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A man answers; not Zacharov. “Is she there?” I ask.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he says gruffly.
“Just tell her I need two more tickets for Wednesday.”
“There’s no one here—”
“Just tell her,” I say.
I have to believe he does.
* * *
Leaning against the brick wall of the building, I start talking. Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.
I don’t play them. I don’t even try. I just start at the beginning and tell them about being the only nonworker in a family of workers. I tell them about Lila and thinking that I’d killed her, about finding myself on the roof.
“How could all of you be curse workers?” Sam asks.
“Working is like green eyes,” Daneca says. “Sometimes it just shows up in families, but if the parents are both workers, worker kids are more likely. Like, look at how almost one percent of Australians are workers, because the country was founded as a worker penal colony, but only, like, one one-hundredth of a percent of people in the U.S. are workers.”
“Oh,” says Sam. I don’t think that he was expecting such a comprehensive answer. I know I wasn’t.
Daneca shrugs.
He turns to me. “So, what kind of worker are you?”
“He’s probably a luck worker,” says Daneca. “Everyone’s a luck worker.”
“He’s not,” Sam says. “He’d tell us that.”
“What I am… doesn’t matter. The point is that my brothers want me to kill this guy and I don’t want to do it.”
“So you’re a death worker,” Sam says.
Daneca punches him in the arm, and despite being huge, he flinches. “Ow.”
I groan. “Look, it really doesn’t matter because I’m not going to work anyone, okay?”
“Can you just bail?” Sam asks. “Skip town?”
I nod for a moment, then shake my head. “Not going to.”
“Let me try to understand,” Sam says. “You believe your brothers can potentially make you kill someone, but you’re going to stick around and let them try. What the hell?”
“I believe,” I say, “that I am a very clever young man with two fantastically clever friends. And I further believe that one of those friends has been looking for an opportunity to display his expertise in fake firearms.”
At that, Sam’s eyes take on an acquisitive gleam. “Really? The guy who’s getting shot has to put the wires through his pants, put the trigger in his pocket or something. And it would have to be timed so it happens at the exact moment as the gunshot. Unless you’re talking about faking death work. That’s a whole lot easier, really.”
“Gunshots only,” I say.
“Wait,” Daneca says. “What is it—exactly—that you’re planning on doing?”
“I have a couple of ideas,” I say, as innocently as possible. “Mostly bad ones.”
We talk through the plan a dozen times at least. We refine it down from the ridiculous to the unlikely to something that might work. Then, instead of going to dinner in the cafeteria, they drive me over to Barron’s house and I show them how to pick a lock.
* * *
