Fade Out

“Right.” Eve took a deep breath. “I’ll check the bedroom.”

“Bathroom,” Shane volunteered.

“You’re brave. All right, you keep going in here,” Michael told Claire. “I’ll take the kitchen.”

“Good luck.” She meant it. She bet mold had formed its own civilization in the refrigerator.

That left Claire on her own in the big, trashed-out room. She had no idea where to even start looking, but when she let herself ignore the trash, strewn clothes, and general mess, she found herself focusing on the walls. One of them had a mural painted on it, creepy elongated faces and staring eyes.

Staring eyes.

They glittered. For a frozen second, Claire thought there was someone behind the wall, watching her, and then she got her head together. It was just glass, reflecting; it wasn’t real eyes. But why would Kim put glass on the eyes—no, on only one eye?

Oh.

“Guys?” Claire opened the closet beside the mural, shoved through piles of crap and boxes, and found the camera that looked out through the eyehole. It was a small high-tech thing, wireless. So there had to be some kind of receiver, somewhere. She ducked out of the closet to yell, “Any computers around here?”

“In here,” Eve said. There was a Mac set up on a rickety table in the corner of the bedroom, jammed in next to a sagging, unmade bed. It had a screen saver on it, and when Claire tapped the space bar, it asked for a password. She looked at Eve, who raised her shoulders in a clear no-idea shrug.

Claire typed in Eve’s name. Nothing. She tried Morganville, but again, nothing.

On a wildly unpleasant hunch, she typed in Shane.

The screen cleared, and Claire was looking at herself. She recoiled in surprise, and the screen image did the same, leaning back from the camera.

Oh.

The built-in camera was on. Claire clicked it off and looked at what was on the desktop, which was where she personally put things she wanted to use quickly . . . and there it was. It was a folder, marked Reality Project Cam #72.

There were video files there. Claire clicked one, and instantly, Kim was there, filling the screen, leaning in dramatically toward the computer’s lens. “Day twenty-two of the project,” she said in a loud whisper. “Still not sure whether or not any of the extra sites have been discovered, but I’ll run it as long as I can. Great stuff so far. The official history project is still going, but most of the vamps won’t talk. It doesn’t matter anyway; this is going to be so much better. The Oscars are going to be kissing my ass.” She grabbed a handy bottle of soda and held it in both hands, looking over-the-top happy. “Oh, thank you so much; I just can’t believe this honor. I’d like to thank the Academy—”

Claire paused it and looked at Eve, and Shane, who’d come out of the bathroom to watch. Michael joined, too.

“What is this?” Claire asked. Eve was shaking her head, eyes fixed on the screen. “Seriously, you don’t know?”

“No. What’s she talking about?”

Claire fast-forwarded until Kim finished her acceptance speech, then clicked PLAY again. Kim’s image was glowing with glee. Whatever she was talking about, to her, it was major.

“I can’t believe it; I finally got to put some in the last Founder House. Connections look good, stream is starting up. God, why do people always fall for the stu pidest things? The old bathroom trick? She didn’t even worry when I was gone for ten minutes, poking around. Sweet.” Kim leaned in, close and confidential. “I may have to keep some of this for myself. Shane, undressed. Oh yeah.”

“Excuse me?” Shane blurted. “What the hell?”

Eve’s eyes widened, and she licked her black-painted lips and said, “When was this?”

Claire checked the date. “Early last week.”

“Oh God,” Eve said. “I—I met Kim at the auditions. I mean, I already knew her, but not like close friends or anything, and she just seemed really—interesting. She came over after we got done. You were at school, Michael was out, Shane was just leaving.”

“And she asked to use the bathroom?” Claire prodded.

Eve looked miserable. “Yeah. She was gone awhile, but you don’t ask, right? You’re not supposed to hover, I mean, come on. Besides, she was so cool.”

“She is cool,” Shane agreed. “She’s also a raving bitch manipulator. I dated her, remember? Once. You should have asked me. And what is this crap about seeing me naked? I wasn’t even there!”

Eve covered her mouth with both hands. “What did she do? Oh my God—she used me, right? She used me.”

“She uses everybody,” Shane said. “Twenty-four, seven. I’m sorry, but I was kind of worried when you got so head over heels with her. She’s not . . . yeah. She’s just not.”

Claire wondered if she should feel some kind of vindication, but she didn’t. She felt nervous. “What did she do in our house?”

“What do you get Oscars for?”

Shane and Michael both said, at the same time, “Movies.”

And the four of them looked at one another in silence for a moment. Claire didn’t know how they felt, but her stomach seemed to be in free fall, and no end in sight.

She slowly turned back to the screen, shut down the video, and looked at the folder.

“What?” Shane asked. She pointed at the screen.

“This is Kim’s personal video journal,” she said. “It’s where she recorded all her personal stuff.”

“So?”

“Look at the number.”

“Reality project cam . . . number . . .” Eve drew in a sharp breath. “Oh, holy crap.”

“There are seventy-one other cameras out there in Morganville,” Claire said. “Somewhere.”

“And at least one of them’s in our house,” Shane finished.

There was no sign on the Mac in Kim’s apartment as to where the video was streaming to. . . .

She’d need more computing power than a laptop to run seventy-one other cameras, especially if she was saving terabytes of data. “She’d need a server array,” Claire concluded, after doing the math. “Or off-line storage dumps. Maybe she only records during certain hours, then dumps everything to DVD-ROM or something.”

“What about the university?” Eve asked. “Plenty of servers there, right?”

Claire considered it, then shook her head. “Yeah, there’s available space, but how would she get to it without somebody noticing? She’s not even an enrolled student. And the TPU computer security’s pretty tight—it would have to be, because the vamps monitor it to prevent anybody from sending compromising information out.” That led her to another, badder place in her mind. “Kim thinks of herself as some kind of renegade indie filmmaker, right?”

“Right,” Eve said. “She talks about that a lot. About TV, cable shows, all that kind of thing. She’s kind of obsessed with it. The acting thing was really so she could see all the backstage stuff, the technical parts.”

Shane lowered himself onto Kim’s sagging bed, which gave Claire unpleasant associations she wished she hadn’t made. “She’s bugged the town,” Shane said. “She’s got it rigged up with surveillance. And she’s going to cut it all into, what, some kind of über-documentary about vampires?”

“Worse,” Claire said. “Seventy-two cameras, all running at once? She’s cutting together episodes. She wants a reality show. A Morganville reality show.” She spun back toward the keyboard and brought up Kim’s e-mail. As far as Claire could tell, the built-in in-box had never been used. “She’s got to have e- mail.”

“Web mail,” Michael said. “If she wanted to cover her tracks, she’d do it that way. You think she’s in communication with someone outside?”

Claire brought up the browser’s history, but it had been cleared. “There’s some kind of maintenance app running. It wipes out her temp files and history every twenty-four hours.”

“Somebody’s working with her,” Shane said, and shrugged when they all looked at him. “Makes sense. Webcams don’t fall off trees, right? Buying that many takes funding, and Kim isn’t making that off her spare-parts