I wake, abruptly, hours later; it’s 2:00 a.m., the room light is still on, and my mother still isn’t here.
“CheshireCat,” I say. “Where’s Mom?”
“Her phone appears to still be in the hotel.”
“Where? You need to lead me to it.” I leap out of bed and start putting my clothes on. I try calling her; it goes straight to voice mail. I try a text, but I don’t even really expect a response. I jam my key card into my back pocket and step out to the hallway.
At 2:00 a.m., the hotel is as brightly lit as ever; the heavy silence is broken abruptly when the elevator opens and two giggly drunk women get off. One shrieks, “We’re here!” and her friend shushes her aggressively.
“The restaurant is down next to the lobby,” CheshireCat says.
“Is she still there?” I ask. The restaurant and bar are dark and silent, but the space is still open, so I walk through—did she drop her phone? I don’t see it. I ask CheshireCat, who says they’re trying to get a fix on the phone’s location.
There’s a night desk clerk, so I go over to ask if he’s seen my mother. “I was expecting her back in our room by now,” I say. “I’m just wondering if you saw her in the bar? Or if you saw her leave?” I have a picture of her on my phone—this still weirds me out, given that for most of my life pictures were completely forbidden—and I pull it up to show him.
He shakes his head. “I only came on at midnight. There were some people in the bar, but I don’t remember seeing your mother. I might not have noticed her, though. It closed at one.”
“Do you have any phones in the lost and found?”
They do, of course, but none that ring when I dial my mother’s number. “Thanks,” I say, and sit down for a second in one of the lobby chairs, feeling utterly lost. Do I call the police? Would normal people call the police for something like this? Is there anyone else I can call? Rachel is two and a half hours away; she’s also surely asleep. The only person likely to be in the Clowder this time of night is CheshireCat, anyway.
I stand up to go upstairs when CheshireCat says, “The phone location lines up with where she parked the van.”
“I thought you said she was in the hotel.”
“It’s very close.”
The parking garage is around the corner from the front of the hotel and across the street. “Was it there earlier? I mean when I asked hours ago?”
“No.”
CheshireCat has mentioned that locations are sometimes approximate. I look out the hotel’s front door for flashing lights, rioting, and so on. Nothing—either the Mischief Elves went home, or the barricade I crossed earlier is keeping them out of this part of downtown.
The parking garage is close but unheated; I’m definitely going to want my coat. “Where are you going?” CheshireCat asks.
“Back to the room to get my coat,” I say.
“That makes sense,” they say.
Upstairs, I remember my trip outside earlier. I can’t replace my thin coat, but I check my mom’s bag, and there’s an extra wool sweater inside. My own bag had a change of clothes for tomorrow, and my shirt will be another extra layer, so I go to dig that out and see a leaf of paper from the hotel’s notepad lying on the floor, like maybe it had been left on my pillow and then blown off.
I pick it up and find a note in my mother’s handwriting.
PHONES COMPROMISED
GO TO GROUND
CALL XOCHITL ONCE YOU HAVE A SECURE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION
Go to ground? I mean … what does that even mean? When it’s this cold outside? I at least know exactly where I can find a secure means of communication: my burner phone, which is in my desk back in the apartment. And if phones are compromised … that means my mother’s phone is almost certainly not with my mother. If it’s out by the van, that’s more likely to be bait than a clue. I swallow hard. Right.
Back in my apartment, I have a phone with no data connection, my laptop—which will let me communicate with the Clowder while not using my thumbs—and a robot. It occurs to me that if my mother’s phone does have any useful information on it, I could potentially have CheshireCat send the robot to retrieve it, but if my phone is compromised, I definitely don’t want to have that conversation with CheshireCat right now.
I put on all my layers, take the money my mother left for me to pay for room service food, and—I’d been planning to use my own phone to order a taxi, but the room’s courtesy tablet has a Get Taxi button, so I hit that, turn on my phone’s “hide my location” app, and head to the elevator.
“I can’t see where you are,” CheshireCat.
“Good, that means it’s working,” I say. “Do you trust me?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Trust me.”
CheshireCat can normally see people’s locations even when they’ve turned off location services (they’re just too polite to mention it), but because my mother is paranoid, she set up a bunch of security apps on my phone, including a VPN and an app that actually hides my location. I’m not convinced that uninstalling the Mischief Elves app will un-compromise my phone, but I also don’t want to just turn my phone off, because without it, I won’t have any way to talk to CheshireCat.
“Are you going to the garage?” they ask.
“Shh,” I say.
“Because I’m not sure that’s entirely a good idea.”
“Yeah,” I say. “You might be right about that.”
“I think you should stay at the hotel. In your room. That seems like the safest option right now.”
I want to tell CheshireCat about the note, but there’s no way to do that that’s not potentially compromised. “I have some information you don’t,” I say. “Just hold tight.”
The taxi pulls up, and I run out and get in. “Destination?” the car asks.
I mute my phone’s microphone and start to give the taxi my address, then decide to have it let me out at the end of my alley instead.
“This will be billed to your hotel room with an additional 15 percent convenience fee,” the car says.
“That’s fine,” I say.
“Current traffic conditions may require a longer route.”
“That’s also fine.”
“Please fasten your seat belt and adjust your headrest,” the car says, and then goes into its marketing spiel as it starts moving. “You have chosen the best of all possible taxi options, the Robono Tranquility 9000, which has an unparalleled safety record and fully optimized street routing—”
There’s a button I can press to shut it up, so I press it.
* * *
I’ve been climbing in and out of second-story windows for years, and I scouted the best routes up and down when we first moved in, but I haven’t actually climbed out, let alone in, from our Minneapolis apartment. Doing it with snow, ice, and a frigid wind is going to make this exciting. Not the good kind of exciting.
I turn my phone’s mic back on before I get out of the taxi and say, “CheshireCat, I need your robot to go unlock the apartment balcony door.” I don’t wait for a response; it’s so brutally cold I’m afraid I won’t be able to grip properly if I don’t get there as fast as I can. I run down the alley to my backyard, then use the window of the garage to climb up to the garage roof, stepping carefully because this would be a really bad time to slip and fall. From the end of the garage, I can reach a tree branch, then swing from there onto the edge of the balcony, then over the rail.
The door is locked. “CheshireCat,” I hiss.
No response.
I bang on the door. “This door,” I say.
Still no response.
“CheshireCat, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Bring the robot.” I take out my phone and stare at it. Then I pull off my right glove and dial Rachel, even though it’s 3:00 a.m. and she is definitely asleep.
She picks up on the third ring. “What’s wrong?” she asks, sounding a lot less sleepy than she should.
“
Can you please go online, right now, and ask CheshireCat if they can bring the new robot to open the balcony door in my apartment?”
Somewhere far away, I can hear a siren, and I have a really bad feeling someone saw me climbing and thinks I’m breaking in.
“Also, tell them to hurry.”
“Okay,” Rachel says, and I hear the click of keys; she’s typing. “Okay, they say they’ll do that right now, and also they think something might be wrong with your phone.”
I hear a clunk from inside; I think CheshireCat overshot with the robot and ran it straight into the sliding glass door to the balcony. Then, to my immense relief, I hear the click of the lock sliding back. I open the door, and the warm air surges out around me. I slam it shut inside.
“Did it work?” Rachel asks me anxiously.
“It worked, it worked. I’m inside,” I say. Now that I’m inside, I actually start shaking harder. My teeth rattle. CheshireCat trots the robot off to the kitchen, and I hear water running. I think they’re putting on the kettle.
“What’s going on?” Rachel asks.
“Hang on,” I say. “I’m going to call you back on a different phone.”
I power down my smartphone completely and leave it in the kitchen before going into my bedroom, where I open my desk drawer and dig out the pencil case with my burner phone zipped up inside it. The phone hasn’t been on in months, but it powers up without a hitch and tells me I have three hundred minutes. I use it to dial Rachel’s number as I wake my laptop and log in.
“What’s going on?” CheshireCat asks as soon as I’m in the Clowder.
“Have you not been listening in?” I ask.
“You shut off RideAlong,” CheshireCat says. “I assumed you wanted privacy.”
“When?” I ask. “What’s the last thing you overheard?”
“You told your mother about the tracking device the Catacombs people gave you, and she got very upset.”
“Someone’s been talking to me,” I say. “And they said they were you. Even though they were not.”
* * *
CheshireCat uses the robot to make me a cup of tea, which is a very nice thought, although a combination of not really understanding “tea” and the limited motor skills of the robot means it’s a cup of hot water with a cherry-flavored tea bag, a mint tea bag, and an apple-cinnamon tea bag all in the mug together.
Meanwhile, I call Xochitl. However, it’s the middle of the night in Boston, and she doesn’t pick up. CheshireCat looks at ways to get her attention but has no luck. “I mean, she worked with my parents and Rajiv,” I say. “She’s probably the last person in the world who’d have an internet-enabled house.”
I call Rachel back and try to bring her up to date. “So do you think your mom is okay?” Rachel asks. “Do you think she just went to ground, like she told you to do?”
I think about this.
“No,” I say. “Because she’s told me to leave her. But she’s never left me.”
“Do you think she was lured out?”
“Yes. Or—actually, I should ask the real CheshireCat where her phone is.”
CheshireCat agrees with the other AI that my mother’s phone is in the parking garage where we left the van. “I do not recommend going there,” CheshireCat adds. “Given the other AI’s interest in directing you there, the possibility that an ambush is waiting seems very high.”
“If someone kidnapped her with, like, a gun,” Rachel says, “maybe she dropped her phone? Or maybe they made her drop it?”
If there is one thing my mother is terrified of, it’s being kidnapped again. “She could not have been quietly abducted. She’d have screamed and made a scene.”
“What if Rajiv just straight up approached her?” Rachel asks. “Were they friends? Would she maybe have just gone with him?”
“I don’t think so. She really doesn’t trust him.”
I don’t know how CheshireCat is waking people, but one by one, people are logging on: Bryony, Icosahedron, Firestar, Hermione. “I thought you might need some backup,” they say when I send them a private message consisting solely of question marks.
“Even Rachel and Bryony are 150 miles away,” I say.
“Distance isn’t everything,” CheshireCat says. “We’re your friends, and we all want to help you if we can.”
“Easy for the person who doesn’t need sleep to say,” I say, but Hermione and Firestar are asking me what’s wrong, am I okay, what’s going on…? So I leave the private chat, and tell everyone what’s been going on.
32
• Clowder •
Icosahedron: So the first thing you’re going to want to do is restore your phone to factory settings. That should wipe whatever malware the other AI used to impersonate CheshireCat.
LittleBrownBat: Do you think I can still use CheshireCat’s app
CheshireCat: It should be okay. All the app did was give me permission to listen in.
LittleBrownBat: Why don’t I just give you verbal permission and NOT install the app, just in case
Marvin: I’m torn between defending my future reenactor friends and thinking you’re probably right
LittleBrownBat: I’m not saying your friends are bad, anyway, I’m saying they’re being used by bad people! Like the people who tried to plant a tracker on me!
Hermione: Correction—the people who successfully planted a tracker on you. Where are you right now?
LittleBrownBat: Home
Firestar: OH COME ON LBB, you went HOME when you knew they’d tracked you?
LittleBrownBat: I climbed in through the window and you have no idea how COLD it is here right now, where else am I going to go?
Georgia: Deep breaths everybody.
CheshireCat: If anyone comes to LBB’s apartment, I’ll use the robot to distract them while she escapes back out the balcony.
Icosahedron: Robot? What robot?
LittleBrownBat: CheshireCat bought me a robot.
Icosahedron: Can you buy me a robot? I would LOVE to have a robot.
CheshireCat: How would you explain the robot to your parents?
Icosahedron: I wouldn’t.
Hermione: How would you explain the robot to your parents when they FOUND the robot while looking for your laptop?
Icosahedron: Fair point.
LittleBrownBat: What I really want right now is to find my mom.
Orlando: LBB, your mom wants you to be safe. When she was in the hospital after her surgery she stole a nurse’s phone to tell you to keep running.
Firestar: Orlando, can you and Georgia head to Minneapolis?
Georgia: 2 hrs 24 minutes. That is TOO LONG for LBB to sit in her apartment.
Boom Storm: Maybe try another taxi?
Firestar: Could you call Nell’s family and see if they’ll help you?
LittleBrownBat: I just thought of something.
My GRANDMOTHER is in town. And she gave me her number …
33
• Steph •
I wipe my smartphone and start reinstalling the stuff I trust, like the CatNet app, and the stuff I need, like the taxi app. I’m briefly convinced I dropped my grandmother’s card in the hotel room, but then I find it in a different pocket. Rose Packet, Master Gardener, it says, and gives a phone number. I dial it, trying not to get my hopes up. It’s 4:00 a.m.
On the third ring, my grandmother picks up. “Hello?” she says, her voice thick from sleep but with the alert edge of someone who is already sitting up and preparing for whatever the emergency is. “Laura?”
“It’s Steph,” I say. “Mimi, there’s … a lot I need to explain, but … Mom and I are in trouble.”
Her voice sheds the last of the sleepiness. “How can I help?”
“Mom is missing. I’m in my apartment, but there are people I don’t trust who know where it is and may be watching. I can climb out the back, but I can’t just run away on foot. It’s too cold. I need someone to meet me.”
“With a car.”
“Yes
.”
“Ten minutes. No, fifteen. I’ll need a little time to find a car.”
“I’ll watch for you.”
“You do that, sweetie. I’ll be there.”
I put my cleaned phone in my pocket and add the burner phone just in case. I look longingly at my heavy coat, but I can’t assume they didn’t plant another tracker in there somewhere—I add another wool sweater layer and then put my too-light jacket back on. My laptop goes into my backpack and so does the robot and its spare battery.
I haven’t turned on any of the overhead lights in my apartment—after all the trouble I went to breaking in through the back, being Obviously Here seems counterproductive. So when I hear a car drive up outside and pull in next to the curb, I freeze, not wanting to even provide shadows of movement. The car is just sitting there, engine idling, and I list out all the perfectly normal reasons they might be sitting out there in the middle of the night: They might be buying or selling illegal drugs. They might be lost and consulting a map. They might be catching Pokémon. Many possibilities that have nothing to do with me.
My nose is itching, and I sneeze.
That startles my cat, who leaps up from the spot where she’s been napping and runs over to stand, for a minute, in the window, looking out.
A minute later, I hear the car driving away. Probably just lost and consulting a map, I tell myself, trying to calm down.
I open a can of food for Apricot (thank you, good kitty), then check the time. It’s been almost fifteen minutes. I peer out the back window—and there’s a big gray car idling in the alley. My burner phone pings, and it’s a text. I’m here.—Mimi.
Okay. I go back out through the balcony door, even though with the robot in my backpack there’s no way to latch it from the inside. At least it’s a lot easier to climb down off the balcony than it was to climb up the garage—I just lower myself and drop, it’s not even all that far—and then run over to the car. Mimi is behind the wheel. I slide into the passenger seat.
Someone is coming down the alley toward us, and for a second, I think we’re going to be trapped, but Mimi slams the car into reverse and careens out of the alley, just missing a second car that was getting ready to pull in.
Chaos on CatNet Page 18