Sarah shook her head. “No, you mostly asked questions.”
“Questions? What kind of questions?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know – all kinds of stuff. How everyone had been while you’d been away, had anything unusual happened, what everyone was up to, etcetera. Just a hodgepodge – you kind of jumped around in terms of subject matter.”
I frowned but didn’t say anything. Being a shapeshifter myself (and therefore knowing how they operate), I understood that my double’s visit to Sarah had had one primary purpose: to get information. She had given it willingly, but couldn’t be blamed since she’d been under the impression she was talking to a friend.
Rather than continue grilling Sarah, I put an end to the questions and finished driving her to school. Once there, she made me promise one last time that I’d talk to Smokey, then got out of the car and headed inside just before the bell rang. I pulled away, driving another few blocks before turning in to the lot of a strip mall and parking. Then I teleported, car and all, back to the garage of the embassy.
Chapter 37
I teleported back to my room and flopped down on the bed, thinking about what I’d learned. The fake me had gotten a decent amount of information from Sarah. None of it was earth-shattering, but it was enough to allow him to do what shapeshifters do best: get close to people without arousing suspicion. But who else, exactly, had he gotten close to?
That was a difficult question to answer. Anyone who saw my double would probably assume it was me, as Sarah did. I’d only discovered that my evil twin had approached her because she called me and referenced a conversation that we’d never actually had.
Hmmm. Had anyone else spoken to me in a way that suggested we had interacted when we actually hadn’t?
I grabbed the notepad containing my witness list and started scanning the names. However, I stopped about halfway through as a new thought occurred to me: my list only contained the names of people from the party on Saturday, but my doppelganger had been in business since at least the day before that, when he had met with Sarah.
Letting out a despondent sigh, I flung my mind back yet another twenty-four hours in time and tacked onto the list the names of people I had interacted with as of Friday afternoon. There weren’t many, so within a minute or so, I felt I finally had a complete list of all the people I had crossed paths with over the past few days.
Looking at the names, it quickly became apparent to me that, from the standpoint of the fake Jim, a good number of them wouldn’t have been worth talking to. The bulk of them were folks that I didn’t associate with on a regular basis – case in point, the people who had come through the receiving line. They wouldn’t have enough information about me to merit a conversation. (Of course, all of this rested on a hypothesis that I was somehow the focus of my double’s actions, but since he was walking around with my face and basically setting me up to take a fall, it didn’t seem too much of a stretch.)
Next, I started eliminating those whom my double was unlikely to have made contact with, such as my family. As they could all read minds and generally kept a mental tab on me when I was at home, my mother and grandparents had a pretty good idea of what I “looked like” telepathically. Fooling them would be next to impossible, so I would have heard about it if they’d been approached. Likewise, there were others who would be hard to hoodwink.
In the end, I was left with a short list of people who might have been contacted by my lookalike. In fact, upon reflection, there was at least one person whom I was all but certain had interacted with my double, and I made a phone call to BT asking her to look into it for me. After eliciting a promise from her to get back to me asap, I called Mouse.
My mentor answered after the first ring, stating, “If you’re calling for a status update, I don’t have anything.”
“No problem,” I said. “I was actually calling to update you.” I then gave him a quick overview of what Sarah had told me (sans the part about her issues with Smokey), and my efforts to narrow down the list of people whom my evil twin may have reached out to.
“That’s not bad detective work,” Mouse admitted grudgingly. “It’ll be interesting to see what BT comes back with, but what about the others? Have you contacted them?”
“Uh...not yet,” I said a bit timidly.
“Get on it,” Mouse ordered. “I’m still at home, but I can be at HQ in an hour. Meet me in my lab when you’re done.”
He then hung up without waiting for any acknowledgment.
Chapter 38
There were three names for me to check out: Li, Smokey, and Electra. I decided to take them in reverse order and started with my girlfriend.
In an ideal world, I would simply have called her on her cell phone. However, like Sarah, I expected Electra to be in class by this point, and since cell phone use was prohibited during the school day, I had to go to Plan B.
I teleported to her school, popping up in the student parking lot at the rear of the campus. Electra actually attended a different high school than I did, so – while I had a vague notion of her schedule – I didn’t know exactly where she was.
It was chilly out and I hadn’t worn a jacket, so I adjusted my body temperature to compensate. Unbothered now by the weather, I reached out empathically, extending my ability in the direction of the school. Almost immediately, I started picking up a number of typical adolescent sensations: teen angst, high school crushes, simmering rebelliousness… In a similar vein, there
