Page 69 of Static/Cling

“How could I know if I couldn’t crack it?”

And that reminder was the only thing that saved Kassian from hating his brother, because what the hell? He couldn’t crack it? Since when? “What do you mean you couldn’t crack it? Of course you can crack it.”

“I tried.”

“And what makes him think if you couldn’t do it that I can?”

“Because I told him you were the smart one.”

“Gee. Thanks.”

“It saved you being the dead one,” Rufus ground out.

There was no question the room was bugged, and no chance the many cameras on the computer and monitors on the desk in front of Kassian weren’t recording his every move. No way to ask Rufus if he really couldn’t do it, or if he had managed to find a way to make it look like he couldn’t.

Except Rufus really was the smart one.

“Do you remember when you were twelve and you couldn’t ride that dirt bike? And no matter how much we explained it, you just didn’t get it?”

Kassian hadn’t had any issue riding their eldest brother Gerome’s motor bike. He’d been told not to, because the bike was too powerful for him, and he was too small. That hadn’t stopped him. The problem hadn’t been that he couldn’t do it. Ithad been that he absolutely should not have, and doing so was going to get him hurt. Which it inevitably had.

But for the longest time, if he ever got caught taking the bike out, he pretended he was trying to learn how to drive it and failing. And he’d gotten away with it, managing to keep the ruse going for half a summer, but eventually, the signs had been too clear to miss. It hadn’t even been the wipeout or the resultant shattered bones in his foot that had given him away.

It had been the bike itself. A slightly adjusted angle to one of the footrests, a bit of spattered mud under the front fender, it not being parked at the exact angle it had been when he’d taken it out—all of that together, and Gerome had taken a closer look at the gas gauge and the odometer and figured out what was going on.

As soon as he realized Gerome was onto him, to try proving he really did know what he was doing, he’d taken it out to the dunes, ripped up the side of the little valley, and wiped out. One broken bike and one broken foot later, and Gerome had refused to let him get his own dirt bike for the rest of that summer and the following one.

“Remember how pissed off you were about that?”

He did. But he suspected that Rufus’s point was that he could break the encryption on the file perfectly fine. He just hadn’t. But now it was getting dicey, and he worried that, like the bike had given away Kassian’s activities, the signs were all there to show George that Rufus could do it, but wasn’t.

Which made Kassian wonder. Had Rufus lured him here with that near miss? Was this his way of saving his own skin, throwing Kassian, his annoying, talentless little brother to the wolves so he and Randolph and Gerome would be okay?

“So now you get to shine, little brother,” Rufus said. “You get to do what I couldn’t.”

“Which is what?” Break the encryption and be blamed for doxing hundreds of people who just wanted to live a quiet, normal life? Put those people in the hands of the military who would use them until they burnt out? Or worse, the MNR, who would do much worse things to them, trying to figure out how their powers worked.

“Save the day, obviously.” Rufus put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, and didn’t that bring him back to that day, sitting in the sand, in pain, twisted bike next to him, Gerome there, a hand on his shoulder as he checked him over and told him it was okay. He was okay. Everything would be okay. “Save the day,” Rufus said, squeezing again. “Like with the bike.”

He wasn’t sure what else to take away from the bike analogy, because at the end of that day, he’d wrecked the bike, his foot, and his relationship with Gerome for the entirety of his teen years. It had been a disaster and had cost him Gerome’s respect while proving his brother had been right about his reasons all along.

The stress he’d put on all four of them, because he was a stubborn asshole, hadn’t, in the end, been worth it. He hadn’t saved that day by trying to show off. He’d ruined it and almost ruined his family.

Gerome had stuck the trashed bike in the back of the garage and never taken it out again. He didn’t fix it, and he stopped riding himself. He’d become the parent Kassian hadn’t appreciated until much, much later.

But Rufus hadn’t said “save us.” He’d said “save the day.”

Like he had with the bike.

Wreck it?

He scowled at the screen.

Wreck what? The file? He pondered if he could implant some kind of parasite into the file while he pretended to un-encrypt it, one that would devour the information it contained if it wasopened. He doubted it. And even if he could, there would be no way to hide that it had been him who did it. At that point, losing his legs, even a piece at a time, would be the least of his problems.

He sighed, and for a split second, really, really wished he’d brought Bjorn in with him. That would have offered them a completely different—arguably more effective—destructive option.

Still, he was glad he hadn’t, because neither Bjorn nor Leif deserved to be in this position, and where one went, the other would always follow. He sort of wished he had someone—anyone—in his life with that kind of loyalty.

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