I flick on the light in the walk-in closet. The artificial beams glow off the racks of dresses and blouses, the poised rows of shoes… and the double ring of shelving just above my head, where dozens of purses and clutches wait to be paired with the right outfit.
I’m prepared to search them one by one, but as my gaze slides over them, it catches on one mid-sized handbag tucked into a corner of the shelf.
The brown suede surface is mostly hidden by the bags on either side. The fixtures gleam gunmetal gray amid shinier gold and silver. Nothing about the color or the shape would draw any attention or make it appealing enough for someone to ask to borrow it.
It’s dull, like my book on sediment.
I kick the stepstool over to that corner and clamber up to ease the purse out of its nook.
The moment I lift it, I can tell I’ve hit the jackpot. An empty purse wouldn’t weigh this much.
As I hop up to sit on the central island cross-legged, my pulse thumps faster. I yank at the zipper and open the bag.
A mini tablet in a plain gray case tilts against the silky lining.
I set the bag aside and flip the case open with the tablet balanced on my knee. The screen blinks on automatically to a generic lockscreen.
There’s a moment’s pause during which my heart stops, and then the facial recognition kicks in.
The home screen is sparse, just standard apps like Notes and Photos. I click through to Photos first, since that’s where Other Elodie’s regular phone provided me with the most material.
The single folder holds only twenty-eight files, mostly still images: outdoor shots from around the city. A few show the side of a maroon brick building with decorative concrete fronds protruding from the edge of the wall. A few others capture a different, boxy-looking building with neon graffiti streaked across its black siding.
There are shots of maybe seven buildings in total, though some might be different angles of the same location—it’s hard to tell when none of them show a full view of the front. About half of them include people shown at a stealthy distance: descending a steel staircase down the side wall, standing together in apparent conversation, walking by with a slight blur of movement.
Other than some of the passers-by and a few people who are visible mostly from behind, the faces are blurred too. My stomach twists into a knot.
I don’t think Elodie anonymized them. There’s a hazy quality to the blur that I recognize.
When a lucent is up to something they don’t want any record of, they can work magic over any distinguishing features—a spell that only affects camera lenses. You won’t know they’re disguised if you glance at them with your eyes, but photos and video footage of them will turn out like this.
Who was my double taking covert photos of who’d be so protective of their identity? The only time I ever encountered this effect was in the briefings for my missions with Uncle Nik.
Of course, I wasn’t exactly going around snapping tons of pics on my phone in my everyday life. Maybe it’s more common among the upper crust than I realized.
A few of the photos show only a black sedan cruising down a street that looks vaguely familiar—I think it’s near Luminary. But the license plate is blurred in the same hazy way as the faces, and nothing else about the car stands out.
I flip over to Notes to see if those will provide any enlightenment.
The page that’s already open looks like a jumble of letters and numbers. Studying it, I determine that some of the numbers are probably dates and times, one or two each month going back to last fall, a bunch more in March and early April. The times are all in the late afternoon onward other than a couple in the very early morning.
Outside of class times. Is this what Other Elodie was up to when she was ditching her friends?
Even if I have a when, I still don’t have a what. Some of the newer and most of the older notations are marked with the letters DVB. The recent ones include TEC and GG and other seemingly random combinations. There are also additions like3x ivandleft on ds.
I’m sure they meant something to my doppelganger, but I haven’t got a clue what they stand for. Cross-referencing them with the info on the photos, it looks like some of them line up, but that’s not enough of an explanation.
Is this a schedule—appointments Other Elodie made, arrangements to meet up with people? To do what?
What kinds of trouble do bored rich kids normally get up to? I list out the usual suspects.
She could have gotten into some kind of magically-enhanced drugs. The dates and times could be when she’d have a chance to meet her dealer.
That could explain the secrecy—and the sudden increase in activity in the past month could mean she’d started dealing as well. Are the other notations customers?
And then… she was taking photos of her clients or her supplier? Drug peddlers would definitely be the type to want to obscure their faces.
I don’t know why she’d want photos of them, though. Maybe some kind of insurance in case they wanted to tattle on her, but I don’t see how that would work out with their identities blurred.
