Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

  “Wardrobe change,” she said. “Now you. Lose the shoes, lose the jacket, lose the hat.” I could see her point. The cops would be looking very carefully at anyone who looked like they’d been a part of the VampMob. I ditched the hat entirely—I’d never liked ball caps. Then I jammed the jacket into my pack and got out a long-sleeved tee with a picture of Rosa Luxembourg on it and pulled it over my black tee. I let Masha wipe my makeup off and clean my nails and a minute later, I was clean.

  “Switch off your phone,” she said. “You carrying any arphids?”

  I had my student card, my ATM card, my Fast Pass. They all went into a silvered bag she held out, which I recognized as a radio-proof Faraday pouch. But as she put them in her pocket, I realized I’d just turned my ID over to her. If she was on the other side…

  The magnitude of what had just happened began to sink in. In my mind, I’d pictured having Ange with me at this point. Ange would make it two against one. Ange would help me see if there was something amiss. If Masha wasn’t all she said she was.

  “Put these pebbles in your shoes before you put them on—”

  “It’s okay. I sprained my foot. No gait recognition program will spot me now.”

  She nodded once, one pro to another, and slung her pack. I picked up mine and we moved. The total time for the changeover was less than a minute. We looked and walked like two different people.

  She looked at her watch and shook her head. “Come on,” she said. “We have to make our rendezvous. Don’t think of running, either. You’ve got two choices now. Me, or jail. They’ll be analyzing the footage from that mob for days, but once they’re done, every face in it will go in a database. Our departure will be noted. We are both wanted criminals now.”

  She got us off Market Street on the next block, swinging back into the Tenderloin. I knew this neighborhood. This was where we’d gone hunting for an open WiFi access point back on the day, playing Harajuku Fun Madness.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “We’re about to catch a ride,” she said. “Shut up and let me concentrate.”

  We moved fast, and sweat streamed down my face from under my hair, coursed down my back and slid down the crack of my ass and my thighs. My foot was really hurting and I was seeing the streets of San Francisco race by, maybe for the last time, ever.

  It didn’t help that we were plowing straight uphill, moving for the zone where the seedy Tenderloin gives way to the nose-bleed real estate values of Nob Hill. My breath came in ragged gasps. She moved us mostly up narrow alleys, using the big streets just to get from one alley to the next.

  We were just stepping into one such alley, Sabin Place, when someone fell in behind us and said, “Freeze right there.” It was full of evil mirth. We stopped and turned around.

  At the mouth of the alley stood Charles, wearing a halfhearted VampMob outfit of black T-shirt and jeans and white face-paint. “Hello, Marcus,” he said. “You going somewhere?” He smiled a huge, wet grin. “Who’s your girlfriend?”

  “What do you want, Charles?”

  “Well, I’ve been hanging out on that traitorous Xnet ever since I spotted you giving out DVDs at school. When I heard about your VampMob, I thought I’d go along and hang around the edges, just to see if you showed up and what you did. You know what I saw?”

  I said nothing. He had his phone in his hand, pointed at us. Recording. Maybe ready to dial 911. Beside me, Masha had gone still as a board.

  “I saw you leading the damned thing. And I recorded it, Marcus. So now I’m going to call the cops and we’re going to wait right here for them. And then you’re going to go to pound-you-in-the-ass prison, for a long, long time.”

  Masha stepped forward.

  “Stop right there, chickie,” he said. “I saw you get him away. I saw it all—”

  She took another step forward and snatched the phone out of his hand, reaching behind her with her other hand and bringing it out holding a wallet open.

  “DHS, dickhead,” she said. “I’m DHS. I’ve been running this twerp back to his masters to see where he went. I was doing that. Now you’ve blown it. We have a name for that. We call it ‘Obstruction of National Security.’ You’re about to hear that phrase a lot more often.”

  Charles took a step backward, his hands held up in front of him. He’d gone even paler under his makeup. “What? No! I mean—I didn’t know! I was trying to help!”

  “The last thing we need is a bunch of high school Junior G-men ‘helping’ buddy. You can tell it to the judge.”

  He moved back again, but Masha was fast. She grabbed his wrist and twisted him into the same judo hold she’d had me in back at Civic Center. Her hand dipped back to her pockets and came out holding a strip of plastic, a handcuff strip, which she quickly wound around his wrists.

  That was the last thing I saw as I took off running.

  I made it as far as the other end of the alley before she caught up with me, tackling me from behind and sending me sprawling. I couldn’t move very fast, not with my hurt foot and the weight of my pack. I went down in a hard face-plant and skidded, grinding my cheek into the grimy asphalt.

  “Jesus,” she said. “You’re a goddamned idiot. You didn’t believe that, did you?”

  My heart thudded in my chest. She was on top of me and slowly she let me up.

  “Do I need to cuff you, Marcus?”

  I got to my feet. I hurt all over. I wanted to die.

  “Come on,” she said. “It’s not far now.”

  “It” turned out to be a moving van on a Nob Hill side street, a 16-wheeler the size of one of the ubiquitous DHS trucks that still turned up on San Francisco’s street corners, bristling with antennas.

  This one, though, said “Three Guys and a Truck Moving” on the side, and the three guys were very much in evidence, trekking in and out of a tall apartment building with a green awning. They were carrying crated furniture, neatly labeled boxes, loading them one at a time onto the truck and carefully packing them there.

  She walked us around the block once, apparently unsatisfied with something, then, on the next pass, she made eye contact with the man who was watching the van, an older black guy with a kidney-belt and heavy gloves. He had a kind face and he smiled at us as she led us quickly, casually up the truck’s three stairs and into its depth. “Under the big table,” he said. “We left you some space there.”

  The truck was more than half full, but there was a narrow corridor around a huge table with a quilted blanket thrown over it and bubble-wrap wound around its legs.

  Masha pulled me under the table. It was stuffy and still and dusty under there, and I suppressed a sneeze as we scrunched in among the boxes. The space was so tight that we were on top of each other. I didn’t think that Ange would have fit in there.

  “Bitch,” I said, looking at Masha.

  “Shut up. You should be licking my boots, thanking me. You would have ended up in jail in a week, two tops. Not Gitmo by the Bay. Syria, maybe. I think that’s where they sent the ones they really wanted to disappear.”

  I put my head on my knees and tried to breathe deeply.

  “Why would you do something so stupid as declaring war on the DHS anyway?”

  I told her. I told her about being busted and I told her about Darryl.

  She patted her pockets and came up with a phone. It was Charles’s. “Wrong phone.” She came up with another phone. She turned it on and the glow from its screen filled our little fort. After fiddling for a second, she showed it to me.

  It was the picture she’d snapped of us, just before the bombs blew. It was the picture of Jolu and Van and me and—

  Darryl.

  I was holding in my hand proof that Darryl had been with us minutes before we’d all gone into DHS custody. Proof that he’d been alive and well and in our company.

  “You need to give me a copy of this,” I said. “I need it.”

  “When we get to LA,” she said, snatching the phone back. “Once you’v
e been briefed on how to be a fugitive without getting both our asses caught and shipped to Syria. I don’t want you getting rescue ideas about this guy. He’s safe enough where he is—for now.”

  I thought about trying to take it from her by force, but she’d already demonstrated her physical skill. She must have been a black belt or something.

  We sat there in the dark, listening to the three guys load the truck with box after box, tying things down, grunting with the effort of it. I tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Masha had no such problem. She snored.

  There was still light shining through the narrow, obstructed corridor that led to the fresh air outside. I stared at it, through the gloom, and thought of Ange.

  My Ange. Her hair brushing her shoulders as she turned her head from side to side, laughing at something I’d done. Her face when I’d seen her last, falling down in the crowd at VampMob. All those people at VampMob, like the people in the park, down and writhing, the DHS moving in with truncheons. The ones who disappeared.

  Darryl. Stuck on Treasure Island, his side stitched up, taken out of his cell for endless rounds of questioning about the terrorists.

  Darryl’s father, ruined and boozy, unshaven. Washed up and in his uniform, “for the photos.” Weeping like a little boy.

  My own father, and the way that he had been changed by my disappearance to Treasure Island. He’d been just as broken as Darryl’s father, but in his own way. And his face, when I told him where I’d been.

  That was when I knew that I couldn’t run.

  That was when I knew that I had to stay and fight.

  Masha’s breathing was deep and regular, but when I reached with glacial slowness into her pocket for her phone, she snuffled a little and shifted. I froze and didn’t even breathe for a full two minutes, counting one hippopotami, two hippopotami.

  Slowly, her breath deepened again. I tugged the phone free of her jacket pocket one millimeter at a time, my fingers and arm trembling with the effort of moving so slowly.

  Then I had it, a little candy bar shaped thing.

  I turned to head for the light, when I had a flash of memory: Charles, holding out his phone, waggling it at us, taunting us. It had been a candy bar shaped phone, silver, plastered in the logos of a dozen companies that had subsidized the cost of the handset through the phone company. It was the kind of phone where you had to listen to a commercial every time you made a call.

  It was too dim to see the phone clearly in the truck, but I could feel it. Were those company decals on its sides? Yes? Yes. I had just stolen Charles’s phone from Masha.

  I turned back around slowly, slowly, and slowly, slowly, slowly, I reached back into her pocket. Her phone was bigger and bulkier, with a better camera and who knew what else?

  I’d been through this once before—that made it a little easier. Millimeter by millimeter again, I teased it free of her pocket, stopping twice when she snuffled and twitched.

  I had the phone free of her pocket and I was beginning to back away when her hand shot out, fast as a snake, and grabbed my wrist, hard, fingertips grinding away at the small, tender bones below my hand.

  I gasped and stared into Masha’s wide-open, staring eyes.

  “You are such an idiot,” she said, conversationally, taking the phone from me, punching at its keypad with her other hand. “How did you plan on unlocking this again?”

  I swallowed. I felt bones grind against each other in my wrist. I bit my lip to keep from crying out.

  She continued to punch away with her other hand. “Is this what you thought you’d get away with?” She showed me the picture of all of us, Darryl and Jolu, Van and me. “This picture?”

  I didn’t say anything. My wrist felt like it would shatter.

  “Maybe I should just delete it, take temptation out of your way.” Her free hand moved some more. Her phone asked her if she was sure and she had to look at it to find the right button.

  That’s when I moved. I had Charles’s phone in my other hand still, and I brought it down on her crushing hand as hard as I could, banging my knuckles on the table overhead. I hit her hand so hard the phone shattered and she yelped and her hand went slack. I was still moving, reaching for her other hand, for her now-unlocked phone with her thumb still poised over the okay key. Her fingers spasmed on the empty air as I snatched the phone out of her hand.

  I moved down the narrow corridor on hands and knees, heading for the light. I felt her hands slap at my feet and ankles twice, and I had to shove aside some of the boxes that had walled us in like a Pharaoh in a tomb. A few of them fell down behind me, and I heard Masha grunt again.

  The rolling truck door was open a crack and I dove for it, slithering out under it. The steps had been removed and I found myself hanging over the road, sliding headfirst into it, clanging my head off the blacktop with a thump that rang my ears like a gong. I scrambled to my feet, holding the bumper, and desperately dragged down on the door handle, slamming it shut. Masha screamed inside—I must have caught her fingertips. I felt like throwing up, but I didn’t.

  I padlocked the truck instead.

  Chapter 20

  None of the three guys were around at the moment, so I took off. My head hurt so much I thought I must be bleeding, but my hands came away dry. My twisted ankle had frozen up in the truck so that I ran like a broken marionette, and I stopped only once, to cancel the photo-deletion on Masha’s phone. I turned off its radio—both to save the battery and to keep it from being used to track me—and set the sleep timer to two hours, the longest setting available. I tried to set it to not require a password to wake from sleep, but that required a password itself. I was just going to have to tap the keypad at least once every two hours until I could figure out how to get the photo off of the phone. I would need a charger, then.

  I didn’t have a plan. I needed one. I needed to sit down, to get online—to figure out what I was going to do next. I was sick of letting other people do my planning for me. I didn’t want to be acting because of what Masha did, or because of the DHS, or because of my dad. Or because of Ange? Well, maybe I’d act because of Ange. That would be just fine, in fact.

  I’d just been slipping downhill, taking alleys when I could, merging with the Tenderloin crowds. I didn’t have any destination in mind. Every few minutes, I put my hand in my pocket and nudged one of the keys on Masha’s phone to keep it from going asleep. It made an awkward bulge, unfolded there in my jacket.

  I stopped and leaned against a building. My ankle was killing me. Where was I, anyway?

  O’Farrell, at Hyde Street. In front of a dodgy “Asian Massage Parlor.” My traitorous feet had taken me right back to the beginning—taken me back to where the photo on Masha’s phone had been taken, seconds before the Bay Bridge blew, before my life changed forever.

  I wanted to sit down on the sidewalk and bawl, but that wouldn’t solve my problems. I had to call Barbara Stratford, tell her what had happened. Show her the photo of Darryl.

  What was I thinking? I had to show her the video, the one that Masha had sent me—the one where the President’s Chief of Staff gloated at the attacks on San Francisco and admitted that he knew when and where the next attacks would happen and that he wouldn’t stop them because they’d help his man get reelected.

  That was a plan, then: get in touch with Barbara, give her the documents and get them into print. The VampMob had to have really freaked people out, made them think that we really were a bunch of terrorists. Of course, when I’d been planning it, I had been thinking of how good a distraction it would be, not how it would look to some NASCAR Dad in Nebraska.

  I’d call Barbara, and I’d do it smart, from a pay phone, putting my hood up so that the inevitable CCTV wouldn’t get a photo of me. I dug a quarter out of my pocket and polished it on my shirttail, getting the fingerprints off it.

  I headed downhill, down and down to the BART station and the pay phones there. I made it to the trolley car stop when I spotted the cover of the week’s Bay Guardi
an, stacked in a high pile next to a homeless black guy who smiled at me. “Go ahead and read the cover, it’s free—it’ll cost you fifty cents to look inside, though.”

  The headline was set in the biggest type I’d seen since 9/11:

  Inside Gitmo-by-the-Bay

  Beneath it, in slightly smaller type:

  “How the DHS has kept our children and friends in secret prisons on our doorstep.

  “By Barbara Stratford, Special to the Bay Guardian”

  The newspaper seller shook his head. “Can you believe that?” he said. “Right here in San Francisco. Man, the government sucks.”

  Theoretically, the Guardian was free, but this guy appeared to have cornered the local market for copies of it. I had a quarter in my hand. I dropped it into his cup and fished for another one. I didn’t bother polishing the fingerprints off it this time.

  “We’re told that the world changed forever when the Bay Bridge was blown up by parties unknown. Thousands of our friends and neighbors died on that day. Almost none of them have been recovered; their remains are presumed to be resting in the city’s harbor.

  “But an extraordinary story told to this reporter by a young man who was arrested by the DHS minutes after the explosion suggests that our own government has illegally held many of those thought dead on Treasure Island, which had been evacuated and declared off-limits to civilians shortly after the bombing…”

  I sat down on a bench—the same bench, I noted with a prickly hair-up-the-neck feeling, where we’d rested Darryl after escaping from the BART station—and read the article all the way through. It took a huge effort not to burst into tears right there. Barbara had found some photos of me and Darryl goofing around together and they ran alongside the text. The photos were maybe a year old, but I looked so much younger in them, like I was ten or eleven. I’d done a lot of growing up in the past couple months.

  The piece was beautifully written. I kept feeling outraged on behalf of the poor kids she was writing about, then remembering that she was writing about me. Zeb’s note was there, his crabbed handwriting reproduced in large, a half-sheet of the newspaper. Barbara had dug up more info on other kids who were missing and presumed dead, a long list, and asked how many had been stuck there on the island, just a few miles from their parents’ doorsteps.