Black Heart (Curse Workers 3)

I shoulder on the hoodie and zip it up, then go into the bedroom, where I fold the pictures of Patton up and shove them into the back pocket of my jeans. I put the comb in the other pocket, with the index cards. The pen and hair gel I stick into the front pocket of the hoodie, along with my car keys.

I walk back out to the table and take off my gloves, spreading my fingers out on the pressed wood of the table as I sit.

Yulikova glances at my face and then back at my hands. She picks up my right hand with her gloved fingers and draws it closer to her, turning it palm up.

Jones is watching us, readiness in every line of his body. If I grabbed for the bare skin of her throat, he’d be out of his chair and on us in seconds.

If I grabbed for her throat, he’d be too late. I bet he knows it too.

She uncaps the tube and squirts cold black gel onto the back of my hand. She doesn’t look flustered at all, just calm and efficient. If she thinks of me as anything more dangerous than just another worker kid she’s training, she doesn’t show it.

The bristles of the brush tickle—I’m not used to anything touching my hands so directly—but the paint covers my skin thoroughly, drying to a dull leathery sheen. Yulikova is careful to ink everything, even the pads of my fingers, and I am careful not to move, no matter how much I want to laugh.

“Okay,” she says, capping the tube. “As soon as that dries, we’ll be ready to go. You can relax now.”

I study her face. “You promise that the charges against my mother will be dropped after this, right?”

“It’s the least we can do,” she says. There is nothing in her expression that gives me any reason not to believe her, but her words aren’t exactly a guarantee.

If she’s lying, I know what I have to do. But if she’s not, then I will have thrown away everything for nothing. It’s an impossible choice. The only chance I have is to rattle her into revealing something. “What if I don’t want to join the LMD? I mean, after this operation. What if I decide I’m not cut out for federal agenting?”

That makes her stop in the process of cleaning off the brush in a cup of water. “That would be very difficult for me. My superiors are interested in you. I’m sure you can imagine. A transformation worker is very rare. In fact . . .”

She brings out a stack of familiar papers. The contracts. “I was going to wait to do this later, when we had a few minutes alone, but I think now is the time. My bosses would feel a lot more comfortable if you would go ahead and sign.”

“I thought we agreed to wait until I graduated.”

“This operation has forced my hand.”

I nod. “I see.”

She leans back and pushes her gloved fingers through her mop of gray hair. She must not have gotten all the paint off her glove, because some of it smears like soot over her bangs. “I can understand if you have doubts. Go ahead and think about them, but remember why you first talked about joining us. We can keep you from becoming a prize to be fought over by rival crime families. We can protect you.”

“Who’s going to protect me from you, though?”

“From us? Your family are some of the worst—,” Jones starts, but Yulikova stops his words with a wave of her hand.

“Cassel, this is a real step forward for you. I’m glad you’re asking me this—I’m glad you’re being honest.”

I don’t say anything. I am holding my breath, without really knowing why.

“Of course you feel this way. Listen, I know you’re conflicted. And I know you want to do the right thing. So we’ll keep talking and keep being honest. For my part, I am telling you honestly that if you walk away from the LMD now, my bosses won’t be happy with your decision and they won’t be happy with me.”

I stand up, flexing my fingers, looking for cracks in the faux gloves. They move like a second skin.

“Is this about Lila Zacharov?” Yulikova asks. “The reason you’re hesitating?”

“No!” I say, and then close my eyes for a long moment, counting my breaths. I didn’t rattle Yulikova. She rattled me.

“We always knew you two had a close relationship.” She has tilted her head and is studying my reaction. “She seems like a nice girl.”

I snort.

“Okay, Cassel. She seems like a very ruthless girl whom you like very much. And she also seems like she wouldn’t want you working for the government. But this decision is yours, and you should make it. You and your brother are a lot safer here. She’ll come around if she really cares about you.”

“I don’t want to talk about her,” I say.

Yulikova sighs. “All right. We don’t have to, but you need to tell me whether you’re going to sign.”

There is something reassuring about the stack of paperwork. If they were just going to throw me in prison, they wouldn’t need me to agree to anything. They’d have all the bargaining power once I was behind bars.

I pick up the lanyard and hang it around my neck. Then I grab the headset off the table. I’m not going to be able to figure anything out this way—we could talk forever and Yulikova would never slip up, never reveal anything by mistake.

“The Zacharovs are a crime family, Cassel. They’ll use you up and spit you out if you let them. And her, too. She’s going to have to do things for them that will change her.”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”

Agent Jones stands up and looks at his watch. “It’s almost time to go.”

I glance toward the bedroom. “Should I pack up my things?”

Jones shakes his head. “We’ll come back here tonight before we drop you off at Wallingford. Let you sleep off the blowback and wash off that paint.”

“Thanks,” I say.

He grunts.

All of that sounds possible. I might really be coming back to this room, Yulikova and Jones might really be federal agents trying to figure out how to deal with a kid whose criminal past and valuable skill make him both an asset and a liability. They might really not be planning on double-crossing me.

Time to go all in, one way or the other. Time to decide what I want to believe.

You pays your money and you takes your chance.

“Okay,” I say, sighing. “Give me the papers.” I take the pen out of my hoodie and sign on the dotted line, with a flourish.

Agent Jones’s eyebrows go up. I grin.

Yulikova walks over and looks at the papers, tracing one gloved finger just under my name. She puts the other hand on my shoulder. “We’re going to take good care of you, Cassel. I promise. Welcome to the Licensed Minority Division.”

Promises, promises. I put away the pen. Now that the final decision is made, I feel better. Lighter. The burden of it is removed from my shoulders.

We head out. In the elevator I ask, “Where’s Agent Brennan?”

“Already there,” is Jones’s response. “Setting things up for us.”

We cut through the lobby and go out to the car. When I get in, I make sure to take the same side that I rode in on the way here. As I fumble with my seat belt, I grab my cell phone out of the side well in the door and shove it into my pocket.

“You want to stop for a breakfast burrito or something?” Jones asks.

Last meal. I think it but don’t say the words aloud.

“Not hungry,” I say.

I look out the tinted window at the highway and silently go over all the things I am going to have to do once we arrive at the press conference. I list them all to myself and then list them all again.

“It’s going to be over soon,” Yulikova says.

That’s true. It’s all going to be over soon.

They let me out into the memorial park by myself. I squint against the bright sunlight. I keep my head down as I pass through security, holding up my ID tag. A woman with a clipboard tells me that there’s a courtesy table with coffee and doughnuts for volunteers.

There is a big stage with a blue curtain covering the back. Someone is rigging a mic up to an impressive-looking lectern with the seal of New Jersey on it. A roped VIP section is being set up to one side of the press pit. A couple other people are stacking speakers under the stage, which is fronted by a shorter curtain, this one white.

Behind that is the area where the trailers are, arranged in a semicircle around several tables where volunteers are arranging stacks of leaflets, signage, and T-shirts. Then there’s the far table, with the food on it. Several people are milling around there, talking and laughing. Most of them are wearing headsets like mine.

Yulikova did her homework. The layout is just like the map. I pass by the trailer that Governor Patton’s supposed to use and head into the one that Yulikova marked for me. Inside is a gray sofa, a dressing table, a small bathroom, and a television mounted high on the wall, tuned to a news channel that’s promising a live broadcast of the speech. Two newscasters are talking to each other. Below them is the closed-captioning of what they’re saying, slightly off and on a delay, based on my limited lipreading skills.

I check my phone. It’s seven forty in the morning. Patton’s speech isn’t until nine. I have a little time.

I depress the flimsy lock on the doorknob, then rattle the door a little. It seems to hold, but I don’t trust the lock. I could probably pick it blindfolded.

There’s a crackle in the headphones, and then Agent Brennan’s voice. “Cassel? Are you in?”

“Yeah, everything’s perfect here,” I say into the mouthpiece. “Never better. How about you?”

She laughs. “Don’t get cocky, kid.”

“Duly noted. I guess I just watch TV and wait.”

“You do that. I’ll check with you in fifteen minutes.”

I take off the headset and rest it on the table. It’s hell to just sit here and do nothing, especially when I have so much to do. I want to get started, but I also know that they’re going to be paying attention now. Later they’ll get bored. For now I take out the index cards and pen and amuse myself by figuring out where in the room a camera could be hidden. Not that I am sure there is one. But I figure that if I stick to being as paranoid as possible, I can’t go wrong.

Finally I hear the headset crackle again. “Anything to report?”

“Nada,” I say, picking it up and speaking into the mic. “All good.”

It’s nearly eight. An hour isn’t a lot of time.

“I’ll check in with you in another fifteen,” she says.

“Make it twenty,” I say, hopefully just as casually. Then I find the switch on the headset and turn it off. Since they didn’t specifically tell me not to do that, I figure that even though they probably won’t be happy, they probably won’t come looking for me either.

If they’ve got some kind of GPS tracking thing on me, it’s in the ID tag, the hoodie, or the headset. I’m betting it’s not the ID tag, since it has to be scanned. I take off the hoodie and leave it on the table. Then I go into the bathroom and turn on the taps to muffle any sounds.

I strip off my clothes. I fold them and rest them on the small table with the towels and antibacterial glove soap. I take out and unfold my pictures. Then, naked, I crouch down on my knees and rest my bare hands on my thighs. The floor is cold. I dig my fingers into my skin.

I concentrate on everything I learned over the past week, every detail I know. I concentrate on the photos in front of me and the videos I saw. I bring Governor Patton into my mind’s eye. Then I become him.

It hurts. I can feel everything shift, bones crack, sinews pull, flesh reshape itself. I try very hard not to scream. I mostly succeed.

Just as I’m starting to stand up, the blowback hits.

My skin feels like it’s cracking open, my legs melting. My head feels like it’s the wrong shape and my eyes are at first closed, then wide, seeing everything through a thousand different lenses, as though I am covered in unblinking eyes. Everything is so bright, and all the different textures of pain unfold around me, pulling me under.

It’s so much worse than I remembered.

I don’t know how much time passes before I’m able to move again. It feels like a while. The sink’s flooded, splashing over onto the floor. I wobble to my feet and turn the taps, grabbing for my clothes. The T-shirt and boxers fit badly. I can’t get into the jeans at all.

I look at myself in the mirror, at my bald head and lined face. It’s jarring. It’s him. With my comb and gel I groom the few silver hairs on my head to be just like in the photos.

My hands are shaking.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a transformation worker because it was rare. It was special. If you were one, you were special. That’s all I knew. I never really thought about the actual power much. And then, when I figured out that I was one, I still didn’t really understand. I mean, I knew it was unique and powerful and cool. I knew it was dangerous. I knew it was rare. But I still didn’t really comprehend why it scared powerful people so deeply. Why they wanted me on their side so much.

Now I know why people are afraid of transformation workers. Now I know why they want to control me. Now I get it.

I can walk into someone’s house, kiss their wife, sit down at their table, and eat their dinner. I can lift a passport at an airport, and in twenty minutes it will seem like it’s mine. I can be a blackbird staring in the window. I can be a cat creeping along a ledge. I can go anywhere I want and do the worst things I can imagine, with nothing to ever connect me to those crimes. Today I might look like me, but tomorrow I could look like you. I could be you.

Hell, I’m scared of myself right now.

Holding my phone in one hand and my index cards in the other, edging past where I guess cameras might be so as not to be caught on film, I walk out of the trailer.