by Dan Wells
“We don’t know,” said Bao. Calaca aimed the gun at Carlo Magno again.
“His name is Lal,” said Marisa. “He works with a man named Nils, but we’ve only ever found them online—never in the real world—”
“Online is the real world,” said Calaca. “Find them in one and you find them in the other.” He pointed the gun back at her, taking two steps forward. “Or are you trying to tell me that our friendly neighborhood hacker girl couldn’t find one little drug dealer?”
Two screens down.
“One little drug programmer,” said Marisa. “I’m a hacker, but I’m small time—these are big fish, swimming in some very deep water, and they have fought back against every attempt I’ve ever made to try to find them. One time I followed them with a nuli, and not only did they kill the nuli, they traced my satellite connection and almost found me. I had to burn a whole server just to get away.” She hadn’t told him everything, but everything she’d told him had been true. She prayed that it would be enough.
Calaca stared at her a minute, the gun not even wavering. Marisa watched his eyes, waiting for the telltale twitch that he was about to pull the trigger. He stared back, practically boiling with fury, and abruptly flicked his eyes to the right, looking over her shoulder at Bao. “Is she telling the truth?”
“Yes,” said Bao.
Three screens down.
Calaca roared in anger. “I need to know where they are! This is my pinche neighborhood, and I’m not going to stand by while some cabrón tears it apart. If what you say is true, all we have to do is find these people, and then it’s game over for them. We cut off the connection, and everyone they control goes back to normal. Am I understanding the situation correctly?”
She changed the final screen, praying that she’d done it right, switching the satellite image of the warehouse with one so similar he wouldn’t notice that she’d been trying to hide anything. All the screens were clear.
He took another step toward her. “You tell me how to save my sister, or I will drop you right where you are, and everyone else in this room with you.”
“I don’t know!” Marisa cried.
He stalked forward, pressing the rail gun barrel directly against her head. “You have to know! You—” And then he stopped, his mouth open, staring at the table behind her. “What’s that?”
She’d missed a screen.
She turned. The menu screen on the table had been damaged, the surface splintered and cracked so much that the network couldn’t even talk to it. She’d thought it was broken. But the image was still there, fractured but visible.
“Marisa Carneseca,” said Calaca, staring at the surveillance image. “You’ve been lying to me. I’m honestly kind of impressed; that takes balls.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
He shot, and Marisa dropped to the floor in pain. Her eyes refused to focus, seeing a double image of Calaca saying something else; she couldn’t hear what it was, her ears still ringing from the sound of the gunshot. Calaca turned and walked out, and Bao rushed to Marisa’s side.
She tried to push him away, but only one of her arms worked. The bullet had destroyed her prosthetic arm. She looked down at her torso, expecting to see a pool of blood and viscera, but all she found was a bruise. The SuperYu had stopped the bullet.
“Are you okay?” asked Bao.
Marisa couldn’t find the words to answer him. Her entire world seemed to be falling apart.
Bao touched the twisted arm gingerly; the force of the bullet had bent it to a hideous angle, slagging the circuits and crippling the motors. Her side felt like she’d fallen off a roof, but nothing had broken the skin. “This hunk of junk saved your life,” said Bao. “That new Jeon you used to have never would have stopped a bullet like that.”
“I can’t do this,” said Marisa, shaking her head. “This is too much. Calaca and Lal and Nils and Omar and Tì Xū Dāo and who knows how many thousands of puppets. They’re better hackers than I am, they have more guns than I do, they have more everything.” She shook her head, tears collecting in her eyes. “I can’t do it.”
“You have friends,” said Bao. He tried to lift her, but she pushed him away again, so he simply slid down the wall to sit beside her. “You’re one person, but together there’s two of us. Wake up Sahara and there’s three. Call in Jaya and Fang, and we’re five. Cure Anja and we’re six.”
“I can’t cure Anja.”
“Not yet,” said Bao, “but we can figure it out. We can do this.”
Marisa shook her head. “No we can’t! I’m a teenage girl, for crying out loud—I’m not a hero, I’m not a fighter, I’m barely even a hacker after the last few days. Everything I’ve touched has gone wrong. Everyone I’ve tried to help I’ve failed.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” said Bao.
“I’m talking about me, la Reina Idiota—”
“I watch every one of your games,” said Bao.
Marisa stopped, confused. “What?”
“Your Overworld games,” said Bao. “I haven’t missed one since you entered the league.”
“You . . . don’t even have a djinni.”
“There’s a bar downtown that shows them on a big screen,” said Bao. “I even have one of those Cherry Dogs logo hats—not just my fake hat, but real branded merchandise.”
“Okay,” said Marisa, “but . . . what does that have to do with anything?”
“Your Overworld persona is a hero,” said Bao. “Heartbeat is a hero. Calaca’s a psychopath, but he was right about one thing—the internet is the real world. What you do there matters, and what you do here matters. I’ve seen you spend days nursing a sick sister back to health; I’ve seen you work triple shifts in this restaurant to pay your family’s mortgage. You took Gabi to ballet when your parents were too scared to send her. Three nights ago you ran into the middle of a freeway to rescue your friend. You’re not just a hero, Mari, you’re my hero. If anyone can figure this out, it’s you.”
Marisa put her arm around him, a couple of tears rolling down her face, though this time they didn’t come from despair. “That’s the cheesiest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she said. He smirked, and she smiled back. “Thanks.”
“I try,” said Bao.
“Don’t worry,” said Marisa, pulling away to wipe at her eyes. “You’ve convinced me. But if we’re going to do this, we need all the help we can get.”
Sahara groaned, and rolled on her side.
“Just in time,” Marisa said, and crawled to Sahara’s side. Her broken arm dragged behind her, twisted and useless; if she was going to do this, she’d have to take it off. She smiled grimly at the image: a one-armed girl taking on two rabid gangs and a deadly cartel. She laughed.
Bao followed her to Sahara’s side. “Is that a confident laugh, or a just-slipped-off-the-deep-end laugh?”
“I was just thinking,” said Marisa, disconnecting the main coupling from her prosthetic. The tangled wires pulled taut, and she ripped them free with a final tug. “I’m literally going to beat them with one hand tied behind my back.”
“So,” said Bao. “Just-slipped-off-the-deep-end it is.”
Sahara groaned again, her eyes fluttering behind her eyelids. Marisa took her hand and shook her gently by the shoulder.
“Wake up, babe,” she said. “We’ve got a game to plan.”
TWENTY-TWO
“Everybody here?” asked Marisa. She was upstairs in Sahara’s bedroom, changing out of her tattered, bloody T-shirt while Sahara and Bao waited in the room beyond. All the Cherry Dogs were patched into a call, preparing for battle.
Jaya’s voice was clear as crystal over the djinni. “Ready to go.”
“Ready to tear Lal a new anus,” said Fang.
“I’m ready too,” said Bao, grouped into the call over his handheld phone. “But less graphically than Fang is.”
“I think I’m still seeing double,” said Sahara, “but I’m ready.”
; “We don’t have a lot of time to plan,” said Marisa, looking in Sahara’s closet. Most of her clothes were too flashy, but the back of her closet held the perfect standby: black shirt, and a black leather jacket. She pulled them on as she talked, struggling with only one arm. “La Sesenta is headed for Bluescreen’s headquarters, and Tì Xū Dāo is already there, and that’s going to be enough of a bloodbath even without Maldonado’s enforcers, plus the news feeds are showing all the Bluescreen puppets converging on Mirador. This has to be where they’re going—some kind of failsafe defense mechanism, I guess, to protect the programmers? I don’t know why they’re doing it, but if we don’t find a way to stop it fast, thousands of people could die or be permanently catatonic, including Anja.”
“The good news,” said Bao, “is that all the plans we made before are pretty much screwed.”
“How is that good news?” asked Jaya.
“Because Lal has no idea what we’re going to do instead,” said Marisa. “He was using us to identify holes in his security—we just have to hope we didn’t find all of them.”
“If La Sesenta and the Maldonados are heading there,” mused Sahara, “we don’t have to have to worry about being subtle anymore.”
“She’s right,” said Jaya. “We’ve got the best distraction we could ever ask for, so let’s take advantage of it.”
“There has to be a back door to this place,” said Fang.
“There is,” Bao confirmed. “The side entrance we spotted when we were first surveying the warehouse. If we can ensure a big enough commotion out front, I’m sure we could slip in there without attracting too much attention, even if there are alarms.”
Fang laughed. “If we’re going that far, let’s go all the way. Set off every alarm they have—even if they follow up on some of them, they can’t handle all of them.”
“That’s perfect,” said Marisa. “Especially if we can force them to follow up on one or two in particular—breach the front door so dramatically that they can’t help but leave the back door for later.”
“There’s a gang war on their doorstep,” said Sahara. “Do we really need to add more distractions?”
“If they’re smart, the guards in the building aren’t involved with the gang war—they’re waiting for the building to be breached. As soon as we open the back door, they’ll head straight to it, unless we can convince them that another breach is more important.”
“I think we can pull that off,” said Sahara. “We’re going big, right? No pulling punches?”
“As big as we can make it,” said Marisa. She finished changing, and stepped back into the main room with Bao and Sahara.
“Looking good,” said Sahara. “So check this out: after our chase through the freeway the other night, I started studying autocar swarm algorithms, to see if there was any safer way we could have saved Anja. Like reviewing an Overworld mission—old habits die hard, I guess. I don’t think we can mess with the swarm, because it has too many backups—that’s the point of a swarm AI, to let each car support the others. But if we can cut a car off from the swarm, we could drive it right through the front door.”
“I love you,” said Fang.
Marisa felt suddenly short of breath, and she reached instinctively for her prosthetic arm. Her hand closed on the loose, empty leather of the jacket sleeve, which only made her feel more anxious. “You mean . . . drive a car? Manually?”
“Not in person,” said Sahara. “The controls are all electronic, so we can reroute them to anywhere.”
Fang was almost breathless. “Pick me pick me pick me!”
Marisa was still leery of the idea. “Those are dangerous.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” asked Fang. “I’m supposed to crash it.”
“What car are you planning to use?” asked Bao.
“I don’t have time to reroute the controls and hack the access, so it has to be one I already have the codes for,” said Sahara, and her face twisted into a malicious grin. “That leaves Marisa’s dad’s . . . or Omar’s.”
“Did I tell you I love you?” said Fang. “Because I love you.”
Marisa couldn’t help but mirror Sahara’s grin. “That is the first step of a very long and painful reckoning for that boy. I love it. But Fang, don’t hurt anyone—our goal is to reduce casualties, not add more.”
“Got it.”
“I just called the car,” said Sahara. “Turns out he doesn’t have it with him at the warehouse—he probably went in something less recognizable, trying to stay incognito. That means it’ll be here in about two minutes, and then it’ll be ten more minutes to get us to the warehouse. If I can work while it’s driving, I can do most of this hack job on the way, and then hand control over to Fang when we get there.”
“Twelve minutes might be too late,” said Marisa, clenching her teeth. “But—” She looked up. “I doubt we can get started much earlier than that anyway. Let’s do it.”
“We still need more distractions,” said Bao. “This plan only works if we overwhelm their security staff.”
“They’ll have plenty of online alarms,” said Jaya. “I can work on those from here.”
“You won’t get in,” said Marisa.
“I don’t have to,” said Jaya, “I just have to set off the alarms and distract them, right?”
“Protect yourself as much as you can,” said Marisa. “False servers, decoy accounts, bounced signals—everything you can possibly think of. These are the best coders I’ve ever come up against, and if they trace you, it will hurt.”
“Already working on it,” said Jaya. “Let me know when to pull the trigger.”
“What else?” asked Sahara. “I’m trying to remember the satellite images, and I’m pretty sure there were some proximity alarms around the fence.”
“Trip them all with nulis,” said Fang.
“No good,” said Marisa. “We used a nuli to spy on the building before—Lal will be ready if we try it again.”
“All the better to distract him,” said Bao. “Show him exactly what he’s expecting to see.”
“Good enough for me,” said Sahara. “If they’re looking at an army of nulis swarming in, that makes it easier for us to reach the building without being recognized.”
“Forget ‘recognized,’” said Bao. “I want to get in there without even being seen.”
“How?” asked Marisa. “It’s barely twilight, and there are least two gangs between the gate and the building. That’s a lot of people to see us.”
“We could go through the back fence,” said Sahara. “Or maybe over it.”
Marisa shook her head. “Every side of the property that doesn’t touch the street fronts against another industrial property. We don’t have time to research those other places’ security systems, let alone figure out how to break through them and Bluescreen’s in the next twelve minutes.”
“Eleven,” said Sahara.
“So we go in the car,” said Bao. “Instead of getting out when we reach the gate, we can stay inside while she circles the building. If everyone’s in front fighting, we can get out in the back without anyone seeing.”
“Especially if our army of nulis gets there first,” said Sahara. “Maybe we can use them to take out the security cameras or something.”
Marisa felt that wave of fear again, like a tightness in her chest. “Staying in the car while a human is driving it is not safe.”
“Omar’s car is bulletproof,” said Bao. “Even on manual controls, it’ll be safer to drive past a gunfight than run past one.”
“You don’t understand,” said Marisa, her voice rising. “You don’t know what happens to one of these things in an accident—”
“I know what you went through,” said Sahara, putting her hand on Marisa’s. “I know what you must be feeling to confront such a long-standing fear. But this is a good plan, and I’ll be with you the whole time.”
“I’ll only be driving you for a hundred meters,” said Fang. “Mayb
e a hundred and fifty. We’ll pass the gangsters, you’ll jump out in back, and then I’ll circle back to the front. I’ll hit the lobby the same time you hit the back door, causing enough damage that they’re sure to come to me instead of you.”
“We can do this,” said Bao. “I know it’s risky, but we can do it. We have to do it.”
Marisa closed her eyes.
“You know I hate saying this,” said Sahara, “but . . . play crazy.”
Marisa felt the empty left sleeve of her jacket, imagining the human arm that she couldn’t even remember anymore. She was only two years old when that car accident spun her world off its axis; her few remaining memories were fragmented and terrifying.
I can do this, she told herself. It’s just another game of Overworld.
“Car’s here,” said Sahara. “We don’t have time to wait.”
“Let’s go,” said Marisa, standing up. She clenched her hand into a fist, and then put it into the middle of the room, palm down. “Cherry Dogs forever.”
Sahara put her hand on Marisa’s. “Cherry Dogs forever.” Fang and Jaya echoed the phrase over their djinnis, and Bao hesitated just a moment before adding his hand to the stack.
“Cherry Dog for one evening,” he said. “Let’s go save Anja so she can have her spot back.”
“You don’t get out that easy,” said Marisa, squeezing his fingers. “You’re on the team for good now—an honorary member.” She put her arm around him and started toward the door. “We’ll be the only team in the league with six players.”
“And the only team in the world with a player who doesn’t have a djinni,” said Sahara, following them down the stairs. “Five women and one caveman.”
Omar’s Futura Baron was waiting for them on the curb, as attentive to Omar’s access code as it ever was to Omar. They got in, gave it an address a few blocks away from the warehouse, and told it to hurry. While Sahara plugged herself in to the command core, Marisa blinked online and got to work on the fleet of nulis.
“Can you hack that many nulis that fast?” asked Bao.
“Not a chance,” said Marisa. “We’re doing this the old-fashioned way—we’re paying them.” She searched for every window washing company she could find and started placing rush orders for the warehouse: get to this address right now and give it the full treatment. She bought the largest service packages they had, paid extra for immediate service, and sent them off, wave after wave, hundreds of window-washing robots converging on the cartel like a plague of locusts. It cost thousands of dollars—money Marisa didn’t have—but she didn’t care anymore. She’d deal with that later, and with Omar, and with everything else. She realized with a shock that they hadn’t even planned an escape route—they were putting everything on the line. All that mattered was saving the people, and stopping the war.
