but that doesn’t seem to matter to anyone out there. New York is more claustrophobic than Chicago, the buildings tall and looming so that you can’t see anything beyond your street. This afternoon as I prowled the city, waiting for James to text me that it was time to go in, I passed the Empire State Building without even noticing until I almost knocked down a tourist.

How come Pixie is here? Why isn’t she in the school?

“My name isn’t Pixie. And it’s because I’m too good for the school, you idiot. When they interviewed me for a scholarship, I started asking them about the Keane Foundation and what on earth Feelers were and assured them that I was more than qualified for whatever they had in mind. Then they put me up against their best Readers—”

“Did you get Doris?”

“Yes! Kill me now, her thoughts were like being trapped in an airless room with nothing but smooth jazz.”

I cackle. “So, what, they gave you independent study?”

“Pretty much. Said I could cut my teeth at the front desk of Keane’s main office, since I was too young to place somewhere big.”

“And your family …”

Her eyes get tight and she snaps her head to look outside. Not in a tragic, I’ve-been-ripped-away-from-them way. I tap tap tap tap a finger on the counter. She wants to be here, I can tell. Hmm. I will tread carefully. Super careful.

Ha ha ha ha, as if.

She clears her throat. “I lived with my grandma until she died when I was thirteen. Then I got saddled with my dad who’d sooner raise hunting dogs than a teenage daughter. So.” She claps her hands together, smile too wide and eyes too bright. “I get to come to the great big city and do great big things, and he gets to take the sheets off the couch that doubled as my bed. Win-win!”

Am I supposed to hug her? Console her? (Annie would know what to do. Would have. Would have.) “Well, screw that. Let’s go dancing.”

She frowns as though trying to hear something better, then shakes her head and jumps off the stool. “That, I can do.”

My phone buzzes and I pull it out. Text from James. Stuck in meetings.

Late dinner? I can eat twice if it means we can talk.

Eating with my father. Sorry. Will make it up to you tomorrow.

I narrow my eyes at the screen, tap tap tap tap on it. I need us to move, to do, to start this wheel spinning until it flies off its axis and destroys everything around us. I hold James’s face in my thoughts, imagine his arms around me. Imagine his voice whispering “patience” in my ear before I elbow him in the stomach because I hate it when he tells me that.

I take a phone off the counter, where someone set it down to go get a refill.

“Did you just steal that guy’s phone?” Pixie asks as we hunch our shoulders against the chill. She has her own phone out, looking for a nearby club.

One can never have enough phones, I think at her. She gives me a secret smile in return.

ANNIE

Three Months Before

I’VE BEEN VENTURING OUT MORE NOW THAT RAFAEL got me a white cane. Coming and going as I please is a luxury I intend to take advantage of. It’s strange—for so long I hated seeing the future because it didn’t belong to me. It belonged to Keane. Now I have my own future, and no idea what to do with it. Fia was always supposed to be with me. She’s not.

I feel lost.

As I trail my fingers along the hall wall I hear voices. I pause—both are hushed but clearly angry. Taking a few steps forward, I lean near a doorframe and listen.

“—you know I’m right!” Cole.

“I don’t! And you don’t know, either. I’m tired of arguing with you.” Sarah sounds exhausted.

“What about Annie? There’s no reason for her to stay here. She can’t accomplish anything. She sees even less than you do, and she’s a huge target. She needs to be placed somewhere else.”

I flinch at the tone of his voice. I didn’t think Cole liked me, but I had no idea he wanted me gone that much. Rafael decided not to set me up somewhere else with a real life and a new identity. He wanted me close.

I was flattered, but lately I’ve realized I’m useless here. It makes me feel pathetic and small, but Cole’s right. There’s no reason for me to stay, other than to be protected.

I’m tired of needing other people to protect me.

“That’s not our call,” Sarah says.

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about! Why isn’t it our call? Why does he get to decide who stays and who goes?”

“You start bankrolling this operation and you can have more say,” Sarah snaps. Something thuds to the ground, too small for a body, and then Cole swears.

“What is this?”

“Give it back.”

“You’re taking these?”

She sounds ashamed. “I haven’t started yet.”

“This is insane, Sarah.”

“How am I supposed to help if I can’t see enough? Rafael has a source on the inside that says Keane has all his Seers go on Adderall.”

“He also has girls killed and thrown into the river. Is that our next step?”

“Aren’t you the one who said we should do whatever we have to, whatever it takes to keep more girls out of his claws? Well, this is my whatever it takes.”

Something small hits the other side of the wall I’m leaning against and I jump, turning and hurrying back to my room. The last thing I want is for Cole to catch me eavesdropping. I can only imagine what he’d say.

I flop onto my bed, tormented by futures both seen and unseen. They feel just out of my grasp, as usual.

“Fia,” I whisper to the empty room, “what should I do?”

Then something changes. I’m still in the dark. It’s not a vision, it can’t be, I don’t see anything. But I’m not on my bed anymore. It has to be a vision.

Someone reaches out and laces his fingers through mine and my world blossoms with color—inside the darkness. It’s color and light and life that I feel inside me instead of seeing outside. I’m wild with giddy joy, a warm heat flaring like something long dormant in my heart has finally been switched on.

His fingers are not much longer than mine, his palm only a bit bigger, rough but warm, and the way our hands fit together …

Holy crap. I’m in love.

That’s when I feel my bed underneath me again and realize I’m back in the present.

I had a vision where someone holds my hand and I know I’m in love with him. It’s the single most romantic thing I have ever experienced.

And it wasn’t even real.

But if I saw it—or felt it, really, because I’ve never had a vision where I was me like that, where I couldn’t see—then it has to happen, right? I rub the palm of my right hand with my left thumb, torn between elation and nerves. Love. I can live with the promise of love. I just wish I knew when. And who.

And, with a sudden sharp ache, I wish more than anything I could tell Eden. It feels wrong to have something like this without her to whisper it to. For a moment I hate Fia for her choice. She not only took herself away from me, she made it impossible for me to ever see my best friend again.

Someone is going to hold my hand, and I’m going to be thrilled. And no one I love will know.

FIA

Three Days Before

“HOW DO YOU DO THAT?” PIXIE ASKS, FROWNING AT me over her drink. I got her a Shirley Temple. She didn’t find it nearly as funny as I do. Last night she managed to scam some alcohol, but not tonight.

“Do what?” I eye the dance floor, annoyed she called me over. I am falling apart. I’ve barely even seen James since we got to New York. I need something, anything to distract me from the waiting. Visions of flames dance in my head, but I cannot light anything on fire yet.

Dancing is the only thing to take the edge off. (I could get in a fight. That’s good, too. Pounding and moving and reacting, always reacting, no room for thought.)

“How do you stop thinking like that?” Pixie asks. “When you’re dancing, everything shuts down. I’ve noticed you doing it a few times, like you’ve switched to autopilot and there aren’t any active thoughts in your brain.”

“Isn’t that the point of dancing?”

“Not for the guys you’re with. You should hear their thoughts.” She scowls, disgusted and miserable, shoulders slouched protectively inward as she stabs her straw through the ice.

I pat her head (four times, four is the magic number and I don’t like it, four feels lonelier than three, no middle to huddle around, but I hate them both) and laugh. “They aren’t people, they’re just bodies. I don’t care what they’re thinking.”

“I can’t tell you how much I wish I could not care.”

I sigh and sit down. “You have one minute to unburden your soul to me before I get too antsy and either hit you or go back to dancing.”

“See, that’s why I like you. You don’t lie.”

“I lie constantly. All the time. I’m nothing but one big mass of lies.” I shouldn’t tell her that. I should tell her that I’m good and obedient and do exactly what I’m told all the time. But I forget around Pixie, because she is lonely and small and fragile. I still don’t know whether or not Keane can trust her, and whether or not that means I can’t. She is such a silly, pointless assignment for me it’s hard to take it seriously.