Breach

by Eliot Peper

  Taking a deep breath, Emily tamped down the revulsion curdling in her gut. Killing Lowell outright would create more problems than it solved, and certainly wouldn’t guarantee Javier and Rosa’s safety. She needed to find out what was going on, and, as was so often the case, testicles were the lowest hanging fruit. Lowell was a man who frequently thought with his dick, and Emily would do what it took to get the intel. Knowing what she did about his history and preferences, it had been all too easy to secure a booty call to his hotel room after the meeting finally adjourned. Now she had to figure out how to actually convert sex into secrets. Hopefully, stroking Lowell’s ego would prove as effective as the physical equivalent.

  She emerged from the bathroom.

  The bed was empty. The door to the balcony was open, the delicate curtains billowing in the humid midnight breeze. She could see Lowell’s naked silhouette against the moonlight, standing out there, listening to the crash of the surf. He struck a match, and Emily smelled the sharp tang of sulfur dioxide. He raised it and lit a cigar, giving it a few exploratory puffs and then a long pull.

  This was a tipping point. Lowell might very well lose all interest in her now that this one-night stand had been consummated. Emily had to ensure the opposite. She needed to make herself endlessly fascinating in his eyes, a puzzle he could never quite figure out, a black hole for wandering attention. True seduction had far less to do with carnal delights than with enigmas. She would stoke his interest by withdrawing her own, treating him with a casual indifference that would corrode his brittle self-esteem and fan the flames of obsession. Eventually, he would feel compelled to draw her in, do her bidding, keep her close. From the vantage of counterfeit intimacy, she would unveil his secrets, sabotage his plans, and safeguard her friends.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  Emily startled at the non sequitur. Had she missed something?

  “Yes,” he said. “We have approval.”

  His words had nothing to do with her. Lowell was talking to someone via feed. She moved forward quickly, careful to step on the front outer edges of her feet before rolling onto the ball and heel, totally silent on the thick carpet, a phantom levitating toward the ghostly curtains. She breathed through her open mouth so that the sound of her heartbeat wouldn’t interfere with her hearing.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

  He exhaled a cloud of smoke and she tasted cloves and marzipan.

  “Nope,” he said. “We’ve waited long enough. No more beating around the bush. I want you to go in and get her tomorrow. Do it at home: fewer witnesses. Once we cage the bitch, her brother is ours.”

  Tomorrow. Shit. There wasn’t time for temptation games, or maybe she had just won this particular round. Emily summoned her feed and accessed accounts she hadn’t touched in years.

  “Let me know when it’s done,” said Lowell with finality. He took a long pull and leaned his elbows on the balcony railing, staring out into the night.

  Emily retreated into the suite, a thousand variables dancing in her pounding head. She pulled on her soiled leotard and retrieved her glasses from the bedside table. Opening the closet, she selected Lowell’s last remaining pressed shirt and pulled it on.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, stepping back into the room.

  She looked up without expression, then looked back down and continued buttoning up the shirt.

  He leapt onto the bed, lying sidewise as if it were a divan. He patted the mattress beside him. “Come on, babe, we’ve got the whole night ahead of us. Don’t worry, there’s more gas in this tank.”

  Ignoring him, Emily put on her sandals. She heard him bounce back up, heavy footsteps padding toward her.

  “Hey, I’ll double your standard rate,” he said. “Sex, violence—all you need is drugs and rock and roll, and you’ve got the whole package, Pixie.”

  He pinched her ass.

  She spun, shooting one hand up to latch around his throat again, actually squeezing his larynx this time, and reaching the other hand between his legs to grab his balls. As he went up on tiptoe to relieve some of the pressure on his neck, she pulled down on his scrotum, trapping him between discomforts, establishing control.

  “I have a car waiting,” she said in a bored voice. “And I’m a fighter, not a courtesan.” She cocked her head to one side like a bird of prey assessing a trembling rodent. “So if you ever want these”—she squeezed his balls—“to feel real satisfaction again, I suggest you ask yourself what you’d be willing to sacrifice to make that dream come true. Not pay, sacrifice. The more you have to lose, the better it feels to win.”

  She held his gaze for an extra moment as if to underscore her cryptic bullshit. She really should have come up with something better, but there hadn’t been much time to prepare. Nevertheless, his pupils dilated sufficiently to suggest that he was taking her obscure point to heart, and hopefully entering an endless loop of conflicted interpretation.

  “Good night, Mr. Harding. May you hold your ghosts at bay.”

  And just like that, she was gone.

  CHAPTER 9

  Acceleration pressed Emily into the seat as the car pulled away from the hotel. This was far from the urban malaise of Rizal’s neighborhood. Luxury resorts hugged the beach, interspersed with starchitect-designed mansions. Yachts rested at anchor just offshore, a few of them still ablaze with light that flickered out across the peaks and troughs of ground swell, partiers determined to make it to sunrise.

  Emily rubbed her temples. For the first time since descending into the fight club earlier that evening, she wasn’t playing Pixie. Rizal wasn’t here. Lowell wasn’t here. Nobody was watching. The car would take her home. She would shower, scrub away the night’s sins, hope against hope that her guilt might sluice down the drain.

  But that would come later.

  Right now, she had to warn Rosa.

  Emily summoned her feed, found Rosa, steeled herself, and—could she really do this?—unblocked the communication channels that had been sealed tight for thirteen years. Her fingers dug into the seat as the scale of this hidden history became suddenly, painfully apparent. Messages, calls, years of appeals in all formats, their frequency tapering off over time as the futility of the one-sided conversation proved undeniable. Emily had blocked Rosa, Javier, Dag, and everyone else from her old life because she knew it would be impossible for her to resist being drawn back in, and she couldn’t risk hurting them again. But actually seeing this chronicle of loss etched into the digital firmament hit Emily harder than Niko ever could have.

  She dialed back opacity, stared out at the waves rolling up onto the beach, white water catching the moonlight as it tumbled in to shore. It felt like Camiguin was sinking even as the car ferried her silently along its empty streets. The next breaker would wash up the beach and onto the road, flooding the streets, seeping into basements and through cracks, tourists and residents fleeing upward, ever upward, to escape the rising tide until the roofs were packed with panicked crowds gawking at debris and flailing loved ones bobbing along in the flood, everyone broadcasting the emergency over the feed, the world watching the disaster play out in real time with sick fascination, knowing that no emergency responders could possibly arrive in time, that this little island in the Southern Philippines would be lost forever, drowned like a modern-day Atlantis, a geophysical anomaly ripe for scientific investigation, a tragic anecdote to commiserate over, to wonder at with shaking heads and somber tones, performative empathy for the calamities of distant strangers.

  A distant stranger was exactly who Emily had become. Alienation, the process of becoming other. She had metamorphosed in reverse, from butterfly to ugly little grub. Looking down at herself, all she could see were the scars.

  Struggling to escape these spiraling delusions, she returned to her feed, egged herself on, and initiated the call to Rosa. Hi, love, just wanted you to know that you’re the target of a kidnapping plot. Or So I’ve been on an extended sabbatical as a gladiator
and guess who I ran into? Cut to the chase with Long time no see, do me a favor and call the police right away. Perhaps even I know this is unbearably weird, but we need to talk. Or maybe just Hey girl, I miss you. Emily ended the call before it could connect.

  “Shit,” she said aloud, the spoken word making her suddenly aware of her physical body, her raw and swollen throat, the syncopated ripples of pain turning the inside of her skull into a neurochemical mosh pit.

  She began to draft a written message instead.

  A phrase. A sentence.

  Delete.

  Another sentence.

  Delete.

  Language wasn’t built for times like this. How could mere words capture the enormity of the situation, the years of enforced isolation, the depth of the emotional fallout, the urgency of the danger? It was like trying to explain crimson to the color-blind or summarize all of mathematics in a limerick.

  As the car rounded a corner, Emily had to quell rising nausea. When she blinked, she saw flashes of Niko spinning her around the ring, slamming her against the mat again and again.

  Maybe she didn’t need to contact Rosa directly. Emily could send an anonymous tip to the Addis Ababa police, or even Commonwealth security. She could reach out to Diana, explain the situation, ask her to protect Rosa but keep Emily’s role secret. She could even message Dag and he could get the ball rolling. She could bite the bullet and ring Javier, leaving him to call in the cavalry.

  She conjured these prospective recipients one after the other and dismissed them just as quickly. With the resources Lowell was bringing to bear, could Emily really trust the police not to be on the take? Would she stake Rosa’s life on Commonwealth’s technocracy? Was it any easier to contemplate what she might say to Javier or Dag or even Diana? Why would anyone trust her anyway? She would be a specter emerging from the mists of time to whisper paranoid delusions in their ears, a villain straight out of one of Rosa’s samurai serials, a wraith whose word was worthless and whose presence was poison.

  And yet inaction was impossible. She would not, could not, leave Rosa at Lowell’s mercy, let this shitty world have its way. She lacked the means to sound the alarm, but she was the only one who could. A flash of Rosa, thirteen years old, expression preciously sarcastic, declining Emily’s offer of frozen yogurt with teenage haughtiness, rolling her eyes when Javier tried not to smile.

  The car pulled up in front of her apartment. The car door opened, briny tropical humidity invading the air-conditioned interior. Emily looked up at the unexceptional building, found the window of her studio apartment on the third floor, considered the neatly stacked dishes by the sink, the photos she’d pasted all over the walls, the well-stocked first-aid kit. She thought about the little gecko who liked to hang out up in the corner of the ceiling, the faint smell of cat piss that she’d never entirely been able to get rid of, the occasional thumps and moans of her upstairs neighbors trying to get pregnant again after the miscarriage that still cast a melancholy shadow.

  Emily reached out and slammed the door shut, the sharp noise setting off another migraine. Forcing through the headache, she summoned her feed and input a new destination. Acceleration pressed her into the seat once more. There were battles far more daunting than anything she had to face in the ring, and she was running out of excuses.

  CHAPTER 10

  Camiguin receded as the plane gained altitude, a shrinking halo of lights against an ocean of darkness. Emily’s exhale fogged up the plexiglass, and when she wiped it clean, the island that had been her home for a decade had disappeared.

  Even Filipinos need their roti canai. That vendor had prepared her teh tarik so expertly, the boiling liquid arcing from cup to cup in a sort of magic ritual, a simple offering to the gods of hospitality. If trains, planes, and automobiles had made the world smaller, the feed had distilled it into a single instance. Emily could remember a time when a Malaysian street vendor would have had a hard time getting a visa to set up shop in the Philippines, and he wasn’t the only one. Rizal’s heritage was Filipino, but he had grown up in New Zealand, and he’d needed a visa in order to settle on Camiguin. Emily herself had gotten her paperwork approved at the embassy when she first arrived. She remembered her parents’ anxious conversations at the dinner table about their American green-card status. As a child she hadn’t understood the details but had picked up on their simmering fear of returning to Seoul in disgrace.

  That age was over, one of the cascading paradigm shifts that had swept across the world during Emily’s violent hibernation. The feed ignored national borders, and Commonwealth had negotiated global open immigration for all feed users. If you were on the feed, and essentially everyone was, you could move wherever you could afford to move. Seamless international mobility was no longer the province of the elite. The apocalyptic prognostications of nearly every government had not borne out. After an initial uptick, immigration rates had returned to relatively normal levels. The economy was already global, and people’s lives and families were still local. The impact might be important over the long term, but it was undramatic in the short term. Or at least undramatic to demographers. It mattered far more to the millions of refugees whose status was rendered legal overnight, and to nativist groups whose riots laid waste to the homes they professed to protect.

  Open immigration had been another of Javier’s projects as a Commonwealth board member, and it was thanks to him that Emily could so easily find her favorite snack far from its homeland. But between that, the carbon tax, and the eclipse of national currencies by universal feed credits, the changes were coming hard and fast, and while they might create more winners on net, that was cold comfort to the losers. Once we cage the bitch, her brother is ours. Emily shivered. Was Javier taking a step too far with this new wealth-inequality initiative? Would he finally earn enemies powerful enough to crush it and him? The feed underpinned the operations of the companies that plutocrats owned, the financial games they played, and the assets they held. It was the fascia that stitched their wealth together. The megarich did not like to see their fortunes threatened and, if history was a guide, would go to great lengths to defend them.

  Emily had lived to see her personal sense of manifest destiny collapse under its own weight, taking everything else with it. When ambition became an end in itself, even in the service of the greater good, it stripped you of your humanity. But this was different. Javier wasn’t betraying his own to achieve his dream. He was brilliant, and if there was one thing she was totally sure of, it was that he would never break their code for any reason, never risk the family they had made for the sake of the high ideals that united them. Javier was taking yet another leap of faith because that was what progress demanded, and Lowell would do anything to bring him down in flames.

  Craning her neck, Emily peered up. A dome of stars wheeled above, light finally arriving after countless centuries spent traversing the void separating earth from distant suns, photons from the past illuminating the present, a cosmic time machine that confirmed human insignificance, a guard against the hubris that had ruined her life.

  Emily stood. Her legs trembled. Her nerves flared. Her muscles rebelled. Her aches compounded. She stripped off the leotard and walked stark naked up the center of the cabin to the shower, fighting back vertigo, feeling the plane shift slightly under her feet as the feed piloted it across continents whose borders were not gone but fading, and whose peoples saw so many of their assumptions, their entitlements, crumbling and knew not whether this was a promise or a threat, sensing in their heart of hearts that you could not have one without the other.

  And as steam filled Emily’s lungs and water cleansed her skin, the threat of a promise became the promise of a threat.

  CHAPTER 11

  The thing that made Emily’s heart skip was the smell.

  She had known it would be strange, standing in Rosa’s apartment for the first time. Emily had been forced to revive burglary skills she hadn’t practiced since she was a teenager, but appare
ntly some things never change, and now here she was.

  Jasmine, peat, a hint of cumin, and maybe makrut limes? She’d never tried to identify a person’s smell before—not their perfume or deodorant but that faintest of scents that was tied to them specifically, their body, their biological terroir, as unique as a fingerprint. Emily closed her eyes and inhaled, the theater of her mind filling with scene after scene. Squeezing Rosa in a hug when she moved away from home for the first time. The way the corner of her mouth quirked when she smiled. The sadness and quiet pride Emily had felt when Rosa decided not to dedicate her life to the Island’s various initiatives but pursue a career in art instead.

  Yes. This was Rosa’s apartment. No doubt about it.

  Emily opened her eyes, looked around.

  Paintings, photographs, etchings, charcoals, tapestries, and reliefs covered the walls. The effect should have been disjointed and overwhelming—there was so much to look at, so many perspectives at play. But instead of a visual cacophony, the diverse media and styles felt somehow of a piece, as if there was an emotional tone, an underlying aesthetic that unified them. As Emily’s gaze flickered across the various pieces, poignancy kindled inside her, and she imagined an unrequited lover throwing one final bittersweet glance back over a shoulder at the object of their spurned affection.

  Emily explored the apartment, unable to disentangle wonder from dread.

  The kitchen was clean but not neat, dishes in the drying rack, spice jars pushed up against the backsplash. The wooden cutting board was stained and scored. She ran a finger along the granite countertop and noticed that the sink had a slow leak, a single drop of water distending off the faucet before dropping into the stainless-steel basin.