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Well, if he did know the only thing I could do was go on as if I didn’t care. “It’s normal for people to want to stick up for one another in the midst of injustice, Axel.”
He snorted. “You make it sound like you’re banding together against the CCP.”
“If you can’t understand why people might want to look out for one another, I’m not going to be able to help you.”
“Here’s what I’m going to do, Aileen,” said Axel, his tone all self-important like he really was conducting a business deal instead of annoying the crap out of me. I felt like I was in the middle of a visit with my poor grandma in her nursing home, stuck playing along with what she believed was reality now. The thing was, Axel was able to make almost everyone around him believe in his messed-up world. “I’ll make sure Matt gets off, since you seem so fond of him. A gesture of goodwill. This situation will go back to being between you and me.”
I offered him a grudging, “Thank you,” even though I was fuming. He acted like he could just switch Matt’s guilt on and off at will. Probably he would call in on a favour from some other friend. Still, I supposed what really mattered was that I got Matt out of the line of fire.
Axel veered closer to me, so his arm was rubbing against mine as we walked. “And now, it’s time for you to reciprocate with your own gesture of goodwill. Let me visit with your father.”
I would have dearly loved to slap him, but I had a feeling actually ruffling his feathers would make him walk back on what we’d already achieved, and I didn’t want to have to tell Matt I’d screwed up his chances of getting out of this. “This is not a negotiation, Axel, this was always you putting right what you did wrong. My last offer is still my last offer.”
Axel stepped sideways. I shivered when his warmth left my arm, then shivered again in a reaction to a feeling of fear I didn’t understand. “Then you will regret your refusal to negotiate in good faith.”
“Isn’t it against the principles of good business to threaten someone like that?” But by the time I’d said it, he was gone.
I kept walking a while longer in the same direction, until I paused at the sound of footsteps coming from behind. Callie was running after me.
“Please,” she said, “even if you think I’m not going to believe you, tell me what’s going on.”
I had no intention of being secretive, but now it came to it, I didn’t know what I would say.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I said, “but I’m fairly sure things are about to get worse for me.”
Chapter Six
I didn’t trust Axel one bit, so I spent that evening scrounging up th
e printout that listed my year eleven exam results. Dad followed me from room to room until I located it in a pile of papers Dad must have gathered up from the kitchen table at some point and stacked on a nearby bookshelf.
“You’d do better keeping track of where things are if you spent more time organising your paperwork,” Dad told me when I complained about him messing with my stuff. “There should be an empty drawer in the filing cabinet in my workshop. You’d better take the opportunity to bring some order to your life while I’m in a good mood.”
Dad probably didn’t remember he’d offered me the use of that drawer several times before, because that would have indicated a certain degree of order in his own life. I decided now might be a good time to accept the drawer before it became filled with bits of broken robots or something else that would just add to our current state of chaos.
I could smell something off in the little space under our main house even as I was coming down the stairs. Dad had a nerve going off at me when he kept his space like this. I had to wrestle with the little half-window to get it open an inch and claim the tiniest bit of ventilation. A quick search revealed a sandwich that had been sitting on its plate on a shelf long enough to have changed a few different colours. It was hardly distinctive in a clutter of completely uncategorised inventor’s tools and materials: some I recognised, some I didn’t. I would come back to pick that sandwich up when I didn’t have an armful of documents that might actually be important.
On the way back up the stairs, I heard Dad saying his ‘polite goodbye’ to someone on his phone.
“If you’ve got another girlfriend you really don’t have to wait until I leave the room, you know.”
Dad turned to me with such unease in his face I almost thought I’d hit on something by mistake. Sandy had been a fixture for a year but I never really pictured her as his girlfriend. After Marcia, Dad had been making a quick retreat to the next whenever a woman seemed to be getting too serious. Sandy was not going to break the pattern in my view.
“It was just a weird call,” he said. “Someone from the bank, saying there’d been a problem with my account?”
This was much more worrying than the thought of my dad getting some action. “What, like fraud or…?”
“They were a bit vague about it actually, I had to go through this big process to verify my identity and then they just said my balance looked normal and I shouldn’t worry and almost hung up on me.”
Verifying his identity… which would mean he’d have to give them a whole bunch of details that would give them access to his account. “Dad, are you sure whoever you talked to was from the bank?”
“Well who else would they be?”
He sounded aggravated already. I wasn’t going to say this guy from my school who cares far too much about your patent. “People call and try to get your information so they can impersonate you and steal your money. You should call the bank and make sure they really were the ones who just called you.”
“Aileen, you know I hate using phones. I’m not going to sit around on hold for two hours just so I can get some poor bank employee to tell me yeah, I just talked to some other poor bank employee.” He looked green already.
I knew better than to think I could change his mind, and there didn’t seem to be any way I could impersonate him well enough to trick the bank. Maybe I was being too paranoid after all. Axel had his friends in the bank if he wanted to spy on us; why would he start directly calling?
