by David Wong
Will said, “Now, never take your eyes off the DQ, it’s over there in the southwest corner. See the flowers?”
Zoey followed Will’s gesture and saw an explosion of color—a dais, straining under flowers piled on top of flowers, wreathes and bouquets and arrangements as tall as a house. At the center of it all was a ten-foot-tall stack of logs, and on top of that, a body in repose.
Zoey said, “Wait, is that … I thought there was no body?”
Will said, “There wasn’t. We had a wax replica made, getting it done on such short notice only cost a mere thirty thousand dollars. But you need it for the DQ.”
It was the creepiest thing Zoey had ever seen. “Now what’s DQ stand for again?”
Andre said, “You know how you get ice cream from Dairy Queen, and it’s always got that little curl at the top? What’s the first thing you do when they hand it to you?”
“You bite it off.”
“Right, you can’t resist it. Back when we were doing, uh, the job we used to do before this, the DQ was the equivalent of that, something you knew the enemy would go right for, first thing. See how we got the speakers sitting right there? We’re trying to keep the crowds sparse around it, that’s why.”
They were starting to lose her. Zoey thought, This is just another Saturday afternoon for these people.
Will said, “Speaking of which, try to eat something. Do it out somewhere where you’re easily visible. And laugh, make it a point to laugh during conversations, even if they’re not funny. And when you’re talking to people, put your hands on your hips like you do when you’re angry. Yeah, like that, elbows at a ninety-degree angle. Not like you’re angry, though, but like you’re confident, making yourself bigger. Any questions?”
She had so many. But instead, she asked, “Where are the bathrooms?”
Echo said, “Don’t use any of the public toilets. They’re disgusting. We have our own, behind the first-aid tent. Armando knows where it is.”
“Good, because I think I’m going to be sick.”
Zoey walked away from the group, trying to quell the riot that was breaking out in her abdomen. Someone was following her. It was Echo. Zoey stopped, and tried to breathe.
She asked Echo, “Do you have cats?”
“What?”
“Do you own any cats. As pets. Or are you good with them, I guess is what I’m asking.”
“I have dogs.”
“Oh. Nevermind.”
“Come on, Zoey, don’t fall apart on us. You’ve handled all of this with aplomb so far, we’re all impressed.”
“This is just … it’s all hitting me at once. My mom told me one time that everybody thinks they’re the star of their own movie, and I don’t think I knew what she meant until now, this exact moment. Because Arthur thought he was the star, that he would be the hero who would see this whole crazy thing to the end. Then just like that, he was gone. And it’s just now hitting me that I’m probably not the star of the story, either. I’ll be that girl who dies halfway through the movie to give the real hero motivation to beat the bad guy. My movie could end tonight and … that would be it … just, nothing…”
Zoey was hyperventilating. She bent over and tried to steady her breathing.
Echo kneeled by her. She put a hand on Zoey’s elbow and said, “Come on. Stand up. Rule One, we don’t let them see us like this.”
“Who?”
“You know what I mean. Look around. Stand up.”
Zoey stood, and nodded. “It’s okay. I think I’m okay.”
“Here.”
Echo pressed a bright blue capsule into Zoey’s palm.
“What’s that?”
“Plaxodol. Antianxiety. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“My doctor, obviously. I have two other prescriptions in my purse if this one doesn’t work.”
Zoey swallowed the pill, along with all of the follow-up questions she had been about to ask.
Echo said, “Hey. Look at me. This is what he wants. This is what they always want. That’s why he told you he was coming. It was all about making you feel like this. Don’t give him that. Whatever he does when he arrives, you have control over this part. You all right?”
She nodded, let out a breath.
“Yeah. Let’s do this.”
Zoey ventured out into the rapidly thickening crowd, Armando right behind her. She immediately felt like a thousand pairs of eyes had all turned toward her at once, then realized that if you factored in Blink, that was probably only a tiny fraction of the real total. She considered going back to get a second pill from Echo. Zoey thought that it was like she had a bull’s-eye on her back, but then she heard the sudden chatter of voices in her earpiece from the rooftop snipers announcing her movement to each other, and realized that she actually had a dozen bull’s-eyes on her back.
That she knew about.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Overload.
Rushing flames lashed and danced from the firepots, perfect girls giggled in tiny dresses and garish wigs, guys screamed jokes and laughter at each other, a terrible band angrily stabbed power ballads into the night. The buildings overlooking the park were lit up so that they were like the bars on an equalizer, vertical lights pulsing up and down in time with the music. Zoey felt each beat pulse across her throbbing cranium.
Oh, and there were ghosts. They had these stupid holograms roaming randomly through the park, depicting a translucent Arthur Livingston doing ghost things—conversing with Gandhi, fistfighting Hitler, high-fiving Jesus. The projectors were mounted on little remote control buggies that rolled around in the snow, to make it look like the ghosts were mingling with the crowd—Stench Machine would have hated it. Then Zoey started noticing these weird little green, glowing orbs floating around the crowd, and finally got close enough to one to realize it was this glow-in-the-dark ice cream people were eating out of little cups. Even the food here screamed for attention—she was surprised they hadn’t modified it to make a loud noise the whole time you were eating it. She was looking forward to seeing one of the drunks spray glow-vomit everywhere.
Under all of this were the electronic voices coming from the earpiece—useless cross-chatter from rooftop spotters, perimeter guards, and undercover gunmen mingling with the crowd. Spotting threats, dismissing them, throwing around jargon that imparted no helpful information to Zoey about whether or not she was about to die.
Through it all, she just kept moving, through the noise, and the little clouds of steam from people puffing on vaporizers that would probably give her a contact high by the end of the night. They say humans, and many other herd animals, will wander in a counterclockwise motion if left to their own devices—grocery store floor plans are set up to accommodate this, for instance. And sure enough, after a couple of hours, that’s what Zoey found herself doing—circling the park, aimlessly, only because she couldn’t stand to be still. Her feet were already killing her. She glanced behind her for the five hundredth time in the last two hours to find that, yes, Armando was still back there, following her around like a puppy. He was wearing a black pinstripe suit over a deep, blood-red shirt with no tie, sunglasses with dark wraparound lenses that flashed crimson when light hit them. She assumed they were wired up to feed him real-time security scans, but it was no accident that they also looked cool. It was also no accident that it was very easy to see the chrome-plated gun in his shoulder holster every time his jacket shifted. Armando was not undercover.
A sorority-looking girl passed them, wearing what appeared to be a fur coat and absolutely nothing else. She and a lot of the girls here had gotten that eye-widening surgery celebrities kept getting. Zoey thought it made them look like cartoon characters. Yet Armando watched her pass, apparently his glasses feeding him intel that the potential assassins were all young girls in slutty clothes (on at least three occasions, the rooftop spotters in Zoey’s earpiece had called out “targets” to Armando that amounted to, “Ruiz, we got a blon
de bending over in a skirt, three o’clock, good god would you look at that”). Earlier Zoey saw a size zero blonde wiggle by wearing nothing but a men’s button-up shirt and panties, her hair mussed like she had just rolled out of bed. Then she saw six more girls dressed like that over the course of the next hour and realized it was a common party outfit in Tabula Ra$a. Tre had been right: Zoey’s outfit was dowdy in comparison to the girls who’d come to mourn Arthur Livingston’s passing with free drinks and bumps of cocaine, along with the copious party drugs that were making them think the temperature was forty degrees warmer than it actually was.
To Armando Zoey said, “This place is Slutsylvania.”
“It’s what?”
“Nevermind.”
Zoey had noticed that when a particularly spectacular girl sauntered by, Armando would always start doing official bodyguard things—putting his finger in his ear as if to hear commands, putting a hand on Zoey’s back as if to guide her through the crowd. In other words, making it very clear to the world that he was not there as Zoey’s date.
A group of young Korean couples passed. They looked Zoey over, then gestured and laughed.
Yeah, that was the other thing: it wasn’t until the party started that Zoey suddenly remembered that she was famous. Not the kind of celebrity that draws admiration or autograph requests, oh no. This was the “Hey, I saw this person in that crazy story on the news, and isn’t it weird that they also exist in real life” sort of fame. Lot of glances and giggles and nudges, like her existence was one big inside joke. Zoey always felt in crowds like everyone was staring at her, but this time it was true. No one could devise a more exquisite form of psychological torture.
But worse than the gawkers were the people who knew about the assassination threat, and had come specifically to watch it play out. She could read it on their faces. They were the ones who didn’t laugh, but instead had the expression of someone who was watching a movie that was just getting good. They’d point and mutter to one another, like, There, she’s the one we’re going to see get killed at some point. Like they were attending the world’s most elaborate murder mystery dinner theater.
But just as Zoey had decided that those people were the worst, she passed a chubby boy who looked fourteen, wearing a black “TEAM MOLECH” T-shirt, the logo animated to look like it was on fire.
As he passed, he giggled as he shouted, “Say hi to your mom!”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. Can we kick that kid out?”
Armando shrugged it off. “Just him, or all of the people wearing those shirts? They’re selling them out on the street.”
“I hate this place.”
“Try not to think about it. It isn’t real to them. Have you ever met a celebrity you’ve seen on TV? That first time, it’s like you’re in a wax museum that’s come to life. They just don’t seem real.”
“Are there no Team Zoey shirts?”
“I’m … sure there must be. Somewhere.”
“Well, at least my cat likes me.”
“If it makes you feel better, they have always done this. People follow Tabula Rasa’s gang wars on Blink, they pick sides and track the body counts, like keeping score. Whenever there is a shootout, everyone jumps into the feeds and watches in real time, rooting for their side to win.”
They passed one of the little hologram toys that had been kicked over, its holographic animation of Arthur Livingston—admiring his new angel wings and adjusting a halo—being projected sideways into the dirty snow.
Zoey said, “But shouldn’t they all be rooting for me? Aren’t I the good guy here?”
Armando hesitated, then said, “You have to understand, Arthur was the richest man in the city. Loud, brash, always on the news. And he was a real estate tycoon—meaning he owned a lot of property, and charged a lot in rent, and maybe did not always maintain the buildings to people’s satisfaction.”
“So he was a slumlord.”
Armando shrugged. “No one likes their landlord. Do you like yours? But in this case, the landlord was also a flamboyant playboy who smoked cigars worth more than some of these people’s wardrobes. So on Blink, the narrative frames it as the spoiled rich daughter of a slumlord versus the shirtless alpha males looking to put her in her place. Remember, it’s a largely male audience.”
She spotted Budd, telling an apparently hilarious story to an enthralled group of a dozen men in some kind of military dress uniforms. Old army buddies. They ran across Echo near the first-aid tent, messing with her phone while ignoring a male model-ish guy who was trying to hit on her. She was hoping to find Andre, but he must have been off coordinating security or doing some other Suit business she probably didn’t want to know about.
Will, on the other hand, she found in a somewhat hidden spot back near the dais where the creepy wax corpse of Arthur Livingston was raised over the flower jungle. He just stood there in the shadows, sipping his drink and watching the crowd flow past. That wasn’t a surprise—Zoey had trouble imagining him mingling.
Armando muttered to Zoey, “Watch the crowd. As it passes Will, watch.”
“What do you mean?”
“Notice how no one comes within ten feet of him? Everyone gives him a wide berth. Scared of bumping his elbow. That, Zoey, is the proverbial black cloud.”
It was true. The crowd flowed around his spot, like he had a force field. At one point a drunk girl stumbled close to him and her boyfriend grabbed her arm and yanked her away, as if pulling her away from a cliff.
Armando said, “The people who are from Tabula Rasa know who he is. The rest get alerts in their glasses, the facial recognition flashing up a warning saying, ‘Do not make eye contact with this man.’”
Zoey approached Will and said, “You’ve been hiding back here the whole time?”
“I had to oversee the preparations of the, uh—”
“You are a lying fart balloon! You’re avoiding the party! Ha, I knew it!”
“I’m doing no such thing. I don’t know why you would think I was, or suspect that deep down I think all of these people are leeches.”
“Armando was showing me how all of the people in the crowd steer way clear of you. Is it because they’re afraid your liver is going to spontaneously combust?”
“What?”
“I’m making fun of your alcoholism because it’s the only thing I know about you.” She glanced around at the crowd. “There’s got to be like ten thousand people here.”
Will said, “Eighteen thousand, one hundred and forty-six inside the backscatter perimeter at this moment.”
“Right. You know how many people would be at my funeral if I died? Like, four. I’d have to have Stench Machine give my eulogy.” Will wasn’t listening. He just watched the crowd, over her shoulder. Zoey said, “Oh, you know what you forgot to do? Show me how to do the coin trick. That was in Arthur’s will.”
“Later.”
“There might not be a later!”
A Chinese man with a shaved head and smiling eyes walked up in a black tunic, with a katana strapped to his back. Zoey barely had time to brace herself for a kung fu sword battle, when Armando glanced at him and nodded.
“Zoey, this is Wu, my backup. I don’t believe you have met him yet, you’ve always been asleep when he has rotated in.”
“Oh, I just thought you never slept.”
Wu said, “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Ashe.”
Zoey said to Armando, “Why don’t you have a sword?”
“Why don’t I have a fake sword, you mean?”
Wu said, “I assure you, the sword is real. This blade is three hundred years old. When I bought it, it was covered in blood rust. When I grind the blade, the water in the bucket runs red—dried blood of men who died on the battlefield centuries ago.”
Armando rolled his eyes and said, “Wu was born in Oakland, by the way—remember that when he starts dropping ancient wisdom from the Orient later. The sword is for show. I know for a fact he has never used it.”
> “Of course it is for show. But it is also real. Only a fool would consider those mutually exclusive.”
Armando said, “All right. Look alive.”
The band stopped playing, and an announcement came over the loudspeakers that they were going to be lighting the pyre. Zoey actually hadn’t gathered that the pile of logs stacked under Arthur’s wax body was a funeral pyre until just now, but how else would he go out if not in a stupid blaze of glory?
Will and Andre had stepped up onto the dais, joined by a group of people Zoey didn’t recognize—presumably Arthur’s friends, business associates, and … family? Zoey hadn’t even thought about it, but if Arthur had a brother that would mean she had an uncle. And an aunt, and cousins. Weird.
Will now had a microphone, and asked for quiet. He said, “I would like to say a few words about Arthur Livingston. I would like to, but his will expressly forbids me from giving a eulogy at this service, for fear that it would, quote, ‘bring everyone down.’ Instead, he only wanted us to impart one final wish on the guests here, and I am going to hand this off to Andre Knox for reasons that will soon become apparent.”
He handed the mic to Andre, who was greeted with massive applause. He pulled out a small slip of paper.
“Now, I’m gonna read Art’s exact words, so no one here thinks this is coming from me.” He made a show of reading off the slip. “‘Those of you listening to these words are in the midst of enjoying free food, drink, and various illegal substances at my expense.’” Huge cheer from the crowd. Andre motioned for quiet, then continued reading. “‘I only ask that you repay this act of charity in the same way that so many lovely ladies repaid mine—by having sex with someone several notches lower than you on the attractiveness scale.’” Laugher and hoots from the crowd. Andre gestured for quiet again. “‘If you’re a nine, go home with a four. You’ll give them a story they can tell for the rest of their life, and be shocked at what they’re willing to do once the lights are off. Do it in my memory. Thank you.’”