Code Name Komiko

by Naomi Paul

  The doors closed behind him, and Lian returned to the apartment from where Hong Kong looked beautiful. She made herself finish her day’s school assignments—a blessedly light load—and change into her pajamas, and then keyed the ten-digit passcode into her laptop.

  11:08 PM HKT — Komiko has logged on

  Blossom: . . . And Komiko makes four.

  Komiko: Good evening, everyone. I went on a field trip today and made a new friend.

  Crowbar: Were U checkin N2harrison?

  Komiko: Affirmative. I took a stroll around the Harrison Corp complex, and halfway through it turned into a guided tour.

  Komiko: I met a kid named Zan. His sister was an employee of HC who went missing three days ago. And you’ll never guess where she turned up.

  Blossom: Out on a limb here, Im gonna say Big Wave Bay.

  Komiko: Got it in one, Blossom.

  Crowbar: Oh no thats horrible! Poor guy

  Komiko: Couple that with the conditions I saw inside the factory, and I think the pieces are starting to fall together to build a case against Harrison.

  Torch: I said it before and I’ll say it again: we should stay away from that man. He gets a whiff of us, and we’re dead.

  Oh Torch, Lian thought. Always such a ray of sunshine.

  Komiko: Well, for now, we’re alive. And Zan’s sister isn’t. So I told him we’d do what we could to help.

  Torch: Hold on. “We?” Are you saying that YOU TOLD HIM ABOUT 06/04?

  Lovely. When Torch hits Caps Lock, rational conversation goes right out the window.

  Crowbar: Whoa take it EZ Torch

  Komiko: I didn’t mention us by name, obviously. Just that I was part of something bigger than myself, a group trying to make things right.

  Komiko: Or is that NOT the whole reason we exist, Torch?

  She knew she was baiting him. But his little outbursts were getting tiresome, and she was fed up with him shaming the others anytime they stepped outside the lines of what he considered “proper” protocol.

  Torch: You met this guy THIS AFTERNOON. You don’t know the first thing about him, not really. And you couldn’t WAIT to broadcast our existence to a complete stranger.

  Torch: Really smart, K. Really good thinking.

  Crowbar: Hold on, this Zan sounds like exactly the sort of person we R meant 2 defend

  Blossom: Clearly hes got a beef w/ Harrison. That puts him on our side by default, right?

  Komiko: That was my way of thinking.

  Crowbar: If he can give us info abt his sister we could trace her records @ harrison corp

  Crowbar: Prove a connection btwn the girl & the factory, thats a major scandal right there

  Komiko: Right. Mynah Bird wouldn’t have been digging into Harrison if there were no story there. He started the work, we owe it to him to see it through.

  Blossom: What strikes me as weird is that there still hasnt been anything in the papers about the —

  Blossom: Does she have a name, K? Can we start to humanize her instead of just “the dead girl?”

  It was little things like this—the sensitivity, the kindness, the wanting to give a face and voice to the oppressed—that continued to make Lian think that Blossom was female.

  Komiko: Her name is Jiao.

  Crowbar: There hasnt been an official police report, hasnt been a postmortem done either

  Komiko: Almost as if all trace of Jiao was being deliberately swept under the rug.

  Blossom: . . .

  Blossom: Komiko, do you think you could convince this Zan to pose as a worker? Get a job inside HC, see what he could find?

  Torch: Terrible, stupid, HORRIBLE idea.

  Lian hated to admit it, but she was in Torch’s corner on this one.

  Komiko: Let’s put that one on the back burner. It’s very high-risk. Once he got in, Zan might never get out again.

  Torch: First sensible thing you’ve said since you logged in.

  Komiko: ENOUGH. We get it, you’re pissed off. The sky is blue and water is wet.

  Lian smiled at her own joke. That certainly felt good.

  Blossom: You mentioned the factory conditions. Did you get any evidence? Photos or video? That would go a long way.

  Lian felt a little sick to her stomach at reading this question.

  Komiko: Well . . . yes and no.

  Komiko: I shot a ton of video on my phone . . . but my phone’s not around anymore.

  Torch: WHAT.

  Komiko: Look, I had to escape, we were being chased, I dropped it somewhere along the way.

  Crowbar: Uh oh

  Torch: Sky = blue.

  Torch: Water = wet.

  Torch: Komiko = LIABILITY.

  11:35 PM HKT — Torch has logged off

  Lian hung her head and closed her eyes, but the word was seared into her vision in all caps, harsh and accusatory.

  And, maybe, completely correct.

  11:36 PM HKT — Komiko has logged off

  She shut the laptop and flopped onto her bed, willing sleep to come but knowing that it wouldn’t. If she could just switch off her brain for a few hours, instead of rehashing the whole day—from the humiliations at school to the dangers of the factory trip, from the new wrinkle that Zan introduced to the awful notion that she’d endangered 06/04—she might be able to wake up with a fresh perspective on it all.

  Instead, over the next couple of hours, she tossed and turned and fretted her way toward a mild headache. When holding a pillow over her head didn’t solve it, she got out of bed in a huff and shook an ibuprofen tablet into her hand. She’d long ago decided that such pills were best washed down with a iced coffee—the caffeine helping to rush the medicine through her bloodstream—and so made her way quietly down the hall to the kitchen.

  She’d heard her parents come in sometime around one and had assumed they were asleep. But there was a light on in her father’s study, so Lian went to investigate.

  “Dad,” she said quietly from his doorway. “What are you still doing up?”

  He was at his desk, one hand on his forehead, his hair mussed. Towers of paperwork were spread before him, and Lian immediately understood that it was these, and not a night of social drinking, that had turned his eyes so bleary.

  “I could ask you the same thing, little panda,” he said, not unkindly. “But I think our answers would be the same. The work doesn’t end just because the day does.”

  “You can say that again,” she said. She walked into the study and took a seat on the other side of the desk. “How did your meeting go tonight?”

  He sighed. “Much like how I imagine the meeting tomorrow night will go. There are so many conflicting interests in the deals I’m working with right now. It’s hard to know where to begin. And our good friend Mr. Harrison is giving me the biggest headache of all, at the moment.”

  You and me both, Lian thought. Instead, she slid the coffee and the ibuprofen across the blotter to him. “Maybe you need these more than I do, then,” she proffered.

  “It’s 2 A.M. already,” he lamented. “I really shouldn’t drink this now. It’ll keep me up for hours.” But even as he said it, he popped the top of the can and took a long swig. Lian smiled.

  “The biggest sticking point is this proposed expansion of Harrison Corp’s empire,” he continued, swallowing the pill. “To say that it flaunts a number of monopoly rules would be putting it lightly. And it hasn’t passed due diligence on several health and safety regulations.” He sighed and flipped a few pages. “But you wouldn’t believe the pressure I’m getting from above to push the deal through.”

  Lian believed it, all right. At the mention of “health and safety,” she had to bite her tongue not to shout out “Ha!”

  “If you’re having doubts, Dad,” she said, “you can’t just cave. There’s no reason you should sign off on a deal that you don’t think is fair.”

  He fixed her with a very serious look. “It’s business. ‘Fair’ doesn’t enter into it.”

  She g
rimaced a little to hear him so world weary.

  “Everyone’s playing with loaded dice,” he told her. “The ones who come out on top are the ones who realize that. This isn’t about what’s fair. This is about me delivering on the deal, or risking my job. Risking everything I’ve worked for.”

  His head fell back onto his hand, and Lian knew not to push any further. Instead, she stood up and walked around to his side of the desk.

  “I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “I know you’ll do what’s right.”

  “Sleep well, little panda.”

  “And you, Dad.”

  TWELVE

  Tuesday

  Lian moved slowly through the corridors of Island South, the previous night’s insomnia making the halls and everyone in them look like photocopies of themselves—faded and distant, indistinct and immaterial. Not surprisingly, the fact that she was headed for Mr. Chu’s economics classroom wasn’t spurring her to walk any faster.

  She’d done the reading, of course; she wasn’t about to be shown up again, by smarmy Matt Harrison or anyone else. But the question was whether she’d be able to recall any of what she’d taken in, or get her mouth to process her incoherent thoughts into actual words.

  Currently, those thoughts were shifting from Matt to his father, who was, apparently, something of an expert in a certain shadowy segment of economic theory. Clearly, Harrison Corp played exclusively with loaded dice. How could anyone—from her harried father, to her splintering activist group, to a poor factory worker like Jiao—hope to stand up to a rule-flaunting behemoth like Harrison?

  She slunk into the room, skirting its edges to get to her desk. Her eyes weren’t focused on anything but her Converse hi-tops, so she slid her backpack onto the floor and nearly sat down before she realized that Matt was occupying her chair, leaning across the aisle to talk to Mingmei. The two had their heads close together, obviously enjoying themselves; Mingmei was doing that thing where she kept smoothing some imaginary stray lock of hair back behind her ear.

  Lian didn’t have time for this crap right now.

  “I think you’re in the wrong seat, pal,” she said.

  “Wow,” he said, turning around and flashing his poster-boy grin. “You, uh, you look really tired, Lian.”

  “What a sweet thing to say,” she muttered, as he rose from her chair. “No wonder you’re such a hit with the ladies.”

  “Okay, let’s start over,” he offered. “Good morning, Lian. Did you have a restful and restorative night’s sleep?”

  “Of course not,” she said, slumping into her seat. “I’m a proper student at a Hong Kong high school. I was up all night studying for the quiz.”

  “Oh, hell, the quiz!” Mingmei said, her eyes going wide. “I totally forgot!”

  “Mingmei is a somewhat less proper student,” Lian told him as he took his seat.

  “Don’t sweat it, Ming,” Matt said. “I never knew we had a quiz in the first place, so you were already one up on me.”

  “You’ll probably still do great,” Mingmei told him cheerily.

  Lian rolled her eyes. There were still a couple of minutes left before the bell called class to order, so she pulled her textbook out of her bag and pretended to focus intently on Friedrich Hayek’s Nobel acceptance speech. The words blurred together on the page, and no amount of yawning seemed to straighten them.

  “So, this Friday night,” Mingmei said, tugging at her sleeve. “Matt’s dad is throwing a party on his yacht. I’m considering it an opportunity to window-shop for all the features I’ll want when I buy a yacht of my own someday. You want to come with us?”

  Wow, Lian thought. She’s been in Matt’s orbit for less than twenty-four hours, and it’s “us” already?

  “I, uh . . . I think I’m busy,” Lian said. “I’ve got to log a ton of violin hours. Plus, Anna Karenina isn’t going to read itself.”

  “The audiobook does,” Matt offered helpfully. “You can knock the whole thing out in about thirty hours, unabridged. You could even do it at the same time you’re playing violin.”

  “Have fun on your yacht,” Lian said, resisting the urge to ask him how he imagined she’d hear the audiobook over the sound of the violin. “I’ve got a date with Leo Tolstoy.”

  “You could probably score a date with a dude who hasn’t been dead for a hundred years, if you eased up on the studying a little,” Matt said. “Think about it, okay?”

  She waved him off as the bell chimed, and Mr. Chu passed the quizzes down the rows. Lian stared at the paper until the words coalesced into sentences, and eventually she realized that she actually had a decent grasp on the material. The first few questions were straight from the text, a couple of true/false and a handful of multiple choice, one or two of which included some sort of humorous option E’s appended by Chu.

  She hesitated over a question on free banking, trying to ferret out the tenets of the system from its name. She shifted in her seat, running down the list in her mind, and felt certain that there were eyes on her. Turning her head just enough to see Matt, she found him looking in her direction. He smiled and raised his eyebrows.

  Lian curled her arm over her paper and hunched down until she was sure his view of it was completely blocked. How much had he seen already? How many of her answers had he swiped? How dare he just sit there, letting her do all the hard work while he reaped the benefits?

  Like father, like son, she thought.

  Her mind then wandered to Jiao and Zan. She wondered whether he would show up that evening, like he was supposed to. Would he be patient enough to let 06/04 help him, or would he strike out on his own and disappear into the long shadows cast by Harrison Corp?

  Chu called for the quizzes, and Lian was jolted out of her musings only to realize that she hadn’t written anything at all for the last three questions. Her heart raced for a moment—she’d always been a straight-A student, and this was two flubs in as many days.

  Calm down, she told herself. It’s only a small quiz, a tiny percentage of the course grade. There’ll be extra credit down the line. You’ll get those points back.

  And besides, she thought with grim satisfaction, if you didn’t answer those questions, Matt didn’t have any answers to steal. “Tough quiz,” she whispered to him as the papers made their way to the front of the classroom.

  “I guess,” he shrugged. “What’d you get for the first blank? The one that just said ‘Name’?”

  It took her a second to realize he was making a joke. She didn’t feel like laughing.

  The lecture dragged, and in the last ten minutes of the period—while Chu checked over the quizzes and the class read about Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem—Lian was in danger of falling asleep with her face in her book. The chiming bell roused her, and she packed up her bag and joined the queue waiting to pick up their papers at the door.

  “Eighty,” Mingmei said, folding her quiz. “Not too bad, after all.”

  Lian stared at the 72% inked in red at the top of her own page. Chu hadn’t said anything as he’d handed it back to her, but had she sensed a look of disappointment in his eyes? She supposed she wouldn’t have blamed him.

  “Hey, pretty good for the new kid,” Matt said when he got his paper. He turned it around and Lian almost choked on air when she saw the red 100 in the upper right corner.

  “Top grade!” it said, in Chu’s neat script.

  Mingmei gave Matt a playful, one-armed hug. “See? Told you you’d do great!” she said. “Hey, what did you get, Lian?”

  “Embarrassed,” Lian answered, and took off as fast as her tired feet would go.

  THIRTEEN

  “So, I need a hat.”

  The last bell had rung, and Lian was at her locker, selecting the books she’d need for the evening’s homework. She double-checked that she wasn’t missing anything, and then closed the locker. “You don’t need a hat, Mingmei,” she said. “You must have fifty hats in your closet, and yet you only e
ver wear the same three.”

  Mingmei ignored her. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get out of here and go hit up that new boutique over off Des Voeux Road. I need to find just the right seafaring look for Friday.”

  “No, that’s okay,” Lian said as they headed down the hallway toward the exit. “I’ve got some stuff I have to take care of this afternoon.”

  “But you love to watch me shop for hats. You’ve done it like fifty billion and three times.”

  “That does sound like an accurate count. But I can’t today, okay? Have fun without me.”

  Mingmei frowned. “What’s up with you all of a sudden, Lian?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re just being . . . kind of grumpy. And weird. You were all moody after economics, and then I didn’t see you at all during lunch. And what was that phone call all about?”