Liáng is wearing heavy tan corduroy pants with a forest-green waffle sweater—I’m sure we look like a jumbled mass of colors, but Liáng’s sweater is soft, and I like the waffle texture.
Liáng takes me through the steps. Right foot back. Left foot back and to the left. Bring right foot together with the left. Left foot forward. Right foot forward and to the right. Bring feet together again.
Pretty basic dance. The key is timing your movements to your partner. When I step back, Liáng steps forward in the space where my leg used to be. It takes us a few laps, both of us staring at our feet, but soon we’re in rhythm. It helps that we’re almost the same height.
“So why waltzing?” I ask.
Liáng looks up and grimaces at first.
The grimace makes me self conscious about my breath after napping for six hours and not brushing my teeth before I came down.
Liáng eventually answers, “They say, never trust a religious man that won’t or can’t dance.”
“And you’re a religious man wishing to give advice?”
“One thing I’ve learned is that we’re all not what we appear.”
Ugh. I break eye contact and don’t try to hide my eye roll.
“You don’t like that answer?”
“I’m not in the mood for mysteries,” I say. Or for potentially brooding men. I’ve had my fill of those, thanks.
“Hmm,” Liáng says. “You’d think mysteries are at the heart of your chosen profession.”
I don’t know how much choosing of my profession I had. Puo and I are legacies. We were born directly into a crew without citizen chips. The only choice we had was deciding what kind of criminals to be. It was only recently that we were able to purchase modified citizen chips that allowed us some normal freedom of movement with hacked CitIDs.
“If we’re doing our job correctly, there should be no mysteries,” I say. “Where’s Puo?”
“Downstairs putting up the acoustic tiling. He asked to be left alone.”
We dance in silence for a few steps.
“Keep your eyes up,” I say.
Liáng keeps alternating between looking at me and looking down at our feet.
“If I didn’t know any better,” I say, “and was wearing a sexy dress, I’d think you were constantly staring at my breasts.”
Which, of course, is directly where his gaze lands for a half-second before he looks up at me with a slight blush.
“Sorry,” he says. “Are you and Puo … ?”
“No,” I say. “We’re like brother and sister.” But closer than most brothers and sisters. A shared life of crime will do that.
“Ah, I see,” Liáng says. “That makes sense. So, then, you’re having a sibling squabble?”
I stiffen in the dance, but then force myself to relax. Well, Liáng is living with us. He could hardly not notice us not talking to each other and yelling at each other behind closed doors. “Yeah,” I say.
“What about?” Liáng asks, surreptitiously trying to watch me.
Puo’s voice breaks in from the foyer, “None of your business.”
We break off the dance, and step back awkwardly from each other like junior high kids, again, whose father had just walked in the room.
Liáng looks between us and says diplomatically, “It’s my business to make sure our investment isn’t poorly placed. You two clearly have a disagreement. It was clear the moment I arrived there was a tension between you. I need to know if that disagreement is going to affect our bottom line.”
“No,” both Puo and I answer at the same time.
Liáng looks like he’s about to say more, but I cut him off, asking Puo, “How’s the tiling coming?”
“I could use some help,” Puo answers. “With all three of us, we might be done by morning.”
Liáng turns off the music and slides his tablet in his pocket.
“What about dinner?” I ask as we walk out of the bare living room toward the kitchen at the back of the house and the stairs leading down to the basement.
“Pizza,” Puo suggests.
Italian again? “What about Chinese food?” I blurt out. “Oh, wait,” I say, blushing at Liáng. “Is that okay?”
Liáng looks at me in confusion. “Why wouldn’t that be okay? Because I’m Chinese? I can’t eat Chinese food?”
“Jeez, Isa.” Puo shakes his head at me.
“What?” I say getting frustrated. “I don’t know what you want to eat!” I swear the more you try to be sensitive, the more you put your foot in your mouth.
“C’mon,” Puo says to Liáng.
Liáng walks ahead with Puo, each of them shaking his head at me.
How did I get to be the one on the outside? “Fine,” I say. “I’m going to order Chinese food then.”
Their self-righteous non-response confirms that I will be ordering one tasty dish for me, and two dishes that I think are absolutely disgusting with all the pepper flakes the restaurant owns for two self-righteous asshats.
CHAPTER TEN
TWO WEEKS LATER, we’re finally ready to send the stolen and refurbished squiddie into the British Museum for reconnaissance. The acoustic tiling went in fast enough, but punching a hole through the concrete floor down to the flooded underground tube beneath us took more time than we thought.
We had to drill slow and set the core drill to a slow rate of turn to try to mitigate the noise that traveled down through the concrete and earth and possibly into the flooded tube. But even with the slow rate of turn, that core drill made a lot of noise.
As soon as we punctured down through to the tube, water flooded upward to turn the hole into a muddy, goopy mess—which then caused our paranoia about being detected from below to peak, which in turn led to a brief detour while Puo sent out sensors small enough to fit through the initial hole to try and figure out what’s down there. Then, after all that, we had to give Puo an extra couple of days to practice driving the rogue squiddie around down in the underwater tunnel once we determined it was safe.
Of course, it didn’t help that after my stunt with ordering terrible Chinese food for Puo and Liáng, both Puo and Liáng separately returned the favor. Now, no one can be trusted to get food alone anymore. We all have to stop working and go together.
But we’re finally ready—it’s been a dull two weeks.
All three of us are in the basement after dinner. Puo is sitting at a foldout table he set up near the hole with his custom, retro-looking computers that he dragged down from upstairs on it. It’s the monitors that give them the retro feel: four wide touchscreen physical monitors stacked two by two. Puo eschews the more modern float screens. He says he likes to be able to slam his finger against something solid when things get hairy and he needs to act quickly.
There’s a distinct chill to the room. The water in the hole is dark and quiet, not a ripple on the surface. All the dirt we dug up is in the corner farthest from the stairs, giving the room a cold earth smell—like a graveyard at night.
Liáng and I are standing behind Puo watching the stacked widescreen monitors. It’s all gobbledygook to me—a bunch of open screens with a black background and color coded text. I’m decent at programming, but I’m no super user—that’s why I have Puo.
The rogue squiddie is unceremoniously lying on its side on the other side of the hole, appendages splayed out like a drunk frat boy in the street. It has hand-sized circular lenses, regularly spaced around the main sphere, that dully reflect the basement around us. There’s no light behind the lenses, just dark voids that I swear are staring at me.
Dark voids just waiting for Puo’s code to get overwritten. Gaping. Dark. Voids. Staring at me—
Puo snaps his fingers at me.
“What?” I ask, abruptly realizing both Puo and Liáng are staring at me.
“We’re ready,” Puo says. “What were you daydreaming of?”
“Never mind,” I say. “Okay, go ahead.”
Liáng walks over to the squiddie to lower it. Both Puo
and I watch him.
“Uh …” Liáng says and stares at us.
“Isa—” Puo says at the same time I say, “Well, go ahead,” and gesture for Puo to go help Liáng.
“I’m doing all of this.” Puo motions over the computers with two hands.
“And lowering the squiddie takes away from—” I mimic his motions. “—all that? You’re stronger than me. Go help Liáng.”
Puo starts to argue then stops himself. “Yeah, all right.” He gets up and helps Liáng lower the squiddie into the water.
Not sure what that was about. The last two weeks has been like that. Puo switching between moments of things being normal between us, and then being uncharacteristically easy, as if he were walking on eggshells or cutting off his remarks like he thought better of it. He hadn’t brought up Winn again at all, or said any dumbass things about me and Liáng—of which there is nothing more going on than two attractive people living and working together in close proximity.
I’m tempted to ask him what’s going on, but I suspect I don’t have the heart for that conversation at the moment.
The squiddie sinks down into the water, lowered in a net between Liáng and Puo. Small ripples push outward and lap up against the rough concrete edge. Once they remove the net, it sinks down to float just below the surface, barely visible in the muddy water.
Puo slides back in his chair at the computers. “Okay,” he says, drawing the word out as he types on the keyboard. “Here we go.” He hits a button with a flourish.
Nothing changes that I can see. The squiddie is still floating near the surface. Nothing but gobbledygook code is on the screens in front of me.
I wait a few seconds, still nothing. “I’m not sure you understand that phrase, Puo,” I say.
Puo blushes and starts banging around on his keyboard more.
“Did you remember to plug it in?” Liáng asks dryly.
Heh.
I’m about to add another helpful comment when Puo slaps himself in the forehead. “Damn it!”
“What?” I ask.
“I, uh, forgot to ‘plug it in.’ ”
“What?” I can’t help but laugh at him.
“The infra-sensor needs to be in the water to communicate with it.” Puo gets up and goes around to the other side of the table. He fiddles with a PVC pipe that has what look like wires and a pressure vessel shoved in the end and puts it into the hole.
The squiddie responds to the sensor in the water by sinking out of sight.
“Uh—” Puo is stuck there holding the PVC pipe. “Liáng, come hold this.”
Liáng does as asked. “Glad you could find something for me to do.”
As Puo sits down back at the computers, I say, “Nice planning.”
“Shush,” Puo responds. “I’m working.”
“What’d you do while you were practicing with the squiddie?” I ask about the infra-sensor.
Puo glances at me out of the corner of his eyes. “I just tossed the infra-sensor on the wire in the water—it floats. It needs to be deeper when the squiddie ranges out farther. Which is why I put it on the PVC.” Puo continues to work on his computers. “Is that okay with you?”
“Yes,” I answer guardedly. What’s with him? I watch him for a bit, growing bored. “Nothing is happening,” I say to be helpful.
Puo answers without looking up, “I’m going through the checkout process to make sure everything is up and running properly.”
Well, that’s exciting. “I think there’s some c-clamps upstairs,” I say to Liáng while Puo continues his anticlimactic checkout process. I head for the stairs to go grab the clamps.
“Grab some wood and some screws as well,” Liáng says.
I fetch the required materials and have a makeshift stand built shortly.
“How we doin’, Puo?” I ask when Liáng and I are done.
“Almost ready,” he says. He continues banging away on the keyboard and then suddenly snaps at me, “Hey—!”
“What?” I ask annoyed at him.
“You sighed,” Liáng answers for Puo.
“I did?”
“Yes,” Puo says. “Look, the squiddie emits a coded signal that identifies it to other squiddies. It’s what makes the other squiddies and any other defenses know it’s one of them. It has to be perfect, or we’re screwed—”
The screen on the left blips into a detailed blue pixelated surface of the tube.
“All right,” Puo says, “we’re ready.”
“Wait,” I say. “What do you mean screwed?” There was something about the way he said it.
“If the squiddies,” Puo explains, “think this is a fake, they’ll capture it and drag it to the authorities, who will then trace the chip we ordered to our delivery point. They already know a squiddie went missing. They’ll be on alert.”
“We have an identification gap,” I say about them tracing the chip.
We spoofed the order so the authorities shouldn’t even know about the new SFID. And even if they do eventually learn of it, we opened a post office box in another resident’s name without their knowledge. The authorities will track down one Jay Chadwick Brewer, and if they pull the video data from the post office all they’ll see is a scrambled mess from our digi-scrambler we wear whenever we go there.
“Yes,” Puo says. “But how long do you think before they pull the data stored on the squiddie and figure out where it entered the underground tunnel.”
Whoa. I don’t show my discomfort, but I’m rapidly thinking of a quick exit plan.
“Suddenly,” Puo says, “I didn’t take long enough to do the checkout, did I?”
Freaking Puo. “Finishing prematurely is your own problem,” I say.
The tube is very detailed in the blue pixels. Way more detailed than I would expect. “Is that active?” I ask.
Active sonar. Almost as good as light underwater. It works by bouncing sound waves off of stuff to get a picture. The problem is anything that’s between the max distance you can “see” and twice that max distance can detect you without you detecting them. Which is why we don’t use it.
“Yup,” Puo says. “We’re one of them now. Nice, right?”
Indeed.
The tube is empty, a cylindrical path with a railway running along the bottom. It curves to the left a bit and comes up to an underground station.
The cylindrical walls expand out. An empty platform extends down the length of the station on the right. It’s all outlined in the same blue pixels. Nothing out of the ordinary. Regular gaps in the wall lead off the platform to stairs that head up.
“There,” Puo says. He taps on the keyboard and brings up a separate window.
It’s a screen capture looking into one of the gaps the squiddie had already passed. It’s a full-sized squatter; it looks a few inches taller than my waist and resembles a vertical pill.
“What’d you call that?” Liáng asks.
“Success,” Puo says.
The squatter didn’t react to the squiddie—we’re good.
Our rogue squiddie ducks into the tube tunnel leading out of the station.
“A full-sized squatter,” I tell Liáng.
Liáng bobs his head in small motions and sticks out his lower lip. Eventually he lets slip, “Hunh.”
“What?” I ask.
The squiddie scoots up near the ceiling of the tunnel to pass over a railcar frozen in time. Fortunately, the sonar can’t penetrate into the closed windows to see if there is anything on the train—actually, that’s pretty interesting. Squiddies can’t see past windows.
I tap Puo on the shoulder to make sure he saw it too.
“Yeah,” Puo says, “I got it.”
Liáng answers my earlier question, “I figured you’d have a more inventive name.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Well—” Liáng crosses his arms in front of him. “—Suppository seems the most likely direction you two would go—”
“Hey—!” Puo says.
Puo says defensively, “Doesn’t have quite the right kind of ring to it.”
“Plopper?” Liáng suggests in a perfectly dry voice.
Puo turns around looking disgusted.
I can’t help myself from snorting laughter. I have to hold my hand over my mouth to try and get a hold of myself—plopper. Man, I haven’t felt this great in a while.
“You know,” Puo says to Liáng, “for someone who accuses of us being teenagers with junior-high maturity levels, you’re spending a lot of time down here in the muck with us.”
Liáng mmm’s, and continues to stand there with his muscled arms crossed.
The squiddie passes into another tube station. There’s a plopper at every entranceway off the platform we pass. Again the ploppers don’t react. The mood in the basement is turning more and more positive. Even Puo’s barks have a little less bite to them.
The squiddie silently passes through four more tube stations in the next fifteen minutes and finally enters the last station, Tottenham Court Station. Puo instructs the squiddie to turn on its flashlights so we can read the sign.
Bright, white light lances out ahead to form two broadening beams. The orange circular with blue rectangular text box in the center confirms it’s Tottenham Court Road Station.
There’s little growth down there. The little thumb-sized tiles that the wall is made of are mostly clean. There’s only a little crud starting to grow in between the cracks. A layer of silt is on the platform, but it’s thin, and we can still tell where individual floor tiles are.
The squiddie approaches the plopper, squatting guard at the base of the steps that lead up and out. All three of us hold our breath.
The rogue squiddie squeaks by above it, and continues on its merry way up the stairs.
The Elgin Deceptions (Sunken City Capers Book 2) Page 8