by Dan Wells
TWENTY-ONE
Marisa screamed, and her father roared—a long, loud, gravelly shout designed to drown his own pain in anger. She tried to take the knife from him, but he gripped it tight and clenched his teeth and sliced through more of the stitches, and she didn’t dare to wrestle it away from him. The liver is up high, just at the bottom of the ribs, almost directly next to the heart. If they started fighting for the knife, who knew how much damage she might do?
Triste Chango sprang into action. “Emergency!” he shouted. “Your vital signs are crashing. An ambulance has been summoned. I am administering pain medication now.” It was already by his side, practically touching his leg, and now it reached out with a small retractable arm and sprayed him with the hypodermic, pumping a massive dose of narcotic painkillers into his system. Carlo Magno’s hand started trembling almost instantly.
“Stop him from the sealing the wound,” he said, dropping the knife and hissing with his teeth clamped tightly shut. “I only have about thirty seconds before those narcs make me too stoned to work.”
“Papi, stop,” cried Marisa, tears streaming down her face. “You’re killing yourself.”
“Better me than you,” he said, and then gasped in pain. He growled again, fighting to regain control, and then shoved his hand into the open wound. “And better I do it than her.”
Triste Chango reached out with another tube, trying to insert it into the wound. Marisa moved to let it get closer, but Bennett pulled the nuli away.
“Let it help him!” Marisa shouted, but Bennett said nothing. Marisa turned back to her father. “You can’t rip out your own liver!”
“No manches,” he said, his hand still shoved inside. She stepped toward him, and he gasped and pulled his hand out of his chest.
It was clutching his liver.
“I’m really good with a knife,” he said. He forced a smile, though his eyes were already closing.
Marisa screamed. Bennett stared, letting go of the nuli, which surged forward again with its tube extended. It placed the end in Carlo Magno’s wound and fired a burst of white foam pellets; they expanded, soaking up the blood and filling the wound, stopping the bleeding almost instantly.
“Papi,” Marisa sobbed.
“I’ll be fine,” said Carlo Magno. His eyes were still closed, and his speech was starting to slur. “This is what Triste Chango is for.”
Marisa stared at him in shock, then grabbed the liver in her hands and whirled around, standing to face Bennett. The plastic connection valve dangled from it, dripping gobbets of blood on the floor. “This is what you wanted, right? Take it! Take it and get out of here!”
Bennett’s face was still unreadable, with those faceted, inhuman eyes. She looked at Marisa for a moment, then sheathed her knife, pulled a thin square of plastic from a pouch on her belt, and shook it. It unfolded into a plastic bag. She held it out, and after a moment of shocked disbelief, Marisa reached forward and slid the bloody liver into it.
“Now go,” said Marisa.
Bennett sealed the bag and attached it to a strap on her side. She looked at Carlo Magno again, staring for a couple of seconds, then turned and walked away.
Marisa screamed again. “What about the antidote!”
“That was a bluff,” said Bennett. “She doesn’t need one.” And then she disappeared around a corner into a different part of the dining room. Marisa rushed after her, but by the time she reached the same corner, the restaurant was empty. However Bennett had entered the building, she’d gone out the same way.
“Marisa,” mumbled Carlo Magno, and she raced back to his side.
“Papi! Are you in pain? Can I get you something?”
“No pain, mija. Just high as a kite.” He smiled broadly, half asleep and covered with blood and sealant foam. “At least,” he said slowly, “I had a knife instead of a shovel.”
“Don’t worry, Papi,” said Marisa. “She’s gone. It’s over and you lived, and the ambulance is on its way, and we’ll get you to the hospital and get you a new liver.”
“Good, good,” he said, and then smiled again. “Make sure it’s not from a wanted criminal this time.”
She smiled with him, laughing through the tears, praying that he would survive until the ambulance arrived to help him. Triste Chango was still closely attentive, taking readings and giving him more drugs—antibiotics, she assumed, and stimulants. Marisa held her father’s hand, talking to him softly, trying to keep him awake. He murmured strange things, only barely coherent from the drugs, and then he blinked, and Marisa leaned closer.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I . . . know you,” he said. His eyes were still closed, though he was struggling to open them. “And I know we can’t afford a new liver. You’re going to follow that woman and try to get my other one back, and I’m not letting you.”
“No, Papi,” said Marisa, “I’m staying with you.”
“The doctors won’t let you,” he said. “I’ll go into surgery, and you’ll be alone, and you’ll start getting ideas.” He blinked again. “I’m stopping you.”
“What are you doing?” she asked again. “You’re stoned out of your mind, Papi, don’t do anything you can’t undo; you’re not thinking straight—”
“I’m using my parental controls,” he said. “Those videos are your only lead.”
“Papi, stop.”
He blinked again. “Now you can’t follow them.”
Triste Chango sounded another alarm, a loud klaxon that stunned Marisa and jerked her father awake. “Please do not go to sleep, Mr. Carneseca. You must remain conscious.”
Marisa shook her head, trying to clear the ringing from her ears, and then blinked to check her djinni. What had he done? It still worked, and when she tried to get online—
“A la verga,” she muttered, and ran for the door. Bennett had blocked the local wireless signals, and she had no idea if Triste Chango’s call for an ambulance had actually gone out. She tried the door but it wouldn’t open; the locks were digitally controlled, and with all the power shut down they couldn’t unlock. She tried a window instead, and forced it open with a grunt.
“Help!” she shouted, trying to climb through to the street beyond. “My father’s been stabbed! Call an ambulance!” She made it through and fell to the ground with a grunt; she twisted, and managed to land on her bionic arm, which saved her from a nasty scrape on the cement but knocked the wind out of her instead. She clambered to her feet, finding a few people staring at her; she recognized most of them as regulars in the neighborhood, and shouted again. “My father’s been stabbed, and our djinnis aren’t working. Call an ambulance now!”
Several of the people shouted back assurances, and more still ran to help her. They called for paramedics and helped force the door open, and soon the restaurant was filled with friends and neighbors tending closely to Marisa’s parents and to Sahara. Marisa found the solar unit in the kitchen and turned it back on, restoring power to the building, but whatever Bennett had done to the wireless signals was still in place. One of the old señoras in the neighborhood pulled Marisa to a chair and made her sit down, holding her hand and trying to calm her. Marisa nodded, recovering from yet another adrenaline rush, praying one more time that her father would be safe. She took a deep breath, holding the woman’s hand, and then remembered her djinni.
What had her father done? She hunted through her system, trying to see what he had changed, and then she remembered that he’d mentioned the videos. Her heart froze, and she looked in the folder where she’d put them.
And started crying again.
“Whoa,” said Anja, “whoa, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
Marisa looked up to see Anja and Omar and Renata walking through the crowd. Marisa stood up, and Anja ran to her, wrapping her in a tight hug.
“It’s okay,” Anja said again. “Everything’s going to be okay. We’re here to help now.”
Marisa looked at Omar. “Do you still have those videos? Of
Zenaida?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Why?”
“Does Jacinto?”
“He got rid of them,” said Omar. “In his djinni and everywhere else. What’s going on?”
“They were our only way to find Zenaida,” said Marisa. “And my dad deleted them.”
The ambulance took Carlo Magno back to Polo Urias Hospital. Guadalupe was already starting to wake up, and went with them to help take care of him and sign the various papers and forms they needed. When Marisa explained to her what happened, she broke down in tears—getting stabbed was one thing, but losing the liver was something they couldn’t feasibly recover from. They’d already spent all their savings buying him the first liver. There was no way they could afford another. They couldn’t even afford the hospital stay.
“Take care of the other children,” Guadalupe told Marisa. “Don’t—” She stopped, took a breath, and recovered. “Don’t tell them how bad it is. We might still find a way to save him.”
And then the paramedics pulled Guadalupe outside, and she got into the ambulance and drove away. Marisa looked around at the devastation in the restaurant—the overturned tables, the massive puddle of blood—and sank down into a chair. What could she possibly do now?
“We can get him another liver,” said Anja.
“We can’t afford one,” said Marisa.
Anja shrugged. “I can.”
“Your father will never agree to it.”
Anja thought for a moment, then sighed and shook her head. “No, he won’t.”
“Neither will mine,” said Omar. “Though I suppose that goes without saying.”
“I still don’t know the exact terms of their truce,” Marisa said, closing her eyes, “but yeah. Papi said this is the one thing he wouldn’t save him from.”
“We need to get that liver back,” said Sahara. She was awake again, too, and propped up in one of the booths while she waited for her equilibrium to return. “You already own it, and it’ll still be good for a few hours.”
“Organs don’t last that long outside of the body,” said Omar. “And Bennett didn’t put it on ice.”
“She did it one better,” said Sahara. “That black sack Mari described sounds like a stasis bag. Assuming she sealed it right, it’ll last until tomorrow at least.”
Marisa felt her heart swell with hope, but she let the air out almost immediately. “No,” she said. “Bennett has it, and we’ve never been able to find her. There’s no chance we can get the liver back at all, let alone tonight.”
“We can find Zenaida,” said Renata. She’d been hanging in the back, avoiding the conversation out of respect or discomfort, but now she joined it eagerly. “Find her and this Bennett chick will find you, guaranteed. Then you can trade for the liver.”
“Maybe,” said Marisa, “but my father deleted the videos. That was our last lead.” She stood up and paced away, too agitated to sit any longer. “Is it just the danger, like he said? Or is there something he’s still trying to hide from me?”
“You might be able to recover the videos from your djinni’s memory,” said Sahara. She was sitting up straighter now. “Deleting a file doesn’t mean that it’s gone, it means that it’s no longer cataloged or protected. That section of the hard drive can be freely written over, but until it is, the file you deleted is still in there.”
“Probably not an option,” said Anja. “Djinnis have very little local storage, and Marisa’s is almost certainly full of install files for Overworld and other games. Anything else, especially big stuff like VR video, will be stored remotely on a cloud server somewhere.”
“You can still find that, though, right?” asked Omar. “I’ve seen you girls hack into virtually anything—this can’t be that hard.”
“Yes it can,” said Anja. “How many times do we have to tell you this? Hackers aren’t magic, missgeburt; it takes time and massive amounts of prep and research. Hacking KT Sigan took seven of us days, and that was with weird windfalls to help get us access. Hacking into a Ganika cloud server would be just as complicated, without the back doors, and by that time they’ll surely have been written over with someone else’s cloud storage.”
“So it’s hopeless,” said Marisa. “My father’s going to die.”
“It’s not hopeless,” said Sahara. She sat up fully, swaying slightly before centering herself and staring at Marisa with fierce intensity. “We can do this.”
“What’s ‘this’?” asked Marisa. “What can we do?”
“Something,” said Sahara. “Anything. Ramira Bennett is out there somewhere, and she has your father’s liver, and we can find it and bring it back. Maybe there’s something on Lemnisca.te that can help us get into Ganika’s cloud servers, I don’t know. Let me check.” She blinked, frowned, blinked again, then refocused her eyes on Marisa. “Why doesn’t my djinni work?”
“Bennett killed our satellite access,” said Marisa. “Local connections work, but we can’t get onto the internet.”
“Sounds like a Faraday cage,” said Sahara.
“Sounds like a Suppression Bubble,” said Renata. “Did the power go down at the same time?”
“Yeah,” said Marisa, “she killed the solar unit. I got it started up again, though.”
“Sure,” said Renata, standing up, “but did you unplug the Bubble? Show me where it is.”
Marisa stood, curious, and led her into the kitchen. Anja and Omar followed, but Sahara stayed where she was, still too unsteady to walk. Apparently being tranqed twice in twelve hours really messed with your head. Marisa found the solar unit by the back door—a private power plant that collected energy from the solar trees and panels on the roof and distributed them throughout the building. It was about three feet tall, two feet wide, and one foot deep, attached to the wall about two feet up. Renata smirked and crouched down, feeling under the unit with her hand.
“There’s always a big outlet right under the unit, but they’re hidden so no one ever uses them. Yep, here it is.”
“Pull it out,” said Omar.
“And kill us all?” asked Renata. She lay on her back and put her head under the unit. “We used to use these all the time when we hit a target—pretty standard stuff. I’m surprised you girls don’t know about them.”
“We’re not terrorists,” said Marisa, “so that might have something to do with it.”
“You wound me,” said Renata. She reached up with her hands and started fiddling with whatever device she was studying. “We prefer the term ‘freedom fighter.’ Though to be fair, we did set traps on our Suppression Bubbles. Your green repo agent apparently does not. Plug your ears in case I’m wrong.”
“What? No!” Marisa barely had time to react before Renata unplugged the device, pulled it out, and looked up at their shocked faces.
Renata looked confused. “What?”
“You could have leveled the entire block!” shouted Omar.
“Cool,” said Anja, reaching for the device. “Gimme.”
“What’d I miss?” asked Sahara from the kitchen doorway. She was leaning against the doorframe, her eyes out of focus. “Everybody shouted.”
“She almost killed us!” said Omar.
“Meet Renata,” said Marisa. “You get used to it.”
“It’s called a Suppression Bubble,” said Renata, handing the device to Anja. “You plug it in and it shorts out the solar unit, giving itself a burst of power that it uses to set up an EM field in a big sphere around itself. Signals can bounce around inside of it, but they can’t go through it, and turning the power back on just keeps the thing going. If you’re trying to take someone out quietly, or even just rough someone up a little, these things are amazing.”
“My djinni’s already reconnecting,” said Sahara. “Give me a minute, I’m going to sit down and check Lemnisca.te for Ganika hacks.”
“Mine’s reconnecting too,” said Marisa. Text alerts and missed calls were already popping up in her vision—apparently Anja and Omar had bo
th tried to call her while they were en route, which was right in the middle of Bennett’s interrogation. She had some texts from her siblings, asking what was going on, and one from Chuy, who’d apparently heard about the attack.
Then another message caught her eye, and she had to sit down in shock.
“Girls,” she said quietly. “I got an email from Grendel.”
“Like, a Lemnisca.te message?” asked Anja.
“No,” said Marisa. “A direct email.”
Anja and Sahara looked at her with wide, fearful eyes.
“Who’s Grendel?” asked Omar.
“There’s no way it’s from his real ID,” said Sahara. “He’d never give you that kind of info about himself.”
“Spoofed ID,” said Marisa, scanning the email for viruses. “The account was created twenty minutes ago. Five bucks says it was deleted five minutes later.”
“Answer the man’s question,” said Renata. “Who’s Grendel?”
“We’re competent, mid-level hackers—” said Sahara.
“Speak for yourself,” Anja interjected.
“Grendel is the real deal,” Sahara continued. “Some shadowy monster from the darknet. Mari ran into him back during the Bluescreen fiasco, and he’s been popping up ever since.”
“He’s contacted her a couple of times,” said Anja. “Mostly he helps us with whatever mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, but there’s always some kind of angle in it for him. Even when it looks like we’re helping someone else, he benefits.”
“And he knows about the accident,” said Marisa. “I was trying to find him because he knew the truth about what happened to me in that car. Which means that on top of everything else, he’s connected to this somehow.”
“Maybe he’s Severov,” said Sahara. “Or that other name we heard, who works for Severov—Teofilo? Something like that?”
“He could be someone inside of ZooMorrow,” said Omar.
Anja nodded. “Like the original assassin who tried to kill Zenaida.”