Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  “No…she hadn’t brought her new friends home yet. I remember one of them was named Sarah. Angela seemed in awe of her. What we used to call a girl-crush, I guess. Do you go to Condoleezza Rice, too?”

  “Uh, no. Homeschooled. Passed my GED last year.” There had been just enough money left from my parents’ life insurance that Uncle Ted could hire tutors after my one-night stand with Mr. Death. I was hoping to get into Skagawit Community College next year. They have a great preforensics program.

  “Well, good for you, I guess,” Angela’s mom rambled on. “I think it’s such a shame that so much of the country has given up on public education.”

  Reality check, lady. It’s your daughter’s life you’re playing politics with here. But I didn’t say that aloud. My folks taught me some manners.

  The holding room door opened again and Doc Sophie peered out. “Mrs. Smith? Would you like to speak to Angela now?”

  “Oh! Oh yes! Thank you!” She stood suddenly, and the Styro cup fell to the floor, spilling the few remaining drops of her coffee. She remembered her own manners at the last minute, turning to say, “Nice to meet you, um…” and then hurrying off for some long overdue bonding with her daughter. Doc Sophie gave me a tired smile before going in after the mom.

  I looked down and saw a colorful backpack leaning against the wall. It had a 3-D photo of the latest pop-hottie, Aramus James, printed on it. Hmmmmm. I doubted it was the mom’s. As my uncle Ted once told me, I’m a good girl with bad girl instincts. I wondered how long the mom would be in the holding room. Well, couldn’t let some Oxy-head walk off with Angela’s backpack, could we?

  I picked it up, set it on my lap, unzipped it, looked around. Nobody was watching me. I hang out in the station all the time, I’m like furniture there. I pulled a battered old e-pad out of the backpack. Mrs. Smith must have bought it used—stores don’t even sell ’em anymore.

  I pressed the “on” button and selected Search: Sarah. The screen shimmered and scrawled writing flowed to the surface. Right there I found what I wanted. Girls get name fetishes. Angela had written over and over, “Sarah Potosi is cool!” and “Sarah Potosi Rules!” and “Callie Harris + Angela Smith = friends forever!”

  I checked the memory use. Sheesh, hardly forty gig. I don’t have the freshest wrist pad, myself, but it’s got fifty times the space of an old e-pad. Fortunately Angela’s was just new enough to have wireless tech. I was able to beam the entire contents into my wrist pad in less than five minutes. Then, being the good girl, I slipped the e-pad back into the backpack and walked up to the front desk.

  Betsy Huang was just coming on duty. She’s no nonsense. I like her. I handed her the backpack, saying, “The lady visiting her daughter in the holding room left this out here. Could you keep it up here for her?”

  Betsy nodded once and that was that.

  I went across the street and waited in Harriet Mizuki’s diner for Uncle Ted to get off work, as I often did when I came down to the station. I sipped at a lemon mushroom tea and did a few searches on my download of Angela’s e-pad. I checked her calendar. Pretty blank, except for a few notes here and there, like “4:30 see Mr. Wasserman about test. 8:00 ask Mrs. Cambert about homework. Zeek—4:00 Comp Lab 201!” whatever that meant.

  Angela had a “Poetry” file full of haikus of confusion and self-hate. I felt a pang at the all-too-familiar words that mostly added up to a big why me? Why were you born with a “kick me” sign on your back, kid? Don’t know, but it happens to more of us than you’d think.

  The poems turned suddenly hopeful, warm odes to togetherness and friendship and I looked at their entry date. Jeez, she’d only been in her hive six weeks.

  There was a photo file, though it was awkward to look through it on my wrist pad’s tiny pop-up screen. Pre-hive, Angela’s pictures were of houses, parks, cats, anything but people, except for a few of her mom. Then there were several pics of a group of girls in a tight hug grinning at the camera. A couple of them had fashionable gold tooth rings and circular cheek scars. Yeah, this was the hive. I was betting the tall girl with long black hair in the middle was Sarah. Maybe it was just what Angela had said, or my imagination, but their smiles reminded me of a pack of wolves staring at a trapped rabbit.

  “Hey, Mitch!” Uncle Ted slapped his hand down on my shoulder and I jumped.

  “Hey, hi! God, you startled me!” I switched off my wrist pad and let the screen sink back into the unit.

  “Ready to go home?” He must have had a court day because he was wearing a suit. Uncle Ted’s fortyish face was more rumpled than his jacket and that’s saying a lot. But it’s the handsomest face I know, anyway.

  “Longtime ready.” I followed him out to his battered old Toyota Prius. I made myself comfortable in the passenger seat as he worked on coaxing the car to life.

  “Sophie says you got somewhere with the girl from the freeway,” Uncle Ted said as he pulled into traffic.

  “Yeah, some.” I still felt a strange lump of guilt in my stomach at having disconnected from Angela. From being disconnected at all. I sensed Uncle Ted’s X-ray gaze on me. “What?”

  “You don’t look too happy. Was it a mistake, honey? Hit too close to home?”

  I shrugged, “Nah, it was all right. Just…really sad, you know? I felt sorry for her.”

  “Uh-huh. Sophie said you didn’t want to take your rig off.”

  Anger flashed through me. “Hey, I just forgot it was on, okay? I’m cool. No problem.”

  After a pause, Uncle Ted said, “You’re a tough girl, Mitch, and I trust you. And you know you can trust me. You can tell me anything, whatever. You know I’ll listen.”

  “’Course, Uncle Ted.” I get a lump in my throat when he talks like that. Best uncle a girl could ever have. I cleared my throat and changed the subject. “So, you ask Sophie out yet? She’s dying to date you, you know that.”

  He gave me a mind-your-own-business glare that could make a perp cry. Then he just growled “Awww,” and flapped his long-fingered hand as he looked away. He still wasn’t over Aunt Dolores. Cousin Rosa says he still calls Dolores once in a while, hoping she’ll come back.

  “So what’s for dinner?” I asked.

  “Macaroni and cheese,” he announced, as if it were a special on the board at Delamino’s.

  “Cool.” It’s always either mac and cheese, tuna casserole, or chicken fingers. Uncle Ted squeezed every dime he could to send Cousin Rosa to St. Margarite’s boarding school, even though it was way down in Tacoma, so we didn’t get to see her much. God bless Uncle Ted.

  “Sure there isn’t something on your mind?” he said.

  God damn Uncle Ted—it’s like he’s psychic sometimes. So I opened up. “Okay, so it’s like…this queen bee of Angela’s—that’s her name, the girl who tried to jump off the overpass—anyway she, that is Sarah, the queen bee, like, cut two girls before Angela, just weeks before, and the girls killed themselves just like Angela was going to, and she’s going to do it again, and—”

  “Whoa, whoa, slow down, kid! That sentence is like a Christmas tree, you got so many clauses hanging on it. Start over. What’s this about Angela?”

  “The girl off the overpass.”

  “Right, the one you were talking to.”

  “Told me about Sarah, the queen bee of her hive.”

  “That’s the girl who’s kinda leader of the pack, right?”

  “Right. Her name’s Sarah Potosi. Anyway, Angela thinks Sarah deliberately cut two other girls out of the hive just because Sarah liked the power of making them go nuts.”

  “Well, that sounds pretty rude.”

  “Rude? Uncle Ted, those other girls killed themselves just like Angela tried to. This Sarah is a killer queen, Uncle Ted!”

  “Whoa, don’t be throwing words like killer around me.”

  “But it’s true! Angela says Sarah’s gonna do it again. We’ve got to stop her!”

  At a red light, Uncle Ted turned and squinted at me. “Let me get this straigh
t. Two other girls from the same hive have committed suicide?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Angela was going to be the third.”

  “Yeah. And there’s probably gonna be more.”

  He sighed and stared out the windshield. “Shit.”

  “Isn’t there some way you can charge this Sarah with murder? Or manslaughter at least?”

  Uncle Ted sighed and shook his head. “No way you could prove it.”

  “Aw, come on! You mean she can get away with it? Think about it, Uncle Ted!”

  “You think I didn’t think about it after I picked you up from the hospital three years ago?”

  I paused. “You did?”

  “’Course I did. Nobody treats my favorite niece like that.” He made a disgusted face and looked away from me as he drove. “But incitement to suicide as murder? Impossible to prove. Especially when the victim’s a teen. Too many other factors the defense can bring up. You’d need a confession from the perp to even get it before a judge.”

  “Well, how about possession of stolen ESPs at least, or illegally setting up a cell network?”

  He sighed heavily again. “Yeah, well. Let me talk to the guys. They’ll work it, honey, but it’ll take some time. Just don’t expect much, okay?”

  “Yeah. I understand.” Like our cops don’t have enough to do, what with mall bombings and ricin in the mail. Lonely girls offing themselves weren’t going to get much priority. I sighed, and stared out my window, watching the decaying suburb roll by. “What’s it take to get people to pay attention? Does another girl have to die?”

  “You don’t know that’s gonna happen.”

  “My gut tells me it’s true, and you always said I should trust my gut.”

  “Yeah, well, guts aren’t always right. And as Papá used to say, they often lead to something messy.”

  “I’m right, Uncle Ted. I know it.”

  He stopped the car in the middle of the street and turned to me, angry. “Look, what are you saying we should do? I asked you to be a friend to that girl, not be her avenging angel. You didn’t promise anything to that Angela, did you?”

  “I didn’t promise nothing!”

  “All right, then. Forget about it. Sometimes you gotta let other people take care of their own problems, okay?”

  I let a long, silent moment pass before saying, “So there’s no justice, huh?”

  “Leave perfect justice to the next world, chica. We just do what little we can in this one.”

  “After all you’ve been through, you still believe?”

  “If I didn’t, I’d go crazy.”

  “Lotta that going around,” I said softly. I remembered the sight of Angela falling back on the couch. I felt awful. “Every school has suicide awareness alerts. You can at least do that, can’t you?”

  “Yeah.” He sighed heavily again. “Yeah, I guess I can put one of the boys on that. What school does she go to again?”

  “Condoleezza Rice.”

  “Shit. It’ll have to go through the mayor’s office. But, yeah, I can do that. First thing tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay. You’re the best, Uncle Ted.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  That night, we were pretty quiet over our mac and cheese. Uncle Ted left shortly after because he was meeting his cousin, former colonel “Skip” Alvarez, for a beer. Cousin Skippy was one of those guys every cop knows–-someone who says he’s former Special Forces, SEAL, CIA spook, what-have-you. Half the stories they tell you’re sure aren’t true, and the other half you’re scared sick just might be. Cousin Skippy was the Black Ops sheep of the family, and I wished I could go along, but Uncle Ted said, “You don’t have the clearance rating for his secrets, and you aren’t old enough to drink. Don’t wait up for me.”

  We live in a highly secure condo, so I feel safe when he has to leave me alone. I’d told Uncle Ted I was going to spend the evening studying the want ads online. See, I have a hard time keeping summer jobs. The last one Uncle Ted got me, data entry at the district attorney’s office, well, I lost that one when I got caught paying too much attention to the data. Turns out the attorneys don’t like their admins playing girl detective. Who knew?

  But instead of the want ads, I spent the evening studying my download of Angela’s e-pad. I was hoping she’d entered the name of the spyder that had set up the network for Sarah’s hive. Techie kids made a lot of side money and loads of new friends by becoming spyders—setting up the illegal webs, the free hive conference connections. The really clever ones pirated satellite relays, sometimes hosting it all themselves over their family TV dish and computer, some piggybacking on their neighborhood cell tower. I’d heard rumors of one girl at ’Soft Academy who’d been caught with a transmitter in her backpack. The network provider corporations are rabid over this, but even their hired PIs learn that spyders are tough to find.

  I Googled under spider, spyder, spidey, anything, but all I found were gushing love notes about the hottie new actor in Spider-Man X. I flung myself down on my bed in frustration.

  What I hadn’t told Angela was that, though I’d gotten over getting cut, I hadn’t let the anger go. Last I’d heard about Patty Nguyen, she’d moved down to L.A. and was dating movie stars.

  I threw a pillow against the wall, but it didn’t help. Another girl was going to die. Like I almost did. Like Angela almost did. Like two girls already had. And what was I going to do about it?

  I went to my desktop. Yeah, still got one of those. I’m so prehistoric. It’s got a nice old plasma monitor that still works well, though. I went online and looked at the Ebisu Web site. Not sure why. Maybe hoping to see a confession of guilt, some hint that they knew what their little toy was doing. A pretty Asian anime lady popped up wearing a rig, purring, “With an Ebisu headset and wireless network, now you can get closer than ever before!” Yeah, helping to crush the egos of girls worldwide.

  The home page had a cute little story about Ebisu’s latest promotional contest, for the farthest separated conf group. The runner-up team had a person on each continent. But the winners were a group of Chinese scientists with a man at each pole and one taikonaut on the moon. Kinda seemed like cheating, to me.

  There was much burbling about how Ebisu’s stock was taking off and would be “a wise choice for savvy investors.” Farther down the page was a nice picture of the Ebisu North American CEO shaking hands with the director of Homeland Security. “Ebisu is helping to make the world safer!” the caption said. Right. How effective would it be for an interrogator or torturer to be speaking in your head? Bet Cousin Skippy would have some ideas about that. But I didn’t want to save the world, just the life of one girl.

  I Googled the blogosphere for a spyder at ’Leezza Rice. No self-respecting net-weaver would out himself in public, but geek boys feud like pit bulls. From the slime they sling at one another you can sometimes tell who’s up to what if you read between the lines. Sure enough, there was some jerk handled Snotwire ragging on a guy named Zeek who’d been getting all high and mighty. Zeek…where had I seen that before?

  I went back to Angela’s data on my wrist pad. It was that entry in her calendar…it was right about the date she would have gotten in the hive. “Zeek—4:00. Comp Lab 201.” With a bright red exclamation point beside it. Well, well. Wonder if Zeek made a habit of hanging at the computer lab at Angela’s school?

  I made my decision. I was going in.

  The next morning Uncle Ted woke me just before he left for work. He still smelled of cigarette smoke and beer. I got up and dressed for invisibility in gray sweats, black T-shirt, and a gray hoodie. I threw random books in my old backpack, wolfed down a couple of toaster tarts, and hopped the city bus to ’Leezza Rice.

  The old brick school was surrounded by a high chain-link fence topped by razor wire. There were only two gates that I could see; each had a grimy white electronic sensor arch. Half the time, the sensors in the arches didn’t work and the schools were too underfunded to fix them, so their deterre
nt factor was kinda lost. Besides, they mostly scanned for guns and sniffed for drugs or bombs and I was carrying none of that.

  Supposedly students had to wave their IDs as they went in, but I arrived at crunch time just before the first period, when everybody crammed through the gates to get in before lockdown. I let myself be caught up in the crushing flow of bodies, getting the breath squeezed almost out of me as we stampeded through the gate. I waved my learner’s permit card as if it was an ID, but nobody cared. I was in.

  And I was reminded why I was so glad I left school. The halls were narrow, crammed with lockers and kids and reeking of wet clothing and sweaty bodies and girls overdoused with pheromone perfume. The girls shrieked their greetings and threats, the guys glowered and shoved one another—you almost couldn’t tell a friendly hit from an angry one. Lots of them wore hive rigs, some with eye-screen attachments for TV or vid. One hulking gangbanger glared at me through a GPS display over his right eye. I felt my stomach tighten, even though this was not my crowd, no longer my world. I hunched my shoulders and pulled the hood down on my head, slogging along like a slacker too lowered with seds or too short on sleep to be worth the bother.

  I’d sussed out Angela’s class schedule from the info I’d downloaded, so I followed that. First hour was Spanish. I’d have aced this if I cared. The class was huge…a hundred kids at least in a big stadium seating room. The party-hearties sat way up in the back, the kids who wanted to learn anything sat way down front. I sat upper middle with the sleepers and stoners who gave me a companionable nod as I joined them. “You a narc?” one of them slurred at me.

  “No. New transfer.”

  “Oh. S’cool.”

  There was a ruckus down front and I saw a posse of girls swagger in, just as the hour chimed. Well, well. I recognized the tall girl with long black hair and circular cheek scars. Angela’s notes hadn’t mentioned she shared classes with Sarah. The killer queen bee was holding hands with a small Asian girl who was staring up at Sarah with near adoration. The rest of the hive—a redhead, a blonde, and two black girls standing behind the Asian girl—could barely hide their cruel amusement. So she’s the next one, I thought, my skin going cold.