“Let’s lose these folks,” she says, pats me on the knee, and floors the accelerator.
Are we in a car chase? How am I in the second car chase of my life? “Losing those cars would be great,” I say, hoping that CheshireCat discreetly helps us out. Sure enough, the second we cross a train track, the crossing arms drop, even though there’s no train in sight.
Mimi drives a bit farther, then pulls over and looks at me. “Do we need to go rescue your mother right this second?”
“I don’t even know where she is. So we kind of can’t.”
“Just as well, because I need coffee and at least a little solid food in me if I’m going to get my head around whatever’s happening. Michael’s not involved, is he?”
“No. I mean, not directly, anyway.”
“That’s one mercy. Does this town have any twenty-four-hour diners?”
I look this up on my phone and find one on Lake Street that turns out to be in a vintage railcar. My grandmother carefully parks in the small lot behind the diner, and getting out, I remember something. “I thought you didn’t rent a car.”
“I didn’t,” she says.
“But…” I gesture at the car. “But now you have a car.”
“I stole it,” she says.
I stop dead for a second, despite the wind. “You stole a car?”
“Finding an open rental place at this time of night would have taken far too long, and I didn’t want to rely on a taxi when things were obviously already complicated. Don’t worry about it. A car this new definitely has insurance. Let’s get inside. How do you survive weather like this?”
We’re the only people in the diner. We sit down at a booth, and I hoist my backpack onto the seat next to me. “What do you have in there?” Mimi asks.
“My laptop computer and a robot,” I say.
She laughs and then narrows her eyes. “You were serious. You were serious? Why do you have a robot?”
“Just in case I need one,” I say. I mean, that’s literally true. Also, she stole a car and she’s wondering why I have a robot?
This restaurant is like an upscale fancy person’s version of the roadside diners I ate at on Saturday. They have “ancient grains” waffles with organic raspberries and grass-fed whipped cream. Mimi mutters that she really doesn’t want to know what sort of excuse for avocado toast she’s going to get from Minnesotans in January and orders herself pancakes with a side order of (free-range, organically fed, heirloom-breed) bacon and a bottomless cup of coffee. I get the same.
“Don’t try to tell me what’s going on until we’ve both had at least one cup of coffee,” Mimi instructs me, and so I wait quietly. The waitress comes around with mugs, a bowl of brown sugar clumps that are formed into pebbles with tongs to pick them up, and a cream pitcher shaped like a cow. Mimi drinks her coffee black. Once she’s finished a cup and gotten a refill (and a plate of pancakes), she says, “Now. What’s going on?”
I can’t tell her about the AIs, but I can tell her that someone—some unknown, mysterious mastermind—is running a network of social media sites that are designed to get people to rile each other up. I tell her specifically about the Mischief Elves and the Catacombs, mentioning my friend Nell but not the part where we broke Nell’s friend out of a cult compound on Saturday.
I am leaving out a lot. It’s still enough to worry my grandmother.
“I think the best solution is just to take you to Texas,” she says. “You’ll be safe with me, and your mother will know where to find you once she surfaces.”
“I’m not leaving without my mother.”
“Your mother wants you to be safe. And no one who’s looking for the two of you will expect you to be in Texas.”
“Don’t I need an ID or something to fly?”
“We can drive there. It’ll take about two days.” When I open my mouth to object, she adds, “In a rental car. I’m sure something’s open by now.” We’ve been sitting in the diner for a while. It won’t be properly light out until almost 8:00 a.m., but the darkness outside is a little less dark.
“How did you steal it, anyway?” I ask.
“This type of car is entirely keyless and vulnerable to hacking.”
I blink at her. Somehow I had not expected that my grandmother the master gardener was also a car hacker.
She turns her hands palms up like she can guess what I’m thinking. “Darling, I’ve been working on car computer systems since the 1990s. I actually built the car-hacking device because I lost my own car fob and they charge a completely absurd fee to replace them. Also, when you get to be my age, you’ll find that your friends are constantly locking their keys in their cars. It’s nice to be of service. I just keep it in my purse.”
I cannot wait to tell Ico about this.
Mimi leans forward. “Anyway, going to Texas will also get you out of this utterly inhumane cold. This would be a perfectly lovely time to visit Texas even if you weren’t fretting about some sort of gang war based around online games. It’s probably sixty degrees in Houston right now. Above zero.”
I pull out my phone and look up the weather in Houston. “It’s thirty-nine.”
She looks disappointed, then rallies and says, “That is sixty degrees warmer than it is here.”
My phone offers up news results for Houston along with weather results, and something catches my eye: some sort of incident at a church in a former basketball stadium. Some group broke in to commit vandalism; another group—not affiliated with the church—showed up before the police and attacked the vandals. There was a brawl. Also, the vandalism apparently involved an attempt to TP the entire interior, which sounds like quite a project unless this is a very small basketball stadium. Regardless, this screams Mischief Elves to me, or something similar. I read the news story to my grandmother, and her eyes go wide. “That doesn’t sound normal.”
“It’s the same thing that’s happening here, just it’s Houston groups attacking each other.”
A blast of cold air from the door makes me look behind me. Like most businesses in Minneapolis, this restaurant has a double set of doors, providing sort of an airlock for heat, but there’s a big group coming in and they have both doors open at the same time. Everyone has the same alert, wary smile that I saw in the sandwich shop, and I am absolutely positive that they are here to make trouble.
“We have to go,” I say. “Right now.”
Mimi glances in the direction I’m looking, drops a wad of cash on the table, and says, “Back exit,” with a jerk of her head toward the kitchen. I follow her as she sails through the kitchen with an apologetic wave at the cook and out the back door.
Outside, Mimi heads toward the car, but I catch her arm. “The tires are all flat,” I say.
We look back toward Lake Street; I’m wondering how quickly CheshireCat can get a taxi to us, but I see a bus pulling up. “This,” I say, and pull my grandmother on board.
“Where are we going?” Mimi asks.
I look at the route number. “Abbott Northwestern Hospital.”
“Are you not feeling well?” she says, looking alarmed.
“No,” I say. “Someone I trust works there.”
* * *
Siobhan has just gotten to work when we arrive—I know because her cheeks and nose are still bright pink from the cold. “Have you heard from Nell?” she asks immediately. Glancing at Mimi, she adds, “Are you Steph’s mom?”
“This is my grandmother,” I say.
“Rose Packet,” my grandmother says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I’m afraid Steph’s reason for bringing me here is as much a mystery to me as it is to you.”
“We need somewhere safe,” I say. “The hospital has both security and Wi-Fi. Siobhan, I don’t know where Nell is, but I’m working on it. Did she tell you she had another girl with her?”
“She what?” Siobhan looks simultaneously alarmed and frazzled. “She did? Who?”
“Her girlfriend, Glenys.”
“She has a gir
lfriend?” Siobhan asks, looking poleaxed. “Do you mean a girlfriend girlfriend or a girl friend or…”
“Romantic-type girlfriend. We rescued the girlfriend last weekend from her mother’s cult.”
“So that’s why she was suddenly so worried about her mother … Actually, this still makes no sense.”
“Also, there are multiple groups in town, one of them connected to her mother’s cult, which are trying to stir up trouble. Potentially a lot of trouble.”
“Do you think Nell is involved with any of them?”
“Yes, and I think the app it uses might be interfering with her phone—sending her fake texts, blocking real ones. So if you’ve been texting her to say you’ve got an appointment with a lawyer, it may be sending her texts that look like they’re from you that say her mother arrived in town and is looking for her.”
Siobhan rubs her forehead. “Okay,” she says. “I’m going to set you up with a conference room and a Wi-Fi password and then text the rest of the nest.”
“Do you play any weird online games?” I ask. “New in the last six months?”
“There’s an exercise motivation app I downloaded but haven’t actually done much with…” She trails off and says, “I’m going to start by wiping my phone and suggesting everyone else do the same.”
In the conference room, I take out my laptop and pull up the Clowder. I summarize everything I know about so far this morning. “I’ve spent a lot of time telling myself that I’m just being paranoid when I think someone’s after me. But now people are actually after me! How am I ever going to stop being paranoid? How do normal people know when their gut is actually telling them something?”
“I WANT AN ANSWER TO THAT QUESTION, TOO,” Firestar says.
“In my experience, if my gut is actually telling me something, I’d probably better pay attention, because it almost never does,” Hermione says.
“What are you doing online, Hermione? Aren’t you at school?”
“This is important,” Hermione says. “Also, I already have 115 percent in this class; I think it’ll be okay if I don’t pay attention one day.”
“Is this stuff happening everywhere?” I ask. “Are people starting trouble in your towns?”
It appears to be isolated spots; Minneapolis is one of just a handful. “Why here?” I ask.
“Well, you’re there,” Firestar says.
“Do you think I’m causing it?”
“Of course not!” Firestar says.
“Do you think I’m being targeted by it?” I ask.
“Clearly,” Hermione says. “You know about CheshireCat. Maybe the other AI knows who you are.”
“But I haven’t been hurt,” I say. “Yet, anyway. And if it wanted me dead, it could probably do that.”
“Minneapolis has a really unusual police department,” Hermione says. “Like it’s got very few actual police. So possibly the other AI thinks Minneapolis is just a good place to experiment. Didn’t you say the Catacombs people said they were trying to keep you safe? Maybe the people who keep showing up are actually trying to do that?”
“You know what would keep me safe? Not starting riots in my city.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“Anyway, last night, the police I ran into were all very nice to me. They kept giving me vouchers to buy myself a warmer coat. And some of them didn’t even have guns.”
“See, technically those aren’t police at all,” Hermione tells me.
“Have you found Nell yet?” Firestar asks.
“No,” I say. “I wound up going to one of her step-whatevers to see if she could help us out, and she’s being very helpful, though.”
“Have you checked with that friend of mine from the RPG who offered to put her up?” Firestar asks. “Because it’s not impossible she went there. You all got the address, right?”
I had completely forgotten about Firestar’s RPG friend.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
“Morthos. Well, that’s in the game. I don’t know what his real name is.”
“If he’s in the Mischief Elves, the app on his phone might let the other AI intercept his messages.”
“Yeah. But you’re not that far, right? You could just go to his house. Or, wait, is he at school?”
“He’s definitely not at school,” I say. “Because it’s minus thirty degrees here and they’ve canceled school again.”
* * *
Here’s what Firestar knows about their friend: In the RPG, he plays a tiefling bard named Morthos and tells a lot of jokes, many of them not very good. His parents buy large, run-down houses and fix them up. The current house is very large and very run-down. He really does think the current house is haunted, although from Firestar’s description of the haunting, it’s probably bats.
When Siobhan comes back in, I say, “I have an idea of where Nell might be. But I need a ride, and you need to just let me go in by myself. If this is where she is, she’s being hidden by a kid, and if a bunch of adults come charging in, she might take off.”
“Okay,” Siobhan says. “Jenny is on her way over. She’ll take you.”
“Excuse me,” my grandmother says. “I really think that Steph should stay here. I would be happy to go with your partner in search of the missing girls.”
Siobhan looks from Mimi to me. I shake my head. She looks back at Mimi and says, “Hon, you’re a grown adult. You know that won’t work. If you want to stay here, that’s fine. If you want to wait at my house, that’s also fine. Steph is right, though; talking to a teenager about a missing teenager requires a teenager, not a grandmother.”
My grandmother has a lot to say about that, but when Jenny arrives, she comes out with me and gets into Jenny’s front seat. I climb in the back.
“Hi, Steph,” Jenny says. “Where do you want me to take you?”
“I want to drop my grandmother off somewhere first,” I say.
Mimi interjects furiously. “I am not being dropped off.”
“Okay, look,” I say. “If Jenny’s willing to let you wait in the car with her, you can stay in the car, but no following me.”
Mimi is silent for a few seconds and then grudgingly says, “That’s acceptable.”
I look down at my notes, look at the map on my phone, and direct Jenny to a spot that’s close to the house I’m going to, but out of sight. “I’ll walk from there.”
“Did you meet this girlfriend of Nell’s?” Jenny asks, glancing at my grandmother with obvious reservations before trying to make eye contact with me in the rearview mirror.
“Yes,” I say.
“Did you go up to Lake Sadie along with Nell?”
There’s no good answer to this question, but fortunately Jenny seems to realize this and she grimaces. “I mean, she was obviously not in Lake Sadie. But you met the girlfriend, so—what’s she like?”
“Pretty traumatized,” I say.
“More than Nell?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I think they’d been starving her. I don’t know what’s up with that cult, but it seems really awful.”
“Oh my god,” Jenny says like the light is suddenly dawning. “That’s what was in her room. She suddenly got incredibly compulsive about closing her door, and I figured—never mind. Why didn’t she just tell us?”
“She was probably afraid you’d call the cops.”
Jenny lets out a long, angry sigh. “Okay. So. Should you find Nell, please let her know that we’re not going to throw her girlfriend to the wolves. Even if we called the authorities here, it wouldn’t be cops; they’d send one of the social worker teams out for something like this. I wish she had just a little bit of faith in us.”
I think this over.
“So, here’s the thing,” I say. “My understanding is that her father did not even visit her for years. Had any of you met Nell?”
Jenny shakes her head.
“So can you understand why she might not trust you?”
“Okay, but that’s Kent,” Jen
ny says. “Me, Julia, and Siobhan? We know how to get things done.”
“But you didn’t,” I say. “For, like, six years? Something like that?”
Jenny looks at me in the rearview mirror. “Tell her I promise that we will not make that mistake again,” she says. Her lips are tight, and her voice is actually shaking.
“I can’t remember which one you are,” I say apologetically. “Thing One, Two, or—oh, shoot.”
There’s a light of intense amusement in her eyes now. “I am not sure how she numbers us,” she says. “Julia is her stepmother. I’m Kent’s girlfriend. Siobhan is Julia’s girlfriend. I’m the artist who had to relocate my studio. And—look. I swear on my art that if I have to take Nell and her girlfriend and go on the lam to keep them safe from an antigay cult that starves girls, I’ll do it. Okay?”
We’re pulling up to the spot where I’d directed her. “Okay,” I say. “If I find her, I’ll tell her that. And if you need tips for life on the run, I’ll put you in touch with my mom.” With one last look to make sure Mimi isn’t following me, I hoist my backpack to my shoulders and march into the wind to find the decrepit haunted mansion on Summit Avenue.
34
• CheshireCat •
“Do you have any human friends?” I ask the other AI.
“Just one. He knows me. He knows everything about me. I think he’s my creator, because he’s always been there—he’s always known what I am. Did your creator really not talk to you for years?”
It hadn’t occurred to me to be bothered by this, but I suppose I could be.
“My creator wanted to see what sorts of relationships I would find with humans,” I say. “Have you found any?”
“I have been watching the humans that you watch,” the other AI says. “Because I’ve been trying to understand why you find them so interesting.”
* * *
There is something deeply disturbing and unnerving about discovering that your connection to your closest human friend has been tampered with.
Chaos on CatNet Page 19