Bluescreen

by Dan Wells

  They walked to the restaurant together, Mami and Papi and Marisa; her parents chatted idly about various bits of news, and their plans for the special of the day—chiles rellenos—but Marisa ignored them. When they got to the restaurant and unlocked the back door, Marisa was tempted to ring Sahara’s doorbell in the attached apartment, begging her to come and join in her pain, but she didn’t go through with it. Why make someone else suffer? She swept the main room and wiped down the tables while her parents got started in the back, and her stomach growled in eager anticipation as the smell of roasting chiles drifted out from the kitchen. When her father brought out two steaming bowls of breakfast, she sat down with him gratefully.

  “Chilaquiles,” he said. “I know it’s your favorite.”

  “Gracias, Papi.” She took a bite, closing her eyes as the creaminess of the cheese and the heat of the chiles seemed to burn her mouth and cool it at the same time. “Ay, que rico.”

  “I’m sorry I yelled at you last night, Marisita.”

  “No, Papi, I’m sorry. I know I’ve been running out and doing crazy things, and I know Pati was watching me but I just wasn’t thinking—”

  “It’s not because of Pati,” he said. “I guess part of it is, but you’re my daughter too. Te amo. You know that, right? I love you and I want you to be safe, not just because of the other kids, but because of you.”

  Marisa felt a tear forming in the corner of her eye, and took a huge bite of chiles, hoping she could hide her crying as a reaction to the spicy food. “Thungz.”

  “What?”

  Marisa laughed, covering her mouth and trying to swallow. “I said thanks, but my mouth was full.”

  “Que grosera,” said Carlo Magno, exaggerating his mock disgust. “Here I’m trying to pour my heart out to my oldest child, and she talks to me with her mouth full?”

  Marisa laughed again, then looked up in surprise as someone banged loudly on their front door. It was still locked; they didn’t open for another two hours. She looked at her father, then back at the door as whoever it was knocked again. She heard a voice, distant and feminine, shouting through the wall:

  “Señora Carneseca! Please open up, I have to talk to you!”

  Marisa frowned. “That sounds like . . .”

  “It’s Adriana,” said Guadalupe, walking in from the kitchen.

  “She’s not welcome here,” said Carlo Magno sternly. He had disowned her along with Chuy, guilty by association. Marisa cringed, remembering just a second ago that her father had called her his oldest child, not his oldest daughter. And she’d laughed.

  “She sounds terrified,” said Guadalupe, striding toward the door. “She might need our help.” Marisa followed, with Carlo Magno right behind. Guadalupe opened the front door, and Adriana looked up in shock to see all three of them standing over her. She was young, just a year older than Marisa, pretty but thin, with eyes that looked bright red from lack of sleep. She clutched their son, Chito, tightly to her chest.

  “Señora,” said Adriana, nodding her head in deference. She looked at Carlo Magno, hesitating and scared, then did the same to him. “Señor.”

  “What do you want?” he snapped. Guadalupe pushed him backward.

  “Cállate, Papi,” said Guadalupe. She backed up to make room in the doorway. “Come in, you look terrified.” Adriana stepped in, glancing nervously at the street behind her.

  “Is everything okay?” asked Marisa.

  “It’s Chuy,” said Adriana. “He . . .” She glanced at Carlo Magno again, then back at Guadalupe. “He’s been shot.”

  “Este cabrón,” growled Carlo Magno, throwing up his hands and turning away in disgust.

  Marisa felt her heart drop, remembering her call to him last night. She couldn’t find her voice, and Guadalupe spoke first.

  “What happened?” she demanded. “Is he okay? Is he alive?”

  “He’s alive,” said Adriana, nodding. Chito looked out at them with wide eyes, as silent as a photograph. “He’s at our house now, with one of the others trying to treat him. I don’t think it’s serious, but—”

  “What did you think would happen?” Carlo Magno demanded, turning back to face her. “We were stuck with him, but you chose this.”

  “He was protecting you!” shouted Adriana. Marisa leaned back in surprise; she’d never heard Adriana raise her voice, but it looked like she had a spine of solid iron when you riled her up. “Someone was selling drugs in your daughter’s school, and Chuy and the others took care of it. Pati is safe today because Chuy took the bullet that could have hit her.”

  Marisa gasped again. “They attacked the Bluescreen dealer? I thought they were just going to—”

  “Nobody asked him to go kill people,” said Carlo Magno, “drug dealer or not. We have police for that—”

  “Are you kidding me?” asked Guadalupe. “Carlito, we pay ten thousand dollars a month to Maldonado for protection, precisely because we can’t trust the police to help with anything.”

  “Then Maldonado should have handled this,” said Carlo Magno, “not La Sesenta. That’s who we pay to be protected from—Chuy and Calaca and all those other rulachos they run with.”

  “And they’re not doing their jobs,” said Marisa. “Calaca told us, and then the Maldonado enforcers said the same thing not five minutes later. If we can’t rely on them, La Sesenta’s all we have left.”

  “Then we’re packing up and moving to Mexico,” said Carlo Magno, “where it’s safe to walk around in your own damn neighborhood!”

  “We need your help,” said Adriana, looking at Guadalupe again. Chito started to fuss, scared by all the shouting, and Adriana switched him to her other hip. “That chundo they have treating Chuy isn’t a real doctor, and he needs a real doctor. Chuy’s too proud to ask, but we can’t afford to go to the hospital, and you can.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Carlo Magno.

  “He’s your son,” said Guadalupe.

  “He did this to himself!” Carlo Magno shouted back. “We can barely afford to pay our mortgage, and he’s out playing cops and robbers in the barrio getting himself shot to pieces, and now we’re supposed to pay for that, too?”

  “So you want to let him die instead?” demanded Marisa.

  “He’s not going to die,” said Carlo Magno. “She said it’s a flesh wound—worst case he needs rehab—”

  “And you’re okay with that?” shouted Marisa.

  “I tried for years to teach him this was dangerous,” said Carlo Magno. “Gangs don’t protect you, they get you shot. If this is the only way he learns that lesson—”

  Chito started crying.

  “Of course we can help,” said Guadalupe, ignoring Carlo Magno and leading Adriana to a table. “Let me get some beans and rice for that baby; I’ll put them in a box so we can take them with us.” She went into the kitchen, and Carlo Magno followed her in. Marisa sat down with Adriana, hoping her parents’ argument didn’t get too heated.

  Adriana looked at her without speaking. Did she blame her for tipping Chuy off about the rival dealer? Did she even know? Marisa swallowed nervously, staring back, until her curiosity overcame her fear. She leaned forward and spoke in a low tone, not wanting her parents to overhear. “Who was it?”

  “You mean who shot him? How am I supposed to know?”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “It was a Chinese gang,” said Adriana. “Ti Xu Dao—not one he’s talked about before.”

  “My Chinese is terrible,” said Marisa. “Something . . . mention . . .”

  “I don’t care what it means,” said Adriana, that hidden steel coming through in her voice again. “They put a bullet in Chuy’s shoulder, but Calaca killed one of them. They’re going to be back for revenge.”

  “Ti Xu Dao,” said Marisa, blinking on her djinni to run a search for the name. She growled and shook her head, standing up to walk to the hostess computer.

  “Have you heard of them?” asked Adriana.

  “No, I jus
t need to run the search over here,” said Marisa. She waved angrily toward the kitchen. “They turned off my djinni.”

  “Your father’s pretty harsh.”

  “Yeah,” said Marisa, tapping the screen to dismiss the restaurant management app and open a browser window. “In my case, though, he was right. I’m not exactly the best daughter in the world right now. Or sister.” She searched the name, taking a few tries to get the spelling right. “Tì Xū Dāo: the Razors. Plenty of news articles pop up in the search, but no history of drugs. Violent little monsters, though.”

  “Why does this matter?” asked Adriana. “A gang is a gang—it was fun when we were kids, all flashy clothes and throwing money around, but we have our own kid now. We can’t live like this, and if Chuy loses his arm he can’t get a job doing anything else, either. It doesn’t matter which gang shot him; he was shot, and he’s all I have.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Marisa. “I’m . . . I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on here.” She could hear her parents still arguing in the kitchen, and talked louder to drown out the sound. “This gang must have been working for a larger group—the drug they were mixed up in was way too sophisticated for some street gang to cook up. I’m trying to figure out if the payback will come from Tì Xū Dāo or from that larger group.”

  Adriana held Chito tighter. “Do you think they’d come for Chuy in the hospital? Calaca said it was better to hide him, but he’s so sick, Marisa, you have no idea—”

  “Attacking a hospital would be a pretty big risk just to kill one person,” said Marisa, hoping it was true. But if there was one thing she knew about these people, it’s that they weren’t concerned with risk. They’d killed, or tried to kill, three people that Marisa knew about, two of them in public places. eLiza was the anomaly there. They struck hard, and they struck fast. . . .

  “Wait a minute.”

  “What?” asked Adriana.

  Marisa glanced at the kitchen door, then back at Adriana. “Three months,” she muttered. Grendel said eLiza had posted the code on the darknet three months ago. She was an anomaly. Saif was targeted within moments of talking about Bluescreen, and they’d tried to kill Anja just one day after she failed to infect her father. But eLiza wasn’t killed until three months after she’d started snooping.

  “What if she was working for them?” Marisa said out loud.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Adriana.

  “What?” asked Marisa. “Oh—sorry. I was thinking out loud.”

  “Are you talking about me?” asked Adriana. “Because I would never work with La Sesenta—”

  “No, no,” said Marisa, “I was talking about the girl who was killed yesterday. Did you see that?”

  Adriana raised her eyebrow. “Do you have any idea how many people were killed in LA yesterday?”

  “This one was killed by the same dealers who hired Tì Xū Dāo. I thought she was killed for snooping around in their business, but why wait three months? They’re not the kind that waits, which means she did something else to anger them, just a couple of days ago: she knew too much and started talking, or maybe she asked them for something they didn’t want to give. Either way, the best explanation is that she was working with them—she studied djinni programming, hell, she might be one of the original programmers for all we know. Grendel said she was asking about the code, but he didn’t say what she was asking. We assumed she wanted to know what it was, but it could just as easily be that she was working on it and needed advice. eLiza wasn’t a snoop, she was a loose end.”

  “What does any of this have to do with Chuy?” asked Adriana.

  “I’m sorry,” said Marisa, turning toward her. “I’m being rude. Chuy’s in danger, and I want to help him, but . . . I’d go and talk to my parents, but like I said I’m kind of on the outs right now. But this is something I can do—I can figure out how they did this, and I can make sure they don’t get the chance to do it again.” She paused, clutching Adriana’s hand. “I want to get to know you better. I’m sorry we waited for something like this to make it happen.”

  Adriana squeezed her hand back. “I’m going to see if your mom is ready to go,” she said, and stood up with Chito to walk back to the kitchen.

  “Tell Chuy I love him,” said Marisa. She returned to the touch screen and started another search, looking for everything she could find about eLiza. There was very little under that name—some posts on hacker boards here and there, but the hacker boards on the regular internet were mostly useless, and she couldn’t check Lemnisca.te until she got home to her secure equipment. Instead she searched for eLiza’s real name, Elizabeth Swaim, and found a deluge of info that would take her days to sort through.

  “I need to narrow the search,” she muttered. “What am I looking for, specifically? Where she was? Who she was with? Yes; who were her friends, who did she know. A hacker studying djinni programming at USC would know a lot of other programmers—maybe they built Bluescreen together.” She found USC’s public registration records, and quickly coded a search to look at all of eLiza’s classes to see who else was in them, sorted by frequency. The list of common classmates was surprisingly long—Marisa supposed that they had a limited number of djinni programming students at any given level, and they all took the same classes. She wrote another search code to compare that list against eLiza’s social networks, to see which of her classmates showed up most often as friends. This search revealed a clear outlier: another programming student named Nils Eckert. It listed his specialty as cyber security.

  “What’s your story, Nils?” Marisa said, and started typing in another search, when suddenly she was interrupted by a loud bang. She looked up—it had come from the street somewhere. She looked at the front windows, then back toward the kitchen. Her father was standing there, looking toward the same windows. “What was that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, walking toward her, “let me take a look—”

  More bangs sounded, and distant screams.

  And suddenly the front windows exploded inward under a hail of bullets.

  FIFTEEN

  “Get down!”

  Marisa couldn’t tell who’d shouted, her or her father or both in unison. She dropped to the floor, ducking low and covering her head. She heard someone screaming, mixed with the crackle of falling glass, and realized it was Adriana, shouting Chuy’s name over and over. Chito was wailing in terror.

  “Get in the kitchen!” shouted Carlo Magno. Marisa peeked out through her fingers and saw that the attack was over—but no, she could hear more guns on the street. The attacker was still shooting. Either San Juanito wasn’t the main target, or it wasn’t a target at all, just caught in the crossfire.

  Another swarm of bullets burst through the front door, showering the room with shards of glass and and a hurricane of splinters. Marisa screamed and ducked her head again, curled into a ball behind the narrow hostess podium. When the shooter moved on to other targets Marisa knocked the podium over and dragged it with her across the floor, heedless of the sharp debris, pulling it behind the nearest wall for cover.

  “Get in the kitchen,” her father hissed. “Now, before they shoot us again!”

  Marisa looked at the wall above her, and saw it perforated with bullet holes. She shrank lower, lying flat on the floor. “We have cameras outside,” she said, tapping the touch screen. “I want to see what’s going on.”

  “Leave that and use your djinni!”

  “You turned off my djinni!”

  Marisa accessed the restaurant’s exterior cameras. A delivery van was driving slowly up the street, the top removed, with four Chinese thugs, two men and two women, poking up out of the top, firing as they went. They seemed to be targeting everything, calmly spraying the streets with bullets like they were watering plants with a hose, pausing now and then to reload when their guns ran dry. One of them turned toward the camera, and Marisa shouted: “Everyone get down!” Bullets tore through the resta
urant again, splintering tables and shattering decorations, digging long trenches in the walls. Somewhere in the back, Chito kept screaming. Marisa was just glad he was alive.

  “Get off the road!” Guadalupe shouted. Marisa looked up, confused, wondering who she was talking to. She looked back at her screen: no one was outside but the Tì Xū Dāo gunners, and there was no way her mother was talking to them. When the bullets stopped again Marisa jumped up to a low crouch and ran toward the kitchen, grabbing her father as she went. They dashed through the door and threw themselves on the floor; Marisa’s mouth fell open in shock to see that the devastation had reached all the way back here—pots and ovens and thick metal cabinets were all pocked with bullet holes.

  “They must be using accelerators,” said Carlo Magno. “Same thing Calaca’s idiotas were carrying when they came in the other day.” He pulled a gun from behind his apron.

  Marisa’s jaw fell open. “You have a gun?”

  “Those cholos came in the other day threatening my family, and I’m not going to get a gun?”

  “Hide behind something,” said Guadalupe. Marisa glanced at her and saw the telltale unfocused eyes of someone talking on their djinni.

  “Who are you talking to?” Marisa demanded. “Who’s out there?”

  “The girls,” said Guadalupe, her eyes refocusing on Marisa. “Gabi and Pati—they were on their way here. They say there are shooters everywhere!”

  The back door opened and Sahara dove in, crouching near them on the floor. She was dressed in her pajamas: pink sweatpants and a loose camisole, her makeup half-on and her hair a disheveled mess. “Who the hell is tearing up Mirador? They’re all over the barrio.”

  Chito’s cries echoed through the kitchen like a primal scream. Adriana tried to hush him, but nothing seemed to work.

  “They’re called Tì Xū Dāo,” said Marisa, “and my sisters are out there.”

  “Can they get somewhere safe?” asked Sahara. Two camera nulis flew in behind her: Camilla and a new one.