The Inside Job by Jackson Pearce

pajama pants, and then slipped out of the room to get a glass of water.
    To my surprise, the lights were still on in the kitchen. Beatrix was asleep in a chair, exactly where she’d been when I saw her a few hours before. Her computers still buzzed all around her, and her glasses were pushed up on top of her head like a headband.
    â€œBeatrix?” I whispered.
    She didn’t move.
    Whenever Kennedy fell asleep on the couch back home, Dad would carry her to her bed. I was pretty certain I wasn’t strong enough to lift Beatrix, but I felt bad that she was going to sleep in a kitchen chair all night. I crept to my bedroom, snatched a blanket off the bunk occupied by Ben’s inventing tools, and went back to the kitchen. I tiptoed around Beatrix and tried to slide it over her shoulders . . .
    Beatrix sat up and yelped. I clapped a hand over her mouth and tried to spin her so she’d see it was me, but she braced her legs into the table and slammed the chair backward, crushing me between it and the wall. The breath was knocked right out of me, and I’m pretty sure my kidneys had been too—
    â€œOh! Hale! Oh, I’m sorry!” Beatrix said, yanking the chair off me. “Are you okay?”
    I tried to say “I’m fine,” but it sounded more like “Iihhii.” Beatrix winced with apology, then glanced at the clock.
    â€œWhoa! It’s four in the morning. Did I fall asleep?”
    â€œYes. And apparently you dreamed of ninjas or something,” I said, rubbing the spot on my stomach where the chair had dug in.
    â€œOtter said I should learn some basic self-defense,” Beatrix said.
    â€œYou’re excelling at it.”
    â€œReally? Yay! I mean—well. Yay, but sorry for smashing your ribs.”
    â€œIt’ll be fine, really.” I pointed to her Right Hand. “Any luck with the helium?”
    Beatrix’s face fell, and she sat back down in her chair. I pulled up one of the others. She said, “Not really, Hale. I mean, plenty of people order helium, but it’s the sort of people you’d expect. Blimp companies. The government. Cryogenics companies—did you know that’s what they use to cryogenically freeze people? I had no idea. But anyway, there’s no one who’s ordering a regular supply who isn’t someone you’d
expect
to order it, you know?”
    I sighed and leaned back in the chair. Then Beatrix said quickly, “I’ll keep looking, though!”
    â€œIt’s okay, Beatrix,” I said, shaking my head. “I just don’t know where to go from here.”
    Beatrix bit her lip and tapped her Right Hand absently for a moment. “Maybe we have to look at SRS now, Hale.”
    â€œNo, that’s—”
    â€œShh! You’ll wake everyone up!” she said. I slammed my lips shut—I didn’t realize I was shouting. Beatrix and I listened for a moment and, when no one stirred, she beat me to speaking first. “I know it’s important to you that your parents have
always
done the right thing, Hale. But you know, it’s okay if they messed up. They’re still good people, I’m sure.”
    I waited a long time. Maybe it was because it was dark and the middle of the night, or maybe it was because thiswas Beatrix, but I closed my eyes and said, “That’s not really the problem. Well. Not all of it, anyway.”
    â€œWhat is?”
    I opened my eyes and stared at her computer screens, unblinking. If I were being interrogated, my eyes would definitely have given away how uncomfortable all this made me. I reached forward and picked up a screw that had fallen out of one machine or another, rolled it between my forefinger and thumb, and then finally spoke.
    â€œMy parents left when they realized SRS was doing something wrong—kidnapping kids for Project Groundcover. But . . . there’s no way they couldn’t have known stealing art from