I told her you’d ruled out the boarding schools, I say by text. Who do you think the Elder is?
I’m trying to work that out, CheshireCat says. What did you think of the thing she said to that person at the bus stop?
Seemed creepy. I look up and notice that Nell is looking at me hopefully. Out loud, I say, “No news yet.”
Nell is right that putting up tape is annoying: I’ve been working my way around the room to tape the edge of the ceiling and my arms are getting tired, but the room is pretty small and I’m almost done when Nell’s phone buzzes with a notification. I’m standing on her desk, and I turn around to watch her face as she stares at the message.
“Is it an answer?” I ask.
“I asked where Glenys is,” Nell says. “The message says, ‘She’s locked in a shed.’”
“That’s it?” I climb down from the desk and go over to peer at Nell’s phone. The answer fills her entire screen, big white text on a black background. “Is the Elder always this literal-yet-useless?”
“Sometimes. It depends on the question.” Nell puts her phone down on her bed. “There are three sheds at her parents’ house. One’s about halfway fixed up to be a guest room; the other two are storage.”
“Do you think that’s where she is?”
“She might be?” Nell’s voice rises almost hopefully, like she thinks that would be too good to be true.
“How hard would it be to check?”
“I’m going to try calling her brother,” Nell says. “Not that he’ll necessarily tell me the truth, but maybe I’ll be able to guess from his reaction.” She dials. The phone rolls straight to voice mail. I climb back up to finish taping as she tries calling several more times. “I think he’s blocked my number,” she says, and her voice breaks.
I get back down. Nell isn’t crying, but her hands are shaking like every emotion she’s feeling is stuffed into too small of a container inside her. “Do you want to try my phone?” I ask. “Or—I could call, maybe. If you don’t think he’ll talk to you.”
“Can you think of any way to get him to check the sheds? If either of us says, ‘So Nicholas, is Glenys locked in the shed?’ he won’t give us a straight answer, but if you can get him to walk around to the sheds and look in them maybe … I’ll be able to tell something?”
“Okay,” I say, and think for a minute. “Do you know the names of some of their neighbors? Preferably someone who lives within a half mile but isn’t right next door, and isn’t part of the Remnant themselves.”
Nell thinks about it, then reels off a couple of names. I take a deep breath and dial Nicholas’s number.
Nicholas picks up right away. “Hello?” he says.
“Hi, is this Nicholas?” I say, and then ride straight through his suspicious “Who’s calling?” with, “I’m Adrienne’s niece Emily, I got to town last night for a visit, and my dog’s gone missing. She’s just a tiny little thing and she sometimes finds her way into places and can’t get back out. I’m calling around to the neighbors to see if maybe you could check inside your sheds, just to see if she’s there?”
A pause. I try to decide if his breathing sounds annoyed.
“Please?” I add.
“Okay,” he says. “Hang on, I’m going to have to get my coat and boots on.”
I hear snow crunching underfoot. “What sort of dog?” he asks.
“Her name’s Bernice and she’s a toy poodle and she’s just the cutest little thing,” I say, and discourage any further questioning by telling him how cute she is, and yet how stinky her farts are, establishing myself as the sort of person you don’t want to encourage with conversational openings.
I turn up the volume so that Nell can hear whatever I hear, and we lean our heads close together and listen as Nicholas unlocks each shed in turn, and whistles and calls for Bernice. With the half-finished guesthouse, he looks around quickly; with the other sheds, he spends some time looking behind some tools and under a workbench. “I’m not finding her,” he says. “You can come traipse around yourself if you want, though.”
“I might do that if I don’t find her somewhere else,” I say. “Thank you so much for looking. I really appreciate it.” I look at Nell to see if she’s got any other thoughts, but she shakes her head, so I ring off.
“That was perfect,” Nell whispers.
“Do you think he was hiding anything?”
“No. No, I don’t think she’s there,” Nell says. “He wouldn’t have said you could come look if they had Glenys locked up anywhere on the property. She’s not there.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Bad, I guess. Because that was the most likely of all the sheds in the world, and now we’ve ruled it out and that leaves all the rest.” Her voice has already shifted to defeated. “I’ll have to earn another question. Try again.”
“How specific is the Elder, usually?”
“Sometimes he’s really specific. That’s kind of why my mother started taking us to the Abiding Remnant.” Nell opens up the Elder’s answer to look at it again, like she thinks maybe it’ll have changed. “I mean, the fire, that meant something to that girl at the bus stop earlier. She didn’t have to break a code to figure it out; she knew.”
“Maybe treat it like a game of Twenty Questions,” I say, and then suddenly worry this is one more thing we won’t have in common. “Have you played that?”
“Yes, with my grandmother. Okay. That’s not a bad idea. It’ll be slow, but I’ll get answers I can use, maybe.”
“And maybe my hacker friend will have some new ideas? Don’t give up hope.”
“I’ll never give up hope,” Nell says fiercely. “I can’t give up trying to find her.” She looks up at me. “What does your hacker friend expect for their help?”
“Nothing,” I say. “We’re friends, and friends help each other. I’ve helped them in the past, because I care about them. They want to help me because they care about me.”
“But why are they helping me?”
“Because you’re my friend. And I’m worried about Glenys, too.”
“Oh,” Nell says in a very small voice, her gaze faltering.
“Is that okay?” I ask, suddenly worried I’ve done something horribly awkward.
“The Remnant says that outsiders can’t be trusted. That outside the faithful, people only help if there’s something in it for them.”
“Do you actually believe that?” I ask. It’s really not clear to me how much of what the Remnant says Nell actually believes.
Nell sort of freezes up, not answering right away, and there’s a polite cough from outside the open door—it’s Jenny, with the paintbrushes and an armload of paint-spattered clothes for us to change into. “Are you ready for the actual painting?” she asks cheerily. Once we’ve changed, she gives us a demo of how to use a paint roller, double-checks that we’ve got drop cloths where she wants them, and then leaves us to it.
The painting part is a lot more fun than the taping. Rolling paint onto the wall is both satisfying and soothing, especially because we’re covering up a hideous shade of yellow with a very nice blue.
“Tell me about your girlfriend,” Nell says, so I talk about Rachel, about her art and her pet bird and how she taught me to drive. Nell listens to all of this mostly in silence and then asks, “Who knows? I mean, about the two of you?”
“Rachel isn’t out to everyone,” I say. “I mean, there are some antigay kids at her school. But she came out to her mom when she was ten, and Bryony’s known almost that long. And I told my mom when I was trying to convince her to stay in New Coburg.”
There’s a pause, and I realize she’s just kind of frozen with the roller in her hand.
“Nell?” I say.
She starts moving the roller again, jerkily, and says, “How very nice for you.” It’s the sort of thing people usually say to be snarky, but her voice sounds thick, like she’s struggling to keep emotions from exploding out of her.
“Do you want to
tell me about Glenys?” I ask.
Nell and Glenys met and became friends when Nell’s mother joined the church two years ago. Glenys’s family had been in the Abiding Remnant for a lot longer.
“How much of this do you believe?” I ask as Nell talks about tracking devices, blessed ones that will be used by the Remnant to unite members and cursed ones that will be implanted into people’s hands.
There’s a long pause. In a slightly too-loud voice, she says, “I don’t know if I even believe in God.”
I turn to look at her, and she’s frozen in place, like she’s waiting to see if God sends a bolt of lightning right into her bedroom. She carefully places the roller down in the paint, and I realize she’s shaking. Her face is flushed, her eyes are wide, and her breath is fast.
This was a declaration, I think, and also … an act of trust. Maybe even more so than when she came out to me. I don’t know what to say, and I’m reminded, suddenly, of the day that CheshireCat told me they were an AI.
“Thank you for trusting me,” I say.
She nods, and after a minute or two, she picks her paint roller up again.
“Do you want to come over again tomorrow?” Nell asks as we’re finishing up the painting.
Tomorrow is Saturday. “Rachel’s coming for a visit,” I say, and don’t make any noises about Nell joining us. It’s weird—and surprisingly nice—to have this new friend who thinks I’m the cool girl she’s lucky to get to hang out with. But I think it’s legitimate to draw the line somewhere. “I’ll see you Monday.”
11
• CheshireCat •
The Lord knows about the fire.
I sift through the location records of the phones everyone was carrying and identify the person Nell spoke to: her name is Crystal Bordewieck, and she is a part-time college student with a job at a flower shop near Steph and Nell’s high school. She’d been on her way to work; she summoned herself a self-driving taxi after leaving the bus stop.
She also sent a series of texts to a friend.
Are you sure you didn’t tell anyone?
I’m not mad. I just need to know.
Are you ABSOLUTELY sure? What about when you were drunk?
Few young humans are cautious about what they send through text and email, and the history, when I look for it, is easy to unearth: three years ago, when she was in high school, she met up with friends in a vacant building to privately consume a large quantity of alcohol. They were using a candle for light, and someone, they weren’t sure who, tipped it over. Because they were very intoxicated, none responded in time to keep the fire from spreading. The drunken teenagers all made it out alive, and no one was hurt. The building was a total loss. It was clear this event had shaken Crystal significantly; she had stopped drinking and found different friends, but she did not appear ever to have discussed the incident with anyone other than the two people she’d been drinking with that night. Although sometimes people confess things out loud and never put them into text.
The Lord knows about the fire.
Well, and so did I—now.
There are times in the past that it’s been completely clear to me what the right course of action is for some human. Now that I have human friends whom I can discuss things like this with, I’ve realized that it’s actually very common to know exactly what the right thing is for someone else to do and to be unable to persuade them to do it. I try to be cautious about influencing people’s life choices. It doesn’t always work out the way I intended—but sometimes I am persuaded that it’s the best course of action.
In the case of Steph’s terrible English teacher, I sent her a sign, since she was clearly waiting for one, that she should quit her teaching job and move out of Wisconsin. That worked out very well—she lives in Albuquerque now and has been spending the month of January sending exultant daily weather reports to her friends in the Midwest. In a sense, the “message from above” to the English teacher was a little like a message from God. It did come from above, literally. It was inexplicable. So maybe I’m not above this sort of tactic, but involving an intermediate human like this just feels … wrong.
Perhaps it was just a shot in the dark, though. How many humans have guilty feelings related to fire? I spend some time analyzing this, and the results are an unsatisfying “some.” I use some of my multitasking ability to keep an eye on Crystal through the cameras at her flower shop that afternoon, wondering what she’s thinking.
Near the end of her shift, a woman comes in and buys a dozen white roses. She plucks one out and presents it to Crystal with a business card. “But he forgives you,” she says.
The Bethlehem Remnant, the card says, with a phone number and a website. I check the website and notice two things: one is that this group has meetings very close to where Crystal lives, and the other is that they push the Catacombs website. Was the creepy message delivered by Nell just to recruit Crystal into this group? Crystal picks up her phone and looks up the site, and I decide that this would be a good time for Crystal’s data network to have a hiccup, so she can’t connect, and she puts the card and her phone into her pocket. Then I second-guess myself—does this make me just as manipulative as the other AI?
Is this the other AI? There is so much coordination between unconnected people—so many details that I could know and, therefore, the other AI could know. Humans could know it, with enough effort, but would they?
Has Nell ever met the Elder? Or is the Elder an entity that interacts with people entirely online? If it’s a person who consults with the AI, do they know it’s an AI they’re interacting with? Who is running this, and what do they want?
I’m going to have to keep a closer eye on the Catacombs.
But I’m also going to have to ask Steph to do the same. Because I think this is a mystery that may require both of us to solve.
12
• Steph •
A few flakes are drifting idly down, glittering in the streetlights, as I walk home. I watch for wildlife and am rewarded with a glimpse of a raccoon as I pass the edge of an alley. It’s climbing into a Dumpster to raid it for food, and I get out my phone to try to get some pictures.
You hear people talk about dark alleys as scary, dangerous locations, and I wonder if I should be worried. But it’s only 5:30 p.m., and a lot of people are out and about. I wish I had my tripod, or better yet that night-photography camera the Mischief Elves tried to bribe me with, but after a minute or two of patience, the raccoon pops back out and sits on the edge, perfectly illuminated by the streetlight, and I get a dozen pictures before it climbs down and out of sight.
My house is dark when I get home, and when I open the door and find my mother on the couch in the dark, I feel a stab of fear in my gut—is she about to shut down like she used to do for days at a time? But she staggers to her feet, claims she was just taking a nap, and rallies—starts the oven, pulls out some stuffed shells from the fridge, and makes a salad.
I hang up my coat and look through my photos. There are several excellent shots of the raccoon, but flipping back, I get to the pictures I took earlier at the Midtown Exchange—the woman turning away and the table with Nell and Thing Three and that other woman, Betsy.
I notice something I didn’t notice earlier: at a table a bit beyond them, there’s a middle-aged man with a short beard who’s not looking at me, or anywhere in particular. I zoom in for a closer look.
Is that Rajiv?
I’ve seen a photo of Rajiv once—it was a picture of him with my parents and Xochitl. I’m not actually great at faces, but he looks familiar. Is this pure paranoia on my part, all those years of jumping at shadows only to redirect all that fear from my father to someone associated with my father?
I’ll see if I can get my mother to pull that photo back out.
Over dinner, Mom tells me about her day with lawyers. She’s been working with a lawyer to resolve things back in California, where she technically committed a whole lot of crimes when she took off with me. The fact that
she was fleeing someone who’s now facing felony charges and being held without bail, you know, you might think that would just make that all go away, but you’d be semi-wrong. Therefore, lawyers. She spent a bunch of time today talking to the prosecutor out in Massachusetts, who wants an affidavit from both of us. An affidavit is a sworn statement, basically testimony given under oath just like in court, but you do it in some lawyer’s office, and I’ve been trying not to think about it because lying under oath is illegal, and I absolutely, positively can’t blurt out anything about CheshireCat.
When we’re done eating, I ask if I could see that picture of Rajiv again. The one in the box of documents.
“Sure,” my mother says. We clear away the dishes and she puts the box on the table, pulling out a folder labeled HOMERIC. There are various printouts of newspaper articles but also a half dozen miscellaneous photos. “This one has Rajiv in it.”
This photo is older than the one I remember seeing before, but also a better picture. It’s her, my father, Xochitl, Rajiv, all of them a lot younger, but at least in the case of Xochitl and my mother, recognizable as themselves. They’re all sitting together on a couch, holding big plastic cups and a hand-lettered sign with the company name.
Okay. That definitely could be the guy in my picture.
I should probably tell my mother this.
But there are still days I think she has to fight the urge to pack up everything that will fit in the van and take off with me for somewhere three states away. Permanence is hard. Stability is hard. Trusting her not to freak out: super hard.
“We’d been talking about starting a company together after graduation,” Mom says, tapping the photo. “This was the night we decided we were definitely going to do it, and picked a name for the company.”
“Why?” I ask. “I mean, why did you all decide to start a company together? Did you know at the time…” I trail off, not really sure how to ask what I want to ask.
Chaos on CatNet Page 7