Fic: The Twelve Labors of Sean Parker [The Social Network][2/3]

[antistar_e]

| then |

He worries at what he calls The Bodyguard Situation for those first couple weeks, like he's picking at a hangnail.

He's at the YMCA before dawn, when he sits up straight and says, "hey," forgetting where he is. The word bounces off the tile and the walls, echoing way too loud, and he cringes. In the tank, the Winklevoss twins stop, the water swirling in slow eddies around their waists, and look up at him with their fog-colored eyes, curious. "Who's the suit that's always following Mark around?"

They look perplexed for half a beat.

"... are you talking about Eduardo?" goes Cameron, and next to him, Tyler skates the flats of his palms over the water's surface, creating a scrim of water as thin as dragonfly wings.

"Yeah," goes Sean, who realizes he hasn't actually heard the dude's name before. "Like, is he a silvertongue or what?"

On the other side of the pool, slacks rolled up to his knees and calves dangling in the shallow end, Divya pipes up. "He fetches a mean pizza," he says, and shows teeth. Divya is not Mark's biggest fan, and Sean isn't sure if it's because they've butted heads over procedural issues or if it's somehow a universal law that people-speakers just don't get along with each other. It would certainly explain why the hell Congress never gets any shit done.

Tyler snorts ungraciously.

Cameron rolls his eyes. "He and Mark ride the subways fourteen hours a day in order to keep our heads afloat," he reminds them, pointed. "They deserve the damn pizza."

"Mark really needs a bodyguard that badly?"

"Uh, yeah," says Divya derisively. "You have talked to the guy, right?"

"Touche," Sean allows.

He lets it go, and gradually, still talking amongst themselves, the twins go back to what they were doing. Sean doesn't think he'll ever get tired of watching them, not really; Cameron and Tyler move in careful, synchronized movements in the middle of the pool, making shapes with their hands and pushing them through the air like they're doing tai-chi, and the water follows where it's bid like it's been polarized.

Without the Winklevoss twins, there'd be no Harvard Connection. Mark is the very first person to admit this.

"They found me," he says, with bald honesty. "And they gave me the idea."

"Why?" Sean asks, curious.

Something passes over Mark's face at that, something edging towards bitter. "They had dreams of competitive sports once," is all he says.

A chill of understanding goes straight down Sean's spine. Of course, being water-walkers, Cameron and Tyler would never be able to join a sports team, to play basketball or do gymnastics or row crew, because they'd have an unfair advantage and nobody wants to compete against a silvertongue. Higher education, competitive sports, equal housing: a lot of things are closed to silvertongues because of what they can do, so the Winklevosses set out to do something about it.

They had money to back them, because their father, Sean learns, is the kind of powerful, influential, rich-cat that he otherwise would have no problem hating on principle, except for the fact Mr. Winklevoss wants and has only ever wanted the best for his sons. He's friends with the president of Harvard University; Cameron and Tyler grew up alongside the Summers children, and routinely, when they get bored, they take the train down to Cambridge to harass Mr. Summers for no reason other than they can and there's nothing the former US Treasury Secretary can do about it.

It was on one of these trips that they found Mark, who, then just seventeen years old, kept crashing Harvard's wireless network from a remote server well off-campus, which in turned caused the whole school a great deal of grief.

"I got a 1600 on the SATs, and they said they'd consider me, but I shouldn't keep my hopes up," is all Mark has to say on the subject, darkly monotone.

So Cameron and Tyler looked into him, the same way they'd looked into Sean before Sean came up to New York to meet them.

"There wasn't a lot to find, to be honest, not like with you," says Tyler around an enormous mouthful of roast beef. Mt Auburn Street has a subterranean cafeteria, which has an industrial-strength stainless steel kitchen and rows of tables that makes Sean think he's back at William Taft, and there's always someone in there. Meals aren't very dignified ordeals; all the utensils are plastic and the paper plates are usually a couple holidays out of date. The one that Tyler's eating off of currently has a Jack-o-Lantern face. "It's like the dude didn't exist before he came out of prodigal nowhere by basically getting nothing wrong on his standardized tests."

"He had a website, though," offers Cameron. "He was using it to test the capabilities of projecting people-speech through Internet mediums, like steaming video. He seemed like the kind of guy we could use."

So they tracked him down, found him living with Erica in low-rent housing in the seedy district of Boston, and offered him a job. The five of them founded the Harvard Connection together; the Winklevoss twins as a single entity, Mark Zuckerberg and Erica Albright as a single identity, and Eduardo Saverin as Mark's partner, which makes Sean wonder what Eduardo's job was before he became Mark's de-facto bodyguard.

The twins stay at the Harvard Connection year-round because they want to; a decision that their parents fully support. And when the holidays come around, they go home. Alice and Dustin, too, have family elsewhere in the United States that they go home to -- pretty much just like they would if the Harvard Connection was a real boarding school.

"That's really weird," Sean decides, watching Cameron and Tyler pile into a taxi at the end of the street. He hasn't voluntarily spent a holiday with his family since he was fifteen years old. He didn't even bother graduating from high school; he just split.

"Their father loves them," says a voice behind him. It's Eduardo, the bodyguard, coming up the steps to stand with him at the mouth of the alley. His voice has the usual edge of dislike in it, and Sean's hackles are about to go up before he recognizes the undercurrent in it; he's wistful about it, too.

"Things not so sunny with you?"

Eduardo cuts him a thin smile. "No. Disowned. Mark's lackey is the furthest from what my mother and father imagined for me."

Sean frowns. "That's rough," he says, because he knows, at least, that his family would welcome him if he ever truly needed to go home. Granted, their love is completely conditional on the fact that Sean keep his head down and be exactly what they want him to be, and Sean's been broke, homeless, starving, and alone, but he's never been that desperate.

It earns him a curious look, like Eduardo honestly wasn't expecting Sean's sympathy. They turn together, going back down the stairs and into Mt Auburn Street. "It really isn't," he goes finally, and his eyes flick away, where, down the hallway, Mark's head comes up like one of Pavlov's dogs hearing a ringing bell, and looks in their direction.

Sean's been looking for a way to ingratiate himself with the Harvard Connection on a large scale since he arrived, so at midnight on New Years, he decides the most brilliant idea is to kiss everybody at least once. He's not quite drunk enough for it, but he does it anyway, because he's Sean I Founded Napster When I was Nineteen Parker and it'll make a great story to tell later.

Some people, like Christy, kiss him back enthusiastically, digging her Edward Scissorhand nails into his scalp in retaliation, and others, like Mark, bat at him feebly in protest but let him peck their mouths. Some people, like Dustin, kiss him before he can kiss them, taking special care to make loud, slobbering noises like a dog until the bottom half of Sean's face is slick with spit and they're too busy collapsing like a card tower, laughing so hard their stomachs spasm, to kiss anymore.

When he tries to kiss Eduardo, he just gets arms barred across his chest, and a very dry, "No thanks, once is enough."

It's odd, because Sean doesn't think he kissed Eduardo already, but whatever. Maybe he lost track.

One of the interesting things about living in Mt Auburn Street with fifteen to twenty other silvertongues is that, every two weeks, everybody gathers in the cafeteria early in the morning to dutifully fill out their government questionnaires.

Sean doesn't quite know how to describe the atmosphere at these get-togethers, because the mood can be anywhere from resentful, like each one of them is feeling like they're on the end of a leash, to practically jovial, as the registered silvertongues pass a hot pot of coffee around and gleefully mark all the boxes they're supposed to mark to indicate that they're timid, law-abiding little citizens getting by on the BIA's tender, loving care.

"I take great pleasure in looking forward to the day when I can answer these completely outrageously and they can't do a damn thing about it," says Christy at one of these. "'Have you had any altercations in the past fourteen days that might be considered unlawful? If so, please specifiy'. Yes, I did. I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, exposed Bonnie and Clyde in public, and made out with a bald eagle in the name of freedom!"

"I look forward to the day when I don't have to fill these out at all," says Alice, which sobers Christy right up.

Sean really has nothing to do at these things besides drink coffee, and he's surprised to find he's not the only one. Eduardo doesn't fill out questionnaires, either; Sean's starting to suspect that he's not actually a silvertongue insomuch as he's Mark's better, more personable, hygienic other half.

But there's another unregistered silvertongue living in Mt Auburn Street: Divya Narendra.

"Was your nurse faulty, too?" Sean asks him, surprised; the only reason he's unregistered is because the nurse with the ear trumpet present at his birth simply just didn't hear the silver word under his tongue. They lean up against the kitchen counters, out of earshot of everybody else, who are bent over their forms with their No. 2 pencils.

Occasionally, one of them will go replace the pot of coffee going around with a fresh one.

Divya shakes his head. "Not faulty, just paid off," he says. His eyes are as black as beetle shells. People-speaking is one of the two branches of silvertongue that doesn't manifest itself in eye color. Thing-speaking is the other one. "My parents gave the nurse with the ear trumpet a hefty bribe in order to give me a clean bill of health."

"That was ... nice of them," Sean says diplomatically.

The corner of Divya's mouth twitches up, rueful. "They said they just wanted to give me a chance at an extraordinary life, without the restraints of government registration. Which worked, up until I got my acceptance letter to Harvard."

"Oi, waitress!" somebody at the table shouts. It's Christy, waving the empty pot of coffee.

Sean retrieves it from her and replaces it with a new one, rolling his eyes when she leers at him. Going back into the kitchen, he asks, "What changed your mind?"

"I met Cameron and Tyler at the freshmen address. Mr. Summers gave us this huge, long soliloquy on how Harvard is the time to let our imaginations run away with us." He draws himself up, taking on an affected air that Sean assumes is supposed to be a caricature of the Harvard president. "Harvard students believe," he says, drawling out 'Harvard' so it sounds like 'hah-vard'. "That it is better to create a job than it is to find one."

He drops the persona, giving Sean a droll look. "I didn't even last the semester. I told my parents thanks, but no thanks. Their idea of an extraordinary life and my idea of an extraordinary life really had nothing to do with each other. If I wanted to create my own job, then I had to do it on my own merit, which meant that I had to do it openly, as a silvertongue. Cam and Ty were the first people who made me think that not only was that possible, it was also perfectly okay."

"So here you are," Sean finishes for him. "With the Harvard Connection --"

"Working fourteen hour days to keep my own head afloat and to volunteer with kids who never had my opportunities," Divya agrees.

"-- and Mark."

"And Mark." His voice turns dry. In unison, they cast another glance out at the table. Sean can just make out the curly crown of Mark's head around Bobby's general bulk. "He's as classy as a cockroach," Divya continues. "And I hate his guts, but he's brilliant. You don't have to start riots to enact change; change starts so much smaller than that. It's when we teach people that laughing at a joke at the expense of silvertongues, or the disabled, or gays -- that's not okay. You stop laughing at the jokes, and then you stop making them. That's how you teach respect. If there's anyone who can prove to the world that being a silvertongue is not a handicap, it's us, doing this. With Mark Zuckerberg as our boss-man."

Sean nods back, understanding what he means. The thing about having the gift of speech is that if you're going to talk, then someone should be listening. Mark is so used to his power that it never occurred to him to learn how to talk to people just for the sake of talking; it's why he comes off monosyllabic and antagonistic. He doesn't know how to listen.

"You know, bro," he says, turning to Divya and tilting his head. "I don't think I've ever heard you use people-speech, either."

Divya is quiet for a long moment, his brows furrowed and his gaze locked on some middle point in the distance. Then he says, "Have you ever heard of transference?"

Sean stands up a little straighter. "In theory, yes," he hedges.

As a child, he used to secretively pour over the brief blurbs they had about silvertonguing in his textbooks, trying to find something that resonated with him. It wasn't until his sophomore year of high school that he realized his textbooks all had the same watered-down view, so he set off to find one of his own. Transference was one of the things he read about, because it had affected the political climate in the Crusades-era Mediterranean, where most of the world powers at the time were all people-speakers.

"It's the concept that every time we speak to something, be it the wind or the water or people or," he inclines his head in Sean's direction, "to inanimate objects, then we leave a little bit of ourselves in them. It would explain why it's so much easier to talk to something after we've already talked to it once. But, at the same time, you can see how this would become a major problem for people-speakers. If we use our speech on someone once, then," he seesaws a hand back and forth. "Theoretically, we leave a little bit of ourselves in them. They will never be able to forget us."

"That'd be really handy on a campaign trail."

"You got it in one," says Divya. "And less handy when you're trying not to attract attention to yourself."

Sean completes the thought for him. "That's why you don't use your people-speech. You're afraid of transference."

Again, a pause. "Yes and no," he says, speaking slowly, like he's still trying to piece his thoughts together. "It's less ..." He falters and then changes tract. "What do you think happens when a people-speaker tries to people-speak another silvertongue? When you try to use your speech on someone who's made of the same material you are?" Jiva, Sean thinks. "What happens then?"

Sean just lifts his hands, perplexed.

"I've been trying to find a scientific study done on it pretty much since I joined up with the Harvard Connection, but it's hard to find reliable research concerning matters of the soul." He folds his arms across his chest, drumming his fingernails on his biceps. "Too many of them like to speculate on whether or not we have them at all. But when people-speakers use their speech on another silvertongue -- the both of them made of the same spiritual alloy," jiva, Sean thinks again, "then there's the slight chance that their souls will ..." His mouth makes a funny shape, like it's trying to revolt against the word that's about to come out of it. "Bond."

"Soul-bonding?" Sean lifts his eyebrows.

"Every thought, word, action, and memory becomes shared. Slight chance," Divya reiterates. "But it's the same way you have a slight chance of getting struck by lightning. It's really unlikely, but you're still not going to go jogging in the rain holding a lightning rod. Likewise, I don't go around using my people-speech unless I know for certain the person I'm using it on isn't a silvertongue." He shrugs. "Just in case."

The loud scraping of chairs out in the cafeteria signals that the others are finishing up with their questionnaires.

Sean claps Divya on the back, half in a show of solidarity and half in thanks for what he confided in him just now. "I wonder how many of us there are," he says, switching the subject. "Unregistered silvertongues, I mean."

"There are probably more than we realize," Divya goes, gamely. "Ear-trumpet nursing is probably one of the most corrupted professions, along with the public records office and limo drivers. The amount of bribes they receive annually probably edges into the ridiculous."

"And us?" Sean asks, curious, thinking of Erica saying, empathy and common human decency cost money, and everyone's feeling broke. "How corrupted are we?"

"Corruption depends on who has the most material and who's going to write the story later," says Divya immediately. "The same way war stories are always written by the victor. Here, do you want the last of the coffee?"

At the beginning of February, Chris Hughes comes home.

Sean's in the rec room, setting up a ping pong table with Dustin's help. At least, that's the theory; it's more like Dustin's sort of vaguely handing him things while making doe eyes at Stephanie Attis, who's reading Scaramouche with her legs drawn up under her on one of the couches.

"Why do we need a ping pong table, anyway?" Sean huffs.

"Mt Auburn Street, Sean," Dustin stresses. "It's not Mt Auburn Street without a ping pong table. Actually," he admits, when Sean just raises an eyebrow at him. "I think it's Mark's way of giving the middle finger to somebody, but I don't know who. There are a lot of people Mark likes giving the middle finger to. Throw a dart in a crowded room, and you'll probably hit somebody who's pissed Mark off."

And then footsteps come pounding down the hall, accompanied by loud girl shrieks, and before either of them have the time to do more than lift their heads, Christy and Alice come slamming into the doorway on their sock feet, jostling each other to fit. Their voices overlap each other, exuberant.

"Chris is home!"

"Chris is back! Come on!"

"Eduardo's getting gyros!"

"Food! Food! Food!"

Dustin makes a high-pitched noise like a tire deflating and flails his hands at them, vocalizing his delight in a series of non-words. Alice beams so wide it's like her mouth takes up her entire face, and Christy drags her off, their voices echoing back as they find someone else to spread the good news to.

"Who's Chris?" seems like an intelligent question to ask at this juncture. "And where has he been?"

Chris, Sean learns, has been in Chicago since November, schmoozing with the Illinois Senators and gathering information on the political environment for the upcoming 2004 elections, which will determine the type of treatment silvertongues can expect for the next four years of American presidency. From this, Sean assumes that Chris is a people-speaker, so the truth, when he hears it, comes as a complete surprise.

Chris Hughes isn't a silvertongue at all.

"He's our secret weapon!" says Dustin excitedly. "Our super-stealthy ninja warrior!"

"What Dustin means," pipes up Stephanie, hooking her finger in between the pages of her book to mark her place and standing up. "Is that because he's perfectly normal, he can go places the rest of us can't."

"Like a spy!" Dustin beams at her.

She looks amused, but concedes the point. "Like a spy. He provides us with information that we can't get otherwise, because the government always communicates with us through that filter of 'there, there, little ones, let Uncle Sam take care of you now. Don't ask questions.' It's infuriating, so we have Chris circumnavigate it."

The three of them leave the ping pong table where it is, still only half-assembled, and head down to the cafeteria. There, Chris -- a slender man Dustin's age with a full head of blonde hair and very straight teeth -- sits in the middle of at least half of Mt Auburn Street like a king holding court.

He's talking very rapidly, "-- screwed either way. All the candidates whose platforms I studied at length are too focused on foreign affairs to have much time for us. Sweeping the internal affairs under the rug seems to be the method of choice this go-around."

"Do you think Bush will get reelected?" Divya demands.

Chris's mouth thins at that. "It's likely."

Such is the look on his face that Dustin breaks, giving a great shout of "Christopher Hughes!" that echoes and makes everyone except Bobby the door guy jump. Chris only just has time to get to his feet before Dustin clambers over the tables to get to him, throwing his arms around his neck. Sean imagines that if Dustin's geese were here, they'd be echoing Dustin's delight by clamoring and honking so hard nobody could hear themselves think.

They're still playing catch-up when Eduardo's arrival is heralded by a sudden, intense waft of the smell of Greek seasoning.

He appears in the doorway, arms laid down with three dozen foil-wrapped gyros.

They throw an impromptu celebration up on the roof, with folding chairs dug out of storage, big thick quilts they tug and wrestle over their laps, and a fire pit that Christy lights with a snap of her fingers, sparks catching briefly at the yellow of her eyes. Up here is one of Sean's favorite places to be; granted, there's not much of a view, unless you really like parking lots, but it's got a real summer campfire feel to it, like they should be roasting s'mores and singing kumbayah. It feels like the kind of place you'd go only with your real friends.

Usually, they come up here late at night, after most of the Brooklyn kids have gone home, to sit around the fire and drink and talk story. It's unspoken that during these times, nobody is boss-man or boss-lady or aunts or uncles, and so they talk like peers, playing haphazard games of I Never and asking questions, like the time they all got to discussing what they'd do if they knew they were going to die the next day. ("I," says Sean grandly. "Would take ecstasy and have sex. If it's the last time you're going to have sex, you should definitely do it hyped up on ecstasy, because I hear it's the most unreal experience and will completely ruin you for all sex you ever have again. So! Do it last."

Eduardo says acidly, "I never took you for the type who needs an excuse to take ecstasy and sleep with anything that moves," which earns him a woah, down, boy, from Christy.

Sean claps a hand to his heart. "You wound me, sir!" he protests.

"Have you ever been on a date in your life?" Eduardo continues. Sean wonders if he's a nasty drunk, or if he's just usually that nasty and is too professional most of the time to vocalize it.

"Yes," says Sean immediately. "Her name was Rin. She was a Victoria's Secret model." Which sets him off on the story about Roy Raymond and the Golden Gate Bridge, because that one never stops being deeply metaphorical and shit. Don't get him wrong, he adores women. He thinks women are, rightly, the most amazing things that were ever put on this earth. He loves having sex with them and he likes to think the feeling's mutual, and he even stays until morning, but while Sean is a fantastic lay, thank you very much, he doesn't actually respect himself enough to date women. He thinks they deserve better, and he's usually right.)

Sean takes the opportunity when he sees it, and when a spot opens up next to Chris, he flops himself down into it.

"Sean Parker," he introduces himself. He didn't think to grab Chris a new beer, but his has barely been touched, so he offers his Solo cup instead.

Chris nods, acknowledging, but waves off the beer. People have been plying him with congratulatory drinks since the alcohol showed up. "The new guy," he goes. "I heard about you. Nice to meet you."

"You should have heard the commotion earlier when the news came in you were back, dude," Sean nudges him. "It was like the prodigal son returned."

"I doubt that," says Chris, but the tips of his ears go pink, pleased.

He, Sean learns, is in charge of the Harvard Connection's public outreach. The threads of bureaucracy that Mark and Erica like to tangle up, he carefully unknots.

"Humans have voices too," Chris says. "And our own way of speech. For too long, we've been using our speech to send messages of hate and intolerance. Silvertongues don't have to stand up and fight the dominant power on their own."

Sean nods, because throughout his life, he's met all walks of humans with opinions on silvertongues; humans who vocally dislike them, talking them down in the same breath they talk down the blacks, the gays, the immigrants. You have people who don't like or dislike them. You have people who are their friends, but only conditionally, and out of all humans, those are probably the worst: the so-called friends who say things like, "you're fine the way you are, except I don't trust being alone in a tent with you at night." They're the ones that do the most damage, like termites eating away at a house's foundations.

And then you have people like Chris.

"He's so ... genuine," he enthuses to Christy, tipsy enough to be honest, and she smiles at him like she thinks he's adorable, reaching out to pat his curly head.

"Yes," she says musingly, letting him pillow his head on her shoulder. "It's kind of sad that it should be that shocking, isn't it? That it's harder to find someone who doesn't have a deep-rooted set of prejudices against us?"

"Mmhmm."

"It doesn't help that silvertonguing falls along race lines, either," Christy continues, warming to this topic. Curious, Sean sits up, because this tingles familiarly in the back of his mind: he maybe remembers reading something about this when he was younger, sneakily fishing for pamphlets in the doctor's office: How At Risk at Your Children for the Silvertongue Condition? "They did some kind of study in the 50s, right as the civil rights movement was really beginning to pick up. It was a classic strategy: the richest 1% of the population trying to find some 'scientific' method of justifying their prejudices, because it takes less effort than actually changing their own behavior."

The folding chair on the other side of Sean creaks as Mark joins their huddle, shoulders bunched up against the cold. Sean offers him the tail end of his blanket.

"Problem is," says Christy, catching their attention again. "It's true. Silvertonguing is genetic, so certain types of speech are more prominent in different geographic locations, depending on where they were considered most useful. So different forms of speech are more common in different races. You can find all types here in America," she gestures around the fire to encompass the types of silvertongues represented in this tableau alone; water-walkers, fire-talkers, people- and thing-speakers. "Because America's a melting pot of race and culture. But, for example, water-walkers? You can trace their ancestry back to the Nordic lands."

Unbidden, Sean looks over at ferret-faced Gretchen, sitting with Erica and Eduardo on the other side of the fire. Unlike the Winklevoss twins, who are most comfortable with moving water, Gretchen's brand of water-walking specializes in ice.

"The same way everybody with blue eyes can follow their lineage back to a single ancestor, all wind-talkers have a common ancestor, who lived in the high steppes of Mongolia, so you'll find a lot of wind-talkers in the Far East. As for fire-talkers, ancient kingdoms in the Middle East and Southeast Asia used to breed us as soldiers for their armies, so we've always run really strong there. It's why there's so much flames-of-tongue imagery in early Christianity and Islam."

"Aren't you Chinese?" asks Mark, frowning at her.

She rolls her eyes so hard the whites show. "I'm Cambodian, you ass," she says, and points a warning finger at him. "And don't even get me started on the anti-Zionist propaganda I can cite that went to great lengths to prove that people-speaking, though a global condition, runs particularly strong in Jewish families."

Mark shrugs at that. "That's a perfectly acceptable thing to assert," he says unapologetically. "It's like saying that Stephanie Attis is fat. Because she is. Exactly my point," he goes quickly, when Christy lifts a palm like she's going in for a smack, eyes wide with outrage. "Fat is not synonymous with ugly, disgusting, or undesirable: you've simply been indoctrinated to think it does. It is a physical description of her attributes, just like 'silvertongue' and 'people-speaker' do not automatically mean sneaky, sly, or money-mongering!"

His voice rises up into a shout on the end of this, incensed, and Eduardo materializes behind Mark like there's a little bell somewhere that summons him.

"Okay, guys, time to go," he says, digging his fingers under Mark's armpits and hauling him up. "We can argue all we want about race politics when we're sober."

Mark gives a token protest concealed by an equally token insult, which Eduardo tolerates good-naturedly.

Because they were just talking about it, Sean tilts his head, taking the opportunity to study Eduardo. He could almost pass as white, he thinks, and if he'd kept to his aspirations of Madison Avenue the way Mr. Saverin had wanted, people could have easily looked at him and seen a fit, rich, white man, because that's what they'd been culturally conditioned to see.

The truth, Sean sees with all the soothsaying skills of the very drunk, is in the eyebrows. Eduardo's eyebrows are just too thick. And there's the dark flush of brown skin around the edges of his fingernails. He's thinking Hispanic, maybe, or Cuban, before he remembers that he's seen Eduardo spell "Brazil" with an 's' before.

I suppose I could just ask, he thinks, but it's almost more fun to figure it out on his own.

Eduardo hauls Mark off, saying good night and welcome home to Chris as they go. Distractedly, Christy pulls at her underwire, and her mouth turns down at the end in a moue of disappointment.

"How are Bonnie and Clyde today?" Sean asks her, mouthing at the rim of his cup.

"Lopsided," she replies, tugging some. Her fingers slip over the worn, red lace of her bra, the collar of her shirt stretched so she could reach. Sean appreciates the view. "Again."

Talking to Christy is sometimes a lot like talking to three people at once: there's Christy herself, yellow-eyed and gorgeous, and then there's Bonnie, her left boob, and Clyde, her right boob. Clyde's bigger than Bonnie, which causes the three of them no end of drama. "It's embarrassing," Christy always complains, throwing her hands up when people tell her they honestly can't tell the difference. "He's a 38C and she's a 36C, how can you not see that? Clyde's an outward representation of my dominant personality, and he makes me so strange looking. I'm like freaking Quasimodo, all right, always leaning to one side. Ma-a-a-aster," she goes, flopping around with an exaggerated limp like Igor, which is mixing up her classical allusions some, but.

Every time she gets sent somewhere, she'll grab whoever's closest to the exit on the way out and go, "am I even?"

The answer is always yes, no matter if it's apparent that she's lined the cups of her bra with nylon. Even Mark knows better than to lie to her, and Mark has never given the socially-acceptable answer to anything in his life.

"You look lovely by firelight," Chris tells her patiently, as Sean pushes himself up and more-or-less steadily goes to get her another drink. The smoke is making his eyes itch and his lungs feel tight; he sends out a question in his head and gets an answer from his inhaler, tucked in the side pocket of his duffel three floors down.

He sits down next to Christy, coughing and waving the smoke away. He picks up her iPod from on top of the blanket and immediately tabs over to the artists, looking for familiar names, the way you always do when you obtain an mp3 player that isn't yours.

Her iPod, it turns out, is full of self-questing, soul-pain music; Linkin Park and Evanescence and other bands favored mostly by fourteen-year-olds with a brand new blooming existential awareness.

He doesn't even say anything; Christy takes one look at the expression on his face and snatches it out of his hands, a movement that rips her earbuds from her ears and makes her grimace. "Don't judge!" she goes flippantly. Sean lifts his eyebrows up at her, so she huffs, "Bonnie doesn't approve," and, "fuck you," as an afterthought, and walks off, ponytail swinging behind her. A snap of her fingers sends Sean skittering out of the way of a hot flush of embers.

Beating sparks off the cuffs of his pants, he cuts a look over at Chris, who looks deeply unsympathetic. "She's kind of crazy, you know that, right?"

"No, she isn't," says Chris instantaneously, and looks at him, clear-eyed and steady. "Just because we don't really understand what goes on in her head doesn't make her crazy."

Around the time the community college goes off for spring break, Sean is finally entrusted with his first real job as a member of the Harvard Connection.

"We need you to lead a raid into this facility here," Mark points at a grid of Brooklyn on his laptop screen, indicating a warehouse right on the water's edge. "It's BIA property," he continues in that sharp, clipped way he gets when he is all Mark Zuckerberg, youngest mob boss in the history of, like, ever, which answers Sean's next question. The government is full of amateurs, he thinks dryly. Dockside warehouses, really? You might as well scream, we solemnly swear we are up to no good! "We have reason to believe they're holding a silvertongue there."

Sean blinks. "Like, prisoner?" he goes, startled.

Mark nods shortly, saying, "I'm sure they call it something else," and then spares him a wry look. "Don't tell me you're actually surprised, Sean," he says. "You're the one with all the conspiracy theories about acts of mass government cruelty. I thought you'd be the first to leap on the bandwagon when proof actually turned up."

"Well, yes, but." Sean snaps his mouth shut, realizing he doesn't know how he was going to finish that sentence.

This is his chance to live up to the claim he made at that first meeting with Mark, and his chance to live down Eduardo's darkly muttered, we don't need him. He agrees without missing a beat.

The plan is this: because it's spring break, the Harvard Connection will have all hands on deck, which is why it's the opportune time to do a raid of this profile; it'll be easier to work around everyone's schedules. While Sean and a couple others are sneaking into the facility to spring out their errant silvertongue (Sharon Trotsky, Sean learns; she's sixteen years old, has a short-ish pixie brown haircut, and was reported missing by the members of her neighborhood softball team, who learned that Sharon was an unregistered beast-speaker just a few days before she disappeared,) the rest of them are going to systematically commit small, petty crimes all over Brooklyn to keep NYPD busy and up to their necks in reports, so that nobody will look too closely if something out of the ordinary happens down at a dockside warehouse.

"I knew you guys were criminals!" Sean says, feeling giddy with anticipation.

Covering his mouth with a rag and testing the pressure in a can of red spray paint, Chris says, "Of course we're criminals," with a voice as dry as dust. "Anyone who goes against the status quo is a criminal. So, yeah, I guess that basically makes us the mob."

Sean's allowed to pick his own team. He foregoes Christy ("the plan is stealth, woman, and burning the place down like it's 28 Days Later is not stealthy,") and instead picks Bobby and Gretchen, because there's no such thing as too much protection detail, not when it's Sean Parker.

"Seems legit," is Mark's assessment.

The raid goes down on the Friday of spring break, during peak party hours, after a busy day of vandalism, disturbance of the peace, and unsolicited acts of silvertonguing ("I wanted to blow something up!" Christy says in her defense, leaning on Eduardo and hobbling; she'd twisted her ankle in the ensuing police chase. "Oh, come on, fires in trashcans never hurt anyone.")

The docks are completely quiet, the weekday workers home early and the weekend workers not here yet, and it's almost no trouble at all to sneak past the guard and find the target warehouse. There are several large, white, nondescript vans parked out front in a row, but when Sean closes his eyes and casts his mind inside, none of the things he touches say I belong to a person, so that rules out the possibility of a heavy guard presence. Except --

There. A girl's golden hoop earrings, a sweet sixteen present from a grandmother whose hands trembled with Parkinsons's when she put them in a gift box.

"Found her," he whispers, opening his eyes and reconciling the voice with his current location. "She's on the second floor." He turns and looks over his shoulder, mind catching on the familiar voices of the guns the two of them cradle in their hands. "Do we even know what the point of the BIA is? Like, within the US government?"

"The Bureau of Internal Affairs?" says Gretchen. "I know that they've been mishandling Native American policy since before President Andrew Jackson got it into his head that a winter march through the Oklahoma countryside was a good idea."

"Fabulous," grumbles Sean. "You guys ready?"

"Yes," says Gretchen.

"..." says Bobby.

Like Christy, Bobby's a fire-talker, but unlike her, he's outgrown the need to use it every chance he gets, which makes him less exciting but also more reliable. Sean wouldn't even have known about it if only Christy hadn't told him, because he's never seen Bobby use his fire-speech for anything.

Gretchen ... okay, Sean mostly picked Gretchen because she's fascinating, and he kind of wanted to get to know her better. She is one of maybe three people over the age of twenty-five who lives at Mt Auburn Street full-time: she was a teenager when the Albrecht case dominated the world news, when most kids her age were set in their ways, indoctrinated into the same beliefs of their parents -- that silvertongues were something to be ignored, not looked at directly, or otherwise pitied. Gretchen, however, took to the case like a shark smelling blood in the water, and started thinking outside the box.

She was in her second year of law school when the United States declared its war on terrorism, and she dropped out in order to serve her country, because it was the honorable thing to do.

She was only overseas in Iraq for a month before she was given an honorable discharge and sent home, because someone, somewhere, forgot to cross a t and dot an i and neglected to check the box that said "silvertongue" in Gretchen's file.

I saved the lives of three men in my platoon, she told him, with a fierce, hard, quiet kind of dignity. I spoke Urdu and Pashtu and I never, never did anything that could cause harm to a civilian's life, and they discharged me for putting ice cubes in our water canteens in the middle of the fucking desert.

That's a really good reason to hate the US government, he said.

No it isn't, she replied. It is, however, a good reason to change the US government. She spread out her hands, as if to say, 'so here I am.'

They go in. As quietly as possible, Sean tells the security cameras that something incredibly interesting is happening over there, yeah, no, just keep looking over there, I swear I saw something, and he keeps Bobby and Gretchen in his peripheral as they climb the back staircase. The amount of thing-speaking that Sean's trying to juggle at once -- asking doors to unlock, telling cameras to look away, listening to the guns at his back in case they're suddenly turned on something, and listening to the storytelling of Sharon's earrings -- makes his head throb like a bad hangover.

It's worth it, though, when he puts his hand on the lock of a door and asks it to please open up, and it does, letting light spill in across a bare mattress on the floor and a short-haired girl in a ragged softball uniform.

"Sharon Trotsky?" Sean asks, crouching down to get eye level, the way you do with children and frightened animals.

She nods uncertainly, eyes flicking from him to Bobby and Gretchen and back again. They're beast-speaker eyes, faint and red, but he can see how maybe people could have mistaken it for a light brown all her life.

"I'm Sean. I'm with the Harvard Connection. We're going to get you out of here, okay?"

They give Sharon a day to settle in and recover from her unexpected stint in captivity ("I did everything they told me to," she tells Erica and Eduardo, sitting curled in the armchair in Mark's study with a mug of cocoa in her hands. Mark's not there, because, and Sean will always quote this, your face will scare her off, Mark, she's just had a horrible ordeal and you have the sensitivity of a two-by-four, go elsewhere. "I was at summer camp when I realized that the horses weren't talking to everybody else the same way they were talking to me, so I went straight to the county office and I told them there must have been a mistake. I don't ... I don't have parents, you know, so I thought there'd probably been something missing from my records. I was a silvertongue. I just wanted to get registered. That's what we're supposed to do, right? So why did they treat me like I had been deliberately hiding it from them?") before they throw her a welcome party, which for the Harvard Connection just means pizza from this place in Manhattan and a beer that comes in imported bottles instead of Bud Light cans.

Sean insists on the party hats, though. Those are completely necessary.

Sharon sticks close to Sean at first, and he preens under the attention because he doesn't often get to play the chivalrous white knight, but eventually she's coaxed over to sit with Dustin, Andrew, and Alice, the other beast-speakers. Riding the high of a successful job and petty crimes committed in the name of a higher good, everyone seems to have collectively forgotten that Sharon's sixteen, because they keep on throwing her beers.

"I thought you were on the softball team," Sean says, after the second bottle sails past her ear and smashes into brilliant shards of glass against the corner of the table.

"I am!" she replies, shoulders hunched up around her ears and her eyes enormously wide. "But we use softballs, not beer bottles!"

On the other end of the table, Mark and Erica have their heads together, talking lowly and seemingly not interested in joining the mass gluttony. When their voices start to rise into an argument, agitated, most everyone manages to politely ignore them. Sean casts a curious glance or two in their direction, but a quarreling couple is not enough to ruin his glow.

And then --

Erica: "Why are you so adamant that --"

"-- because you're just a beast-speaker!" Mark blurts out, so loudly that it cuts through all other conversation in the cafeteria, and a shocked, uncomfortable silence falls, all eyes turning towards them.

Sitting across from him, Erica's expression goes completely incandescent with rage, her mouth twitching like she's unable to even form words, and the look is so intense that Sean's momentarily convinced that she's about to go for the nearest sharp object, or go into the kitchen to grab a garrote and come back out here to behead Mark like a block of cheese.

To Sean's right, Chris takes an uneasy pull from his beer. The sound of the bottle hitting the tabletop again is unusually loud, and he flinches.

Mark seems to realize exactly how far he just shoved his foot into his mouth, because his throat bobs nervously and he goes, "do you want to get some food?" in the pathetic voice of a nineteen-year-old boy and not the semi-prodigious crime boss who can people-speak his way through a committee of bureaucrats twice his height and girth.

Erica, her eyes darting sideways with dawning awareness of their audience, gets to her feet and gathers up her things in careful, very controlled movements.

"I am sorry," she starts, biting out each word. "That you are not sufficiently impressed with my form of speech. Maybe you should look at your own prejudices before you try to go out into the world and change everybody else's!"

Back straight, she turns and marches out.

Mark wets his lips. Keeping his head bowed low, he pushes his chair back and leaves through the door at the opposite end of the cafeteria. Eduardo downs the last of his beer in one big gulp, grimacing, and then ghosts after him. The door clicks shut behind him.

Sean and Christy exchange a look. She widens her eyes, like, wow, did that just happen? and Sean makes a face.

He gets up and claps his hands together. "Well!" he goes, forcing out an awkward laugh. "That's our show for tonight, folks." A few unsettled laughs come back to him: Sean cannot, in recent memory, recall a time Mark and Erica had a fight that serious. They squabble all the time, bickering like any couple did, but never to the point of seriously attacking each other. "Now come on. This is a party!"

Let it never be said that Sean Parker isn't capable of gearing anyone into a party mood, because it takes just a little more cajoling (and a threat to start dancing on the table, because that will never not be funny,) before boss-man and boss-lady's altercation has mostly passed over.

He goes back and sits next to Dustin, who toasts him with a slice of four-cheese.

"You know," Sean says thoughtfully, unconsciously looking towards where Erica disappeared. "I have never actually asked for confirmation, but Mark and Erica. Are they even --"

"I don't think about it," says Dustin flatly. "Absolutely and never. I work for them, they are my boss-man and boss-lady, that is gross and I need it out of my brain. If I start thinking about them having sex, I'll never be able to take them seriously ever again."

There's a pause, where in they both try very, very hard to think of anything other than what they're actually thinking about, which is --

"It'd be really bony," Dustin decides, and Sean barks a laugh so loud it sounds like he's being shot at. "Like, really, just, with the scrawny and the --" At this point, Dustin is laughing too hard to keep going, and he and Sean hold onto each other to keep from falling out of their chairs, laughing until they wheeze. All it takes is one of them going, "bony," and they set each other off again.

Still weakly chuckling, Sean eventually gets up and grabs a paper plate and a couple slices of pizza, because Mark and Erica stormed out without getting any food. Out of the two of them, Erica probably needs the sympathy more, but Sean passes the computer lab in order to check Mark's study first: if Mark's in there, then he won't be in Erica's room. Sean doesn't really want to interrupt them if they're making up, because it's hilarious in theory and altogether nothing he actually wants in his eyeballs.

The door to Mark's study is ajar, so Sean nudges it further open with his elbow, and then freezes.

Mark's in the Godfather armchair. Give him fifty years, a dove-grey suit, and a cigar, and Sean would totally buy the mob boss persona, but as is, he just looks like a kid swallowed up by his grandfather's chair. Eduardo's with him, and Sean arrives just in time to see him turn on his heel and say, low and fierce, "you idiot."

He thinks, for half a beat, that he's interrupting another fight, and is about to loudly announce his presence when the words stopper up in his throat like they've been corked.

Eduardo closes the distance between himself and Mark, planting a hand on the back of the Godfather armchair and bracing his weight with a knee up on the cushion. Sean knows what he's going to do the second before he does it, because the expression on his face goes hard, clear, bright as light and universally recognizable. A frisson of shock ripples down his spine.

Mark must see it too, because he gets out, "Wardo," in a kind of voice Sean doesn't even want to think about, before Eduardo leans in the rest of the way.

He can't see the kiss from this angle, but he knows it happens from the way Eduardo's eyes lid, slow and blissful, the way his neck bends into it.

"You idiot," he says again, and Sean thinks, bizarrely, that he's only really hearing half a conversation, but Eduardo leans in again, mouth already parted in anticipation, and Mark stretches up to meet him, the line of his neck going soft, eager, like this has happened many, many times before. Still frozen in the doorway, Sean's left reeling, like the earth has shifted an inch or two along its crust and left him standing just a little bit to the right of where he's always been.

Mark's hand comes up, catching against Eduardo's stomach, and Sean doesn't really notice what it's doing until he realizes he can't see it anymore, because Eduardo's suit jacket and dress shirt have fallen open, obscuring its movements.

This, finally, is what jolts him into action, and he backs up, double-time, until his back hits the far wall.

"Suddenly," he says to no one in particular, keeping his voice down. "My life makes a lot more sense."

That's nice, dear, the doorknob replies.

| now |

He loses track of how much time passes before the door to the van is ripped open again. It's not Roth or Manningham this time, but two ubiquitous cops, federal underlings dressed in full riot gear; all Sean can see of them is the square lines of their jaws underneath the mirrored lenses of their visors, and when he touches their equipment with his mind, he hears nothing but the static of complete and utter stone-cold loyalty.

"Up," barks one, and they don't even wait for him to struggle before they hook their hands underneath his elbows, hauling him to his feet.

Sean staggers hard. After so long in one position, his feet no longer want to support his weight, and the sudden release of the pressure on his bladder makes it scream, and Sean whimpers, not even bothering to be ashamed of it. Pride is the only thing left that keeps him from peeing his pants, and even that's hanging on by a hair.

The cops don't bother waiting for the pins and needles in Sean's numb feet to go away; they manhandle him out of the van and across pavement, at which point Sean manages to get his legs under him and sort of help. The sunshine is back to being blinding, so he keeps his eyes closed.

Hello again, something whispers in his mind, and he startles, badly, tripping over his own feet. The cop on his right gives an annoyed shout when he almost topples them both, and the wrench he gives Sean's arm in reply feels like it's going to rip it right out of its socket.

Hello? he says back, probing.

It's you again, we haven't seen you in awhile, it's such a pity we're not allowed to help you this time, the voice continues happily, and it's only when they pass through a wide open doorway that it clicks, everything pinging familiarly in his mind. He's at the dockside warehouse where the BIA held Sharon Trotsky captive. It's been almost six months since then, but the locks on the doors remember him, just because he was nice to them.

That's ... that's okay, he manages. Could you let me know if anybody comes to rescue me, though?

I'm not sure that's something we can do, the lock says timidly. But we could ask?

"Hey," goes one of the cops, loud enough to shake Sean right out of his conversation. The pain in his body comes roaring back to him, wrenched shoulder and over-full bladder and stiff back. The cop steadies him as he starts to sway. "Whatever you're talking to, stop it."

And he punches Sean right across the face.

He's not expecting it at all, so he goes down hard, hitting the concrete floor with an almighty crack of his skull.

"No thing-speaking, you hear me?" the cop says, sounding very, very far away.

Sean groans, nonverbal, so the cops haul him up again. He doesn't have control of his hands, so he has no way to catch himself when they punch him again, this time across the other side of his face; he'll have a matching shiner later. It's like he can see the punch coming, but can't make the connections from his brain to his body in time to get out of the way. Blood spurts through his mouth, hot and stingingly metallic, and the wind goes out of him when he hits the ground.

While he's down there, his eyes slide across the concrete floor. He's in a tiny, cell-like room, he realizes; not unlike the one they kept little Sharon Trotsky in. There's a big, fat, grey rat in the corner, watching him with beady red eyes.

Erica likes rats, he remembers dimly. Erica's a beast-speaker, like Alice and Dustin and Andrew and Sharon, because beast-speaking is statistically the most common kind of speech in the United States, the way wind-talking is in Japan and fire-talking is in India, which is where Bobby's from. But just because it's the most common doesn't mean that the silvertongues who have it are any less extraordinary than, say, people-speakers or thing-speakers. That was the mistake Mark Zuckerberg made.

Dustin liked to talk to birds and Alice liked to talk to horses, and Erica liked rats the same way she liked Mark; she saw in them something nobody else did.

They're very intelligent creatures, she told Sean once, while he helped her garrote a whole wheel of cheddar. It was summer then, so there were rats everywhere in the alley when they climbed the steps out of Mt Auburn Street, carrying morsels of cheese to entice them with. And they're very polite, granted that you're polite to them first, and most people aren't. They look at rats and see only the worst kind of vermin.

What have they told you? he wanted to know.

She smiled at him, dimples appearing in her cheeks.

Their favorite thing is the smell of bookbinding glue.

Hands on him again, hauling him up to stand on his own two feet, and Sean doesn't want to be here for this. He can feel blood flecking down his chin, and can't do anything to wipe it away. He wonders if Erica's here somewhere. He sees a black-gloved fist cock back in preparation to punch, and closes his eyes again, cringing away and retreating deep into his head, beyond even all forms of thing-speech.

He remembers another time, with Erica, not all that long after Sean's successful raid. She'd been sitting in her room, which was covered in posters featuring famous pages from different novels, and a calendar that hadn't been turned over to the new month yet. He'd lingered in the doorway, watching her straighten her hair. It's naturally curlier than he thought.

Mark and Eduardo ... he finally started, and she looked up, eyebrows lifted. How long have they ...

Oh, she sounded surprised. You didn't know? Pretty much ... yeah, pretty much since the beginning. Eduardo was our partner, originally, and our friend before that. She lowered the straightener. Mark tried to people-speak him once, in the early days. Wanted something out of him that Wardo didn't want to give.

Just the once? Sean had asked.

She'd given him a darkly significant look. Once was all it took.

| then |

Sometime after Halloween, during one of the Harvard Connection's monthly raids on Goodwill, Sean makes an unexpected discovery.

He finds the book of Jaina traditions from his childhood on one of the shelves in a drunken, leaning stack, behind a battered and duct-taped copy of Fellowship of the Ring.

The title is obliterated by the bright red "BANNED" sticker stamped over the spine, but something about the shape pings familiarly at Sean's mind, stills his fingertips. He pulls the book out, heart swelling in instant recognition at the sight of the blue-painted man sitting Indian style on the front cover, his eyes downcast and his fingers curled into a mudra, resting on his knees. The pages are musty with age, their edges nuclear yellow.

He pays fifteen cents for it, and on the subway home, he finds the section on jiva and ajiva and reads it again, the words as familiar to him as a Hail Mary.

And so it is said that in the beginning, the universe was made of two things: those which were things, and those that were not. Those which were things became those with soul, and the not-things became soulless. Those with soul became the man, the beasts, the fire, the water, the wind, and the growing wood, and all them spoke a single language.

"What's ajiva, then?" Mark asks when Sean brings the book into his study, thinking he would tuck it among the other banned books for future members of the Harvard Connection to find.

"Empty matter, I think," Sean says, leaning against the desk. Mark watches him from the armchair, laptop open in the cradle of his thighs and his head tilted to one side. "Things that exist but don't have substance. Thoughts, for example, or time and space. Gravity. Probably emotions, too -- prejudice and instinct, and so on."

Mark muses on this. "Do you think it's possible that jiva things are filled with the ajiva?"

"Like?"

"Humans," his mouth forms bitingly around the word, spits it like the shell of a sunflower seed. "Sometimes I think they're nothing but dark and soulless."

Sean frowns at him, unsettled. He knows Mark's misanthropic to an almost anarchistic degree, but usually he saves his venom for just one or two individuals, not people as a whole. He shifts his weight, remembering the cheerful way Erica said shut up, or I'll cut out your dead human tongue, not liking where this is going. They're talking about Chris and Eduardo here, who are some of the best humans that Sean knows.

Reminding himself that Mark is only nineteen, he starts to say, "That doesn't make us better than them --"

"Sure it does," Mark cuts him off. He blinks, lizard-like. "We're silvertongues."

Only nineteen, Sean thinks again, because there is an overwhelming, inherent danger in thinking that one is automatically superior to the other. But before he can sort out his response, something very interesting happens to Mark's face. His expression shifts and sharpens, eyes sliding to focus on some middle distance, like a dog straining to hear the sound of its master's key in the lock. The next beat, and he goes pale with fear.

"Mark?" Sean goes, but the lid of Mark's laptop slams shut and he's on his feet in a movement like a coiling spring, raw panic visible in his eyes.

"They have Erica," Mark says, clipped and tight.

How do you know that? Sean thinks, disbelieving, because it literally looks like Mark just received that information via radio signal beamed directly into his brain, but Mark's already out the door, and Sean hears his sandals go flapping down the hall at a dead run.

"The fuck?" he says out loud, but panic is infectious and his heartbeat picks up in response to it. He might be projecting, but he thinks he can hear the distant echo of shouting in the corridors; Divya's voice canting loud, Mark yelling in response.

He turns around, intending to follow and see what's going on, when he hears something else; a whisper, tugging at his ear like a breeze that signals the secret exit to a locked room in movies, faint and wispy. We have a secret, it tells him, and his head swivels, trying to follow it. He's never been alone in boss-man's study before, he realizes; there's any number of interesting things he could find. He listens hard.

We have a secret! There it is, a gleeful whisper in his mind -- something, not someone -- and he circles the desk, running his fingers along the edge and feeling a lot like he's in the Thomas Crown Affair.

No, shhh, you're not supposed to find us! We have a secret!

He doesn't find a switch to a hidden compartment, but what he does find is a raised ridge of tape, worn ragged with age. Heart pounding, he crouches down and picks at it. Whatever's been taped to the underside of the desk, it's not very big, or thick. In fact, he thinks as he peels away more tape, feeling the giggling shape of no, no, no, we're a secret!, it feels a lot like --

They fall loose into his palm.

Fingers catching around a smooth, varnished surface and hard plastic, he pulls out two IDs: driver's licenses for the state of Massachusetts, one with Mark's face on it and the other with Erica's, the both of them looking childish and even younger than the real deal. He pulls them into the light to get a better look.

For a split second, Sean's tempted to laugh, thinking that he's looking at a pair of fake IDs, so juvenile they're practically adorable.

But that's not right, because these aren't Class O licenses. These are learner's permits: bold print proclaiming that the card-holders are not allowed to drive without someone 21 years or older in the passenger seat. He has one half-beat to realize that these are completely genuine, relics from Mark and Erica's lives before the Harvard Connection, and then he notices two things at once.

One, the birthdays are the same on both cards; day, month, and year.

Two, the names aren't the ones he knows.

Erica Albrecht, says one.

Mark Albrecht, says the other.

And suddenly, everything clicks.

Sean's fingers go numb, nerveless, and the IDs slip right out of them, clattering to the cement floor. It doesn't matter, because he's pretty sure the information is seared across his brain, a permanent brand.

The Albrecht twins. The babies born in upstate New York when Sean was preschool age, the landmark court case that spawned the surge of the silvertongue civil rights movement, the babies who disappeared somewhere and grew up while kids like Sean were learning about them in school the same dull way they learned about revolutionaries long dead ... and after all this time, here they are, right in front of his face.

Mark and Erica are the Albrecht twins.

Mark and Erica are the Albrecht twins.

Adults now, which is weird to think, because every time Sean's read about the Albrecht case, it was always about the infants, so somewhere in the back of his mind, it's like he expected them to stay little babies forever, except here they are, with new identities and their own criminal organization that run after-school programs for at-risk silvertongue teens, who call them boss-man and boss-lady.

It's exactly what the suits at the BIA are afraid of -- the Albrecht twins becoming the touchstone of a revolution.

They could, he knows. If at any point they came out with their real names, people would rally to them. They would.

If one domino goes, the others go.

Holy shit, it's so weird to think. Mark and Erica are twins.

They're brother and sister.

"Oh god," says Sean, suddenly and keenly mortified for all the times he's casually thought about them having sex, because they were always in each other's personal space, and -- and come on, how was he supposed to know? "Dude!" he says emphatically. "Awkward!"

Told you we had a secret, the IDs tell him, unsympathetic.

return to masterpost | part three -->