“I’ve heard of it. The more removed you are from a person, the easier it is to dehumanize them,” I said. “Like if they’re in a car, windows closed, it’s easier to view them as not a person and hit max rage on them.”
“Exactly.”
“And it translates to the internet, right?” I asked.
He seemed a little impressed that I’d known this. “Yes. Bile that would be nearly impossible to summon in person gets regularly thrown at strangers via Instaphoto or Socialite or whatever.”
“Oh, I know,” I said, and when he cocked his head at me, I explained. “A few times while I was on the run I looked up what people were saying about me online. It was...not nice.”
“I’ve read some very thorough criticisms of you,” Mendelsohn said. “Hateful ones, even.”
“Yep,” I said. “From the timbre of my voice to my looks to my ass to my cup size, there’s nothing the fine folks on the internet haven’t insulted.”
“Let me ask you something, just out of curiosity,” Mendelsohn said, leaning forward. “Are you familiar with the concept of ‘power distance’?”
I blinked a couple times as I recalled. “Sure. It’s a measure of the relative class or caste distance between people in a society. I like to think of it as the ‘Fuck you’ distance.” It was his turn to blink. “In a high power-distance society, you wouldn’t dare say ‘fuck you’ to a higher level stranger. But in America, which is a low power-distance society, I can say it to any member of Congress or even the President if I wanted to.”
Mendelsohn nodded slowly. “Are you familiar with the concept of the ‘uncanny valley’?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s the point of diminishing returns on computer generating a face, right? That there’s a wide gulf in the last mile or whatever you want to call it on trying to make it look photo-realistic?”
He nodded again. “Do you know what a Black Swan event is?”
“Sure, it’s me emerging from my house as a functional human being at seventeen instead of as an irrevocably scarred, psychologically damaged mess.”
Now he smiled, rubbing his hand on his chin. “Remarkable.”
“That I’m not an idiot?”
He shook his head. “Not only are you not an idiot, you’re quite bright. You didn’t even attend formal schooling, and your grasp of some high-level concepts is complete. Have you ever taken an IQ test?”
“Yeah,” I said, “when I first went to the Directorate.”
“And?”
“I’m smart enough, I guess,” I said. “Mom tended to err on the side of history and the social sciences rather than math, so I’m lacking in anything beyond basic algebraic knowledge. Filling in the gaps hasn’t been a high priority in my adult life, either, so...” I shrugged. “Why the third degree?”
“Because in those spiteful online critiques—and even formal press articles,” Mendelsohn said, “buried among all the insults of your physical appearance, a constant thread is that they call you stupid.”
“Yes,” I said, “and it’s really damaging my self-esteem, let me tell you, being called an idiot by those self-important geniuses who will be almost completely out of a job in the next decade or two.” I touched the painful spot along my stomach. “It really wounds me, you know. Not in the same way as having my guts laid open or my skin flayed like this, but deep inside. Really, really deep.” I smirked. “Where I can’t even feel it at all, actually.”
Mendelsohn chuckled. “Good. Because, not that you need the validation, but you’re really quite bright. To have taken the very rudimentary foundation your mother gave you and built on it to understand concepts like these... Do you read for enjoyment?”
“I read a lot of articles. Stuff from the web.” I tried to straighten up and succeeded, this time. “Occasionally I’ll get into a book, usually non-fiction. Lots of times nowadays it’s a biography.”
“I don’t find that particularly surprising,” Mendelsohn said. He seemed to be sitting a little straighter in his seat, as though he’d made some sort of decision. “So...what time shall I pick you up tomorrow?”
“Uh, don’t you have other work to do, Managing Director?” I asked. “Don’t you have managers to direct or something?”
He shook his head. “Wittman Capital can survive a few days without me.”
“Yeah, but does it need to?” I asked.
“I think I could be of some use to you in this,” Mendelsohn said.
I gave it a couple minutes’ thought. “If you say so and your boss doesn’t mind. I’m certainly no ace when it comes to putting together a valid motive for all this tech stuff Grendel seems to be stealing. And it always helps to have someone who knows the lay of the land.”
“Give me another day and maybe I’ll come up with a theory on the tech-related thefts he’s perpetrating,” Mendelsohn said. “I’d have felt a lot more confident about it if we knew what Grendel came to Inquest to steal. As it is, I need more data.”
“Don’t we all,” I said, and let out a hearty yawn. Even though the sun was only dipping low in the sky now, it was pretty close to my bedtime back in New York. “Take your time. I wouldn’t want to rush a genius.”
The limo pulled into the drop-off loop of a several-story, modern hotel shrouded in greenery, and Mendelsohn scrambled to open the door for me before the driver could. To my credit, I managed to actually get out under my own power. The driver handed me my wheeled luggage, handle extended, and I was able to drag it without keeling over. Two wins.
“See you tomorrow,” I said, standing under the hotel portico. The orange colors were flooding in from the impending sunset.
Mendelsohn looked out at me from the door, the driver still holding it open. “Oh, and Sienna?”
“Yes?”
“What time do you want us to be here tomorrow?” he asked, and he was smiling, too. “Whenever you’d like. After all, I don’t want to rush a genius, either.”
I tried not to snort at him turning my little joke around. “Nine o’clock is fine.” The driver shut the door and I headed inside to claim my hotel room.
It wasn’t until a little later that I realized...he was actually sincere with that ‘genius’ line. Way off base, but...sincere.
28.
“So...did you get your ass kicked?” Reed asked, deep in the throes of my dreamwalk. We were in our usual setting, the faux-Zollers office I’d created for us to hang out in within the framework of my mind.
“Just a little,” I said, hedging on telling him that, in fact, I’d died yesterday. That would set him off for sure. “But hey, what’s life without getting a royal ass-kicking every now and again?”
“Calm, peaceful and nice,” he said, raising an eyebrow at me. “That’s what life is without an ass-kicking every now and again. I speak from experience on this.”
“Yes, I know, Mr. Hurricane,” I said, giving him jazz hands. “You’re so badass now that you’ve been upgraded to a meta superstate.” I shifted in my couch, no hint of the hotel bed I was actually sleeping on bleeding through into the dream world. “Too bad I’ve been downgraded.”
“You’re still the Slay Queen,” he said with a smile that faded quickly. “Sorry about your associate, though.”
“Yeah. West was a good egg.” I shook my head. “This Grendel does not mess around, Reed.”
“I’ve never even heard of one of them before.” Now he was frowning. “What’s the power set?”
“Transformative. They become a monster with bone protrusions, super strength, near invulnerability,” I said. “But honestly, it reminds me of—”
“Doomsday from Superman?” he asked.
“Yeah. Thanks for teaching me the elaborate history on that one. I could have been content having just seen the stupid movie, but no, thanks to you I’ve got years of comic book lore bouncing in my head...”
“Not my fault your brain is like a piece of Velcro, picking up anything it comes in contact with. Maybe if you let some stuff fall out every now a
nd again—”
“I’ve had a lot of stuff removed, y’know. Makes me cling tightly to whatever’s left.”
He couldn’t quite contain his grimace at my reference to Rose. “Whatever the case...how did the fight go with the Grendel?”
“I already told you. Badly.”
His grimace deepened. “No, I meant on a play-by-play basis. What moves did he use?”
“Punchy and stabby ones,” I said. “With super strength behind them.”
His frown turned pensive. “So you got stabbed?”
“A little bit.” I might have answered a little defensively.
“But you’re all right now?” The concern was layered thickly on his words, and he sat forward in his seat, eyes attentively on me.
“Clearly,” I said, throwing my arms wide. None of my wounds—which I’d still had when I went to bed—showed in the dreamwalk, thankfully.
I could tell by his look that he wasn’t buying it. Not a bit. “Sienna...” He leaned in a little closer. “What happened in the fight with the Grendel?”
“Which fight?” I asked. “Because there have been two now.”
He shifted in his seat, sitting more upright. “Where are you right now?”
“Silicon Valley.” At least that was an easy one to answer.
Reed’s frown deepened. “How did you get there?”
“Long story,” I said. “Look, can we shift focus to something else for a while? I’ve been working this case for the last couple days, lost a partner...I’m just not really in the mood to continue hashing it over.”
“Well, maybe I am,” he said, “and it’s not all about you, sis. Besides, maybe I can help. What’s this thing after?”
“Not sure,” I said. “Something tech-y.”
His brow furrowed. “What has it stolen?”
“A piece of algorithmic programming in New York,” I said, burying a sigh and going along. I tended to touch base with someone different every night in my dreams lately, so after this, I wouldn’t be seeing Reed again for about a week. I liked to make these things frictionless as possible, and fighting with him? Not frictionless. He may have been the only person on earth as stubborn as me, so I picked my battles with him, and since I’d already waged and won a major one this year, ceding this minor one to him seemed eminently reasonable. “A couple state of the art servers here in San Francisco before that. Something robotics-related from Chicago; didn’t get the exact detail yet. No clue what he was after here at Inquest.”
Reed’s eyes moved back and forth as he thought. “Inquest is a search engine, but they own a lot of different things beneath that rubric.”
“Yes, like Google before them, they seem to be sticking their fingers into a lot of different lines of business,” I said. “I heard they bought a couple small internet retailers with an eye toward expanding their ability to fulfill demand for things that their users search for.”
“It’s kinda brilliant, really,” Reed said. “I go online looking for a screwdriver, Google sends me to whoever pays them the most and lets them sell it to me. Probably some vendor on Amazon. Inquest is aiming to cut out the middleman.”
“Yep, genius, kinda creepy,” I said, nodding along. “But it’s all so arcane it leaves me wondering what Grendel is up to. Corporate espionage? Some kind of revenge deal by a jilted ‘tech bro’?” I shook my head. “Very muddy.”
“What are you up to, then?” Reed asked, a little shrewdly.
“My job,” I said, not quite unloading on him but not sparing the slight hostility that crept into my voice when I answered. “You remember? That thing I do to keep the world safe from—”
“Yeah, I’m aware,” he said. “It’s the thing I do, too. Except I do it running this family business that you stuck me with, and you do it working for a federal government that seems to have its ugly hooks buried in your skin.”
That shot of his made the wounds in my chest and belly tingle, like they could hear his metaphor and decided to pipe up. “You know why I’m doing this,” I said, trying to get back to calm rather than blowing up at him. If I did, I’d regret it until I got a chance to talk to him again.
“I know why you say you’re doing this,” he said, and I couldn’t decide whether he sounded more cranky than tired. “But I’m a little unclear on why the rest of us have to sit it out.”
“You know damned well why,” I said, glaring at him. “We’ve had this same conversation on a repeating basis for months now. Is it that you don’t listen when I tell you the reasons, or are you just amazingly dense?”
“Maybe I’m just amazingly worried that my sister is being manipulated by the government,” he said, firing right back. “And used in ways we swore we wouldn’t be used again when we walked away from the FBI before.” He threw up his arms. “I’d had enough of them before Andrew Phillips hit maximum a-hole, but after two years of watching them chase you around for shit you didn’t do, I thought after Revelen—” He folded his arms in front of him, the full surliness bleeding out now that his mood had soured.
“What did you think would happen after Revelen?” I prodded. “Reed, we’re talking about a government that fired drone strikes at me in Utah. That opened fire on me without warning in Montana. They sent a government kill team after me in Scotland and another while I was in Revelen.”
“And we saved them from a nuclear catastrophe!” Reed blew like all the storm force winds he had been holding inside needed to rush out at once. “Does that count for nothing?”
“It’s not nothing,” I said carefully. “But it doesn’t erase what came before. Harmon rang a bell in trying to get me declared a fugitive, and it’s not one I can un-ring. More to the point, there are people in power in this country that didn’t just forget about the narrative they pushed that painted me as the dregs of humanity. They may have had to reverse themselves because of Revelen, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there still, just waiting to bring down the axe the moment I become...inconvenient. And...I have done things. Things I shouldn’t have.” I looked at my feet. It was surprisingly easy to examine my shoelaces whenever I started thinking on my darker deeds. Almost like looking another human being in the eyes when discussing the masses of dead people I’d created was difficult for some reason.
“But you paid for those things,” Reed said, and he’d backed it down a little, his yelling done. “Isn’t that the point of the pardon from Gondry? That you did wrong, but you have saved the world...so many times now.” He leaned against his hand. “Don’t you get tired of saving a world that’s always vacillating between whether you’re a hero or a villain?”
“Well, that’s kind of the point of this whole ‘law and order’ push, isn’t it?” I shrugged. “If I can do things the right way, the non-felonious way, bully for me, right? It feels like I should be able to use the law to get justice rather than perpetually short-cutting my way to success via lethal means.”
“Tell that to Governor Ivan Warrington.”
“Hey, protecting Warrington from himself wasn’t my case. I was only supposed to save him from assassination. Which I totally did.”
“He’s still dead, so I’m not sure there’s much of a distinction there.”
“Well, what the hell should I have done to keep him from leaping out of the window?” I asked, throwing my arms up. “I can’t fly anymore, and it’s not like in Revelen, when that tower collapsed and I had you to save me.”
“Wait, what?” Reed’s frown crinkled crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes.
A loud noise intruded into my consciousness, a familiar ringtone.
My brother’s already-narrowed eyes narrowed farther. “Is that Clair de lune?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I set my nighttime ringtone to it so that it will gently wake me up during emergencies. Which is why I’m still talking to you rather than having already been launched out of bed by...I dunno, Metallica or something.”
“I find Enter Sandman to be a fantastic thing to wake up to.”
“Yes. But not exactly gentle once things pick up.” The world started to fuzz around me. “Sorry, bro. Catch you later.”
“Conversation ‘To Be Continued,’” Reed said, pointing a finger at me.
“Hooboy,” I said, jarring awake in my darkened hotel room and snatching my phone off the bedside table. “Can’t wait.” I answered the unknown California number. “Hello?”
“Sienna,” came Aaron Mendelsohn’s familiar voice at the other end. “It’s me.”
“I figured that one out through detecting,” I said, stifling a yawn. “Also, my amazing ears. Which are detecting the sounds of a car in the background of this call.” I glanced at the clock. 3 AM. Yikes. “What’s up?”
“Inquest got hit again tonight,” Mendelsohn said, cutting right to it. “Three police officers were killed at the scene.” My stomach dropped. “Grendel...he came back to finish the job.”
29.
Veronika
“You have got to be effing kidding me.”
Berniece Adams’s amusement was all spent, and Veronika had worked for her long enough by now to know that tone of voice meant nothing good.
“Not kidding, boss,” Veronika said. Tough luck it was her job to be the bearer of bad news today. “The Grendel came back after everything cooled off and hit the office. Killed three cops in the process, too.”
“I don’t care about that,” Berniece said. She was standing now, covered in a thin, silky sheer nightie, in the bedroom of the rented Mountain View mansion she and Hollister shared. In the time she’d been working for them, Veronika hadn’t seen any hint it was anything other than a platonic relationship. Which was good, because the idea of Hollister being sexual with anyone slightly creeped Veronika out. “I want to know what it took.”
“Tech geeks are still determining,” Veronika said. This was the un-fun part of the job. Actually, the whole job was un-fun, especially compared to hunting down and rounding up meta crooks. At least it paid well.
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