by Barry Lyga
Tucking it into her waistband at the small of her back, she covered it with her jacket. Now how would she move on? She had the most famous face in the country, and facial recognition software was looking for her from every ATM and traffic camera. Plus, the cops would be back soon, no doubt, to retrieve TonyStark’s body if nothing else. She had to get out of here.
The only resource at her disposal was the gun, and she didn’t think she could shoot her way through a Hive Mob and heavily armed cops. She thought frantically, hopping from one foot to the other, and then her eyes fell on her hiding spot, the pile of garbage bags.
There had to be something in there that could help, right?
The prospect of trawling other people’s refuse did not excite her, but she had no other options and time was running out. After prodding the bags with her toes, she tore open the one that felt the least squishy and liquid. It turned out to be filled with old cardboard and a broken glass that nearly ripped open the webbing between her right thumb and forefinger.
The second bag, though, was a bit more helpful. There was a pair of sunglasses with one arm twisted askew. She stared at the glasses for a moment. Facial recognition always started with the eyes. That was how it knew the subject in question was a person. Once the software recognized eyes, it proceeded to map the surrounding area, using machine learning to match features with what it already knew comprised a human face.
If you could stop it from seeing your eyes, you were halfway home.
Most cameras these days sprayed infrared dots in addition to using visible light, so sunglasses didn’t always work, but if they were polarized …
Fortunately, there was a simple way to find out. She whipped out her cell phone and turned it on. For the first time, she was glad for the ancient tech — it had an LCD screen, as opposed to the OLED screens on newer phones.
She held the phone vertically and looked at it through the sunglasses as she slowly rotated it to horizontal. Sure enough, the colors on-screen shifted. The lenses were polarized.
Great. That would help with the cameras — maybe — but human beings wouldn’t be fooled by a pair of shades. She was just too damn recognizable. She wished she could text her dad for some advice, though she wasn’t sure exactly how to frame the question to get any sort of useful advice from the bot. Maybe Hey, Dad, how do you hack people?
Much to her surprise, the answer popped up in her head, almost but not quite in her father’s voice: Social engineering, sweetheart.
Sure, sure. Social engineering — the flip side and companion to digital hacking.
First, she would need to do some pretty radical surgery, the kind she’d done on at least three dolls when she was a kid, before her mom decided to stop buying them anymore. With a piece of the broken glass held carefully in her hand, she managed to hack away at her hair. Now it was probably patchy and stood out in tufts, but that was OK.
Then she prowled through the trash some more until she found what she was looking for. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough: a short metal curtain rod, slightly bent. When she cupped the end of it in her hand, it looked like a cane.
Combined with the sunglasses and the bad haircut and the grime from her trash diving, she figured she could pass for a blind, homeless person.
Fooling machines is one thing, Dad had told her. Overrun a buffer or spoof an IP address. Whatever. To fool people, you have to work with their prejudices instead of against them.
With a deep breath, she stepped out of the alley, tapping the sidewalk with her makeshift cane, trying her best to appear as though she couldn’t see.
There was a loose cluster of people at one end of the street and a police cordon in the opposite direction. The cops or the mob?
The mob would be easier to fool. The cops would have portable face scanners, would make her take off the shades and then it would all be over. The mob would either recognize her or not.
She breathed a silent prayer that she was pretty sure headed nowhere and to no one, then tap-tapped her way down the sidewalk.
*
To her surprise and delight, it worked. A guy in his thirties even offered to help her cross the street when the light changed. It would look weird to decline, she decided, so she said yes and allowed him to take her elbow and escort her. He was a perfect gentleman, sweet and concerned, and for the time it took to cross, she even forgot that he wanted to kill her.
The police had cordoned off a three-block radius around OHM’s now-defunct headquarters, but they hadn’t set up blockades everywhere. Feigning blindness and homelessness, she became invisible to most passersby and was able to prowl the alleyways until she found one that led her out of the danger zone.
Bad thinking, that. Everywhere was the danger zone. Anywhere there was a camera, she was in trouble. All it would take was one hit on a database and the mob would descend.
One hit on a database and you die. One stupid joke and your life is over. Rowan and the Homework Coven flashed in her memory. She’d been goaded into this. She’d been pushed …
You did it to fit in, a voice told her. No one made you.
It was her mom’s voice. Clipped and unsympathetic and — oh, yeah — telling the truth, by the way.
I wish you were wrong. You’re always wrong, but not this time. And I bet you’d love to hear you were right, but who knows if I’ll ever …
She found a spot in an alley that was blocked off from cameras and sat with her back against a wall, her knees drawn up to her chest, head down. It was the safest thing she could imagine, and now that she felt safe, all she could think about was the jump from the building, watching TonyStark’s head crack open on the ledge, the way he’d tumbled through the air.
Sobs racked her. This was her life now. This was her life.
100101800101
A megaphone in her hands, Rachel could feel the buzz in the air. She was as surprised as anyone by the size of the crowd, driven by her virtual plea to save Cassie but also by their own many reasons to tell the world that this particular brand of Hive Justice had to be stopped.
She had used the digital world to summon an analog mob to put an end to the idea of using the digital world to summon analog mobs. The irony was not lost on her.
Rachel shielded her eyes from the sun and from the remaining images of rifles, of bodies, that she hadn’t yet been able to shake. She tried to find Bryce in the crowd but guessed he wouldn’t show. He knew as well as she did that she was being watched — the officers weren’t even making themselves subtle, blatantly glaring at her as she took her place on the makeshift stage in the campus quad.
She couldn’t think about Bryce right now. Only herself, only Cassie. Watch this, she thought.
“Attention, moms and friends of moms!” she called. She almost dropped the megaphone, surprised by the powerful way it made her voice sound, the way it rippled throughout the crowd. She coughed a little bit, just to stall. She hadn’t really prepared anything. In fact, she realized, as hundreds of faces stared expectantly at her, she had no idea what she was supposed to do now.
So Rachel did what she always did when she was unsure: she lectured.
“Bread and circuses,” she started, and she could almost hear Cassie groan. Jeez, Mom! Not that crap again!
“Bread and fucking circuses!” she said with heat. It killed the professor in her to curse so casually in front of her “class,” but she couldn’t lose this audience. Already, she could see that her emotion was reeling them in.
“The Roman elite figured everything would work out all right for them,” she said, practically spitting her contempt, “as long as they gave the masses bread and circuses. Well, the economy’s doing well, so you have your bread. And now they have a genuine circus that Nero himself would approve of: Hive Justice. Who needs to worry about the upkeep on lions when you can just get a bunch of pissed-off trolls to do your dirty work for
you? It’s a circus, all right.”
She had them. People were holding up their phones to record her. Behind the safety of the megaphone, Rachel grimaced. She never let students shoot video of her lectures; she was uncomfortable with the idea of having her face and voice plastered all over the internet. But right now, she needed to go viral.
So she kept talking, shouting despite the megaphone, letting herself go hoarse.
She talked about history, sure, but also about her daughter, about her family, about the way Cassie had been grieving her father’s death. About a parent’s fear, bone-deep, blood thick and ever present.
And all around her, some people — not all, but some — listened.
*
Afterward, hands shaking from adrenaline, Rachel sipped some water and accepted congratulations and encouragements from strangers who lined up to meet her. She remembered nothing about any of them. Her eyes were too blurry, her mind was too busy. But she felt a deep appreciation for each of them, and she knew that feeling of their support would buoy her.
One kid stood out, though. He approached Rachel somewhere near the end of the event, right before she could make her way back to the safety of her office. He was lanky in that way only teen boys are, as though his limbs had minds of their own. He wore a black leather bomber jacket and a T-shirt that read TO ERR IS HUMAN. TO REALLY F&%K UP TAKES A COMPUTER. But the word “computer” was upside down.
Rachel had to smile.
“Mrs. McK-Kinney?” he said, stuttering a bit, holding out a hand. “Professor, I mean? Doctor, I mean?”
She shook his hand before he could run down further honorifics. “Professor is fine. Thanks for coming.” He was so incredibly out of place here, in the midst of the middle-aged. She wanted to give him a hug and tuck him into bed.
“I just wanted to say …” He realized he should take his hand back, then stared at it for a moment, as though unsure what to do with it. He settled on jamming it into his coat pocket. “I knew your daughter. Know her. I go to Westfield. I’m Carson.”
Rachel’s eyes widened. Cassie never, ever spoke of her friends. Not to her mother. “You’re one of Cassie’s friends?”
He blushed. “I, uh, probably not, you know? I mean, I met her a couple of times and she seemed cool and I liked her … Uh, not in a creepy way. Not like creepy.”
Rachel nodded. “It’s OK. You know her, though?”
“Yeah. And I just … I saw about this rally online and I had to come, you know?” Shuffling his feet, he stared at the ground. “I know computer stuff. I mean, I’m no Harlon McKinney. But if I can help. At all. Tell me.”
And then, to her surprise, this utterly charming young man handed her an actual slip of paper with his phone number on it.
Rachel tucked it away. “Thank you, Carson. I’m going to keep that in mind.”
Over his head, she noticed the university police were beginning to disperse the crowd. It was time for her to go before someone invented a pretext to arrest her.
“Thanks again, Carson,” she said. It seemed to mean a lot to him, and Rachel figured she’d at least accomplished that much.
100101900101
The slender spike of sky between the two buildings forming her alley began to darken with night and thicken with clouds. Rain was coming. She had to find some kind of shelter. It was one thing to emulate a homeless person, quite another to become one.
That might be her ultimate fate, she realized, and then shoved the thought aside. TonyStark hadn’t meant to sacrifice his life for her, but he had, and she wasn’t going to let that life degenerate into a puddle of self-pity and meaninglessness. She was going to finish what she’d started with OHM, which meant following the only lead she had: @Shameless.
With a name like that, could she even trust such a person? Hell, even if he was named @MostTrustworthyGuyEVAH, could she afford to trust him?
It was getting late and she didn’t know where Venecia was. Her ancient phone couldn’t get on any kind of data network, so she couldn’t check maps or the website. She contemplated flagging a cab and just saying “Venecia” to the driver. But cabs had cameras, she remembered. No way.
She couldn’t get online, but text messages were sent using unused bandwidth on the voice line of phones. She had only one choice. She had to ask Sarah for help again.
hey its me
Time passed. She remembered that this phone had no personal data and she’d purged the earlier text thread. So she added:
cassie
After a few moments, Sarah came back:
wtf?
I need your help again just an address please it’s a place called venecia
r u kidding me?
please
where r u? r u going there? that’s a rough spot
doesn’t matter. just need that address
A few more moments passed and then the address came through, along with BE CAREFUL!!! and a heart emoji.
ty! Cassie texted and then quickly shut off the phone. The address was on the other side of town, and it would take a while to get there, since she was pretending to be blind.
*
With minutes to spare, she lurked at the corner of an alleyway with a line of sight to the entrance to Venecia. As she watched, masked revelers approached the door, gave a complicated knock, then spoke to the bouncer and entered. How in the world was she supposed to make this work? She had no mask and no password. Just by watching over and over, she thought she had the secret knock down — two short, one long, three short — but that wouldn’t get her very far.
Her fists clenched. Her body, exhausted, nevertheless vibrated with energy. She had to get in there.
Just then, a strong hand grabbed her from behind and dragged her back into the alley. Before she could scream, another hand was clapped over her mouth. She lashed back with an elbow but missed.
“It’s me,” a familiar voice hissed in her ear. “Stop fighting me.”
Bryce.
She stopped struggling and he let go. She stepped away from him and spun around. A part of her wanted to fling herself into his arms in joy and gratitude and relief. Another part wanted to kick him in the nuts.
“Did you do it?” she demanded. “Did you tip off the mob?”
It was such a weird coincidence, after all. Bryce got a message from @Shameless, then left OHM. Soon afterward, the raid.
The bullets.
The body, spinning in the air …
She shook herself all over, like a dog trying to get clean.
“Did I …?” He ran a hand through his hair, newly shorn, she noticed. It suited him so much better than the trustafarian look. “Did I tip them off? Are you crazy? Those were my friends, Cassie. I risked everything for them. No way did I narc on them. I don’t know who did. Someone BLINQed the location.”
“Then they tracked your text.”
“Uh-uh. Not a chance. We bounce signals all over God’s creation before they land anywhere in HQ.”
“Then who?” she asked. Her blood pumped so hot that she imagined it bubbled in her veins. “Who did it? And how?”
“I don’t know, Cassie,” he said with frustration. “Maybe it was just that our time was up. It was inevitable that we’d be found out someday. That’s why we had escape routes planned in the first place. Just bad luck, all right?” Bryce checked his ridiculously old-fashioned watch. “We don’t have time for this. We have to get inside.” He unslung a messenger bag from his shoulder. “I brought gear.” He unzipped the bag. “Cutting your hair was a good idea, ditto the shades, but this should work better. Here.”
She took the thing he handed her. It was a latex mask, but more detailed than any she’d ever seen. “It’s called a prosthetic mask,” he explained. “They’re way expensive, but there are benefits to being a trust-fund kid. Someone passing you on the street probably won’t
realize you’re wearing a mask at all.”
She tugged the mask on. It was a little hot in there but otherwise fine.
“How’s it look?”
He shrugged. “When your lips don’t move, it loses some of its magic, but we’re going somewhere where you’re supposed to be masked, so it’s fine. Let’s go.”
100102000101
From the outside, Venecia was an abandoned warehouse, all crumbling walls decorated in graffiti and spare cement blocks dotting the perimeter. At the entrance (under a blacked-out sign with a single flickering light bulb), Bryce did the knock, and when the door opened, he flashed a fake ID. He’d given Cassie one, too, and she held it up with a hand that — she was proud to note — did not tremble.
Didn’t matter. The bouncer, who barely glanced at them before holding up a finger, mouthed the word “Wait,” and closed the door again.
The pounding bass spilled onto the street in those seconds the door had been opened, leaving behind a yawning silence that made Cassie feel exposed, vulnerable. She shivered and surveyed the block. It was empty; nothing of note except an old bus stop shelter, which, with its ripped-out bench and weeds bursting through the sidewalk cracks, looked positively dystopian. On the far corner, a single streetlight cast a weak orange glow, and in it Cassie could see a mist forming, particles of water floating, trying to decide if they had enough pizazz to turn into a proper rainstorm.
“Bryce,” she croaked. “This is a bad idea.”
“That’s not my name,” he hissed. His mask was a sleek army green, and without his trademark red dreadlocks, Cassie couldn’t shake the idea that he had turned into a different person. That somehow, in the space of the day — a day when she’d been raided, forced to go on the run and watched one of her only allies killed in the process — the world had turned upside down yet again.