Again, I opened my mouth, and again she spoke over me, leaving my protests powerless and unspent. “That girl trusts you.” Something dark and intense flashed behind the mask of anger Liv wore. Something I recognized… “She loves you, and you…”

“She what?” I said, forgetting to whisper. Liv blinked, and her confidence faltered. “Is that what you think?”

“I can see it, Cam. I can see it in the way she looks at you. And that’s fine. You and I can’t be…us…anymore. So you may as well be with her. But that’s not the point. The point is what you—”

“Olivia, will you shut up for a minute?” The toilet flushed down the hall, and I spoke over the anger rapidly flooding her cheeks. “She might love me like a brother. Because I took care of her. But she’s not in love with me.” I hesitated, trying to decide how much of Van’s business I was entitled to share with someone else. Then I forged ahead, hoping the truth really would set me free, at least to some degree. “She might like you, though.”

Water ran in the bathroom sink, and Olivia gaped at me. “She doesn’t like…men?”

I raised one brow, mildly amused. The bathroom door creaked open, and I leaned close to Liv to whisper in her ear. “You were jealous,” I taunted. She pushed me away, but before she could deny it, Van emerged from the hall, and Liv’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click of teeth.

“Okay, let’s get this done.” Van slid onto her bar stool and moved her finger over her laptop mouse to wake up the screen. “I have to be somewhere in an hour.” Then she glanced up, as if something didn’t feel right. “Did I miss something?”

“No,” Liv said, before I could even open my mouth. And when I saw her watching me out of the corner of her eye, I watched her back, while Vanessa clacked away, largely ignoring us both.

Armed with Eric Hunter’s address, the IP address I’d taken from his computer, the partial social security number from his hospital bill and his bank-account number from the statement Liv had found, it took Van less than ten minutes to find Hunter’s middle name.

“Ta-fuckin’-da!” She clapped her hands in triumph. “Richard! His middle name is Richard.”

“Great.” Liv leaned over Vanessa’s shoulder to peer at her screen. “Did you find anything on the other one?”

Van frowned. “The other what?”

“The other middle name. Skilled children are always given two middle names.”

“They are?” Van glanced at her, then looked to me for confirmation.

“Yeah. One from their mother and one from their father, but neither tells the other.”

“Why wouldn’t the parents tell each other their own child’s name?”

“Two-person integrity,” Liv said. “So only the child himself knows his full name. I got one for my sixteenth birthday and the other for my eighteenth.”

“You got your own name for your birthday? Twice? How lame.” Van frowned. “Then again, I didn’t even get the day off for my birthday, so maybe that’s not such a bad deal after all.”

“It’s done for the child’s protection,” Liv explained, scribbling information from Vanessa’s laptop onto a notepad while she spoke, hair tucked behind her ears. She’d done the same thing in college, when we studied, and I never could understand how she could say one thing, but write something else entirely. “Names are power, and children aren’t mature enough to handle that power responsibly.”

“What do you mean names are power?” Van asked, and Olivia frowned at me in question.

“There are some things I can’t explain to her.” Not without breaching my contract with the Tower syndicate. Liv was right about that much—they don’t want us arming anyone with knowledge.

“Stupid binding restrictions…” Liv muttered under her breath. Then she stood, pen in hand, and gestured with it while she spoke. She would have made a scary teacher.

“If you know someone’s name—even just part of it—you have a certain measure of power over that person. The power to track, or compel, or bind that person to an oath or contract. Or, in your case, the power to hire someone to do any of that for you. How much power you have depends on how much of the name you know. And how much of that name is real.”

“What do you mean real?” Van looked fascinated, and more than a little frightened, now that she was starting to grasp the scope of her own ignorance. “Do Skilled children use fake names?”

“Not really. But kind of.” Liv chewed on the end of her pen, thinking. “Were you always called Van?” she finally asked.

“No, Cam was the first to call me that. I was always just Vanessa to everyone else.” Van hesitated, and I could see the light go on behind her eyes. “That’s why…” She turned to me, and that light brightened. “That’s why you told me never to give anyone my full name.”

I nodded, but was contractually prohibited from elaborating.

Liv rolled her eyes at my restrictions, but then she started filling in the things I couldn’t say. “Cam probably gave you your nickname for two reasons. One, out of habit. Skilled children are always given names that can be shortened into at least one nickname. To us, full names sound formal, and a little dangerous.”

“Like when your mom gets mad and she shouts your whole name?” Van asked.