But it was too much of a risk.
She set the medichines to work on breaking down the ink that stained her flesh. She watched the dragon’s tail unravel in a cascading wave. The dark green was replaced with a yellowish hue of her mixed parentage. Cell by cell, the tattoo disappeared, leaving clean, raw flesh a shade lighter than her normal complexion. The color would settle as the medichines completed their task.
Letting the medichines toil away, she focused on the next step—her clothes. Her blue jeans were a total loss. One leg was shredded, soaked in blood and embedded with pinpricks and shards of glass. Her blouse hadn’t fared any better.
After rummaging around in the backpack, she came out with a fresh pair of black jeans and a gray tank top.
“Let’s see if you pass muster,” Kaizhou said, opening the bathroom door.
As she strode into the cement-and-metal expanse of the auto body shop, Rameez gawked. He wasn’t subtle about it, letting his eyes travel up and down, lingering.
“Wow,” he said, his Pakistani accent over-inflecting the vowel.
“You look fucking awesome,” Jade said. “I want to loan you my checkered skirt.”
“I’m not playing dress-up here, guys. This isn’t for fun.”
Her words shook some of the triviality out of her friend.
“No, you’re right,” Jade said.
“Are we all in danger?” Ashita asked.
Mesa stared at the assemblage before her. They stood, clustered close. Ashita and Sri were holding hands, leaning on one another for support. Sri’s doe eyes were red-rimmed, her cheeks puffy. She was dazed and lost, and seeing her that way broke Mesa’s heart.
Doris licked his lips, his mouth opening and closing, but he said nothing.
“I don’t know,” Mesa said. Leaning against the hood of a rusty early-twenty-first century Camaro, she crossed her arms over her chest. “But we have to presume you are. We need all of you to be safe. Go underground, get off the grid, back up everything, and destroy what’s left. Stay off Somnambulist. Keep a low profile. Whatever. Just be safe.”
“What are you going to do?” Rameez asked.
Jade chewed on her lip, not liking any of her options. “Honestly? I have no clue. But we’ve got five of our own in the wind after that thing in LA. Try to find them, I guess.”
“You think it’s connected?” Sri asked.
Mesa shrugged, going for a coolness she couldn’t quite muster. “I kinda have to think that it is. Nearly a whole sect wiped out, now they’re after me. Maybe after all of us. It’s not a coincidence.”
“Who are they?” Doris asked.
Mesa shook her head. “Guys, I wish I had answers for you. I don’t. I’m completely lost here. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on. I can’t tell you where I’m going or what I’m doing…”
“Right, in case they kill us and chip our skulls,” Jade said. Her crooked smile wobbled as her eyes went glassy.
Mesa wrapped her arms around her. The woman’s tears splashed on her shoulder, wetting the sides of their faces. Jade was her sister, not by blood but family, nonetheless. Her best friend. She was in danger, and Mesa couldn’t even tell her why. She had no answers to give, but she sure as hell was going to find some, for all their sakes.
“You be careful, honey,” Jade said. “I love you, OK?”
Mesa squeezed tighter. “I love you, too. We’ll relink once all this over.”
“We better.”
“I need to finish backing up,” Rameez said, breaking away from the group. The repair shop belonged to his uncle, and Rameez worked the day shift. In a sub-basement below the service bay was an office with a smattering of tablets and mem chips—their secret outpost for their memorialist enclave. After tonight, none of them were likely to return. In another hour, all the data on their local servers and storage devices would be erased.
Slowly, the rest of the group broke off with hugs and goodbye kisses until Mesa and Kaizhou were the last ones left.
“You don’t have to do this for me,” she said.
“Fuck that noise,” he said. “We do this together.”
“Love you, Kai.”
He took her in his arms, and she tried to clamp down the tears. She allowed herself that moment, savoring the warmth of his body and the security of his embrace. Gently, she pushed away, telling him she needed to use the bathroom and get her stuff.
She closed the door behind her and rested against its cool steel, trying to resolve herself for what came next. In three years, she had worked hard at building a life for herself, worked at trying to reclaim herself, a self she didn’t even really know. She tried to figure out what kind of a woman she was, and she’d let Jonah guide her toward the woman they both wanted her to be.
Her tears smeared the thick layers of mascara. The mirror gave her a glimpse of her appearance. She looked like a disheveled raccoon or a stoned, drunken, troubled rock star. She tried to laugh but couldn’t.
At the bottom of the go bag was a data plug. A kill stick. She inserted the male connector into the port behind her ear and brought up the menu.
I can’t do this. She gave a mental tap to the Proceed box.
A warning symbol flashed, asking her if she was sure. YES floated before her left eye, NO on the right.
If she hit YES, the kill stick would disconnect her immediately. She would be completely off the grid. Lines of code would shut down her cybernetics and dismantle the entirety of the DRMR delivery system that wrapped around her hippocampus. The REMIND programs would cease to be. She would walk out of the bathroom with her memory intact, but she would be utterly alone. She could never use another memory chip or never dream of her father with anything other than her own memories. The kill stick was a last resort, one more layer of security.
In three years, she had never been disconnected. She didn’t remember a single day of her life before waking up in the hospital, already connected to the world around her. She hadn’t spent a single day outside the cool embrace of modern technology, with information nothing more than a simple thought away. She’d been constantly plugged in to an entire web of instant gratification—sports, news, shopping, research, learning opportunities, the Somnambulist boards, MemSpace, and all the other DRMR addicts she could instantly connect to.
If she hit YES, her world would promptly collapse down to a single party of one. She would never have Kaizhou in her head again, never get to share her thoughts on the most intimate level imaginable. The neuronal interface would cease to be, and the bioelectric wiring that ran through her brain would eventually shrivel and dissolve from disuse. The medichines would break it down and carry it away.
The tears came freely, and she collapsed under the weight of the evening. On the bathroom floor, her back pressed against the door, she let it shake loose.
She tapped NO and tore the kill stick loose then flung it across the small, confined space. It hit the floor and skittered back to her.
Palming away the tears, she shoved herself back up, wincing at the various aches and pains. She stuffed the kill stick back into the bottom of the bag, buried beneath loose mem chips, ammo clips, food packets, and her last change of clothes. Shouldering the bag, she stepped into the empty bay and followed the chattering of rain against the building. Kaizhou was waiting for her.
“Ready?” he asked, squeezing her hand and drawing it to his mouth. He kissed her knuckles.
“No,” she answered.
Chapter 5
Mesa watched as the wind whipped hair across the woman’s face, obscuring her features. The inky strands gleamed with a mercurial shine in the dying embers of the passing day. With the certitude of dreamscape knowledge, Mesa knew this was Selene, just as she knew the enflamed city behind her was Los Angeles. The fire-ravaged cityscape was unfamiliar to her, y
et recognizable. Long, skeletal fingers stretched toward her, and as the wind died down to reveal the woman’s face, her body turned to ash and collapsed with a puff before the strong thermal currents of approaching flames carried it away.
She emerged from sleep, feeling disoriented and lost, her body tightly cramped in the confines of the passenger seat. Passing headlights washed through the cabin of their parked Trans Am, obnoxiously bright. Beyond the windshield, Nickelsville brightened and dimmed in the waves of light. She pushed herself up in the leather seat and rubbed her eyes, scratching away the pointy, gritty carbuncles glued into the corners.
Outside, bent forms shuffled as they organized their belongings. Others huddled over rusty barrels and burning wooden pallets, warming themselves over the fire. A group of children sat in collapsible lawn chairs, doing their homework by the light of the flickering flames. There were tents and wooden shacks, and some of the homeless, dressed in bulky layers of thick clothes, slept in sleeping bags or covered themselves with dirty newspapers. A hand-written poster was staked to the ground, illuminated by the headlights of passing motorists: “I see less rats! Keep up the good work, Nickelodeons!” A cluster of ratty blue tents formed a loose cul-de-sac, and somebody had crafted a sign adorned with glued-on cartoon cats, proclaiming the small area Kitty’s Korner.
A few other families were packed away in their own vehicles, many of which were unwashed and banged up. Kaizhou’s ancient car blended in nicely. As far as the Nickelsville residents were concerned, he and Mesa were just another down-on-their-luck couple. Nobody had greeted them, but none had discouraged them from parking and keeping to themselves. Nicklesville itself was a large tract of city-owned land that had been turned over to the city’s homeless.
Unlike the rest of Seattle, the politicians and police didn’t think it was worth keeping watch over. Nicklesville was a small black hole in the web of surveillance that reached across the city. It had no cameras, no securiclouds, and little to no police presence. After all, what were the lives of non-taxpayers worth? The Nickelodeons, as they called themselves, policed their own. Occasionally, they got some outside help, and every Thanksgiving, kind-hearted folks from the Vietnamese Cultural Center gifted them with food, haircuts, fresh clothes, and pleasant conversation. Other than that, they were on their own and forgotten until a well-fed suburbanite mom got uncomfortable with their presence being too close to home.
Jonah had called it King County’s answer to Tent City, the derisive name of the refugee camp he and Mesa had lived at following the Pacific Rim Coalition’s invasion of California. Of course, she didn’t remember anything of those days, and her father had rarely spoken of it. When she’d asked, he’d been vague and turned their discussion to other topics.
Her eyes burned, and she felt haunted by the unpleasantness of her dreams. She knew little of her mother. Still, she found herself unsettled by the nightmarish vision of Selene’s disintegration. When she closed her eyes, all she saw were the fatal shots to Jonah’s chest and the way he’d folded in half. The despair in his eyes was etched into her soul.
When she’d woken up in the Harborview Medical Center three years ago, he’d been at her side. His face was the first to greet hers; his warmth was a thing she could cling to. There had been an odd sense of familiarity, despite his stranger’s presence, and she’d absorbed the mems of their lives together. Memories were all she had left of Jonah, she realized. She pressed her knuckles into the corners of her eyes and sniffed back the mucusy gorge compressed in the center of her skull.
Kaizhou began to stir. He reached over and scratched at her fuzzy scalp.
“We can’t stay here,” she said.
“Where do we go?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. Staring out the windows, she watched children finish their schoolwork beneath rain-soaked hoodies. “They’ll come here soon, though. Looking for me.”
She pictured the dark, empty void in Seattle’s securiweb that was Nickelsville, and she knew it was only a matter of time before the hunters stalked her there. She eyed her stark reflection in the passenger’s window and wondered if her old life at Echo Park had been the same—one day passing into the next, waiting for the horrors to find her.
Kaften woke up annoyed. Those fucking suits.
The more he thought about the botched op, the more annoyed he became. They could blame him for that crap in LA. That was one thing. But he would not take the blame for Mesa Everitt being in the wind. It was not how he would have run it if he’d been given free rein on the planning.
The suit had called him as they were setting up. He told Kaften to carry out the mission right away, don’t wait. “There’s no time for observation,” he’d said. “Get in and get it done.”
And that was what Kaften and his team had done. And half of their quarry had gone missing in a city of more than half a million people.
Kaften would have waited and followed her around a bit, learned who her friends were, where she went, and what she did. He would know if she had a job, had a boyfriend, or did a lot of partying. He wondered who would miss her. If he’d been given op control, he would have an answer to all those questions.
But the suits—they sat on high and spat out their commands, entirely ignorant of the subtleties of fieldwork. They had no appreciation for planning. Too often, they insultingly mistook Kaften and his team as nothing more than hired guns.
If they’d had eyes-on, maybe they would have learned enough about Mesa Everitt to avoid underestimating her. Would have learned she was a scrapper with shooting experience. Would have learned, maybe, that her daddy had taken things to heart and trained her.
If, if, if. All kinds of ifs.
Ifs were pointless. Kaften closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath and let it out very, very slowly. Then he took in another slow, deep breath and spent several seconds exhaling.
Again. Inhale, exhale. In, out. The aggravation was lessening, and the muscles in his shoulders began to unstiffen and relax. He rolled his head from side to side and rotated his shoulders in small, smooth circles, his eyes closed all the while, his breathing steady. He still had a job to do, and there were ways to carry it out.
While waiting for the 71 bus, Crassen had kept them apprised of law enforcement activity. Surprisingly, nobody had called to report their activity or seemed to have even taken notice of the evening’s earlier violence. He knew the sound suppressants and noise-camouflaging software had gone a long way toward keeping their own gunshots whisper quiet, but he had presumed Mesa’s wild gunshots in the alley would not have gone unnoticed. He chalked their good fortune up to the joys of living in a desensitized modern world.
Unconcerned about a heavy police presence, Kaften and Crassen returned to the Everitt apartment while Boyd slept off his injuries in the van.
The door was unlocked, and they entered cautiously. The apartment stank of cordite and gore. In the living room lay the dead man.
Kaften had known Jonah in another life, back in Los Angeles. Mentally, he shrugged it off. Their association had been superficial at best, a means to an end. No love lost.
The frag rounds had not been kind, and his skull was brutally misshapen. Kaften knelt and studied the data port behind Jonah’s right ear, surprised to find it still intact.
Poor bitch. After making it out of LA, starting over, preparing—none if it had mattered. He’d found Jonah’s go bag, and Mesa… well, she was a spitfire, to be sure. Years of preparation and training. The corpos should have taken care of Jonah sooner; Kaften had warned them. He let out a noisy breath as he stood.
He pushed up and waved his partner over. “See what you can collect. Maybe the backup’s in good shape.”
Crassen nodded, already unspooling the data cable and pulling a tablet from one of the many pockets on his black pants.
“And hey,” Kaften said, meeting Cra
ssen’s eyes. “Find me something happy in there, huh?”
Kaften left him to it and went about the search. He gave the kitchen a cursory review then went back into the living room, where he ran his hands between the couch cushions, flipped through a small collection of old, well-worn books on the coffee table, opened up drawers, and closed them when he was finished. Gently, he lifted a collection of e-papers and swiped through the digital drawings. He recognized much of it—the Echo Park camps, Chinatown, Mesa. He carefully refolded the documents and placed them back atop the table. He swiveled his head, making sure he got a good mem capture of the area for future analysis. If needed, he could physically go back through the place further, but he didn’t want to leave a giant footprint of activity.
His primary concern was Mesa, and he figured the information he needed would be found in her bedroom. He passed photos of Jonah and his daughter—some showed her as a child and a few were more recent—hanging in the hallway, forced smiles on their faces, as if the photographer had coaxed them into being happy. Some of the photos were nice, and a few even approached honesty. Kaften didn’t have any photos in his place—he considered them too old-fashioned. The ones on Jonah Everitt’s wall were relics of much better days, and Kaften felt that helped prove his point all the more.
Mesa’s room was neat and orderly. Her dirty clothes were sorted by color. Clean clothes hung in the closet; socks and underwear, folded and put away in the dresser. Her desk was the busiest part of the room. The fake wood was stained with rings of coffee, and a sheaf of e-papers and mem chips vied for space. The drawers held more chips, an odd assortment of doodles, and torn pieces of recycled paper with notes scrawled across them in a tightly controlled print. He recognized some book titles and names of authors, but the others were obscure. He didn’t think any of the notes were important or useful. He certainly wouldn’t be able to lure her out with an ancient Stephen King book whose title had interested her enough to actually write down—certainly not after killing her father, at least.
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