by Dan Wells
Sahara drew with her finger as she talked, leaving 3D stick figures hanging in the air above the table. “Zenaida de Maldonado died in a car accident fifteen years ago—or so we thought. What we do know—and what we assume is still true—is that Mari was in the car with her, though we don’t know why. Omar and his brother Jacinto were there too. Mari lost her arm, and Jacinto lost . . . more than that. He was badly injured, but we don’t know how.”
“And Omar didn’t lose anything,” said Anja. “Lucky bastard.”
“He lost his mother,” said Marisa. Anja scowled but grew more somber.
“So last night,” Sahara continued, “La Sesenta and a chop shop gang called Discount Arms—I can’t believe that stupid name—got into a shootout, and though none of them died, that we know of, a severed left hand was found at the scene.” Sahara sketched a hand into her diagram, and Sahara being Sahara, it was a better-looking sketch than it needed to be. “Police forensics determined that the hand had spent at least a day on ice, and DNA tests confirmed it was definitely Zenaida’s hand.”
“Or someone else in the family,” said Fang. “Zenaida’s children share enough of her DNA to maybe fool a forensic test.”
“Not likely,” said Jaya. “Maybe thirty years ago. Maybe even fifteen years ago, honestly, which might be how they identified the wrong body. But not today. Modern DNA tests are crazy accurate.”
“But Jacinto is such an obvious lead,” said Anja. “Right? Marisa’s seen everyone else in their family in the last few hours, and they all still had their hands, but no one’s seen Jacinto in years. Assuming he’s even still around, maybe he got out and—” Her eyes went wide. “Heilige Scheiss.”
“Please don’t pose a ridiculous conspiracy theory,” said Sahara.
Anja’s grin spread from ear to ear. “What if Jacinto is the one who died in the crash, and Zenaida’s been hiding in their house ever since, pretending to be him and pretending to be psychologically damaged as an excuse not to leave the house! Boom! I just blew your minds.”
“Your nose, maybe,” said Fang.
Sahara covered her face with her palm. “Oh my word.”
“Jacinto was ten years old at the time of the accident,” said Marisa. “There’s no way a ten-year-old boy’s body gets mistaken for an adult woman’s.”
“Fine,” said Anja. “We’ll stick a pin in this idea and come back to it later.”
“Meanwhile, back in reality,” said Sahara, “we have two potential leads: Chuy, who was involved in the shootout, and Mystery Babe Ramira Bennett, who works for some shadowy megacorp and claimed the severed hand as that megacorp’s property.”
“Federal statute whatever-the-hell,” said Anja, and looked at Marisa. “I like the detective, by the way. Hendel.”
“So Bennett’s a corporate liaison,” asked Marisa. “Or a lawyer, or an . . . I don’t know. A corporate enforcer?”
“She’s someplace to start,” said Sahara. “Anja, Fang, and Jaya: that’s your job. I’ll forward you the footage Mari recorded at the police station, and you see if you can find any more clues about who she is, or an image search of her face, or whatever.”
“If she works for a genhancement company, that could explain her face,” said Anja. “No way someone that beautiful isn’t running some custom DNA.”
“We’re on it,” said Jaya. “What are you two doing?”
“We’re going after the other lead,” said Sahara. “We’re going to talk to Chuy.”
Mirador wasn’t a rich neighborhood, but it wasn’t really a poor one, either. Don Maldonado, for all his faults, did manage to keep the place lively enough to get by, and while vast swaths of Los Angeles had essentially become shantytowns, Mirador was still clinging to the edge of viability.
Some blocks were clinging much more desperately than others.
Chuy lived in a quadruplex on the western edge of Mirador, in a fading slum that was not, Marisa realized, all that different from the apocalyptic ruins they’d been playing through in Overworld. Each building and house had a cinder-block wall around it, topped by razor wire and shards of glass bottles set into cement. The roofs were festooned with ad hoc solar collectors, and black, ragged cables spread out from each one like fraying spiderwebs, carrying illicit power to whoever was savvy enough to steal it. Marisa and Sahara and Bao walked down the sidewalk warily, blinking at the morning sunlight and trying not to look like outsiders. Only Bao was succeeding. Suspicious locals watched them from porches and corners, and Sahara’s camera nulis hovered overhead like protective guard dogs.
“Both Cameron and Camilla have several taser charges each,” Sahara whispered. “And I’ve been taking tae kwon do since I was four.”
“Taking it doesn’t mean you can beat people up with it,” whispered Bao.
“Trust her,” whispered Marisa. “I’ve seen her take down groups of four at a time.”
“Nice,” whispered Bao. “Now I kind of hope we get jumped.”
Marisa sighed. “Sometimes I think it would be easier to drop this whole thing and start searching for Grendel again.” Grendel was a mystery—a hacker lurking in the darkest corners of the internet, sometimes helping her and sometimes masterminding horrific plots to frighten and destroy. The last time they’d talked, he’d said that he knew about the car accident that killed Zenaida and took Marisa’s arm, and the girls had spent every day since trying to track him down. He may as well have been a ghost.
“What do you mean, ‘again’?” asked Bao. “You don’t expect us to believe that you ever stopped.”
“Fine,” said Marisa. “No, I didn’t—I’ve been combing every darknet forum I can find for him, even with all this stuff going on. This morning I left two messages on old dummy forum accounts I’m pretty sure he used as aliases. So at the very least, he knows I want to talk to him—maybe he’ll just talk to me first.”
“Fat chance,” said Sahara, and then nodded at a dead, yellow lawn. “We’re here.”
They turned at the lawn and walked up the short driveway to Chuy’s building. The iron gate stood open, and despite the security elsewhere on the walls, it didn’t look like the gate was even capable of closing. An old man in a shaded folding chair stopped them with a brusque bark:
“Oyen! What are you doing here?”
“I want to see my brother,” said Marisa. She looked closer at the shaded man and realized his eyes were clouded over; he was probably blind, but he seemed to be able to see them just fine. “Chuy Carneseca, in 2B.”
“He ain’t here.”
“You mind if we go knock anyway?”
The man seemed to take that as an affront. “You think I’m lying to you?”
“We want to leave an analog,” said Bao, and the man grunted.
“Well, that’s different,” he said, and waved them by.
Marisa leaned in close as they passed the man and tramped up the stairs. “What’s an analog?”
“A real-world message,” whispered Bao, “like, on a piece of paper. Poor neighborhoods like this one use them all the time to pass notes.” He nodded at the building. “Chuy’s front door’s probably full of them.”
“They don’t text?” asked Sahara.
“They don’t trust each other enough to share their IDs,” said Bao.
They reached the door to 2B, and Marisa gave a cursory glance to the five or six fluttering, tacked-on notes. Most were from people wondering where Chuy’s girlfriend, Adriana, was, which wasn’t a good sign; it didn’t look like anyone had been here in days. Marisa knocked loudly, and they waited.
Bao pulled out a small notepad and started writing. “We’d better leave an actual note—I know that blind guy can see me.”
“Probably hear you, too,” said Sahara. She was scanning the street, one hand shielding her eyes from the bright LA sun. “This whole neighborhood is watching us.”
Marisa knocked again, even more loudly. “I’ve sent messages to him and Adriana both,” she said, “and neither one is answering.�
�
“Hey!” said a voice. She looked around, startled, but didn’t identify the source of the sound until it spoke again. “Chica, they’re not home.”
The voice was coming from the window of the next apartment over, in 2A. The lights were off inside, but behind the wire screen and the wrought-iron bars Marisa could just make out the shape of a face.
“Órale,” said Marisa, greeting the man. “Chuy’s my brother. Do you know where he is?”
“Chuy don’t have sisters.”
“He has three,” said Marisa. Did the man really not know, or was this a test to make sure she was for real? “And he has a girlfriend named Adriana, and a son named Chito—or, uh, Jesusito. He’s named after his father, but I always just call him Chito.”
“So what’s your name, then?”
“I’m Marisa,” she said. “I really need to talk to him.”
The man in the window was silent for a moment, and then the half-glimpsed face broke into a smile. “Este cuñado! He never told me his sister was so fine. What’s up, baby girl?”
Marisa wrinkled her lips into a grimace. “Can you tell me where he is?”
“They’re gone, guapa, the whole group.”
“But do you know where?”
The man paused, and a moment later something cylindrical and metallic appeared in the window. Marisa and her friends ducked immediately, throwing themselves down and to the sides, but the man only laughed. “Kind of jumpy? It’s not a gun, niñitos, it’s a Wi-Fi scanner. I gotta make sure you’re safe.” A series of colors lit up on the end of the cylinder, and the man hummed and muttered over the results until suddenly he dropped the scanner and disappeared, just as jumpy as they had been.
“You got cameras?”
Marisa looked up at the nulis. “Yeah?”
“Everyone has cameras,” said Sahara, glaring at the man impatiently. “Even if we didn’t have nulis, we have cameras in our eyes—so do you, and so does everyone on this street. Including the lights and the stop signs.”
“Chuy—” the man started, still hiding out of sight, but he stopped before he went any further. “Listen, I can take you to him, but not on camera.”
“Where do you expect to go that doesn’t have cameras?” asked Sahara.
“La Zona Muerta,” the man whispered.
“The Dead Zone?” asked Marisa.
“I don’t really want to go to a place called the Dead Zone,” said Bao. “Just a personal preference.”
“You’re the only one who can go,” said the man. “Scanner says you got no Wi-Fi.”
“No djinni,” said Bao. “I’ve got a handheld phone, but it’s off.”
“Smart,” said the man. He was still hiding.
“Listen,” said Marisa. “I have to see him, so if you can take us, let’s go. I can . . .” She hesitated. “Turn my djinni off.” She’d done it before, to protect herself from a virus, but it was intensely unsettling. To go from a real-time connection with the entire internet, including a full heads-up display overlaying and supplementing her vision, to . . . nothing at all. Trapped in her own head with no way out but her own senses. It made her shiver just to think about it.
But if it meant helping Chuy, she’d do anything.
“I’m not going to let you just take them somewhere,” said Sahara, stepping closer to the window. “We don’t even know you.”
“Fine with me,” said the man, “I didn’t want to go anyway.”
“Just turn yours off, too,” said Bao.
“These cameras are my livelihood,” said Sahara. “People pay to watch this stream, and if I turn them off I don’t eat.”
“We’ll be okay,” said Marisa. Sahara was their protector, and probably terrified to leave them alone. “We’ve got this.”
“Are you armed?” asked Sahara.
“We’re in La Sesenta territory,” said Marisa. “No one’s going to mess with Chuy’s sister.”
“Take this anyway,” she said, and handed Marisa a slim black rod about the size and shape of a lipstick tube. “Not as good as the tasers in the nulis, but it’ll help you in a pinch.”
“Whoa,” said the man behind the window. “Those cameras run a live feed? Are you famous?”
“I don’t know,” said Sahara, “do you recognize me?”
“You’re that girl with that show,” said the man. “Sahara Cowan.”
“Well, what do you know,” said Sahara, and Marisa could see how surprised and pleased it made her. “I guess I am.”
“I love your show,” said the man, “I watch it every night.”
“Then why didn’t you recognize Marisa?”
“I only watch while you’re sleeping. It’s kind of a thing with me—the girl’s just lying there, totally at peace—”
“Here,” said Sahara, and handed Marisa another item: a black plastic gun. “If creepazoid goes for you, skip the taser and kill him.”
“We’ll be fine,” said Marisa. “Now go, before he changes his mind.”
Sahara gave them a last look, then walked down the stairs and back to the street. Cameron and Camilla followed her, using their carefully calibrated algorithms to catch her and her surroundings from all the best angles.
“You realize,” said Bao, “the more successful she gets, the less of this kind of stuff she’ll be able to do with us.”
Marisa watched her walk away, and then banged lightly on the window. “Okay, cuate, she’s gone.”
“Your djinni’s not off yet.”
Marisa clenched her jaw, bracing herself for the shock of it, but Bao stopped her.
“Can’t you just . . . turn off the satellite connection or something? Leave at least the interface? That might make it more comfortable.”
“The interface can still take pictures,” said the man in the window.
“Djinnis don’t work like that, anyway,” said Marisa. “That’s like saying ‘Can’t you just leave the car turned on, but remove its engine?’ Very few of a djinni’s programs are run locally; I have my own data stored in here, but all the processing is done server-side. My djinni just taps in via the internet. It’s either on or its off; no half measures.”
“Let’s get it done,” said the man in the window.
She took a deep breath, and blinked through the long series of menus and confirmations required to shut down a djinni. She hit the last one, a timer icon started spinning, and then all of her icons disappeared completely. Her chat windows, gone; her GPS tracker, gone; the overlays and interfaces that augmented her reality, giving meaning and order and a personal touch to everything she saw, all disappeared. Her mind was accustomed to filtering a dozen worldwide internet connections at once, and now it had nothing. The world felt smaller and more isolated, and she shivered involuntarily.
“It’s okay,” Bao whispered. “I got you.”
“Ándale,” said the man in the window. “I didn’t think you’d do it—kids these days and their HUD apps, man, it’s like cutting off their air supply.”
“Which is of course a thing you’ve never done and would never do,” said Bao.
“Wait right there,” said the man. “I’m coming out.”
Bao and Marisa stood on the walkway for a moment, Marisa blinking at the strangeness of the unmodified world, and when the door to 2A opened they saw the man for the first time—tallish, thin, and with a long, wispy beard matched in disarray by his long, unkempt hair. He was older than Marisa expected, and he scanned them one last time with his Wi-Fi wand before grinning, shoving the tool into his belt, and pulling his hair back into a ponytail. He wound it tight and locked it in place with a chopstick.
“I’m Raña,” he said. “Let’s go.” He walked to the stairs, and Marisa hurried to keep up, Bao close behind.
“Where’s La Zona Muerta?”
“There’s a lot of them,” said Raña. “All over the city. This one’s close by. It’s not a place like a named place, like a coffee shop or a VR parlor, but it’s like a kind of place, you know
? Like a park or an intersection. It’s not about branding, like everything else in the megacorps’ world, it’s just what it is.”
“This whole explanation sounds herbally augmented,” said Bao.
“That’s how you see the world for what it is,” said Raña.
“So where are we going?” asked Marisa. They were out on the street now, walking quickly to keep pace with Raña’s long legs. “And why’s it called a Zona Muerta?”
“Because it’s dead,” said Raña, and patted the Wi-Fi scanner on his waist. “No signals, no cameras, no radio frequencies playing songs in your teeth.”
Bao looked at Marisa, obviously worried about what they’d gotten themselves into. She smiled back and kept walking.
They followed Raña for several blocks, past old, run-down houses and a long parade of improvised storefronts, thrown together with paint and desperation to sell everything from chip phones to groceries; knockoff shirt brands and chapulín tacos and sets of mismatched dishes piled high on rickety shelves. Some of them had scraped together enough cash to add holodisplays to their windows, and Marisa blinked to make sure her ad blockers were all in place, only to remember that her djinni was off. She smirked. At least they couldn’t send her ads, even if they wanted to.
“This is what you live like all the time?” she whispered to Bao. He lived in a similar shantytown, built in the husk of a half-finished hotel.
“You get used to it,” he answered.
Marisa wasn’t sure she wanted to.
Raña led them to an empty lot, blocked off by chain-link fences and filled with huge piles of dirt; they’d obviously been intended for a construction project, but at some point it had been abandoned, and now they were covered with tracks where local kids raced bikes around the hills and valleys. “This was going to be a mall,” said Raña, picking his way through the rubble and weeds, “but they never finished it.”
“Looks like they barely even started it,” said Marisa.
“Well, yeah, not the building,” said Raña, and pulled aside a sheet of corrugated tin. A narrow tunnel of packed dirt and cement stairs yawned before them. “The underground parking was finished twenty years ago, though. Most people forget it’s even here.”