by David Wong
“My point is, if I were to, say, smash you through that window and feed you to the propellers—”
Zoey grabbed Will’s arm. “Stop. Go. Walk away. Go outside and have a smoke.” She glanced back at Wu. “You, too. I want to talk to Mr. Chobb alone.”
Will stared daggers at her, but didn’t move.
She repeated. “Go. There’s a little bar through that door, right? Go have a drink.” To Wu, “And yes, go with him. Don’t make me say it again.”
They both left, reluctantly. Chobb almost imperceptibly nodded to Dirk Vikerness, who stepped away, taking up a position in the corner instead of leaving the room, as Zoey would’ve preferred. Chobb was spooning more beans onto a cracker. Zoey grabbed a cracker and started doing the same.
“What is this? Some kind of bean salad?”
“They’re all eggs. A mix of salmon roe, caviar, escamoles—that’s ant larva. The orange crumbles are sugar-cured egg yolks. These are fried blinis. The sauce is a Moroccan harissa.”
She chewed. The eggs were just frozen enough to kind of gently shatter in the mouth, the sauce was spicy and minty. The varying temperatures hit her tongue in waves. It was deeply unsettling and also she immediately wanted more.
Chobb nodded in the direction Will had gone and said, “You know he agrees with everything I just said, right? Don’t let him tell you any different. He knows he should be at the head of the table. I can’t even imagine what lies Will is telling you to make you think your interests are aligned. And I’ll say this—I think it’s cruel the way he’s stringing you along, letting you be the public face of the operation for whatever demented purpose he’s decided that serves. This summer, when I heard he’d supposedly found you like that and gotten you to a hospital, I said, ‘Ah, there it is. That’s how he’s going to do it once he’s decided he’s done with her. He’s set the stage.’ Soon they’ll find you in the tub with your wrists split open and he’ll say, ‘We all knew she was troubled, the poor girl. Even had to be institutionalized at one point. The burden of leadership was just more than what little Zoey could bear.’”
Instead of taking the bait, Zoey swallowed, leveled her gaze at Titus Chobb, and said, “They’re right. The Blowback, I mean. I had Dexter Tilley killed.”
She watched him very carefully. Anyone can suppress a reaction when the situation calls for it, but it is almost impossible to avoid that initial half-second response. It was in that fraction of a moment that Titus Chobb flashed an expression of mild amusement, the look of a man who had heard a statement he knew was a lie and was relishing the power of knowing the truth. And in that moment, Zoey knew that either Chobb had killed Tilley, or knew who had done it. It wasn’t that strange of a thought; the man’s empire was built on gunmen who, in a sane city, would have washed out of a police academy. If he wanted it done, he could have ordered it with a glance and a nod.
Still, Chobb’s expression recovered faster than most people’s, she had to admit.
“Well, that’s good to know. Am I supposed to be scared?”
The nude server returned and placed in front of each of them a small wooden plank. On each was a piece of meat that was still squirming. It was a flayed eel, its head intact but body sliced open and pinned to the wood, like a dissection in biology class. Zoey suppressed her urge to recoil in disgust but, just like Chobb, knew she did not do it in time.
Chobb said, “This way, you know it’s fresh.”
Zoey tried not to look at it. Still, she could hear it. A slimy exposed wound, writhing in pain.
“I don’t expect you to be scared of me, no. But if the roof blows off this city … it’s not going to look like anything you’ve seen before. How many private security staff do you have on your payroll?”
“Over a thousand,” he said, as he carved off a piece of eel. “And growing.”
“But you don’t accept anyone who has implants, and you don’t use any other Raiden gadgets. No tiny blasters that can melt a whole car.”
“That’s because none of it works. I just heard about a man who’s in the hospital, still on fire a week later.”
“The bootleg implants don’t work. They have buggy software, by design. That’s because there’s only one source for the real thing. And I’m not selling. Yet.”
Chobb stopped chewing. Just for a second, but she caught it.
She continued, “This situation in the city will get fixed, and soon. I can’t make them love me, but I can make them piss their pants at the sound of my name. I would prefer it not to be that way. But if they don’t leave me a choice?” She shrugged.
“I believe you. After all, you killed Dexter Tilley.”
He cut off another chunk of the thrashing eel and took a bite. As he chewed, they locked eyes for about three seconds.
Zoey looked away first. She picked up her knife and sliced the head off her eel, putting it out of its misery, and stood.
“Where’s the server? I want to leave her a tip.”
13
Zoey joined Will in the cramped little bar area and they had a drink in silence. The encounter had gone more or less the way they’d planned it. They were passing a giant golden cat on their left—a Chinese casino designed as a five-hundred-foot-tall maneki-neko, like the “lucky cat” figurines with the left paw that waves back and forth in a beckoning motion. The building did in fact have a motorized arm, slowly tilting back and forth to their left as if at any moment it could reach over and slap them out of the air. Zoey felt a twinge of bitterness at the sight of it; this joint was the only reason she wasn’t able to design her own headquarters like a giant cat, as it’d have been seen as a petty knockoff.
They finally landed back at the Freya’s Palace rooftop and a few minutes later, they were back in the van, stuck in traffic. Now that she knew about the canceled subway project, Zoey would silently curse her father every time she crept through Tabula Ra$a’s constipated surface streets. A few blocks from the hotel, a Threat Warning briefly popped up on the van’s monitor, noting that someone up ahead was concealing an assault rifle under their clothes, but that they were alone and did not convey hostile intent from their posture. This kind of thing wasn’t uncommon in the city and the van probably figured one person with one weapon didn’t pose much in the way of a threat, considering how many ways the vehicle could instantly ruin any assailant’s day.
They hit a stoplight and Zoey said, “Chobb isn’t just stirring up the mob. He either did Tilley, or knows who did.”
“Correct. And now he’s happy to sit back and see how it plays out.”
“Would he feel the same way if we put a bounty on him? Have Wu board his blimp via jetpack and chuck Chobb out of it, screaming?”
Wu said, “After all of these months, I feel like you still don’t completely understand what a bodyguard does.”
“This group, The Blowback, would just add that to their list of grievances,” said Will. “Chobb did this to light a fuse, killing him doesn’t stamp it out.”
He said it like he’d already considered it as an option.
“So how do we stop a lit fuse?”
“That depends on how far you’re willing to go.”
“You can’t just kill them all, Will. There are thousands of people in my personal hate group. Tens of thousands.”
“Well … yes and no. You remember the Goldstone building fire back in the spring? All those deaths because the alarms didn’t go off, and the office workers just sat there until it was too late?”
“I think so.”
“The victims smelled smoke. They all wanted to get out but they didn’t hear an alarm. The alarm, in that situation, wasn’t there to announce there was a fire—they knew there was a fire. The alarm was there to give them permission to get up and leave. Nobody wanted to be first, the social pressure kept them glued to their seats. Well, mass violence works the same way. It just takes one person to be the fire alarm, to give everybody permission to go wild. But probably half of the rioters back at the inn couldn’t pic
k you out of a lineup or even explain what they were angry about. It’s a core of obsessed true believers surrounded by a cloud of fence-sitters looking for a purpose to cling to. Most of those would disperse if the core were to … go away.”
“But taking them out would just turn them into martyrs, like Tilley.”
Will thought for a moment, a pause Zoey had come to recognize as Will deciding whether or not to share a piece of potentially upsetting history with her. Or, having decided, trying to figure out exactly how to frame it in the best light possible.
“There was a fundamentalist Christian group,” he began, “who was giving your father trouble, this would have been more than ten years ago. It was led by a guy who called himself Phinehas and when I say fundamentalists, I’m talking polygamy, child brides, didn’t believe in money or the right to own property because it all belongs to God … the whole thing. Maybe a hundred members altogether. So, first they started squatting in one of the under-construction hotels, claiming that a message from the Lord had told them it was their holy site and destined to be a temple. Then they started harassing sex workers and customers at nearby brothels, calling them sinners, filming them and saying they would tell their families back home, yelling to passing tourists about how we were spreading pestilence. One time, one of the girls started yelling back and some of these guys beat her up pretty badly. You know, to save her soul.”
Zoey braced herself. Will always played up the badness of Arthur’s enemies in stories like this, to make what they did in response go down easier.
She sighed and said, “And to deal with them, you did … what?”
The Threat Warning briefly popped up on the monitor again. Same guy with a gun, somewhere in the vicinity. Zoey noted that Wu was tapping his screen up front, tracking the guy. Just to be safe.
Will flicked his eyes over to the monitor before saying, “Now, in PSYOPS training they taught us that social norms exist to keep societies running smoothly over the long term. So if you have a splinter group with a belief system based on rejecting social norms—a cult, a gang—they’re usually destined to self-destruct because there’s a reason society has those rules, right? It’s like starting a motorcycle gang that doesn’t believe in traffic lights, you’re just counting down until the crash happens. That means that within those groups there are already fractures or contradictions ready to be exploited. Somebody in there is a hypocrite.
“Well, Budd did a little digging and found that the group’s second in command, a guy who called himself Malachai, had lost a daughter a couple of years before, when she was just nine. See, the group didn’t believe in modern Western medicine, they said all ailments could be cured by prayer or whatever weird purification ceremonies they were doing. It turned out those were ineffective at treating a respiratory infection in a child already suffering from asthma. Malachai and the girl’s mother begged the leader, this Phinehas, to take her to a doctor. Absolutely not, he says. So they all stand there and watch this girl suffocate and as a reward for this show of faith, Malachai gets elevated to his current role as Vice Messiah.”
“Okay, just how dark is this story going to get, Will?”
“So, there’s a device called a hypersonic projector, that can beam an audio signal like a laser, you can aim it at a person in a crowd and only they’ll hear it. Do it to a person who is alone, and they’ll perceive it as a voice in their head. As it happens, one day Phinehas’s favorite wife comes down with a terrible and mysterious illness. Something very much treatable in a modern medical setting, but impossible to treat at home. Her condition goes downhill very quickly, so much vomiting that she’s becoming dehydrated and has lost consciousness. The entire group is constantly praying for her recovery and, sure enough, they get an answer. Or, rather, one of them does. Phinehas, alone in his room, hears a voice as plain as day, telling him to take his wife to a nearby clinic, that the Lord is going to work through the doctors to see her back to health, that this exception is being made due to the important role said wife is going to play in fulfilling the prophecy and the building of the temple. Later that night, without telling anyone else about this divine message he’s received, Phinehas sneaks her off to the clinic and they immediately hook her up to an IV.”
“Who was operating the magic voice thing, to beam the message into his head?”
“Andre. So, just moments later, Malachai, the second in command, is awoken in his room by a vision of his deceased daughter, floating outside his window—”
“Oh my god. That was, what, a hologram?”
“And a replication of her actual voice, both constructed from what few videos we could find from when she was alive. The spirit directs him to leave the construction site he’s squatting in and to go down to the sidewalk. There, his daughter’s spirit points him toward the clinic, tells him to go to a certain room if he wants to see a false prophet in action, saying the man who sentenced her to a horrible death is now indulging his own wife with the very care the daughter was denied. Malachai bursts into the room with Phinehas and his wife, a fight breaks out, Phinehas winds up dead via a scalpel to the jugular. The next week, Phinehas’s inner circle murders Malachai and five of his most loyal followers in retaliation. The rest of the group takes sides and either kill each other, or flee the city to go find some other movement to get brainwashed into. Problem solved.”
“And what was the wife’s name?” asked Zoey. “The one who almost died?”
“I don’t remember. Something biblical.”
“And she just happened to get sick right when you needed her to, for the plan to work? You didn’t make that happen?”
“When did I say that?”
“Wow.”
“I asked you how far you were willing to go.”
The light had turned green at the intersection, but the pedestrians in the crosswalk kept coming, ignoring the signal. Wu edged the van forward slightly and tapped the horn. In this city, it just made the people walk slower.
Zoey said, “Well, the good news is Stench Machine got twelve new followers on Blink today.” He had a camera attached to his collar, people could watch him stalk the courtyard at the Casa de Zoey. “Have you ever watched him try to hunt a bird? It’s hilarious. One time he lunged after one that was already dead and still missed it.”
The pedestrians had parted and Wu was finally allowed to pull into the intersection, then as he crossed the lanes and reached the opposite crosswalk, a single figure strode out and stopped right in front of the van. The vehicle automatically detected the pedestrian and slammed on its brakes, leaving the van in the middle of the intersection where it would be blocking cross traffic once the light turned. The person standing there, Zoey noted, was the one who had already been highlighted on the Threat Monitor. The man, a small, muscular guy with a mass of red hair, looked right at them.
Zoey had found that Halloween month was fraught with awkward social situations in Tabula Ra$a, as it was never clear when exactly someone was or was not in costume. This was a city in which you could stand in line at a taco truck in April and end up behind a guy wearing a cape and a sword and in front of a woman wearing nothing but thin strips of gauze and a flamboyant wig. In late October, complimenting someone on their “costume” was dangerous business, if in reality they had just come back from the dentist. Zoey was pretty sure, however, that the man standing in front of the car giving them the stink eye was not dressed for Halloween.
He had long, red braids that made Zoey think of a Viking, which spilled over enormous metal shoulder pads. Below that was a bare torso covered in tribal tattoos. Below that, a codpiece that was flickering with animated flames. Belts of ammunition crossed his torso. Hovering on either side of his head were plastic skulls with blazing red eyes, whizzing softly as tiny propellers held them aloft.
The ginger Viking reached behind him, his hand vanishing under an emerald cape, then brought out an exotic-looking machine gun that the van, of course, already had noted. Some of the pedestrians in the crosswalk
fled at the sight of it.
Some of them.
“They’ve made the van,” said Will, stating the obvious.
Wu tapped an icon on the dash. A booming electronic voice said, “YOU ARE OBSTRUCTING THE VEHICLE. IF YOU DO NOT MOVE AWAY IMMEDIATELY, EXTREMELY PAINFUL COUNTERMEASURES WILL BE DEPLOYED. IF YOU IGNORE THIS WARNING, ANY FURTHER ACTIONS WILL BE CONSIDERED SELF-DEFENSE.”
The man glanced to his left and right, then smirked. About a dozen pedestrians in the crosswalk fanned out in formation. They weren’t armed, they weren’t in combat gear. At least two of them were boys no older than thirteen. They just stood there, eyes fixed forward. A human wall, blocking the street.
The Viking sneered, pulled up the machine gun, and thunderous orange fire erupted from two different barrels. A cluster of white pock marks appeared in the glass in front of Wu. Zoey ducked and screamed, joining a chorus of pedestrians outside doing the same. Wu, however, remained calm—there was a reason the vehicle’s security protocols didn’t see this as a lethal threat. The bullet marks in the windshield quickly healed themselves.
But the dozen people who blocked the road also didn’t flinch. The protocol here was to just run the threat right over, but they couldn’t do that, or go around him, without flattening three or four noncombatants, including some minors. The man had brought human shields and was no doubt streaming their plight to the world. Zoey turned and saw that there were more human shields behind them and there was stalled traffic on both sides. They were boxed in, and would remain so until or unless Wu decided to call their bluff.
As the Viking reloaded, he yelled, “CONFESS!” Then one of the hovering plastic skulls opened its plastic jaw and in a cartoonish skeleton voice repeated, “CONFESS!”
Will said, “Just go! They’ll move.”
Zoey was not so sure of this. Before Wu could act, the Viking reached behind him and pulled something else out from under the cape. He flung the object toward the van—it was a little black disc, like a hockey puck. It hit the windshield and stuck there, attached by three prongs. The van’s threat software was rapidly scanning the device and immediately flashed,