Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

I blinked at her. “Uh . . .”

“Because I’ve been the hiring manager here for two years—don’t laugh, I’m young, but I went to business school, and the company knows potential when it comes along. I’ve seen a lot of people come through those doors and run into the gatekeepers like Clarice. She’s supposed to screen out the ones who aren’t safe to be around children, the ones who aren’t competent. Clearly, it’s time to send her back to sensitivity training.” Sophie rolled her eyes. “Some people can’t get it through their damned thick skulls that if you’re willing to see the potential in everyone, you’re in a position to benefit from everyone. You’ll never find a harder, more dedicated, more loyal worker than someone who’s already been passed over by somebody else.”

“You’re running a corporation like a cheer squad?” Sophie had become squad captain when we were sophomores in high school, winning by a clear majority vote on a platform of inclusiveness and not being a jerk without good reason. She didn’t quite have an “everybody into the pool” policy, but under her guidance, our squad had become a lot more diverse and a lot more successful than it had been under the previous regime’s “we like skinny blondes who don’t make good bases but sure can shake their asses” guidelines.

Sophie smiled thinly. “I’m not running the corporation yet. Give me ten years, and maybe I will be. Did you marry him? Because I’ll be honest. I assumed you’d said ‘no’ when he asked, and that he’d murdered you and stuffed your body into a drainage ditch somewhere. It’s not like your absentee parents would ever have noticed.”

Just like that, everything clicked.

Melody West did not come from a warm and loving home, because if she had, I wouldn’t have spent all my time making excuses for the absence of her—of my—parents. My home was warm. My home was loving. It was just that my parents couldn’t come to my school functions any more than they’d come to Verity’s or Alex’s. We were as close to on our own as the system allowed. But that meant people looked at my naturally somewhat dour demeanor and frequent bruises and assumed I was neglected at best, abused at worst. I didn’t work very hard to convince them otherwise. If they thought they had all the answers, they didn’t look any deeper.

Unfortunately, it also meant that when my squad decided I was dating a boy who beat me, they didn’t trust my parents to step in and stop it before I got seriously hurt. My high school career had been peppered with well-meaning interventions aimed at ending a relationship that didn’t exist. When Melody West vanished after graduation . . .

It was easy to understand why they’d drawn the conclusions they had, and I felt terrible for doing that to them.

Not so terrible that I wouldn’t take advantage now that I needed it. I cast my eyes down at my hands, clasping them together in my lap, and mumbled, “I didn’t get murdered.”

“Where is he now?”

I shrugged.

Sophie sighed, relieved. “Mel, did you finally leave him?”

I glanced up, reading her expression quickly before I said, “I was in a bad spot. I couldn’t stay. So I just . . . I ran with what I had on me. The money ran out a couple of days ago. I know I look like hell, but I can work, you know what kind of work ethic I have, and I thought . . . I thought I might feel better if I went to work someplace that’s about making people happy. I thought it might make me happy, too.”

All of it was true, except for the last part. Working at Lowryland wasn’t going to make me happy. It was going to make me harder to find. It was going to buy me the time to figure out what to do next. I needed to disappear before the Covenant used me to find my family.

Sophie nodded. “I can’t do you any special favors just because we have a history.”

“I know. I didn’t expect to find you here.”

“But I can do you the favor Michael Lowry wanted us to do for the entire world: I can give you a chance.” Sophie leaned across the desk. “Do you really want a job?”

“I do.”

“Then welcome to Lowryland,” she said, and held out her hand. “And welcome back to your life.”

I took her hand, and shook it, and smiled. Things were finally going my way.





Two




“If you live a lie too long, it turns into the truth. Be careful which ones you decide deserve that kind of power.”

–Enid Healy

A shitty company apartment five miles outside of Lakeland, Florida

Now

MY ALARM WENT OFF before sunrise, shrieking shrill and piercing in the gloom of my bedroom. Only gloom, not darkness: both my roommates were already up, and while they were generously keeping their voices down until I crawled out of bed, neither of them could see in the dark. The hallway light crept around the edges of my door, painting everything in shades of charcoal.

I rolled onto my side and hit the alarm clock with all the pent-up aggression I’d collected over the past few days. It stopped shrieking. It did not, alas, break. Like all Lowryland Cast Member Housing (capital letters mandatory, unless you wanted an Official Lowryland Branding Lecture), our apartment came equipped with ancient, industrial-strength alarm clocks designed to wake the dead, if necessary. If you could break one, you’d be fined twenty dollars and issued a replacement that had been made less than ten years ago, which meant it could take an iPod hookup and wake you with something less violent than the screeching of a nuclear air raid siren.

(As to why we didn’t just replace them: spot inspections were a thing that happened because, apparently, we couldn’t be trusted not to destroy company property. If one of the managers swung by and found us with an unauthorized alarm clock, we could be fined a lot more than twenty dollars. We’d also get a black mark on our records—all three of our records, even if only one of us had gone to Target for modern technology. Much as we hated the alarms, we hated black marks on our record even more.)

My name is Antimony Price, even if no one calls me that anymore, and sometime in the last eight months, this became my life. I worry about alarm clocks now. I worry about black marks on my record.

I worry about getting out of bed on time.

Groaning, I sat up and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, trying to make them want to open. They did not. Opening was, in fact, low on their list of things to do today, right above “staying open” and “looking at the world.” I respected their right to protest, but had to declare a fiat, since they didn’t really have a choice. I needed to work if I wanted to eat, and I needed to eat if I wanted to stay alive. For all that things had turned to shit since leaving the carnival, I wasn’t ready to lay down and die. Not yet. Not until I knew whether I’d managed to save my family by running when I did.

Most people have seen the footage, either live or on YouTube: a blonde girl in high heels and a sequined dress fighting a giant monster snake on national television, right before declaring war on a shadow organization, shooting the camera, and disappearing. (Oh, heads almost certainly rolled over that. Someone should have killed the feed before it hit the air. The network did kill the feed for all time zones after the first one. But we live in the age of instant gratification, uploads and downloads and viral videos, and once the cat—once the giant dimension-hopping snake—was out of the bag, there was no putting it back. The world was watching.)