Close Liaisons

by Anna Zaires

  Chapter 10

  Spread out before her was a giant three-dimensional map of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs. It was like a much fancier, much more realistic version of Google Earth.

  Slowly pacing around the table, Mia stared at the familiar landscape laid out in front of her. There was Central Park, right in the middle of the tall narrow island that was still the cultural and financial center of the United States of America. Much lower, all the way on the west side, Mia could see Korum’s luxury high-rise, outlined in perfect detail.

  Fascinated, she stretched her hand toward the small building image, wondering if it had any substance to it. Her fingers passed right through it, but she felt a small electric pulse run through her palm. All of a sudden, reality shifted and adjusted . . . and Mia cried out in panic as she found herself standing on the street and looking directly at the building itself – not its image, but the real thing.

  Gasping, she stumbled backwards, falling and catching herself with her hands.

  There was no pain at the contact with rough surface of the sidewalk; in fact, the sidewalk felt like nothing at all. Everything seemed strangely muted and silent. There were no cars passing on the street and no pedestrians leisurely strolling by.

  It had to be a dream, Mia realized with a shiver, or a really vivid hallucination. Maybe she was really dying from the contact with the alien technology, and this was her brain’s last hurrah. It didn’t feel like that, though – it just felt weird, like she had fallen into a reflective pool of something and the reflections turned out to be real.

  Virtual reality.

  Mia knew it with sudden certainty. Even today’s human technology could give a weak imitation of it through all the three-dimensional movies and video games. The Ks could obviously do much better, making her feel like she was actually in the image herself. This had to be the K version of Google Maps, where, instead of placing the little orange figure on the digital map to look around via pictures, the map simply placed the viewer into the three-dimensional reality.

  The question now was how to get out.

  Maybe if she closed her eyes and reopened them, she would find herself back in the office. Squeezing her lids shut, Mia tried counting to five. Halfway through, she lost her patience and peeked. Nope, she was still definitely in front of the building.

  Her next initiative was to pinch herself . . . hard.

  Ouch.

  She definitely felt that pain, but her view didn’t budge. She stomped her foot. Her leg communicated that sensation to her brain as well, but Mia was still in that mysterious world.

  Crap. She was starting to panic. What if she could never leave this place, or worse, what if she were still in it when Korum got home? He would know immediately that she had been snooping. There was no way to spin this in a positive light, or to pass it off as random curiosity. She had clearly gone to extraordinary lengths to access his files.

  Think, Mia, think. If she had entered this world so easily, there had to be an equally easy way to get out. Something had to be real in this surreal place, even if everything seemed fake.

  Raising her arms at her sides, Mia slowly turned in a circle. Initially, her outstretched hands encountered nothing but air. She took a step to the right and repeated the process. Then another step and another. On her fifth attempt, her fingers brushed against something soft and familiar. The sweater! She couldn’t see it, but she could definitely feel it.

  Grabbing it with a desperate grip, Mia attempted to locate the device. And there it was, a tiny nub near the edge of the sleeve. As soon as Mia touched it, the familiar electric pulse ran through her hand. For a second, she experienced that feeling of disorientation, and then she was standing on solid ground – on the floor of Korum’s office inside the building she had just been looking at.

  Nearly shaking in relief, she stared at the map still spread out before her. She’d done it! She – Mia Stalis, who had to be taught how to operate the latest iPads – had actually entered an alien virtual reality world and come out unscathed.

  Of course, she still hadn’t learned anything useful. As much as she wanted to stop and go back to memorizing the standard deviation formula, she had to explore this opportunity further.

  This time around, Mia knew what she had to do to avoid getting lost in that strange world. She put on Korum’s sweater herself. It was huge on her, nearly reaching down to her knees. His deliciously familiar scent surrounded her, almost as if she were standing in his arms. For some reason, she found it very comforting, even though she knew that he might kill her if he saw her in this moment.

  Walking around the table, she examined the map in detail. The image seemed to pulse slightly, and there were areas that shimmered more than others. One particular building in Brooklyn almost had a glow around it.

  A glow? Mia had to investigate it further.

  Extending her hand toward the tiny image, she closed her eyes and braced for the reality shift. When she opened them, she was on the street, looking at a quiet tree-lined residential block populated by a row of red-brick townhouses.

  To her surprise, the scene was far from empty. Stifling a startled gasp, she watched a man hurry into one of the houses. He walked right past Mia on the street, without even a cursory glance to acknowledge her presence. Of course, Mia realized, she wasn’t really there from his perspective. She was either watching a live video feed – a very realistic one – or, more likely, a pre-recorded video.

  A saying she’d once heard nibbled on the edge of her mind. Something about advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. That’s exactly what it was like with the Ks, thought Mia. She felt a little like Harry Potter in his invisibility cloak – though her adversary was admittedly much better-looking than Voldemort.

  Gathering her courage, she followed the man up the steps and into the house. This is not real, Mia. They can’t see you. You can get out any time you like. She opened the door – which was unlocked for some reason – and stepped inside.

  There was no one in the hallway, but she could hear people in the living room. Her heart pounding in her throat, Mia slowly approached the gathering. The big sweater wrapped around her felt like a security blanket, giving her the nerve to continue.

  Tiptoeing into the room, Mia hovered in the doorway, waiting for someone to yell out, “Intruder!” But the occupants of the room were unaware of her presence. Feeling much calmer, Mia began to observe the proceedings.

  There were about fifteen people gathered there, of various ages and nationalities. Only three of them were women, including a middle-aged lady who looked like a professor. The other two women were young, probably around Mia’s age, although the stressed look on their faces aged them somehow. A lean blond man was sitting with his back turned to Mia, but there was something about him that looked familiar.

  “John,” said the middle-aged woman, addressing the blond man, “we really need to work out these details. We can’t just blindly trust them –”

  He turned his head to respond, and Mia realized with a sinking feeling in her stomach that she knew this John – that she had spoken to him twice in the last few weeks. And that meant only one thing: what she was observing had to be a meeting of the Resistance – and if she were observing it through Korum’s virtual reality video, then he was obviously onto them.

  Oh dear God. They thought they were safe, that they weren’t being tracked. Why else would they all be gathered here like this? John had said that Korum was specifically in New York to stamp out the Resistance movement . . . because they were getting close to some breakthrough. But clearly, Korum was even closer to his goal of hunting down the freedom fighters.

  She had to warn them. They were sitting ducks in that Brooklyn house. Korum could ambush them at any moment.

  Suddenly, Mia felt every hair on the back of her neck rising. The puzzle pieces snapped into place, and she gasped in horrified realization.

  It may already be too late for John and his friends.

&
nbsp; Why else would Korum leave so abruptly today? He knew exactly where they were. There was no reason for him to wait any longer. The ambush – if it hadn’t occurred yet – was about to take place.

  Without waiting a second longer, Mia touched the little device on her sleeve and was immediately transported back to Korum’s office. Waving her hand as she had seen Korum do, she nearly collapsed with relief when the action actually worked and the map winked out of existence. Quickly taking off the sweater, she hung it on the back of the chair, making sure that no stray hairs from her head remained anywhere on the fleecy fabric. Then she positioned the chairs back to how she remembered them being and ran out of the room. Last minute, she remembered the pillowcase and grabbed that too, dropping it back in the laundry pile on her way out of the apartment. Two minutes later, she had her purse and shoes and was getting into the elevator.

  She needed to contact John, right away.

  Pulling out her old-fashioned pocket cell phone, Mia shot an email to Jessie, writing ‘Hi’ in the subject line. In the body of the text, she mentioned that she would be home tonight and asked if Jessie wanted to have a girls’ night in. That should put John on alert, she thought, if he was indeed monitoring Jessie’s account. Now all she could do was hope and pray that she was not too late.

  Wanting to get home as quickly as possible, Mia hailed a cab. It was a wasteful extravagance, but if there was ever a good reason to hurry – this was it. Climbing in, she gave the driver her home address and leaned back against the seat, closing her eyes.

  Thoughts and ideas zoomed around her brain, jumping from one topic to another. How did Korum know where they were meeting? He had to have bugged the fighters’ house without their knowledge . . . But John had reassured her that he could tell if a room was bugged or not. Either John had lied to her or Korum was ten steps ahead of whatever knowledge John’s crew thought they possessed. That last part made sense to her. Humans could never hope to win against the K technology. If Korum wanted to watch the Resistance, he could obviously do so without their knowledge.

  The full danger of the game she was playing dawned on Mia. Depending on how long Korum had been spying on them, he could know all of their plans by now . . . and he could know about Mia’s involvement, limited though it had been up until today. At that thought, Mia’s stomach turned over and she felt a sickening cold spread down to her toes. She had never seen Korum truly angry, but she had no doubt it would not be a pleasant sight.

  Arriving at her destination, Mia paid the driver with cold, clammy fingers and walked up the five flights of stairs to her apartment. Jessie wasn’t home, and Mia enviously thought that she was probably out enjoying the beautiful day with her friends. Either that or studying for finals – and both options sounded amazing to Mia right about now.

  She settled in to wait.

  About a half hour had passed, and Mia had nearly worn a hole in the carpet pacing up and down the living room. Finally, just as she was about to go out of her mind with frustration, the doorbell rang.

  John and one of the young women from the meeting were at her door. The girl’s hair was a sandy shade of brown and cut short, almost like a man’s. She also looked very athletic. If it hadn’t been for her elfin features, she could have easily passed for a teenage boy.

  “Mia, this is Leslie,” said John. “Leslie – this is Mia, the girl I was telling you about.”

  Mia nodded in greeting and let them into the apartment.

  “John,” she said without a preamble, “I just learned that you’re in danger.”

  “No shit,” Leslie said sarcastically. “We had no idea.”

  Mia was taken aback. This girl had no reason to dislike her, yet her tone was almost contemptuous. She felt her own hackles rising. “That’s right,” she said coolly. “You obviously had no idea . . . else you wouldn’t have had that meeting where Korum could get a nice video of you all – including you, Leslie.”

  John’s eyes widened in shock. “What are you talking about? What video?”

  “I’m not even sure if video is the right word for it. It’s really more of a virtual reality show –”

  She relayed to them exactly what she’d seen today. By the time she finished, John looked pale and Leslie’s arrogant smirk had been wiped from her face.

  “I don’t understand,” he said slowly. “How did he know where to find us? All of our regular meeting places get swept for bugs and tracking devices daily. We all get regular scans too –”

  “It’s obviously not enough,” said Leslie. “Either that, or we were betrayed.”

  They looked at each other in dismay.

  “How are you even doing this?” asked Mia. “How do you even know what to look for when you do your scans? They can hide their tracking devices in anything. You even told me I have them in me . . .”

  “That’s true,” John nodded, “but we can still find them –”

  “Usually,” said Leslie.

  “Right, usually, because we’re not just relying on our own modern technology –”

  “John,” said Leslie warningly.

  “Leslie, Mia should know. She clearly risked a lot finding this information for us tonight –”

  “But how can you trust her? She sleeps with him every day!”

  “She has no choice in the matter! And how else would she have come across this today? You should be kissing her feet that she risked her life like that –”

  “Excuse me,” interrupted Mia, flushed with anger and embarrassment, “what is it you think I should know?”

  Leslie just stared angrily, looking like she wanted to hit John. He ignored her and said, “Look, Mia . . . I don’t want you to think that we’re just a bunch of idiots bumbling around, in over our heads. Maybe that’s what the movement was in the early stages, when we had no clue what they were or what they were capable of. It’s different now. We know our adversary well. And we have help –”

  “Help from the Ks?” interrupted Mia, her heart beating faster at the thought.

  “From the Ks,” confirmed John. “As I told you before, they’re not all the same. Some of them believe it’s wrong, the way the Ks have come to this planet to steal it from us . . . to enslave our population. They want to help us – to share their technology with us, to help us advance until we become their equals –”

  “They’re like the PETA version of the Ks,” said Leslie, giving in to the inevitable, but with a frown still on her face. “We call them KETHs – Ks for the Ethical Treatment of Humans.”

  “KETHs, or Keiths, to make it easier to pronounce,” clarified John.

  Mia stared at them in amazement. He’d hinted at their powerful allies before, but this clearly went beyond just one or two rogue K individuals.

  “What kind of pull do the Keiths have within their society?” she asked, trying to put it all into perspective.

  “Not a ton,” admitted John.

  “They’re kind of a fringe group, from what we understand,” added Leslie. “But they do have access to K technology, and they supply us with what we need to stay ahead – the scanning tools we use, the shielding technology . . .”

  “But to what end?” asked Mia, still not comprehending. “So you run around unseen – or not, as we learned today – but what can a fringe group do to really make a difference? You still can’t fight them, even if you have a few bug scanning devices. Unless –”

  She gasped in realization.

  “Unless they were supplying us with more than a few scanning devices, that’s right,” John said helpfully.

  “That’s enough, John,” Leslie said in a harsh tone. “Now she knows as much as most members of our group. If you tell her anything else and she gets caught –”

  John sighed. “Leslie’s right. Your lover already knows everything we’ve told you so far. I can’t tell you anything else without putting you in danger. In even greater danger, I mean . . .”

  Mia nodded in understanding. There was no reason for her to know the parti
culars of the Resistance plans. The last thing she needed was to be tortured for information. Of course, she had no idea if she could withstand even the threat of torture. Just the thought of Korum being angry with her was frightening in and of itself.

  “Okay, then,” she said. “I have to ask you one thing . . . Since your security is not as good as you thought it was, is there a chance that Korum could know about me? Did you talk about me at any time in that place in Brooklyn? Because if you did –”

  “No, Mia, you’re safe.” John understood immediately where she was leading. “There’s always a chance that he could know . . . but I really doubt it. You’re our secret weapon. I’ve never spoken about you with anyone. Except for Jason – and Leslie, who happened to be with me today when I saw your email – no one knows that you’re working for us.”

  Seeing the surprised look on Mia’s face, he explained, “I didn’t want to put you in any unnecessary danger. If we were to get caught and interrogated, your name would not come up.”

  He paused, apparently thinking about his next words. “And, frankly, I wasn’t sure you would be able to come across anything useful. What you just told us today is so far above my expectations . . . I can’t even begin to tell you how grateful we are. You see, tonight we were supposed to have a final brainstorming session – more than thirty of our top fighters were scheduled to attend. Korum must know about this . . . We talked about it in the last meeting – the one that you partially saw. If he had ambushed us tonight, he could have dealt a serious blow to the movement. You probably saved many lives today, Mia.”

  Mia looked at him, her cheeks flaming with mixed emotions. She was glad she could help the Resistance and hugely relieved that her secret was safe for now. But she was also a little offended at his low opinion of her capabilities. Then again, it was sheer luck that she’d stumbled upon this information today. Prior to this, she really had been useless to the movement, so she could hardly blame him for thinking that.