by C. A. Gray
After a long lull in the conversation, I asked Alec and Nick, “So how did Kate’s fiancé die?”
Alec glanced at me. “Why so interested in Kate?”
“Why do you think he’s so interested in Kate?” returned Nick, rhetorically. Then he finally told me, “Apparently he was a computer hacker, and he managed to find a database that showed him who the government’s next targets were. Molly got the story out of her.”
“You’re kidding,” Alec deadpanned. Nick shrugged, and Alec glanced at me quickly before he said, “Wait a minute. If that exists… and if we could get access to it… don’t you realize what that would mean?” Nick still didn’t answer right away, so Alec went on, “It means instead of just looking for people who don’t seem to fit in on the very outskirts of the control center’s radius, we could go into the heart of the Republic and actually rescue people!”
“Not if it took longer than two hours,” said Jacob flatly.
“Well, of course not, but if we knew exactly who we were after, it wouldn’t have to,” Alec argued.
“The Crone and the Council would have a fit,” Nick interrupted. “They’d probably cut us off.”
“They can’t cut us off, they’d starve!” Alec retorted. “What is this, Molly talking, or you? Does she have you that whipped?”
“Hey!” Nick whirled on him, and Alec nearly walked right into Nick’s massive, imposing chest. His dark eyes flashed, and Alec took a step back. “Don’t you think for a minute that I don’t want to rescue people as much as you do, kid. You got that?”
After a beat, he turned around and started walking again. It took Alec a moment before he followed, huffing indignantly.
“Besides,” Nick went on, ruffled, “we don’t have any net screens out here. Even if we could theoretically access this database Kate’s fiancé found.”
“There are abandoned net screens in some of the houses we’ve plundered,” Alec muttered. “You know there are.”
We walked on in silence for awhile. Then I ventured, “If you could get to one of those houses, do you have anyone in the caves who might know how to do what Will did?”
“Will?” Alec raised his eyebrows at me.
“Kate’s fiancé. That was his name.”
He didn’t answer me right away. “Been talking to her a lot, huh?” I couldn’t read his tone.
“You should cut her some slack,” I said. “You haven’t seen her since she was twelve, after all. She’s probably changed a bit.”
“I beg to differ,” Alec retorted, “I saw her on the news almost every night when I was on the run. Looking plump and well-fed and brainwashed as ever, I might add, while we were barely scraping by…”
“Jean,” Nick interrupted.
“What?” said Alec, irritated.
“Jean Mitchell. She was a database administrator for the government in her former life. She’s in Kenny’s tribe.”
Jacob ventured, “Does that mean we’re gonna try and find Will’s database?”
Nick shrugged. “What the Crone doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” he said grudgingly.
“And Molly. Don’t tell Molly!” cried Alec. Nick didn’t turn around, but I saw Alec leap into the air a little bit, and I couldn’t help grinning.
Honestly, I was with Alec on this one. If there was a way to identify exactly who the government’s next targets would be, how could we not try and use that information?
“How long do you think it will take?” Nick asked Jean in hushed tones around her tribe’s campfire that night.
“I’ve never even heard of that database,” she murmured, “so I can’t guess. I haven’t a clue how well protected it might be, or even what to search for. We should ask Kate Brandeis, shouldn’t we? Surely if anyone would know, it’d be her.”
“No way,” Alec shook his head firmly. “She’ll rat us out to Molly or the Crone, and it’ll be all over.”
“I can see if she’ll tell me anything else about it,” I volunteered. Alec regarded me with silent, accusing eyes, and I told him, “We’re friends. She said so. She won’t know why I’m asking.”
Without waiting for permission, I got up and walked the half a mile or so back to just outside the cave Kate shared with Nick and Molly. She and Molly sat together, sipping mugs of Molly’s hot tea from herbs planted in their gardens. Molly chatted incessantly. I’m sure Kate appreciated her efforts, but her eyes were glazed over.
“Hi,” I grinned at them both, sitting beside Kate on a log by the fire. “Mind if I join?”
Molly blustered something about getting me a mug for some tea too, and shuffled off to the cave in search of one.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt,” I apologized.
“You didn’t,” said Kate. “She was telling me stories about being a girl in the United States. It sounds—idyllic,” she admitted. “Then again, I guess I thought my life was idyllic too, until very recently.”
I nodded, pausing what I hoped was an appropriate amount of time before changing the subject. “I heard your fiancé found a database,” I said at last. “That’s why they killed him.”
“I don’t know if that’s exactly why,” she admitted. “He’d sent me a comm the day of, telling me he’d found out something else and he was going to tell me about it that night. I assume somehow he left too much of a trail and they traced it back to him, and figured out what he knew. But I don’t specifically know which discovery tipped them off.”
I nodded. “How long was it, from the time you realized something was wrong until the time he—?”
“Only a little over twenty-four hours.” Her face clouded over. Then it cleared suddenly and she turned back to me. “Why?”
“That just seems awfully fast…” I trailed off. “So within hours of finding out something was amiss, he found and cracked that database?”
“Will was one of the best hackers the government had,” she told me, her voice quavering. “If it involved a net screen, there was nothing he couldn’t do.” Then she paused, and added, “Although honestly, he also told me most of his job was offensive. He stole secrets from our enemies mostly. The Potentate invested a lot of resources in protecting the government from hackers outside the Republic, but not a lot in internal security.”
“So do you think another hacker would be able to duplicate what he did then?”
She looked surprised, and then she narrowed her eyes. “Why, what are you up to?”
I looked around, making sure Molly was still out of earshot. “The others don’t want to tell you—Nick and Alec. But we’re going to try to find the database. There’s a woman in Kenny’s tribe who did something with databases for the government in her former life too. If we can find it and break in, we’ll be able to go in and help refugees escape a lot more efficiently. At least that’s the idea.”
Kate sat up straighter, her eyes widening. “That’s a wonderful idea! Why didn’t they want me to know?”
“Because Alec still doesn’t trust you, I think. He’s afraid you’ll tell Molly and the Crone. Molly told me the Crone doesn’t want Nick’s team going in to try to set people free because she thinks it’ll endanger the community here.”
Kate frowned. “But you’re not necessarily going in to rescue anybody yet,” she said slowly. “You’re just trying to figure out if you can find the database and break in. Right?”
I nodded. “For now.” Kate looked away, and I said, “What’s up?”
“I just wonder…” she sighed. “If you guys had had access to that database last week, could you have rescued Will before they killed him?” She swallowed. “I mean, how much advance notice do you think there is in those files before they go ahead and terminate people?”
“Probably it depends on how big a threat the government thinks they are,” I said, “although what do I know, I’m new to this country.”
“So am I,” said Kate dryly.
“Here you are, Jackson!” Molly bustled back, handing me a cup of tea and brushing her hands on her
apron as she settled back opposite us. I thanked her and sipped the tea, and Molly’s eyes got big, looking from me to Kate.
“Did I interrupt something?”
“Nope, just going back to join the hunters,” I said, “all I wanted was to see how Kate was coming along. Glad to hear you’re doing better,” I said to Kate. She smiled at me, her expression wistful.
“Molly’s a great nurse,” she murmured, and Molly beamed. Then she grabbed my hand and pulled me back down to her level, whispering quietly enough that only I could hear, “You guys had better be careful. That’s Molly’s husband you’re talking about, and… and I don’t want to lose my only friend out there, either.”
I blinked at her, touched. “You won’t,” I promised.
Chapter 19: Jackson
It was a simple enough plan. Seven of us: myself, Nick, Alec, Jacob, Kenny, and two other hunters named Pete and Brian loaded ourselves up with as many weapons as we could carry. Nick told me they almost never used guns and bullets while hunting because of the limited supply—“Animals don’t shoot back,” he told me.
But now each of us packed an automatic weapon with a few rounds of ammunition the hunters had stolen them from an old army barracks. “These are the old school kind of guns,” Jacob told me. “The ones that penetrate the skin and leave holes behind them.”
I raised my eyebrows. “As opposed to…?”
“The kind of guns the agents use. They’re more like punching someone’s internal organs.”
“So… they only leave a bruise?” I asked.
Jacob shook his head. “Not usually. They don’t leave any marks at all, but you still die from internal bleeding.”
I was having a hard time picturing the mechanism of action of this kind of a gun. A faint suspicion stirred in the back of my mind, but I pushed it aside.
Pete also carried a crossbow, his pride and joy. Alec and Kenny preferred to carry knives. Brian, Jacob, Nick, and myself packed our usual bows and arrows, the weapons they most often used while hunting and were therefore most comfortable with.
“Jean stays in the middle,” Nick told us for the hundredth time. “Nobody is ever to let her out of his sight. I don’t care if you see big game along the way, you let it be—we aren’t hunting right now. We have enough meat to last us the rest of the week, thanks to Jacob and Jackson, and the agros are out foraging for extra tubers, just in case.” The agros were Nick’s name for the team that gathered produce from the ground. Nick pulled out a long sheet of paper with his hand-drawn map upon it, and re-drew an X over the same spot where he’d drawn it the last four times we’d heard this pep talk. “This house is our best target. We know it’s been recently abandoned, but they’re bound to have at least one net screen. If they don’t, we move on to this house.” He redrew another X. He repeated the process with four other potential target houses, in order of preference. “Should any one house appear to be under surveillance, we will reroute to the next on the list,” he said. “All of you are to maintain a hunter’s frame of mind at all times. What does that mean?”
“Don’t be seen and don’t be heard,” chorused the men.
“Exactly. We’re wearing camouflage for a reason,” barked Nick. He turned to Jean.
“Any questions from you?”
Jean was a middle-aged woman with frizzing gray hair and a rather nervous disposition; she wasn’t the best choice for a mission like this, but it couldn’t be helped, since apparently she was the only database administrator we had in the caves. Even though she hadn’t touched a net screen in years, and even though she said they changed their passwords about every six months, they all followed a particular pattern. Chances were, she could guess the new code without a lot of effort.
Hopefully she holds up under pressure all right, I thought.
Jean shook her head at Nick fretfully. “Let’s just get this over with,” she murmured.
It took three hours on foot before we reached the outer edge of the forest. No one spoke. We spread out, keeping to the shadows, all of us eerily silent except for Jean, who seemed to go out of her way to snap every twig in her path. Fortunately she was slight enough that even her footsteps didn’t make much noise.
At last when we reached the clearing, we spotted our first target. Peeling gray stucco combined with corrugated metal to form the structure, and the weeds overgrew in the yard. Nick was at the helm; I crept up behind him next, and in a few seconds Alec appeared at my side. Nick turned around, putting a finger to his lips.
“We stake it out for at least thirty minutes to make sure there’s no activity,” Nick whispered to us. One by one the other hunters fell in line behind him. I glanced at Jean beside me, her face like a tightly drawn mask. I reached out and squeezed her shoulder, and she gave me a tense smile. I could understand her nerves—in addition to the possible risk of being caught by the agents, she’d told me it had been years since she’d even touched a net screen.
One car drove down the streets, rattling as it went, but the house remained deserted; no one went in or out, and there were no signs of activity within.
“Go,” whispered Nick to Alec. The two of them crept out, sprinting for the house. They reached the siding and snuck around the exterior, making sure it was secure. Jean and I were next.
“I’ll go first and cover you,” I whispered to her. “Stay right on my heels.”
We sprinted the hundred yards or so to the house, and I stopped when we reached the backside of the house so Jean could catch her breath, leaning against the corrugated metal.
“There’s a back door,” Alec whispered to us as Nick signaled the next pair, Brian and Kenny, to join us. I nodded to him, saw the screen door where he pointed, and tried it. Locked.
“Just break it down,” Alec whispered again, but I shook my head.
“Too loud,” I said, “and unnecessary. We don’t want to leave evidence of a break-in if anyone should come looking.”
“It doesn’t matter, we do it all the time,” Alec told me. “That’s how we always get supplies: we break doors down. The agents probably assume they’re just citizen looters. There’s a lot of crime in the Republic still.”
I ignored him, and crept down, peering at the doorknob. Picking locks wasn’t among the skills I’d learned from Grandfather, but I knew from watching old movies with my uncle,that typically thieves picked locks with straight pins. “The pin interrupts the pieces that secure the lock, shifting it to the open position, the way a key does,” Uncle Patrick had explained when I asked him how it worked.
I stood up and looked around. “Anybody have anything long and straight? Like… an old piece of wire?”
“Move,” said Alec, pushing me out of the way. He pointed his gun at the knob and blew it off. The noise of the gun was surprisingly soft, like a clink, and I saw a scrape in the door from the entry point of the bullet. The knob hung by a mangled screw limply, and he pulled it off. Then he motioned to the door with a grand, mocking gesture. “Please,” he grinned.
Jean crept in behind me; I was to be her only bodyguard inside. Alec, Nick, Brian, and Kenny protected the outside of the house, and Pete and Jacob stayed farther away in the forest to keep a lookout. Pete had a long range with the crossbow, and Jacob was the best at marksmanship with a gun. I got the job of sticking with Jean mostly because Jean clung to me like a life raft. She said I wasn’t as “rough” as the other guys. I didn’t know why that was encouraging in a bodyguard, though. Maybe Jacob told her I could ‘sense the spirits of animals’ or something.
The place stank like mildew and something sulfuric—possibly some extremely rotted eggs. It looked as if the house had either been abandoned in a hurry, or its owners left without realizing they would never return. Dishes filled with moldy food and debris littered the counters, and a pan caked with some unrecognizable consumable still sat on the cold burner. The buzzing of flies hovered just out of our vision, and explained the maggots in the food and on the countertops. Photos on the walls depicted an emaciate
d-looking young couple, grinning like skeletons, their arms around a small, sickly child of about four. Jean studied one of them, her expression sympathetic.
“They must have been rebels who never made it to us,” she murmured. “I wonder what happened to them.”
I moved past her into the bedroom—the place had only one, and it doubled as an office apparently. A simple folding table sat beside the bed covered in papers, pens, and yet more layers of dust. But beside the papers was a net screen.
“Pay dirt,” I whispered, pointing. “Look.”
Jean fingered it apprehensively. “Of course you know that the minute I log on from this machine, the agents will be all over it,” she said. “They’ll know this one has been offline for however long, and someone unauthorized is assuming the identities of its former owners—”
“That’s why we brought all the hunters,” I told her, squeezing her shoulder encouragingly. “Just do the best you can. Nobody really thinks you’ll be able to crack into the database Will found on the first try, in less than two hours.”
“But if I can’t, we’ll have alerted the agents what we’re up to, and they’ll be on us like flies the next time we try to do this,” Jean muttered, opening the net screen and plugging it in. “And why there’d still be electricity to this house when it’s abandoned—oh!” she stopped, surprised when the ‘charging’ light showed up in the corner of the net screen.
“Nick told me houses in the city are on a centralized grid for electricity, they don’t disconnect them one by one,” I told her. “And all the agents will know is that someone broke in and was doing something on the net, they won’t know who or for what purpose. Granted, we’ll probably have to find a target in a totally different part of the Republic the next time so they don’t start suspecting where we’re coming from in the forest, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” I smiled at her reassuringly, watching her rusty fingers type in a few keystrokes, bringing up browsers with each one. “I’ll shut up now so you can work.”