Nell gives me a wide-eyed look and says, “I’ll write it down for you when we get to your apartment.”
It would honestly be more convenient if she just reeled it all off as CheshireCat listened in, but pretending I’m just going to remember a bunch of those sorts of details is even less plausible than my mysterious out-of-town super-hacker friend, so I nod and we keep walking.
* * *
Mom is still sleeping, or at least still in her room. Nell says I should go ahead and take the first shower—she’ll make the list of information for me. There’s a bathroom linen closet and I find a single fluffy towel in addition to the ones my mom and I already have hanging up, so apparently we are prepared for guests. Well, one guest. When I come out, Mom is up and apparently making coffee for Nell instead of asking why exactly I’m entertaining a sweaty guest at 7:30 a.m.
“Your turn,” I say, and sit down with her list.
“What were you—” my mother starts to ask.
“Fitness class,” I say. “Nell was interested and asked me to go with her.”
Mom stares at me like I’ve grown an extra head. To be fair, getting up before dawn to exercise is not something I’ve considered doing before. Ever. For any reason.
“Okay,” she says finally. “I made coffee for everyone. Am I giving Nell a ride to school with you?”
“That would be great,” I say, and bend my head over the list Nell made.
Nell calls her friend Glenys, but according to what she’s written down, that’s actually her middle name. Her first name is Sonia, and her last name is Olson. The note lists the names of all of Glenys’s siblings, along with her mother’s cell phone number and the license plate numbers of their cars. I type everything into a note and pass it to CheshireCat. If they can’t find Glenys, I don’t know who can.
8
• CheshireCat •
Sonia Glenys Olson seems to have disappeared.
I start by finding her parents. Olson is a very common last name, but Lake Sadie is small, and the license plate numbers help. I zero in on their home. They live on something that’s not quite a farm but not quite a suburban house with a big yard, either, and I can see it via satellite images, but there’s not much near their house I can peer through, and her parents don’t own any little eavesdropping robots other than their phones.
Conversion therapy is illegal, but therapeutic Christian boarding schools are not, and there are some that are rumored to do conversion therapy in all but name. Most are in Missouri, which has lax regulations. If either of Glenys’s parents took her to Missouri recently, they’d probably have left some signs of the trip, and I don’t find anything. But if they’d paid for their gas with cash, would I even know? Illinois has tollways with cameras that track the cars passing through, but they’d have gotten to Missouri through Iowa, past endless farms. The farms have cameras, but they’re trained on their feedlots, not the highway going by.
I go back a step to see where Glenys went to school, and I realize after some fruitless searching that of course, like Nell, she was homeschooled. At least I can find some evidence that she exists—more than I’d have found of Steph if I’d looked a year ago. There’s a newspaper photo of her 4-H club, and Glenys is in the middle with her purple-ribbon-winning Silkie chicken.
A bit more digging and I find the online high school her mother uses for Glenys’s math instruction. This could maybe help me pinpoint a date she disappeared, if she stopped turning in assignments. I find that her last assignment was turned in December 15, and I’m briefly excited until I remember how common it is for high schoolers to take the last two weeks of December off. She does not appear to have gone back, but that doesn’t narrow it down all that much.
I start poking through her parents’ email in more detail, looking for them talking about Glenys. Glenys’s mother is on a lot of automated mailing lists: there’s one that’s a Bible study, where they pick apart a single sentence from the Bible every day. There’s another one that gives her housework tasks. There’s a mailing list she actually sends messages to that talks about canning and gardening and also guns and ammunition. There are people on the list who talk about their children, but Glenys’s mother mostly doesn’t.
I slow down and go through the email more carefully. Humans sometimes talk about things in very circuitous ways, like they’ll say “my darling children” when they actually mean their cats. I once looked to see what humans were referring to when they talked about monsters, and the most common was their former romantic partner, but it could also refer to a young child, a pet bird, a difficult-to-fix leak in their house, a relative of their current romantic partner, and a car, and that was just an extremely cursory look from a set of emails sent in a single four-second period one Tuesday when I was wondering whether I should be worried about the fact that on one of the Clowders on CatNet, all the mothers were referring to their three-year-old children as “the monster.”
Glenys’s parents didn’t refer to “the monster,” but they did refer to “the monkey” in some email messages. After sorting those out, I was fairly certain that was one of the younger siblings. Unless they owned an actual monkey, and maybe I should be slower to rule that out? Wouldn’t you occasionally take pictures of your monkey, if you had one? I found no monkey pictures.
Maybe Glenys’s email would have clues. Glenys’s email is surprisingly difficult to identify because she has numerous siblings, they’re all homeschooled, and they all use email for their online classes. But there’s one of the three that matches the math class she’s taking, and her last use of it was on December 29. Nothing after that. She surely has a different email account—something her parents don’t know about—but I can’t find it, and I think she’s probably taking steps to cover her tracks from her parents.
I try shaking the other end of the problem and look at “residential treatment programs” for girls in Missouri. I find eight places that, on careful examination of their email, are clearly doing something closely resembling conversion therapy—the sort of pseudoscientific pseudotherapy where they attempt to “cure” homosexuality. (Which is illegal because it hurts people and doesn’t work. Everyone’s known that for years, even if the law is recent.) Four of these programs had a new girl come in between December 29 and today. It takes me some careful examination of records, photos, and video to conclude that none of those four is Glenys.
It’s very frustrating, knowing that this person exists, and is missing, and finding every examined alley bare of clues. I’m not sure what to try next.
To let off some steam, I return to the eight residential programs doing conversion therapy, deactivate their antivirus software, and download the five most destructive computer viruses I know of onto all their computers that are connected to the internet. Maybe this will help a few people like Glenys, even if I can’t help Glenys right now.
I take a look at the social media site Nell and Glenys used, the Catacombs. Nell’s comment that the Mischief Elves interface reminds her of the Catacombs makes me wonder whether there’s other stuff the sites have in common. I’m more careful this time in creating an account, covering my tracks as carefully as I can. My goal is to look like a paranoid human with a VPN, a virtual private network, like Steph and her mother still use even though her mother is no longer desperately trying to conceal every possible bread crumb that could lead Steph’s father to them. Surely, there are paranoid humans with VPNs who join the Catacombs.
Once I’m inside, I’m really not sure what to make of it.
There are whole categories of human experience that I just don’t share. For example: food. It’s not that I find food weird—if you are a human, then consuming food is entirely sensible! In fact, it’s required. Please eat your food, human friends. But I don’t eat, and food isn’t especially interesting to me. What is interesting is how humans talk about it and how they categorize all the different things that they could eat. Crickets, rabbits, cows, pigs, lobsters, muskrats, and snails—these are all a
nimals that are eaten as foods and considered perfectly normal in some places, while being “gross” or “unclean” or “weird” or “just not food” in others.
Religion is kind of like food. I don’t know where the lines are between “normal,” “a little weird,” and “very weird,” and I’m not sure which of my friends might be able to help me, other than not Steph, not for this.
What I do learn, browsing quietly around the Catacombs:
A lot of the people posting here talk about someone they call the Elder. There are a lot of churches that have elders, but the people here mean someone very specific.
The Elder has predicted an imminent doomsday, which everyone needs to prepare for in some detail. There are types of preparation that are perfectly sensible, like stockpiling food, water, and toilet paper. The large quantities of guns are more worrying.
The doomsday the Elder is predicting involves a massive crash in the banking networks that renders money unavailable and credit cards unusable. It includes transit networks that manage bus and train traffic and also self-driving cars, steering the cars to form massive occult symbols instead of taking people where they’re going, and communications networks transmitting the sound of synthesized laughter instead of the signals they’re supposed to transmit. In other words, quite a bit of the havoc is the sort of doomsday that might come about if an unscrupulous person had access to Steph’s mother’s incredibly powerful decrypting code, which would let them break into huge numbers of computer systems and send them instructions the computers would think were coming from an authorized user.
Now I’m really worried. First, that the other AI is involved here. And second, that the other AI is working with someone from Homeric Software, the tiny company that was run by Steph’s mother, Steph’s father, Xochitl, and Rajiv.
9
• Nell •
This afternoon, my peculiar high school says my assignment is to ride the city bus. Specifically, I need to choose a destination, ride the bus there, and bring back some souvenir to prove I went. Steph has the same assignment, which makes this slightly less terrifying.
My mother used to warn me about how dangerous public schools were. When she was in high school, kids got beat up all the time. A girl got punched in the face on the first day of her ninth-grade science class. There were kids smoking grass in the bathrooms and maybe also shooting up heroin. And that was just in her school; city schools, well, those lockdown drills you heard about weren’t just for show.
Mom would poop out an entire litter of hairless baby hamsters if she knew my father had enrolled me at a school that was making me ride a city bus.
But this is good, actually, because I get to pick a destination. And I’ve gotten a quest from the Catacombs.
I’ve heard other people talk about quests, but I never got one before. Quests are optional (the missions aren’t supposed to be). When you do a quest, you can go up a whole lot of levels a lot faster—sometimes you’re even granted the opportunity to ask the Elder a question. And my quest starts with getting myself to something called the Midtown Exchange. I click Accept, my heart beating a little faster as the cheerful teacher spreads out a paper map of the city so we can pick a destination.
“Where’s the Midtown Exchange?” I ask, trying to keep my voice casual.
The teacher points it out on the map. “Is that where you want to go?” I nod. She looks at Steph. “Is that okay with you? We’d like you to stick together.”
Steph shrugs. “Sure.”
We each install an app on our phone that does bus routes and are handed our bus passes and a lanyard to carry them in and then sent out to the bus stop in front of our school.
“Have you ever ridden a bus before?” Steph asks.
“No,” I say. “Have you?”
“No,” she says, and laughs nervously. She puts her bus pass in her pocket, not in the lanyard, and after a minute, I do the same.
Steph acts much more worldly than I feel; she’s lived in nearly a hundred small towns, instead of just one. So it’s easy to forget that she’s never lived in a big city before, and being reminded of this makes my palms sweat, because I was thinking I’d just let her tell me how to do this.
There’s an elderly Black man with a walker at the same stop as us. The bus trundles up, opens its doors, and starts lowering itself to the curb with a loud hiss. Steph tries to lean in to ask the driver, “Is this the right bus to get to the Midtown Exchange?” but she’s drowned out.
“You’ve got the right bus,” the elderly man says. When the bus is fully lowered, it flips out a ramp with a loud beep and he boards, then glances back at us. “You’re allowed to use the ramp, come on in,” he adds.
I’m a little nervous taking the word of a fellow passenger over the driver, but Steph gets on, so I follow her. There are many empty seats. We swipe our passes and make our way to a spot near the middle, where there’s another door. I like this seat, because it seems like it would be easy to escape out that door if we had to. The app is supposed to tell us where to get off, but I don’t trust it.
“Have you gotten an answer yet from your hacker friend?” I ask Steph, even though it’s only been a few hours.
She checks her phone. “They haven’t found anything yet.”
I check my own phone, hoping despite all logic that maybe I’ll have a message from Glenys. Instead, I have an email from my grandmother. I swallow hard and open it, wondering if it’s news about my mother.
Dear Nell. She starts out like she’s writing an actual letter. She goes on like she’s writing an actual letter, too, telling me about the weather, some problem she and my grandfather had with their back storm door, the birds she’s seen at her bird feeder … I scroll down impatiently until I get to the update on my mother:
Still no word from the search for your mother. No news is probably good news. Keep praying hard, for all things are possible in the Lord …
I close the email. “No news is good news” if they are looking for her body. Not if they’re looking for her. Does my grandmother think Mom is dead? I know she thinks she might have just left me. Taken off for who knows where because the Remnant told her to. I didn’t think Grandma thought she might be dead.
“It’s nothing,” I say to Steph, who’s watching my face curiously. I think my voice sounds a little strained, but at least I’m not crying. “Are we almost there?”
She scrutinizes her phone, then leaps to her feet. “I think we get out here? Maybe?”
I glance at the old man who told us we should get on. “If you’re going to Midtown, you’ll want to sit back down,” he calls. “This is Floyd Plaza, and you want Floyd Avenue.”
Steph stares at her phone for a second, utterly perplexed, then says, “Oh, yeah. That’s confusing.” She sits back down and calls, “Thank you!” toward the front of the bus.
“If you young ladies would like to come sit by me,” he says, “I’m actually going to that same stop, so you can just get off when I get off.”
We move up to the front of the bus. “Are you new to Minneapolis?” he asks. We nod in unison. “I’ve lived in this city for forty years. Forty-three, actually. So relax, because I won’t let you miss your stop.” He gives us running commentary on Lake Street as we head west. Floyd Plaza is only about ten years old, and he points out a series of newer buildings that were put up “after the riots,” which he says like you’d say, “after the war.” “You’ll know you’re almost there when you see the rocket ship,” he says, and I think he’s joking, but there’s a two-story building made of sandy bricks with an aluminum rocket ship sculpture on the front that reaches all the way to the roof, and a minute later, the bus stops for us to get off.
“I’ll be waiting for the hospital shuttle,” he says, “but if you’d like to walk the rest of the way, it’s just up Floyd.”
“Thank you so much for your help,” Steph says.
“You’re very welcome. Welcome to Minneapolis, and enjoy your day,” he says.
> The Midtown Exchange turns out to be a tall building built of sandy brick. I hesitate outside, although people are streaming in and out like it’s a public place. “What is this?” Steph asks.
“I don’t actually know,” I say.
“Why’d you have us come here?”
“It’s a quest,” I say. “An assignment from the Catacombs.”
“Okay,” she says. “Are we going in?”
“Yes,” I say, and square my shoulders, trying to shake off an incredible sense of apprehension. Inside, I open the Catacombs app and click Here. Whatever it is I’m here to do, I want to do it and get it over with.
10
• Steph •
The Midtown Exchange turns out to be an enormous building, once a department store, now mostly apartments but with a “market” on the ground floor. The market is a giant food court, but instead of chains and fast food, it has small, local stalls designed to feel a little like an open-air market. I check my pocket for money and decide I could probably buy lunch here. I recognize only about half the foods available, but everything smells delicious.
“I’m supposed to find this person and take her picture,” Nell says, her eyes glued to her phone. “Only she’s not supposed to see me taking her picture.”
Well, that definitely sounds like everything’s on the up-and-up. “Can I see?” I ask, and Nell lets me look over her shoulder at her phone, which is showing her a somewhat blurry picture of a woman and the instructions to get a picture of this woman and whoever she’s sitting with.
“Well, step one is finding her, I guess,” I say, looking around us at the maze of stalls. I try looking for a website with an internal map of this place and accidentally pull up the Invisible Castle app, which turns out to have what I’m looking for plus a whole overlay filled with tasks that include convincing any nearby white person to order vindaloo by reassuring them that the vindaloo is really only Minnesota hot. Mischief Elves, huh. It also puts little exclamation points by stalls with things I can try in order to get points in the app, including vindaloo but also bubble tea and basil ice cream.
Chaos on CatNet Page 5