gave away much, but when we finished the circuit and returned to the stairs, he said bluntly, “Cas, this place is not secure.”
“I know,” I said. Shit.
Should we pressure Diego harder? How? Haul his kids out by their hair? It wasn’t like I knew the man, but he seemed barely inclined to cooperate as it was. Not to mention that we needed to be concentrating on finding Arthur, not wrangling recalcitrant families.
Maybe I could get Checker to talk to him. My eyes felt grainy—God, I needed some sleep, but that wasn’t going to be happening for a while.
“Let’s get the whole family under one roof and concentrate on the Teplova data pull,” I said. I’d briefed Rio on how my night had gone in between studying the house. “If things develop, I’ll force the issue with Diego.”
Somehow.
As if it had heard my last statement, something in Rio’s pocket beeped. He pulled out a device that looked something like a smartphone and said, “Someone approaches.”
I glanced at the screen. Two gangly figures were ambling up what was unmistakably the house’s front walk.
“Cameras and motion sensors?” I guessed.
“I’ve set up some rudimentary surveillance. It was next on my agenda to relay to you.”
Sending Rio had been a good idea. I might have an edge or two over him in a direct fight, but he blasted me out of the water when it came to planning and forethought.
“The twins, I’m guessing?” I tried to recall the photos in the hallway and along the stairs.
Rio nodded—knowing him, he’d filed dossiers of all possible friendlies away in his head immediately upon arriving. With a glance around the landing, he made a compact carbine appear from somewhere underneath his duster and slid down the hall back toward Diego’s bedroom at the front of the second floor. High ground in case any threat was following the kids.
I split off to go back downstairs. The twins were noisy, their keys scraping and jangling in the locks as they piled in with bags and backpacks.
“Hellooo!” one of them called from the door, making the o sound into a long hoot. “We hear our lives are in danger again! Such a dramatic existence for two lowly students of comedy. Oh! Hello.”
The young man who was talking—a tall Black kid with dreads hanging in his eyes and a wide grin—had noticed me coming down the stairs and into view of the foyer.
“Wait, you’re not one of the people trying to kill us, are you?” said the other one, a white boy with shaggy hair who was equally tall and lanky. “Because if so, you have to give us at least the dignity of wetting our pants and screaming for a few seconds.”
“No, I’m here to—I’m a friend of your dad’s. Arthur’s,” I said. The two boys might have height in common, but the numerical aspects of their physical genetic characteristics had no statistically significant overlap, so I thought it likely their twinship was a chosen one. “Matthias and Roy?”
“I’m Matthias, he’s Roy,” said the Black boy with the dreads.
“Or Matti, if you’re friendly with him, and if you’re not, it is my fraternal duty to challenge you in a duel to the death,” Roy added.
“Which on your end would start and end with the aforementioned pants-wetting,” Matti said.
“Truth.”
“You two seem awfully cavalier,” I said, before I could think better of it.
“Oh, even threats to our lives get mundane after a while,” Matti said. “Plus, we’re comedians. We’re contractually obligated not to take anything seriously. It’s in the oath.”
“Don’t ask us to say something funny, though,” Roy added. “If you tell us to say something funny, we’re contractually obligated to beat you around the head with a stick.”
“Zing!”
They high-fived.
“No, I meant about your dad,” I said.
Their smiles dropped to the floor and shattered.
“What about our dad?” Roy asked after a moment.
“Yeah,” Matti said. “Did he call saying there’s more danger? What’s going on?”
Diego’s voice came from behind me, in the direction of the kitchen. “Miss Russell. I’ll take it from here.”
I turned slightly. “You didn’t tell them?”
“Papá?” Matti said uncertainly.
I ducked into the living room to start setting up the laptops. Roy and Matti crowded around Diego, asking if their dad was okay, asking questions he couldn’t answer any better than I could.
But this wasn’t, apparently, a house where I could escape human company. I’d barely gotten a workspace going and signed us into a secure chat session with Checker and Pilar when Tabitha came around from the kitchen and stood watching