by Dan Wells
“Miralos, Mari, they’re called Bluescreen—”
Marisa dropped her T-shirt in shock. “No.”
“My friend Paolo had some at school,” said Pati, “and they’re super awesome—big kids only, ’cuz they work with your djinni—”
“No!” Marisa shouted again, storming toward her and wrenching the drives out of Pati’s hands. She was too horrified to even think. “Did you use them already?” She held them up to the light, studying them closely, though there was no outward sign of whether a dose was still valid or not. “Tell me you didn’t use them!”
“I . . .” Pati looked shell-shocked. “I got one for each of us, I thought we could use them together.”
“Absolutamente no!” shouted Marisa, gripping the drives tightly in her fist and shouting at Pati in a fury. “Do you have any idea what could have happened to you? What these things can do to you?”
Pati was nearly crying now. “I thought you’d think they were cool.”
“Do you have any more?” Marisa demanded.
“What’s going on?” said their father, stomping forcefully into the room. “Marisa, stop yelling at your sister.”
“These are bad,” Marisa continued, feeling the heat rise in her cheeks. “Tell me you didn’t use any, Pati—stop crying and answer me!”
“Stop yelling!” shouted Carlo Magno; he planted himself between Marisa and Pati. Guadalupe came running into the room behind him, with Gabi and Sandro peering in from the hall.
“These are drugs,” said Marisa, too angry to stop now. “We can’t have them anywhere in the house.”
Carlo Magno turned to Pati, his anger already hot. “You bought drugs?”
“Let her calm down,” said Guadalupe, folding Pati into a hug. “She can barely breathe for crying, let alone talk with everyone shouting at her.”
“You—” Pati was blubbering too much to speak, glaring at Marisa, conveying with every ounce of her twelve-year-old body the betrayal she felt. “You—told on—me.”
“You think that’s the worst thing going on right now?” yelled Marisa.
“Stop yelling!” her father roared. “Give them to me!”
“Who’d you get them from?” Marisa demanded, looking past him at Pati. If they were in the school—in the elementary school, no less—then they could be anywhere. But Pati had already told her where she’d gotten them; Marisa was so angry she wasn’t thinking straight. “Where did Paolo get them? Who’d he get them from?”
“Give them to me,” said Carlo Magno, his loud shout dropping down to a menacing growl, so deep and furious it stopped Marisa short. He was inches from her, his body tensed like a spring ready to pop. She argued with him a lot, but he’d never struck her; from the look of it now he was barely holding himself back. She swallowed, her breath suddenly ragged, and handed him the drives.
“These are dangerous,” she said.
“It is not your job to yell at my daughter,” Carlo Magno hissed. “I do not take kindly to people who yell at my daughters.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t tell me, tell her.”
Marisa tried to look around him, but he moved to follow, his face still inches from hers. “I didn’t tell you to look at her, I told you to apologize.”
Almost instantly, Marisa’s rage was back again. “I can’t even look at her?”
“You don’t deserve to look at her!” he roared.
“Calm down, Carlo!” shouted Guadalupe. “This isn’t helping!”
“She has to obey!” shouted Carlo Magno. “She never does what she’s told, and that ends now!”
“She bought drugs!” Marisa shouted. “Why am I the one in trouble?”
“I never said she wasn’t,” shouted Carlo Magno, “but I’m dealing with you first!”
“I didn’t tell her to buy—”
“You showed her,” said Carlo Magno. “Pati worships you, Marisa—she acts like you, she plays your stupid games, she even dresses like you! And she sees you running out at all hours, ditching school, ignoring curfew, breaking every rule I set for you, breaking every law that gets in the way of whatever stupid, dangerous thing pops into your head, and do you care about that example? Do you care what she learns from you when she sees the policia drop you off at one in the morning, dressed like a whore, your new arm broken and your breath reeking of alcohol?”
“It wasn’t reeking,” said Marisa.
“Do you think that makes a difference?” her father roared. “Do you think that a twelve-year-old child sees where your path is leading? Or does she simply see your footsteps, one at a time, as she follows them straight down to hell?”
Marisa stepped back, eyes wide, shocked by his accusation. He hadn’t touched her, but she felt as if she’d been slapped in the face.
She was the good one here, wasn’t she? Wasn’t she trying to do the right thing?
Wasn’t she trying to help?
“You’re grounded,” he said fiercely. “And not pretend-grounded, where I trust you to stay where you’re told and not use all the little tricks and back doors you’ve built into Olaya. Yes, I know about them. Tomorrow’s Saturday, so you don’t have school, which means you’re confined to the house for the entire weekend—no friends, no clubs, no Overworld. I’m deactivating your djinni.”
Gabi gasped, and Marisa looked up through hot tears to see that even Abuela was there, standing in the hallway, the shouting loud enough that she could hear it.
“Everybody out,” said Carlo Magno. “And straight to bed. Pati, you come with me—your Mami and I need to talk to you about this.” They left the room, and Sandro closed it with a final, helpless look.
Marisa was alone.
She flung herself down on her bed, clutching her pillow to her face and sobbing. She’d been trying to do the right thing, but she’d been doing it all wrong. Of course Pati worshipped her—wasn’t that obvious, now that she took the time to pay attention? Wasn’t Marisa the cool older sister she couldn’t stop talking to? And Marisa had done nothing but ignore her, and push her aside, and give her so little attention that of course she kept escalating her rebellions. I play Overworld, just like you. I skip school, just like you. Aren’t I cool now, just like you? Do you think I’m cool yet? What do I have to do to be cool? Bluescreen’s street dealers promoted it as the perfect drug—all the buzz with none of the consequences, a perfect rebellion for anyone looking to stand out. Big kids only. As if it were some kind of harmless toy.
“I’m right to be angry,” Marisa told herself, “but not at Pati. She was only doing what everyone told her to do.” And then she started crying again, because she knew she was just as guilty as anyone.
She sat up, holding her pillow tightly in her lap. She felt isolated, the same as she’d felt the first time she’d turned off her djinni—not just isolated, but abandoned. Even the house didn’t recognize her. She hadn’t seen her father punish anyone this severely since he’d thrown Chuy out of the house.
It surprised her, all over again, how much she relied on her djinni. When was the last time she’d been truly alone? She could talk to anyone she wanted, anywhere in the world, in a nanosecond or less. She could hear her friends’ voices; she could see their faces. She could read the latest Overworld news, or even jump in a game and forget the real world completely. Now was she simply here, stuck in one place and one time and one small room. The seconds ticked on, with no new noises or photos or chats.
“I’m not completely cut off,” she said, looking at her desk. The hotbox was isolated, but she had two other systems that were still connected to the network, systems with a mouse and a keyboard and a touch screen, for a better interface when designing avatars or doing a lot of heavy coding. She stood and walked to the desk, moving the broken Jeon arm gently to clear a space. She could talk to someone, but who?
Not her father. He was too angry; she needed to give him time to calm down. She’d gotten into far too many screaming matches over the years, and she knew how they p
layed out. Her mami would be just as useless, at least tonight. Maybe Sahara or the others? What could they do? But Marisa had dragged them into far too much of this already—yes, it was Anja who’d gotten them all involved in the first place, but it was Marisa who’d poked her nose where it didn’t belong, studying the code and attracting the notice of hackers like Grendel, and eventually the Bluescreen dealers themselves. Sahara and Anja and everyone else was busy enough tonight, protecting their IDs and searching for a way to scrub the Bluescreen code out of Anja’s head. They didn’t have time to dig Marisa out a hole she’d dug all by herself.
Marisa stared at the computers, wishing she could do something—needing, in some primal way, to make something better. To fix something, anything, since she couldn’t fix herself. But the problems all seemed so big: Chuy and Adriana, jobless and half-starved. A whole city full of hungry, homeless nobodies, scraping out whatever existence they could in the shadow of people and companies so rich they seemed to live on different planets. But they were all right there, in the same big city. Maybe the Foundation was right to protest the new Ganika plant—it wasn’t going to help anyone. It wasn’t going to make any new jobs, it wasn’t going to feed anyone, it wasn’t going to do anything but make expensive new toys for people like Anja, so rich she could just replace her djinni at the drop of a hat.
It made Marisa feel uncomfortable, just for a moment, to sympathize so strongly with a terrorist group like the Foundation. The Ganika plant was just one building, just one more circuit in the giant machine that was LA, but it represented so much more. More people put out of work by nulis. More neighborhoods bulldozed to make room for a factory that none of the unemployed masses could ever hope to find a job in. For one brief, exhilarating moment, she thought that maybe Bluescreen was the best possible thing that could happen to this city: get everyone good and terrified of djinnis, force people to realize how much they depended on them, and how easily their technology could slip its leash and destroy them. How would the city react if they knew about a virus so powerful it could break through all your firewalls and control you like a marionette? How many people would turn their djinnis off, just like Marisa had, and go back to a world where people had to open their own doors, and do their own laundry, and build their own world? If Bluescreen was what it took to save the city . . . would that be worth it?
As soon as she thought it, though, she grew angry. Bluescreen in Brentwood was one thing, but they had brought it into Mirador. Into Pati’s school. Into Marisa’s home. Selling this drug to children was as unforgivable as it was inexplicable. Why make a drug that controlled people’s minds, and give it to kids who had nothing? What could they possibly hope to gain? Certainly not money—how much could Paolo, whoever he was, possibly have paid for his handful of drives? It didn’t make any sense.
But it did make her mad. If they were going to hurt her sister, Marisa was going to hurt them back.
She turned on her largest machine, a computer she called Huitzilopochtli—the Aztec god of war. It was time to follow up on that nuli they had sent to follow Kindred, and see what she could find.
Her father had already cut off her Wi-Fi access, but it only took her a few seconds to hop on the neighbor’s network—she’d learned some of their access codes last year, planning ahead in case it ever came in handy. She felt a sharp stab of guilt as she did it, circumventing her father’s rules not ten minutes after he’d accused her of betraying his trust. But what else could she do? It was either guilt about this, or guilt about not stopping the people behind Bluescreen. That didn’t stop the sick feeling in her gut, but she pushed ahead anyway.
She started with a quick message to Sahara: I’m fine. Papi freaking out. Send me the nuli feed.
The answer came just a few seconds later: Nothing yet. Still working on the malware. Still can’t get Anja’s security software to kill it. At the end was a link to the nuli feed. Marisa clicked on it, and a camera window spiraled open on her second monitor.
Kindred was still cruising around the city, his car a sleek black shape that seemed to warp and glitter as it rolled past streetlights, headlights, and the multicolored reflections of passing nulis. She clicked an icon in the corner and another window opened, showing her a GPS tracking map of everywhere the car had been: from Compton to Pasadena to Beverly Hills, and currently heading south on La Cienega—in the direction of Inglewood, though she couldn’t tell if that was his final destination. The route seemed to meander, sometimes on the freeways, sometimes on the surface streets, stopping here and there for what she assumed were more drug handoffs. The nuli was doing a good job of staying discreet, keeping the car in sight but skittering off every few minutes, dropping back or zooming ahead or slipping off to the side. Sahara had probably fed it one of the tracking algorithms she’d written for Cameron and Camilla. With the sky already full of nulis, one more or less would be almost impossible to notice.
And then Kindred’s car pulled off La Cienega and up a hill, turning quickly from a dense city to a forest—one of the few left inside the city borders. Marisa toggled the map labels: it was the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area. A small lake, some hiking trails, and a winding, scenic drive. And almost no nulis to blend in with.
Marisa’s hands flew across the keyboard, looking through the nuli’s admin controls to see if Sahara had left a back door for manual control. Thankfully, she had. Marisa blew out a puff of air, realizing that she’d been holding her breath. She found the hardware controls and turned off the nuli’s running lights—that was a ticketable offense, but so was stealing one in the first place. She hit a few more keys and took control of the now-stealth nuli, and followed Kindred’s car through the trees to a long parking lot, almost empty.
Almost.
Three cars waited at the end of the pavement, their headlights on, five or six figures standing beside them, silhouetted in the darkness. Marisa steered her nuli to the side, out of the line of headlights, and kept it low to prevent a similar silhouette effect. Kindred’s car rolled forward, and Marisa’s nuli flew along beside it, forty yards away, weaving behind tree trunks and picnic tables. She didn’t have access to a microphone, so she couldn’t tell what they said when Kindred stepped out. She circled far to the side and came in behind for a closer look, and gasped out loud when she saw the waiting men up close. They were four men and two women, each armed with a heavy rifle, their long magazines dotted with the glowing text that marked them as smart ammunition. The roof panels on the cars signified some pretty extensive upgrades in them as well, possible armor or some kind of advanced computer package. Maybe both. For what seemed like the fiftieth time in three days, Marisa realized just how far in over her head she was.
Kindred handed the lead man a roll of cash, and two of the thugs opened one of the cars and pulled out a case, hauling it across to Kindred’s car. This was the next step up the chain, the link between the street suppliers and, she hoped, the manufacturers themselves. But what could she possibly do?
And yet she had to do something. The police weren’t exactly reliable or trustworthy, but they were at least armed, and trained for dealing with this kind of thing. She swung the nuli farther toward the back and crept in closer, barely hovering above the ground, trying to get in close enough to read the license plates on the cars. She blinked on the numbers, trying to save them to her notepad, and when it didn’t work she blinked again, only belatedly remembering that she didn’t have a djinni. She grumbled at her stupidity and searched the desk for a pen, scrambling through the pile of old computer parts until she found one. She jotted down the numbers and backed the nuli away, hiding it under a picnic table to watch the drug dealers talk while she opened another window. She routed her connection through a string of straw-man proxies, and accessed the police server with a dummy account.
Drug deal in progress, she sent. Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area. Vehicle numbers 387GSH745, 574OBE056, and 238ACK782. Then she sat back to wait.
The dealers kept talking, and sud
denly Marisa’s computer clanged an alert. One of the straw-man servers had been scanned—the police were tracing her. Why are they wasting time on me when they should be sending every car they have over there? She swore and killed the connection, frying each server as she pulled out of it, barely staying ahead of the trace. When she looked back at the screen the dealers were on the move, not running but searching the area, apparently aware that someone had been spying on them. How had they known? One of the women pointed at the picnic table where the nuli was hiding, and Marisa tried to fly it away, but it was too late; the woman raised her rifle, fired, and shot the nuli in midair. The camera feed died instantly, and Marisa scrubbed that connection as well, trashing every scrap of digital evidence of who had been connected to it. When she was finally sure she was safe, she collapsed back in her chair, breathing heavily.
They’d almost found her. Why had she been so stupid? Of course the people who’d programmed something as sophisticated as Bluescreen would be able to protect themselves from digital threats. She looked at the handwritten license plate numbers in frustration—that was probably what had set them off. Reporting those numbers must have triggered an alert somewhere, cluing them in that someone was on to them. What other explanation could there be, unless they had a double agent inside the police—
—but of course they did. With Bluescreen they could control anybody, and access anything, and hide enough security to cover their own tracks and follow everyone else’s. She couldn’t go after them directly, and now she couldn’t go after them them online, either. Her only remaining weapon was gone.
What other resources did she have? How could she protect Pati, and everyone else in Mirador? She had already caused too much trouble—she didn’t want to be responsible for any more. But she had to protect her sister; she knew that now, more clearly than anything else. She’d try to be a better role model, but that was only part of it. A dealer was selling drugs in Pati’s school, and she had to stop them. But how could she possibly fight a drug cartel?