“Absolutely not,” says Becks.
“Come on,” I say. “Without him, we would have no idea what Let’s Meet is doing.”
“With him, everything we know is what he’s told us. The Chemistry Lab. These packages. The files that are of some type that no one has ever heard of before. The idea of the digital twins.”
“Rodrigo Santos was the one who first brought up the twins.”
“And who pointed us to Rodrigo Santos?”
I laugh. “Even if Matthew had enlisted Rodrigo in a campaign to deceive us, I think he was too scared of you to have lied about anything.”
Becks regards me, something unfathomable in her expression.
“I meant that in a positive way,” I say. “Being scary is an asset. In interrogations and stuff like that.”
She sniffs. “That session with Rodrigo was a goddamn sharing circle.”
“What about the list of profile handles? Matthew delivered on that.”
“He could have randomly pulled them off Let’s Meet’s platform.”
I take a step back from her desk. “Do you seriously think he’s been making all of this up?”
“No. A man like that doesn’t have the creativity.”
“Then why don’t you trust him?”
She flicks her hair back. “This is because you recruited him.”
“It truly isn’t,” I say. “He’s given us no reason to doubt him.”
Again she looks at me in that odd, appraising way. This time I say, “What?”
“Nothing,” she says, followed immediately by: “You’ve been in a…perky mood lately.”
“Have I?”
“You aren’t even annoyed about my insinuation that you can’t be objective when it comes to Matthew.”
“Doesn’t seem worth getting annoyed about.”
“You certainly did the last time I made that point.”
“Endorphins? I’ve been playing really well at Ultimate.” Which is true, if not really responsible for the buoyancy I’ve been feeling since that date-in-all-but-name with Amalia, especially whenever I think about seeing her again. Maybe this dating thing has its merits after all.
“You’re not plotting something, are you?” says Becks. “Some ill-conceived side mission against the synths that will blow up in all our faces.”
I smile at her. “Are you sure you want to be inspiring me?”
She glares back. Then she says, “What do you know about Matthew’s car accident?”
No idea where this conversational switchback is headed, but I’m glad to move on from the reasons for my current state of mind—even aside from the ex-target complications, the thought of Becks finding out about Amalia makes me uneasy. “I’ve told you everything he told me,” I say. “He was driving late at night and skidded off the road. No lasting injuries, but it sounds like the car was all smashed up, and now he doesn’t really like being in confined spaces.”
“Was he alone?”
What kind of question is that? “Yes.” Except—did Matthew ever actually say that to me? “I think so,” I amend. “He’s never mentioned anyone else being in the car with him.”
“There was,” says Becks. “The boy who was driving.”
She sits back in her chair and watches with obvious enjoyment as I try to hinge my lower jaw back into place. “Matthew wasn’t driving?” I say. “But then— Wait. How do you know this?”
“The Mansfield Herald. Local newspaper of Mansfield, Nebraska.”
“I still don’t…” Then I realize: a parenthesis in the email I wrote to her summarizing Matthew’s accident. “Haines Safety Systems.”
Becks nods.
“You found out where Haines was headquartered, so you knew where the accident had taken place. And you knew when, because it was the year of the company’s hundredth anniversary.”
“I realize it’s a murder mystery trope, but it’s really not necessary to explain my deduction process back to me.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m just impressed.” And a tad put-out: Why didn’t I come up with that? Because it never occurred to me to cross-check Matthew’s story. “What did the paper say?”
“Two high school seniors were involved in a car accident. The driver was someone called Drew Wilkins. Matthew was in the passenger seat. Otherwise, what happened sounds consistent with what Matthew told you. It was late at night, the car went off the road, the emergency responders had to cut them out of the wreck. Matthew just erased Drew from the narrative.”
“What happened to him?” I ask, although I suspect I already know.
“Broke his neck.”
I think of what Matthew said about irony, and me, oh god, correcting him. “That could be why. It was too hard for Matthew to talk about him.”
Becks moves aside the copy of The Waves that’s sitting on her desk and picks up the sheaf of papers underneath. She holds them out to me. “Here are the articles. Two on the accident itself, an obituary of Drew Wilkins, a separate story about his nascent-to-the-point-of-nonexistent baseball career, two how is the community coping with this tragedy? pieces filled with the most banal of quotes. Obviously, nothing newsworthy going on in Mansfield. Just as well, because the writing is embarrassingly bad.”
The top sheet is a black-and-white printout of a page from a physical newspaper, a portion of it. The headline reads “Local Teens in Fatal Car Crash.” The photograph below looks almost abstract, the wreckage a blurry blackness defined by the negative space of ground and sky around it, merging into whatever it was that it hit. I flip through the next few sheets. They’re all similar, and evoke a memory of the first time I tried to feed a reel of microfilm into one of the readers in the Margrave library and jammed up the machine. “This is from microfilm.” Which makes sense—Matthew is thirty-seven, so the accident must have been around two decades ago. The online archives of a small town’s newspaper wouldn’t have gone that far back. “You got this from the New York Public Library?”
Becks pauses in a way that, if it were anyone else, I would classify as hesitation. “The library in Mansfield.”
I look down at the papers in my hand. “You went to Nebraska for this? When?”
“Of course not.” Again that pause, a beat longer this time. “I called in a favor.”
“From someone in Nebraska?” That feels almost more implausible—how many people are there even in Nebraska?
“Within reasonable driving distance. Relatively speaking.”
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter. They got us the information.”
I almost let it go, because I’m curious to start reading these articles, but Becks’s use of us holds me back, like the gentle press of a hand on top of mine. “It does matter. This is verifier work, which means we’re in it together.”
The clean lines of her eyebrows slant downward. “Fine,” she says. “It was my brother.”
This is so unexpected that all I can say is “You have a brother?”
“Not so uncommon.”
Her tone makes it sound like she would prefer if it were. I remember the odd exchange we had on the first day of Lunar New Year, when she came into the office and seemed disgruntled to see me there, said that thing about her family being a pain in the ass, and walked right out again. The explanation seems clear now, like I’ve wiped the condensation off a windowpane: she had arranged for someone to meet her there because she thought I was out that day, and so when I showed up, she had to change her plans. And—I’m suddenly sure of it—that person was someone from her family.
“What did you tell him about why you wanted to find out about this?” I ask.
“Nothing. It’s none of his business. I knew he would do it because he hates the fact that he owes me.” She stops. “If there’s nothing further to discuss, we both need to prep for the one p.m. intake.”
I get all the way to the door and then turn around. “Relatively speaking?”
She doesn’t look up from her screen, but I catch her mouth twitch right before she says, “For the fucking love of god.”