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“Huh?”
“You do what I used to do,” he said. “I used to be the one that stayed in place and passed messages. It’s an important job, even if you do it in your pajamas”
I sighed and rubbed my cheek against the rough material of his polo shirt, feeling his chest underneath, the dense muscle. “I don’t mean to complain.”
“Are you thinking we are treating you like a girl? Or that you don’t belong?”
“I’m just anxious to do more than sit here and stare at cameras pointed at nothing.”
“I know,” he said. He smoothed a hand over my back. “I am, too.”
“Is this it?” I asked. It was what I’d been concerned about since Black Friday. “Did Mr. Hendricks find out we were going to smooth things over? Are we stopping him from pointing more fingers, so he’s trying to fish up more dirt on others? What’s going on?”
“He doesn’t have enough dirt to throw, like he thought he did,” Kota said. “I’m thinking he’s getting pretty desperate. So we gave him something that looks like it might be big, but really isn’t anything at all. He’ll have to wait until Monday to use it. In the meantime, we’re preparing.”
“For what?”
“Changes,” he said quietly. “Our only snag is you, though.”
Why wasn’t I surprised? I wiped at my face, but still Kota held me. “Because of my father? Or the school?”
“For a lot of reasons,” he said. He kissed the top of my head and kept his lips there, tucking my head under his chin. “It’s just a big risk. He could easily make a phone call or point a finger at you—and he doesn’t even know the whole of how you would be affected. He doesn’t know that he carries the possibility of taking you down, or at least how strongly we’d fight it if he tried. Don’t worry.”
Maybe that was why they had me playing dispatcher. Maybe it was an important job, like Kota said, but I was the person doing it because if I made a wrong move now, it could bring down everything around me. My father could get a phone call. The police could be notified that we were living alone in our house. The school board could look into my records, and dig deep, only to find my stepmother wasn’t my real mother. They could demand my sister and I go to foster homes.
There were footsteps in the hall, faint ones. I was surprised when they stopped and went still. Usually people just walked in, talking, or I could hear them picking up food from the small display of sandwiches and other things I’d left out for them in the kitchen.
I pulled myself from Kota’s arms and straightened up, looking over the edge of the couch. Kota turned his head to look, too.
It was Luke standing over us. He looked down at Kota and then at me.
The corner of his mouth dipped down for a second, but he wiped the frown away quickly. “Sorry,” he said.
Kota released me and waved his hand. “Don’t be,” he said. “We were just talking. How’d it go?”
Luke looked at me and then at Kota again. He walked around, pushing the laptop I was using aside before he sat heavily on the coffee table in front of us. His hair was tied back in a messy ponytail and his eyes had deep shadows. His jeans and the blue shirt were rumpled.
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “No good,” he said. “I’ve looked everywhere. I can’t find hers or any of our phones in anyone’s house, nowhere in their cars. Not on their person. Mr. Hendricks. Mr. Morris. Rocky. Jay. I even checked a few more Mr. Hendricks sometimes has on his team. Our phones aren’t there.”
Kota frowned. “You’ve gotten that close to all of them?”
“I’ve been in every house,” Luke said, his brown eyes serious. He smoothed a palm over the top of his blond hair. “Victor’s not able to pull any data at all, he can’t recover anything. He’s temporarily disconnected our numbers, but whatever we used to not allow our phone messages to get tapped, they are completely useless. They still got hacked somehow.”
“And it doesn’t appear to be Mr. Hendricks and his team,” Kota said. He picked up his laptop from the couch, but put it on the table next to Luke. “They went to some trouble to replace Sang’s phone.”
“Victor thinks maybe that was the trick,” Luke said. “Her phone was the gateway to figuring out how to do all this. Once her phone was stolen—whenever that was—they had just enough time to hack the rest of our phones.”
I froze on the couch, my hands clenching around the leather of the seat cushion. “This was my fault.”
“No, Sang,” Kota said, waving his hand. “This could have happened to any of our phones.”
“When did you last use yours?” Luke asked Kota.
“Right after Sang left,” Kota said. “I sent out a message to Mr. Blackbourne about Sang going with you. I got an okay from him. That was all.”
“I’m thinking from the moment we weren’t able to call, that’s about when we were hacked,” Luke said. “It adds up to her phone getting stolen.”
“That was quick though,” I said. “I had my phone in my bra for a while. We called the moment we saw Mr. Hendricks. That was the moment I switched my phone from my bra to my pocket. It had to be between the time Gabriel and I went in looking for you…”
“It was crowded,” Luke said. “There were lots of shoppers in that mall.”
“But our phones weren’t calling out then,” I said. “And they’ve done that without switching my phone out. We’ve been having problems.”
“Our signals could be blocked,” Kota said. “Somehow they are blocking our calls.”
“They block our calls and then steal my phone?”
Kota sat up, touching the corner of his glasses. “Or the two things aren’t connected. It could be Mr. Hendricks somehow found a way to block our calls. Whoever stole the phone and hacked our data might be about something else entirely.”
I looked at Luke, the only person I knew who could pick a phone out of my pocket without me noticing. “Who else can do what you do?” I asked quietly.
Luke jerked his head back, and then frowned. “What do you mean, asking that?”
My eyes widened. Did it sound accusing? “No, I just mean, I know you can steal phones from pockets.”
“I didn’t do this,” he said defensively, his voice rising.
“Calm down,” Kota said, pausing in his work to look up at him. “She didn’t mean it like that.”
“I’m tired of everyone asking,” Luke said, pulling away to pace in front of the television. “You think I’d steal them and cause all this uproar? I’m the one trying to find them.”
I glanced at Kota, suddenly afraid to say anything further. What had I said? Had the others been bothering him with questions about how this might have happened?
Luke had disappeared when my phone might have been taken.
And if he didn’t want to find the phones, he could just say he couldn’t find them.
He had access to all of us.
I kept my lips shut, though my suspicions burned inside me. I didn’t want to say anything further, and I didn’t want to even think it, but the more I considered recent actions, he did seem like a likely culprit. Could it be the others had pondered the same thing?
“I’m sure they were just covering their bases,” Kota said.
“Well, I haven’t done anything wrong,” Luke said. Without another word, he stormed around the coffee table toward the kitchen.
Kota got up, looking over the couch at him. “Where are you going?”
“To look for her phone!” Luke cried out. The front door opened, but before Kota and I could stop him, he slammed it shut.
Kota jogged around the couch, heading toward the front door. I followed.
By the time we got outside, Luke was gone. I wasn’t sure how he could have gotten into a car and taken off so quickly. Either he had the motorcycle, which I couldn’t hear, or he’d run off.
Kota stopped on the walkway heading to the drive, scanning the neighborhood. He groaned. “Why would he say that?” he asked. He turned to me, a new pain in his eyes, disappo
inted. “Have people been accusing him?”
“I haven’t,” I said. “Although…I thought perhaps…”
Kota lifted an eyebrow. “Thought what?”
He didn’t know? Had I said some of my suspicions to Mr. Blackbourne? No. Maybe not directly. “I told Mr. Blackbourne about the masks. You know, right? How Luke admitted to it?”
He nodded.
I slid my bare foot against the cold sidewalk. I didn’t want to be the one to pose this question. “I may not have said so out loud, but…I’ve been thinking. What if Luke…is Volto? Like what if the eight masks meant he was saying there would be only eight on the team? What if he stole my phone? He was right there. And before that, he…there were times when…” I tried to present more evidence, but I wasn’t sure where to start.
Kota’s eyes widened. “He would never do that,” he said. “Why would you think such a thing?”
I lifted my hands up, motioning toward the road. “He put the masks on your house, right?”
“He said he did,” Kota said.
“And then again? The second time?”
