Proud Machinery

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"What?" Kess was so startled she reflexively leaned back away from Elias. "They're all Grays? How could you possibly tell?"

"That is what you were hinting at, right? You noticed that no one in the restaurant was laughing or talking loud. We know that's what the Grays are like with their, um..." He waved his hand in front of his face to indicate a blank expression. "Their grayness."

"Well, I thought maybe... I wasn't sure. I just knew something was wrong."

"You didn't think they were Grays?"

She almost had. She had hovered on the edge of thinking they were Grays. To actually all-the-way think so would have been... too much. To bold a conclusion to rest on something as silly as intuition.

When she didn't say anything, Elias continued. "That's what the salads are about, too. Grays don't care how things taste so they just eat what's healthy."

"How do you know that? And what did telling the waiter I thought he was cute have to do with anything?"

"You have to admit he didn't react like a normal person."

"Well, no." She remembered the waiter's calm, composed face. "I imagine that's how Silver would have reacted if you'd tried to flirt with her."

"Back when my anonymous Internet friend first contacted me, he said he was worried I was 'one of them.' He must have meant the Grays. To prove I wasn't one, he asked me what I liked about you."

"Oh. Um... What did you say?"

"Grays must not understand what makes people like people. They can't even fake it."

"But wasn't your anonymous Internet friend Silver?"

"Maybe not. Maybe the Grays hacked his account or something. He never seemed like a Gray all the time I was talking to him, and the Grays don't seem able to pretend very well."

Kess started walking down the sidewalk toward the car, which they had parked at the street corner. She tried to move quickly, tried not to look like she was moving quickly. "We have to get out of here. I know we said we'd stay and keep investigating, but we know they're here. I don't know if they filled that place because they knew we were coming or what, but we have to—"

"Kess." Elias grabbed her arm. "Kess, look."

A cop waited by Elias's car. He was a mustached middle-aged man, perfectly cop-like in every respect, leaning against the hood of the car. He looked very different from Silver and Stone with their business attire and calm twenty-something faces, but now they knew that Grays could look like anyone. They could look like awkwardly-proportioned teenaged boys. Which meant everyone on the street could be a Gray. Everyone in the town.

Elias took her hand and pulled her closer. He whispered in her ear like he was whispering something nice. "We walk the other direction. We walk until we find somewhere to wait for a few hours, then we come back. He can't stay there forever."

"I get the feeling Grays can be patient," she whispered back at him.

He put his arm around her shoulders and moved away from the car and the cop. Her eyes were drawn to every person they walked past. A middle-aged couple. An older man. A boy maybe thirteen. Not a single one was smiling.

#

Kess leaned into Elias and turned her face toward his shoulder, not watching where they were going, letting him lead her. That made it easier not to look at people.

"Maybe we're wrong," she murmured. "Maybe the waiter was just weird. Maybe those people in the restaurant were just healthy. Maybe the cop is just a cop."