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you didn’t know that before, you should now. And Sugar can’t help you. Trust me on that. He’s a good friend, but you don’t need friends right now. You need tactical support.” I let Brent process that bit of information for a moment. “Sugar told me that your father has a gambling problem and has disappeared. Is that correct?”
    “Yes,” Brent said.
    “But those guys today—” I said. “That wasn’t about that, was it?”
    “No,” he said. “No, that’s my problem.” Brent flopped back onto the bed and covered his face with a pillow. “I’m, like, so stupid.”
    “No argument from me,” Fiona said.
    “Not helping,” I said to her. I pulled the pillow off of Brent’s face. “Listen to me, Brent. You need to start at the beginning, don’t skip any details and try not to say the word ‘like’ in the process. And you need to do all of this while sitting upright or I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop Fiona from squeezing your neck again.”
    Brent rubbed his forearm across his eyes, sniffled once and then ran his hands through his hair. My entire life I’ve tried to avoid crying in all its forms—crying women, crying children, crying animals—and now I had a teenage boy in my loft who couldn’t complete a sentence without spilling tears onto my comforter.
    “So, okay,” Brent began. “I had this class project, okay? We were supposed to design realistic Web sites to go along with our game projects—like fully integrated sites that look like actual companies, you know?”
    I told him I did. It was something the U.S. government had been doing for years. If you’re a covert operative working under a second identity in a foreign land as, say, the president of a tissue paper company, you need to have the same online corporate presence as any other tissue company might. The CIA was also especially fond of selecting people just like Brent Grayson to design them.
    “My game, it’s pretty cool; it’s this world-building game where you’re basically trying to become the ultimate capitalist, but, like, do good things, too, so, you know, there’s like evil companies and stuff that want to exploit you. It’s pretty cool.”
    Brent was excited, even if he wasn’t saying much of anything and even though the world was crumbling around him and he was now in a spy’s loft telling him his life story . . . or at least the story of his last few weeks.
    “What is this game called?” Fiona asked.
    “ Lifescape. ”
    “Sounds like a birth control pill,” Fiona said.
    “Yeah,” he said. “I never liked it, either. No one did. In workshop? They said it was too much like a self-improvement seminar or whatever.”
    “Fascinating,” I said. “How do the Russians come into play?” Brent looked like he wanted to do that whole pillow-on-the-face thing again, so I took hold of his shoulder to let him know he had our support and that, if need be, I could grab him, too. “You need to keep it together.”
    He bit into his bottom lip and soldiered forward. “I make this killer Web site for InterMacron, this super badass tech company that has developed new ways for delivering bandwidth, because like that’s the growth industry of the next twenty years, right? I mean, I do it up, because it was going to be thirty-three percent of my grade for the quarter and I’d really slacked off because of this girl who totally got into my head. It was crazy.”
    Brent got a wistful look on his face and I couldn’t tell if he was feeling that way about the girl, the easier time or if that’s just how he looked because he hadn’t yet learned the joys of paying taxes and other adult activities.
    “So InterMacron, the reason it’s so badass is that it’s come up with this way to increase bandwidth loads at a really low cost—fiber-optics, all that stuff? It’s like really expensive, so InterMacron has this device they are developing called the WieldXron, which will allow wireless use to expand using Kineoptic