#; ftf

[exforma]

🙊

You feel the universe protecting you, guiding you, with every step you take.

It was too easy to get a security pass. Pick someone from the list, find them, find their wallet, find their thumbprints. Less than morally superior tactics were employed, of course, but what choice did you have? None, as you’d already forced yourself to accept. If this man was going to be involved in shady-at-best activity, you think you can get away with making him pay a price for it. So here, in the nation’s capital, you let yourself become the person that your stepfather wanted you to be. Just for a few days, just for a bit. It was his own fault that you’re here, anyway. 

You’d already been to the man’s office. You’d seen the lab he worked in on Friday, you’d looked through strings of code that you didn’t understand. His first security card got you nowhere. 

It was time to look at the second one. The building was labeled as a private company, both by its architectural title as well as its listing on the man’s pass. It was far too busy for a Saturday, on which you’d hoped you would be far less visible than you wound up being. In fact, you weren’t invisible at all; people turned heads at you. They whispered. 

You see someone pick up a phone. That can’t be good.

You’re running now, and you hear people calling after you. Telling you to slow down. Telling you to stop. So much for stealth -- they all seem to know, somehow, that you’re not supposed to be here. 

You have to pause at the scanner that he told you would be there: through the glass doors, left, down the hall, last door on the right. You swipe his card and pull the copy of his fingerprint out of your bag, press it to the scanner-- 

“ROSE!” 

You look up to see strangers at the end of the hall. People you’ve never met before. People that know your name. 

The door asks for an eye-scan. You don’t have that. 

You grab your knives from your bag, heart racing in time with racing steps coming down tile toward you. You shove both knives into the doors, prying them open for just long enough, just a second-- 

The door snaps shut behind you as you yank your knives out. Suddenly, the people’s cries are much quieter, on the other side of the metal doors.

This shouldn’t have been so easy.  Why was it so easy?  Were they relying on secrecy instead of security?  Was this a trap?  Were you lucky?

Where are you? 

You step forward in the room in front of you, completely clueless as what to make of it. 

It looks like a museum. Various artifacts rested in glass cases under dim lighting; swords that looked as though they’d been pulled from fantasy novels, harlequin dolls, a golden ring, knitting needles with skulls at the end. Puppets. 

Puppets? 

Your attention soon falls on the biggest pieces of the room. At the front, stationed in a line, encased in glass just like everything else. Four meteors stand on metal poles, all eerily similar in appearance. You walk closer, reading the plaques in front of them: identifying numbers, and dates.

A-001 12/01/1995.  A-002 12/03/1995.  A-003 12/04/1995. 

A-004 04/13/1996. 

Beside the last meteor, against the wall, was a switch. You hesitate at it, reach for it, draw your hand back. 

You don’t have a choice. 

You flip it. 

A computer screen spanning across a wall comes to life, with a path lighting up the floor, leading to a control panel. You nearly run to it, swipe the security card again, and look to the screen as it unlocks. 

Your heart stops. 

Four pictures hit the screen. You don’t recognize two of them, a boy and a girl, jet black hair and crystal cold eyes. 

But you recognize your picture. 

You recognize Davis’. 

STATUS: SUSTAINED  STATUS: SUSTAINED  STATUS: SUSTAINED  STATUS: UNACCOUNTED 

Your status is unaccounted. 

You direct the screen to your name. More information than you knew was quantifiable flashes across; your phone number, your address, your social security number. Your school, your major, your job. The last time you sent a text message, the last number it was to, where you were when you sent it. 

If they know all of this, how the hell did you get this far? The question comes up in the back of your mind yet again. 

You’re distracted from the screen by one of the glass cases. You’re distracted by the CD-ROM slip. You’re distracted by the printed word “SBURB” plastered across it. 

You know what that word means.

The door is thrown open. You can’t see these people’s faces; they’re shielded, and they have guns. They’re coming towards you. 

You’re unarmed, yet they seem reluctant to approach you. 

Do they know you’re cornered? Do they know you’re helpless? Why aren’t they treating you as such? 

You stand there as they surround you, none coming too close to you. They treat you like a loose canon. They treat you like a bomb that might go off. 

They know your name. 

They, too, know your name, and fear consumes you. You think you break into a sprint, you think you can feel your feet hitting the floor as you run past them, but you’re wrong. You’re not running. You’re not on the ground. You’re above them, and you realize that as you pass them, as you carry yourself out of the building at a pace that scares you all the more. 

You’re flying. 

You’re outside, you’re over rooftops, and the wind hitting your face feels like needles in your skin. You’re sure that people see you. They must see you. What does that mean? 

You have no idea where to go from here. 

You close your eyes, and a thousand scenarios pass through your head. It feels like more than just rationalizing, analyzing, predicting; they feel like a thousand truths that you have to sift through. And you do, until you find the path on which you don’t get caught. 

The path leads you, ultimately, to a diner. At a set time, wrapped in a sweatshirt, hood up, hands tucked into your pockets. You step inside and look around. They’re waiting for you here, you’d called them, you’d told them you needed to talk to them and somehow known that they’d show up. 

You don’t recognize your father. You don’t know your own face well enough. But when you see his mother, when you see his red eyes in hers, the soft curve of her jaw, the way her hair falls... 

You make your way to their booth and slide onto the torn leather seat across from them. Their conversation stops, and for a good minute, they just stare at you. 

“...We thought we’d never see you again.” 

His mother speaks. Your father doesn’t. He’s still staring at you. You can see the overwhelming longing in his eyes, the longing and adoration that probably holds back his words. You should be emotional, you want to be, but you can’t. You’re still in danger. Your emotions are still stifled. 

“I’m not here for a reunion.” Your voice is robotic. The questions are drowning you. “Tell me everything.” 

You can be emotional later.

[exforma]

🙉

Be safe.

That’s what he’d told her. He’d told her to be safe. 

She didn’t know why, but her intuition was sobbing inside of her, clawing at the walls of her mind, desperate for her attention so it could tell her not to do this. Despite its pleas, she ignored it; she stared out the window of the cab and silenced her panic, convinced herself that she was undoubtedly overreacting. 

      But... 

Overreaction or not, her stepfather had been somehow entangled with the government in ways that were financially buried. Even if she wasn’t in danger, that couldn’t mean anything good, could it? What did he need from scientists, anyway? 

Why was her mother listed with them?

That’s why she was going to Washington. To find out. To get answers.

Be safe.

She looked down at her bag, reached in, and slowly pulled the folder out. It had been skimmed down significantly, now only consisting of the list of names and routing numbers, the information that Dirk had found on them, her notes that branched from Dirk’s findings, and the phone number. 

She turned the sheet with the phone number over once in her hands. A small scrap of notebook paper, torn from something unidentifiable, with numbers cut from magazines and taped to the page. Always a good sign, right? 

She thought she might throw up as she finally dialed the numbers. More than a week she’d had it and done nothing, but now, now she had to. 

Be safe, he said. 

But she had to know. 

Rose inhaled a shaking breath as the phone lifted to her ear. It rang once, twice, three times -- before a man answered. 

“Rose? Is that you?” 

He knows your name.

It makes sense that he would. It was in an envelope, addressed to her. But how did he know it was her calling? 

“Rose.”  “Who is this.” 

Her voice is cold, trembling, soft to keep it from traveling to the front of the taxicab. 

“We can’t talk like this. Not about your stepfather. That’s why you’re calling, isn’t it?” “Who is this?”  “I can’t tell you. They could be listening.”

It’s ninety degrees out, but she's shivering. She wants to ask Davis for help. She wants Dirk here with her. More than anything, she doesn’t want to have to do this alone. 

“They’re always watching you, Rose.” 

You’d make him cry if he knew you were taking this on by yourself.

She swallows tears, turning her gaze to the window again. Sobs are crawling up the back of her throat, and she chokes them back when she speaks again. 

“Who is they?”  “Tell us where you are. We’ll come to you.”  We?

They’re strangers, but how else can she get answers? Who else can she turn to? What choice does she have? 

Be safe! 

She doesn’t have one. 

“I’ll be in the capital for a couple of days.”  “D.C.? You’re not safe there, Rose, you’re in danger--”  “That’s the option you get. You can meet me there, or we won’t talk.” 

She could feel the acid in the back of her throat, every bone in her body rejecting the choice she was making. But she had to. She had to carry this weight alone. She owed them that much, she owed everyone.

“Fine, fine. Okay. We’ll be there. Call us in the morning. Don’t use a credit card.”  “Alright.”  “We love you.”  Click.

[exforma]

🙈

They’d spent hours. All they’d found were confusing receipts, no vendor names nor itemized breakdowns, only strings of numbers lining the top of each sheet. Identification numbers without a reference. It was frustrating, and made her claim that Davis was overreacting to the fiscal inconsistencies all the weaker. 

His office was huge, somehow bigger than she’d ever imagined her stepfather needing. It branched out strangely rather than occupying an open space, with nooks and crannies that made it easy to see how receipts have been lost. It was odd, to say the least. The very least. 

Davis is narrating old expense reports. She’s listening, sort of, as best she can from a different hallway. He’s talking about how these same false codes showed up in each month, as far back as 1995, always tied to massive amounts of money. She wonders if anyone has caught this before, she wonders if anyone in this office knows. She wonders if, in some dark closet, Bro’s closest aids are hovering together and asking, “what do we do about the children? They know.”

Her fingers are weaving through files, expenses aligning with various codes from the database codebook that they’d been given, the codebook that didn’t list the expense category that kept showing up with the aforementioned massive amounts of money. And there it was, as she found with a skip of a heartbeat, the five-digit code that the database insisted didn’t exist. 

She allows Davis to drone on about his concern, his disbelief, his suspicion without interruption as she opens the file. Sheet after sheet of unmarked paper, likely hundreds of them, with strings of numbers and names listed below them. The same strings of numbers that were showing up on unmarked receipts. The same handful of names, showing up again and again. 

Her mother’s name. 

And in the back of the file, the list of names, followed by a dash, and another unique string of numbers. She recognized her mother’s; a routing number. A routing number for a bank account. 

If this was where the money was going, what could they have possibly done to earn it? 

“Rose?”

She doesn’t think when she does it. She shuts the file and shoves it in her bag without even realizing she had, until Davis is standing in front of her, worried only by his stepsister’s lack of response. 

“Are you okay...?”

She nods, shutting the drawer she was sifting through. She promises him that she’s fine, and she echoes his concerns of their guardian’s actions as head of his company. She coats her agreement with reassurance and denial of some of his more dramatic conclusions, just like she had the night before.

But unlike the night before, she no longer believes her words;                        she says nothing of the folder she found.

[exforma]

⌚️

@caledscratches

     You try not to leave him waiting too long, so after a quick touch-up of makeup and a half-assed-at-best preparation of his “gift”, you enter his coordinates into your transportalizer to send yourself over to his apartment. 

     In one hand, with your palm flattened under the plate, is a single pancake, with utensils and small cup of syrup sitting on top of it. Your free hand smooths your black halter dress as low heels step down from the platform. 

     “This is the best I can do on such short notice,” you state as you look around.