“But why? What did you do?”
“I stole from them.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s enough.”
Jade simply nodded. For most of her life, she’d known only poverty, and she knew, too well, how much her financially sound betters looked down upon her. Much of Jade’s education had come from the streets, and she had no formal documentation of such higher learning. She could raid a rival with all the proficiency of her corporate equivalents, steal all their money, and utterly destroy them. Because she didn’t wear a suit or have an MBA, it was an unsanctioned criminal act. She could slick back her hair, buy a sharp blazer and a team of lawyers, and suddenly become untouchable. She could ruin lives with impunity, all in the name of business and shareholdings.
Life in her native London had been a hand-me-down existence. After hacking out a false ident and back-stopped credentials as a student with top marks, she was granted a visa to attend school in LA. A few worms in some random bank accounts netted her the cash to fly and disappear.
Never lucky, she’d arrived barely a month before the PRC attack. She hacked modestly, never taking too much from any single account, and rarely returned to the well more than once. Ashita had said she had mad skills, but both were high on posh at the time. Once the guns had started firing and the bombs had begun dropping, though, she was back to square one. The old, rich white people were among the first out of LA, under armed protection from the National Guard or with Air Force escorts for their private jets and helicopters.
Street connections kept her alive, and her educational opportunities grew under Alice Xie’s tutelage. She became a memorialist, something she had already dabbled in back in the UK. Organized crime had helped her hone her natural gifts, and before long, she’d started raiding more than private stock accounts and the savings of housewives.
Every time she stepped outside her door—in LA or London, it didn’t matter; everywhere was the same—she got that look, as if people knew she was somehow their lesser. Her hair, the way she dressed, and her attitude all practically screamed poor. From a very young age, she had learned that the worst offense in the world was being poor. Poverty was an albatross, and no matter what she did to work her way out of it, that pressure squeezed tighter and tighter. If she asked for a handout, she was greedy. If she worked hard at some low-wage trashy joint, people would tell her all about how she had options and ask why she didn’t just get a better job, as if finding any kind of work that paid serious credits was easy to come by.
Maybe that was why she had such a strong desire to cut out Schaeffer’s eyes. He carried that look every time his gaze fell upon her, as if he knew she was gutter trash. If she cut out his eyes, though, suddenly she would be his better. She would have the power. Her jaw ached.
“What do we do?” she asked Alice.
The old woman gazed blankly at the ceiling. The one person of class who had ever looked at Jade with fondness, Alice was no better than she was. She, too, had clawed her way up, fought tooth and nail to reach the top. Jade respected Alice for that, a lot. But Alice couldn’t even look at her. They’d destroyed everything about her, leaving nothing but a broken, weak shell.
“I will miss you, Jade.”
Alice tried to squeeze her hand around the fingers pressed to her palm, but the effort was completely devoid of strength.
“The data packet you sent me. There has to be a back door to all this, right? Some kind of escape hatch.”
“No. I’m sorry, but no. I was a fool to involve you.”
“I could recognize bits of you in Mesa, you know. There were signs.”
If anything, Jade thought, those glimmers of Alice that shone through Mesa were far closer to the real deal than the version lying in that bed, broken and too full of self-pity. Schaeffer had turned Alice Xie into a frightened lab rat, and the scars and traumas of abuse ran so very deep. Though Jade had once admired Alice, she only felt pity anymore.
“Perhaps I will have the luxury of dying twice, then,” Alice said.
“I’m just saying, there’s got to be a way for me, too, right? Isn’t there?”
Alice closed her eyes and gave a small, tremulous shake of her head. She withdrew her hand from Jade’s and lifted her quaking arm to Jade’s head. “All that you were,” she said, her fingers a whisper upon Jade’s forehead, “will be destroyed. You will only be a memory.”
Her hand fell away, and, for a time, Jade watched her sleep. Schaeffer returned after an hour, accompanied by his two muscle-bound stooges.
“Jade?” he asked.
She appraised the three men and recognized that Alice was not the only one who had been turned into a ruined shell. She had no fight left in her. Only a dull resignation remained.
“You don’t need these gorillas,” she said. “I’m ready to go.”
While Schaeffer seemed surprised, his companions wore their disappointment clearly across their faces.
“I promise you, the procedure will be painless. It may take some time, and you may feel disoriented, but there will not be any physical harm.”
“Blow it out your ass, Schaef.”
He laughed at her blithe profanity. He turned to lead the trio out of the room and, glancing back over his shoulder, he said, “It’s almost a shame, really. But at least you’ll be special now.”
Chapter 16
After the kill stick failed to initialize, Mesa hit YES again.
YES.
YES.
YES.
Nothing.
She pulled the kill stick loose and whipped it into the hatch door. She was rewarded with the sharp cracking noise of plastic splintering, followed by the gentle thud of the stick dropping to the floor, broken and even more useless. “God damn it!”
How? Mesa said.
I was careful to ensure my safety before allowing you to grow aware of my presence.
Still reeling from dehydration, Mesa popped open a new bottle and sipped slowly. Her heart was racing, her body flushed with fear, anger, agony—and, perhaps, a small measure of defeat.
What do we do now? Mesa asked.
Mesa’s first order of business was figuring out where she was. A soft ping off a hacker sat gave her the GPS coordinates. She wasn’t too far from where Kaften and Boyd lay dead. Real-time imaging showed that the fire had spread toward the outer reaches of Elko, but it had mostly died out as it stretched into the desert, where fuel was scarce.
Her second order of business was putting more distance between herself, the corpses, the fire, and the small city of Elko, Nevada. Studying the local terrain, she found a marker to the east for a town called Ely and set up a quick route. The Humvee fired up without complaint, but a small message appeared on the windshield display, alerting her to a software update. She ignored it and drove.
Soon enough, she passed Elko Mountain and made her way back onto I-80. Crossing the border at the instate checkpoint carried too much risk, so she took the exit for Alt 93 and headed south to Ely, where she could take on the third order of business: rest and recovery.
Ely was a tiny blue-collar town squatting in the crotch of a few hills. Riddled with cheap motels and a few casinos, it reminded her of an even more impoverished Elko. Unlike Elko’s dead polar bear, Ely’s main claim to fame was a historic railroad, a couple dozen ghost towns, and McGill Drugstore, a time capsule from the 1950s that still featured soda jerks.
The Main Motel was in a scrappy neighborhood on its last legs, and the main office looked about how Mesa felt—brutally beaten and falling apart. Still, the rates were dirt cheap and the desk clerk asked her no questions and offered her no advice. He exchanged the cash for a key with barely a hello. If the exterior was any indication, the clerk probably saw women like Mesa all the time and figured she was yet another beat-up housewife.
/> She limped through the weed-riddled gravel drive, down to Unit Three. The red paint on the door was sun-faded and cracked, and the white frame around it was chipped. The screen door was a tattered suggestion more than anything else. Inside, the room was practically a clone of her room in Elko. Mesa locked the screen door, closed and locked the red door, then tossed the key onto the dresser. She dropped the bag onto the floor and collapsed onto the bed.
She utilized a hard-secure hack and pulled up the commNet. Rameez was online, as always, using his cloner ID.
“You look like shit, Mesa.”
“Thanks. You’re a doll.”
He blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think…”
“It’s OK. Things are bad. The idents you worked up for me are blown.”
“What happened?”
Mesa let out a long exhale before answering. How to even answer that was a big question all by itself.
“Short answer—I blew it. I made contact on Somnambulist with an LA survivor, but she was a plant, and our meet-up was a trap.”
Rameez shot her a disappointed look, the kind Jonah had given her when she’d screwed up. “I’ll work up something fresh, but it’ll take time.”
“I think I’ll be OK where I am now. I’ll be here for a few days, probably.”
Rameez glanced around at his own surroundings. He’d made it to the seasteaders; she could make out the clear blue sky around him, and the wind ruffled his hair. Softly he said, “I, uh… I think I’ve been blown, too.”
“What?” She shot up in panic.
“I am not one hundred percent sure, but I think I am being followed. There were some guys I started noticing after I got here. I think they came in after I arrived.”
“You stay away from them. Hole up in your room and do not go anywhere. Do not open your door for anything. Do you understand me?”
“I can’t stay there indefinitely. And what if they break in? I mean, this is big, right?”
“Calm down, first of all. Cool it. And you won’t be in there indefinitely. I’m coming to get you.”
“No, Mesa. You can’t.”
“I will. You get me a new ident, and I’ll be there. It’s not even a question.”
For all of his technical proficiency, Rameez was not a fighter, and she didn’t believe that he would be able to evade the men tracking him forever. And if others were following him, people he had not noticed, it would only be more difficult for him to remain elusive.
She needed him—and his help. More importantly, she could not stand by while another one of her friends stood firmly in the crosshairs. Although she was safer on her own, she knew leaving Rameez to fend for himself would mean certain death for him.
Rameez thanked her, and they watched one another across the distance. He surveyed the damage to her face, but seemed ashamed at his open curiosity.
“I appreciate it,” he said.
She nodded. After a pause, she confessed, “You’re all I have left, I think.”
His eyes cast downward as he spoke. “What about Kaizhou?”
She palmed away a tear. “He didn’t make it. And I think he’s a large part of why I’m still alive right now.”
“What are we going to do?”
She waited for him to raise his eyes, to meet her gaze directly. “We’re going to stop this,” she said with steely conviction. “But I need you. You keep your ass safe. You got that?”
He grinned, but his eyes were plainly distressed. “I’m heading to my room now.” He snapped off a smart salute and disconnected.
We don’t need him, Alice said.
Yes, we do. I need him.
He’ll die, you know. Same as the others.
Mesa balled her fists in her lap and squeezed her eyes shut. She wasn’t in the mood to argue or to listen to Alice’s unwelcome input. I need to sleep. I’m exhausted.
You need to face reality.
What the fuck do you want me to do, huh? We can’t do this alone. Her hands were clenched so tight that her knuckles were white.
Your connections are a weakness, Mesa. Daedalus will exploit those people to their fullest, simply to get to you. That’s probably why Rameez is still alive right now. He’s bait.
If we’re walking into a trap, then at least we’ll be prepared for it. Having Rameez with us may be the only way we can be sure we’re not walking into a lion’s den later.
A ripple of aggravation washed over her, and Alice turned sullen and quiet, back to ignoring her. Mesa pushed her good arm under the pillow, propping her head up. She closed her eyes and slept, but the rest was unsound, and too many horrors lurked in the dark recesses, waiting for her to submerge fully and pounce.
The day’s last light fell in thin slats across the bed. When Mesa woke, she was starving and still in pain. And still far too tired. She dismissed the idea of trying to make her way to the grocery store kitty-corner to the motel and settled on forcing her way through another awful MRE. The meals never tasted anything close to what they advertised, but the high-calorie content helped to stitch her body back together and left her full, if not satisfied.
Once she was done eating, she fished out the antistatic bag containing a stained chip. Kaften’s memories. She slotted the chip into an external reader, plugged that into the port behind her ear, and prepared herself to hit Play.
Diving into Kaften’s memories was harrowing, and she felt as if she’d stepped through a spider web. The experience was unsettling. A constant shiver ran the length of her spine. She’d tripped on some seriously scary mems in the past, but his were different. Darker.
The superficiality of his personality was clear, even before she accessed any of the content. He was a company man, through-and-through, who relied on violence whenever necessary and enjoyed the adrenaline rush of combat. If he hadn’t found a place in private military, he might have simply been another run-of-the-mill sociopath. Instead, he was given a mission and a way to focus his peculiar brand of craziness.
She arranged the mems in a standard cascade. Most individuals placed themselves at the top of their own personal hierarchy, which wasn’t a surprise. Ninety percent of the population organized themselves as the top tier.
People with military-shaped minds often viewed themselves as secondary, if not lower, depending on their service ranks. Above them were varying levels of superior officers and institutional figureheads, who were sometimes nothing more than vague associations rather than memories of direct experience.
Kaften was not particularly unique in these regards, even as a privately commissioned industrial-military man. He filled the second tier in his current self-configuration. Below him were Boyd and Crassen. Above him was a man named Maxwell Schaeffer.
What do you know about him? Mesa asked.
Big name in the press, Alice said. Beyond that, I don’t know much.
Mesa couldn’t help but feel that Alice was being illusive, and the way Alice shrugged off her question was frustrating. I thought you helped Daedalus? Isn’t that what you said?
I did but always through a cut-out. I dealt with Kaften directly. As you can see, he practically defines “middle-man.”
Mesa filtered the mems in chronological order, most recent first, and let the cascade play out simultaneously while she scanned through them. Rather than doing a direct mem tap, she let them run in display windows across her retina display.
Some she recognized with dreadful clarity. She saw Sri and Ashita sharing their bed, forced to watch the other die. And in a more recent recog, Kaizhou was slaughtered in a hail of bullets. Sparks pinged off the Jeep as semi-automatic weapons fire tore into the engine, spiderwebbed the Dura-Plast windshield, then bit into his flesh. His body jerked under the rapid assault. Mesa flicked past the memory quickly, avoiding its absorption as much as pos
sible. Her own memories of his death were sufficient for too many nightmares without the added layers of Kaften’s psyche.
Others, she did not recognize, but she knew, simply because Kaften knew, that those were the murders of her LA counterparts. Kaften had led the assault on a hidden Tong compound and the slaughter of memorialists in the basement of their restaurant hideaway.
Alice’s anger burned, long and steady. The emotion was vivid enough to make Mesa’s skin flush and kick her heart rate up a notch. She thirsted for a deeper vengeance—that chemical reaction worked its way into Mesa’s thinking, making her hungry for revenge. The loss of self was shocking, a deadly reminder of what Alice’s continued presence in her mind meant, and sent her reeling. Mesa suddenly recognized that she was even more lost than she had realized. As long as Alice was a part of her, Mesa could never truly know who she had been—who she was. That put everything in doubt. She wondered how much of the last three years had been a recovery versus a hostile takeover.
She thought back to the casual violence she had employed against the scavengers in Des Moines. Killing them had been simple—far simpler than it should have been. Had that been her, or Alice? What she’d assumed had been muscle memory exerting itself, using the neuronal pathways forever carved into her brain thanks to years of training and developed by memories and experiences she no longer remembered might have been entirely Alice.
Mesa thought she had developed a basic understanding of herself, even despite the trauma that Alice Xie had inflicted upon her. But that was all in doubt.
You need to focus, Alice said.
Mesa’s head was spinning, but she knew Alice was right. She tried to button down the thoughts raging through her… if she even was herself. She swam in confusion, reeling from a devastating sense of loss. All her assuredness had been swept away.
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