Chapter 26 : The Wade Call
The laptop screen flickered twice before the connection stabilized.
Wade Load's bedroom materialized in pixels — multiple monitors stacked in configurations that suggested either advanced ergonomics or aggressive interior decorating, a keyboard the size of a small table, and in the center of the frame, a twelve-year-old boy wearing headphones and an expression that combined professional courtesy with the focused intensity of a person who processed information the way other people processed oxygen.
"Lucas Hernandez. Ron's friend. The transfer student."
"That's me. Thanks for doing this."
"Ron says you're stuck on integration by parts. Show me the problems."
Lucas held the textbook up to the laptop's camera. Wade's eyes moved across the page with a speed that suggested reading was a formality — the information was being absorbed, processed, and solved in parallel with the visual input.
"Problem one: substitution error in the third step. You're treating the exponential as a constant when it's a variable. Problem two: missing the chain rule application on the inner function. Problem three—"
"Wait. Can you go back to the chain rule thing?"
"You missed the derivative of the composite function. When you differentiate the outer function, you need to multiply by the derivative of the inner function. It's not e^x, it's e^(2x), which means the chain rule gives you 2e^(2x)."
The explanation was clean, efficient, and delivered at a speed that assumed Lucas could keep up. He could — barely. The calculus was genuinely confusing, and Wade's rapid-fire corrections landed with the clarity of a teacher who had no patience for ambiguity but absolute patience for the student's need to understand.
"That makes sense." Lucas wrote the correction in his textbook margin. "I've been treating the exponent as dead weight instead of an active component."
"Exactly. The exponent is always doing something. If it's not a constant, it's a function, and functions have derivatives."
[+3 NP. SOCIAL: GENUINE ACADEMIC EXCHANGE. CUMULATIVE: 362]
The calculus took seven minutes. Wade solved all six problems, explained three of the solutions in detail when Lucas asked follow-up questions, and appeared mildly satisfied by the quality of the questions — the micro-expression of a genius who'd expected boredom and received engagement.
Then the interrogation began.
"So." Wade leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled. "Ron says you transferred mid-semester. No prior school on your records. Your guardian address is registered as a single-occupancy apartment."
"That's all accurate."
"It's also incomplete. I ran your enrollment data through the standard state education databases. No match for a Lucas Hernandez with your age and physical description in any school system within five hundred miles."
"Seven minutes. He waited seven minutes out of politeness and then went straight for the records."
"My situation is complicated. My family—" Lucas paused. The cover story assembled itself from the same materials he'd used with Barkin, with Ron, with Kim. "—isn't in the picture. I moved around before Middleton. Some of the records didn't transfer cleanly."
"'Didn't transfer cleanly' covers a lot of ground." Wade's eyes were steady. His tone was neutral — not accusatory, not friendly, the clinical detachment of a person evaluating data quality. "It could mean bureaucratic error. It could mean falsified identity."
"He's testing. Watching my face. Measuring my response time, my eye movement, my vocal patterns. This kid has probably read every paper on microexpression analysis and verbal deception indicators published in the last decade."
Lucas met his eyes through the camera.
"It means I don't have a clean story to tell. I wish I did. The school has my enrollment packet, Barkin has my contact info, and I show up every day and do the work. That's what I've got."
Wade studied him for four seconds. The longest four seconds of Lucas's life, including the three seconds of blindness during the Monkey Fist overload.
"Fair enough."
The shift was visible — a micro-relaxation in Wade's shoulders, a slight tilt of the head that said filing, not pursuing. Lucas's cover story hadn't convinced Wade. It had given Wade a framework: Lucas was evasive but not hostile, incomplete but not deceptive, a puzzle worth watching rather than a threat worth reporting.
"That's the best I can get. Wade Load doesn't trust — he evaluates. And 'worth watching' is safer than 'worth exposing' by a margin I'll take."
"Can I ask you something?" Lucas said.
"You're going to anyway."
"The satellite array on the school roof. Is that yours?"
The question was calculated — acknowledging the obvious rather than pretending not to notice. Wade's surveillance was visible to anyone who looked up. Asking about it positioned Lucas as observant-but-harmless rather than ignorant-or-hiding.
Wade's expression shifted. Interest. The particular brightness of a person whose work had been recognized by someone who appreciated it.
"Custom build. Three-band receiver with adaptive frequency allocation. I use it for mission support — tracking villain communications, monitoring weather patterns for Kim's travel routes, general-purpose intelligence gathering."
"That's aerospace-level hardware on a school roof."
"The school thinks it's a weather station. Principal Murphy signed the installation form without reading it."
"Does it pick up anything besides weather and villain comms?"
The question was one degree past casual. Lucas delivered it with the tone of a person making conversation, not probing for intelligence, but Wade's processing speed meant the subtext arrived before the words finished.
"Depends on what you mean by 'anything.'" Wade's eyes narrowed a fraction. "I've been picking up some unusual electromagnetic patterns lately. Low-frequency, intermittent, inconsistent with standard Middleton infrastructure. Started about two months ago."
"Two months. September. When I arrived."
"Weird. Like, alien weird?"
"Like, 'doesn't match any known technology' weird. I'm still analyzing." Wade paused. "You seem interested in tech."
"I pay attention. People are interesting. So is hardware."
"Ron said you'd say something like that."
The call lasted another eighteen minutes. Lucas asked about the Kimmunicator's operating system — genuinely curious, not performing. Wade described the hardware architecture with the enthusiasm of a person who rarely had an audience that followed the technical details. Lucas followed approximately sixty percent of it and asked questions about the other forty, which Wade answered with increasing animation.
By the thirty-minute mark, Wade's tag — which Lucas absolutely did not scan during the call, keeping the Lens shut down entirely — had probably shifted from SUSPICIOUS to something more nuanced. Lucas couldn't confirm without the Lens, but Wade's body language told the same story: the stiffness in his posture had relaxed, the interrogation cadence had softened into conversation, and the last five minutes were more hobbyist-to-hobbyist than detective-to-suspect.
"This was useful," Wade said. "The calculus, I mean."
"You solved all six problems in four seconds."
"I meant useful for me. I don't get to explain things to people who actually listen."
"That's real. That's not a strategic gain — that's a kid who lives alone in his room and just had a conversation with someone who treated his interests as worth understanding."
"Anytime you want to talk about satellite arrays, I'm available."
"I'll hold you to that."
[+5 NP. SOCIAL: FIRST CONTACT — THREAT CONVERSION (PARTIAL). CUMULATIVE: 372]
The call ended. The screen went black. Lucas stared at his reflection in the dark laptop screen — dark eyes, set jaw, the face of a person who'd just spent thirty minutes performing normalcy for a child who could end him with a database query.
His breath came out in a rush that made his vision spot. The exhale was physical — diaphragmatic, the kind of breath a person released after holding something heavy for too long. His hands were shaking. Not the fine tremor of adrenaline but the deep, bone-level vibration of a nervous system that had been operating at maximum alert for half an hour and was now discharging the accumulated tension.
"Thirty minutes. That was harder than the museum. Harder than Killigan. Harder than any of it. Because Wade wasn't trying to hurt me — he was trying to understand me, and understanding is more dangerous than violence when you're made of lies."
He walked to the wall. Added Wade's name in pencil, below the timeline, beside the sticky notes and the arrows and the accumulated architecture of a life being built one deception at a time.
WADE LOAD — DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE.
Then, below it, smaller:
He's lonely too.
The observation surprised him. He left it.
[Later — 8:15 PM]
Ron's text arrived.
RON: wade said you 'seem cool' which in wade-speak means he didnt hack your identity and report you to the fbi so CONGRATS
RON: also he said your calculus is 'salvageable' which is the nicest thing hes ever said about anyones math
Lucas typed back: "Tell him thanks. His satellite array is impressive."
RON: oh no
RON: you two are gonna be FRIENDS arent you
RON: im going to be the dumb one in the group
RON: rufus says he's the smart one and im the dumb one and you and wade are the medium ones
RON: rufus is RUDE today
Lucas laughed. The sound was loud in the empty apartment — louder than the hum of the fridge, louder than the street noise through closed curtains, the particular volume of a genuine reaction that had no audience and no NP value.
*"Cool" in Wade's vocabulary meant "worth continued observation." But it also meant the conversation had worked. Wade was watching — would always be watching, because that was Wade's nature — but he was watching with curiosity rather than suspicion.
Curiosity could be managed. Suspicion could not.
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