Kurt held the bag of frozen peas against his cheek. He was relieved that the punch had been too low to cause any eye-swelling, which might have ruled out wearing his UltraLenses. He took them from his pocket and put them in his eyes. With his computer still presumably in Harry’s truck, Kurt couldn’t control the Lenses. But in an odd way, he just liked having them in.
The more time that passed, the more Kurt wondered what everyone was doing. He began to worry about his computer and everything else in Harry’s truck. Kurt was one of those weird people with nothing to hide but a desire to keep some of it to himself, anyway. For the same reason that his bedroom windows had curtains, he didn’t want Ernesto or Michael or anyone else snooping through his things.
His futile worrying stopped only when he heard yet more footsteps, this time accompanied by the sound of muffled music. Both the footsteps and the music got louder and louder until Lisa appeared at the top of the stairs wearing a large pair of padded headphones. She pulled them out of whatever they were plugged into in her pocket and said hello.
“What’s up?” Kurt asked.
“Ernesto sent me,” Lisa replied.
In the last few hours Kurt had started to feel like he was in a hospital, what with the brief visits from people who didn’t really want to see him but were one way or another obligated to check in. Lisa’s arrival, first aid kit in hand, did nothing to reduce this feeling. “What for?” Kurt said.
“He wanted someone to tell you that we’re having a “clear the air” group meeting in Home.”
“Home?”
“Tasmart Home. It’s the big massive shop at the north end,” Lisa explained. “Everyone sleeps there.”
“Can you untie my foot, then?” Kurt asked, tilting his head towards it. “I can’t.”
“Because of your hand? The old guy said something about it. That’s the other reason Ernesto sent me,” she said. “I’m in charge of first aid.” Lisa smiled as she held the first aid kit aloft, like a proud child showing off their latest finger-painting. The first aid kit looked brand new. Kurt didn’t know whether this meant that the group was well stocked or that Lisa didn’t have any experience.
Lisa untied Kurt’s foot first so that he could sit on one of the chairs and she wouldn’t have to join him on the floor. She explained that she had brought her nail kit, too, in case she needed tweezers. Kurt insisted that she would be going nowhere near the wound with anything sharp. He removed the dressing from his palm and saw that it was definitely starting to heal over.
“Doesn’t look so bad,” Lisa said.
“I know. It only hurts now when I close my hand.” He demonstrated and winced.
“It’s trying to scab over,” Lisa said. “You need to keep your fingers stretched out so your palm isn’t creasing all the time.” She opened the first aid kit and took a much smaller bag from inside.
“No tweezers,” Kurt said.
Lisa shook her head reassuringly and lifted out something that looked like a weird soft comb which was missing almost all of its teeth. “Foam spacers,” she said. “These are actually for toes, but your fingers are a lot fatter than mine, so…”
She placed Kurt’s fingers in the spacers. They felt like the world’s worst brass knuckles. She added another set of spacers where his middle finger bent and then one more higher up. “Bend your fingers,” she challenged Kurt.
Kurt tried and failed. “It’s like a mitten.”
“Good.”
“But I can still bend them all as one,” he said, “and that’s what creases my palm.”
She saw his point. “Hmmm.”
“Thanks for trying,” Kurt said.
Lisa returned to the first aid kit. After a few seconds of moving things around in search of something useful, she found a small spool of thin yarn-like string.
“Hand please,” she said.
“What’s the plan?”
“To keep your hand open, obviously.”
Kurt rolled his eyes. “Fine, what’s the method?”
“I’m going to tie this string around your wrist like a bracelet,” Lisa said, taking hold of Kurt’s hand. “Then we’ll tie the bracelet to the back of your hand: one bit of string to the tip of your middle finger, one bit to your thumb, and one bit to your pinky. One more bit going across from the top of your thumb to the top of your pinky, and that should do it.”
“Do you really think the string will be strong enough?”
“Better than nothing,” she shrugged.
Kurt couldn’t disagree; anything was better than nothing. He held his hand still and let Lisa give it a shot.
While struggling to tie a tight-enough knot on the bracelet part of her palm-spreading contraption, Lisa exhibited an uncanny ability that Kurt had only previously come across in hairdressers: that of being able to focus her eyes and mind on a highly dextrous task while talking non-stop about completely unrelated things. The conversation was mainly one-way as Lisa seized the opportunity to share her stories and thoughts with someone who hadn’t heard them yet.
Five or six pieces of string came and went before Lisa was satisfied with stage one. She then began trying to securely connect the bracelet to Kurt’s middle finger. She maintained the scattergun chitchat throughout this process, too, and Kurt took note of some of the facts she revealed.
He learned first of all that Lisa and Ty were an item, and that Ty had brought her with him to the safe house without clearing it with Ernesto. This started them off on the wrong foot, she said, and Ernesto had spoken no more than a few sentences to her in all the weeks she had been in the mall.
Lisa said she was from just outside of Durham. “But not the same Durham your friend Harry comes from,” she hastened to add, as if it was necessary. “His is in North Carolina, mine is in the north of England.” Kurt was glad to have an answer to the accent question, but after the initial surprise he quickly tuned in to it and now had no difficulty understanding anything that Lisa said.
The third point of note was that, until today, no one apart from Val and Michael had seen Ernesto since Friday afternoon. As soon as he got the news about Stacy’s death, he had locked himself in what Lisa called “the computer room.”
While talking about how glad she was that Kurt’s group had brought food that wasn’t “the same four meals we have every lunch and dinner,” Lisa finished fixing the piece of string between Kurt’s pinky and thumb.
“Try and close it now then, smart arse.”
Kurt tried to close his hand and though he could certainly relax his fingers a little, he couldn’t bring them in enough to cause a crease in the centre of his palm where the wound was.
“It actually works,” he said, happy to be proven wrong. With three foam spacers and a few pieces of string, Lisa had somehow crafted a functional solution. “I mean, I could break the string if I wanted to…”
“I could go outside and get some barb wire if you want to try that?” Lisa replied.
“I’ll stick with this,” Kurt smiled. He raised his open hand. “High five?”
They both laughed. “Do you know what it kind of looks like from the back?” Lisa said. “One of those stretched-out lizards-on-a-stick that people eat.”
Kurt squinted his eyes and looked for the similarity. “I can see it,” he laughed again.
Lisa was still laughing, too. She proceeded to gently wipe the wound then applied a new, clean dressing on top of a thin layer of antiseptic gel.
“That’s it,” she said, pleased with her work. “Let’s go.”
~
Kurt walked down from the monorail station and gazed once more in wonder at the vast expanse that was La Plethora. Leaving aside the creepiness of it being empty, it was easily the coolest place he had ever been.
Most of the stores had signage installed above the doors showing what would have been inside. Some even looked to be fitted and partially stocked.
They crossed over at Lisa’s suggestion and walked along the right hand side of the huge mall.
The path forked right near the entrance, and Kurt saw the word “Leisure” written on the floor at the opening in a collegiate varsity style font.
“So if we turned right into the leisure section, would the path curve back and come out at the far end?” he asked.
“No, it curves back into the middle. And then, opposite that, there’s another path that curves left and comes back in at the far end. The southeast path is leisure stuff and the northwest is all really expensive designer places. You’ll get the hang of it,” Lisa said. “Not that anyone usually comes this far down.”
Kurt looked over at the path underneath the monorail station, near the Tourist Information booth where Anthony had gone for a chair a few hours earlier. “So where does the southwest path go?” he asked.
“That’s a dead end,” Lisa said. “More of a stub than a path. Same at the northeast. See, the walkways in here are basically like two snakes. One is dead straight and the other one is shaped like an S.”
“Isn’t a straight line running through an S shape pretty much a dollar sign?” Kurt thought out loud.
Lisa’s expression looked like she was tackling some real profundity. “I always thought it was two snakes,” she said, eyes wide. “But your dollar thing makes way more sense.”
“You probably would have worked it out if someone had explained the paths’ shapes to you like you did for me,” Kurt said. “It was a team effort.”
Lisa laughed. She got on easily with Kurt. They were both glad of that.
The stores on either side of the main walkway were a mishmash of everything. Nearest the entrance there were high-end jewellers and a few fashion labels that even Kurt recognised. Their signs and storefronts remained immaculate even after years of neglect. The combination of clear and heavily-blackened glass evoked a shiny new smartphone, and some of the squarer storefronts with window decorations looked almost like app tiles.
The halfway point of the main path was marked by the Lexington Brew Coffee Curve, a circular coffee bar built around a large pillar which supported the weight of the monorail track. Kurt had forgotten about Lexington’s ill-fated coffee venture, the lazily named Lexington Brew.
The corporation’s plan had been to focus on prime locations rather than compete in the crowded markets of already-colonised small towns. Shareholder pressure led to rapid expansion, though, and every new Lexington Brew branch was met with negative campaigns from the existing coffee giants who claimed to have been at the heart of small town America for decades and refused to bow to a faceless corporate giant. A few acerbic voices lampooned the irony of this given that the same chains had themselves destroyed every independent coffee shop in their path without mercy, but the biggest budgets won the day. Kurt felt sure that Lexington would win the battle if they tried again today, such had been the brand’s growth since then, but energy drinks and alcohol seemed to be bringing in enough money to keep the shareholders happy for now.
This midpoint — the centre of the S shape — was also marked by the end of the southeast path and the start of the northwest path, as Lisa had explained. The midwest junction, as she called it, led into the fancy designer area, and the floor here was marked “Designer” in an elegant cursive script.
As they continued to walk, Kurt asked some more of the questions he had about the mall, like how big it was and exactly how long ago it had been abandoned. Lisa didn’t know the answers but said that Ty told her there was an old documentary about the mall on one of the offline computers and that Kurt should watch it if he wanted to find stuff out. Kurt asked what Lisa meant by “offline computers” but she said that this would probably be the kind of thing Ernesto would cover in the meeting.
Two thirds of the way between the Coffee Curve and the north end of the mall, Kurt spotted a sign saying “Food Court” in the extreme north east corner. As it came into focus he saw that every popular fast-food outlet had a counter, all of which ran side by side along the back wall. An abundance of metal chairs — several hundred at least — were arranged in threes and fours around circular tables. Like a few other areas, this section of the mall looked like it could have been open for business at an hour’s notice.
Opposite the food court, in the mall’s northwest corner, a massive storefront extended all the way from the main path to the west wall. The sign above the grand entrance read: “Tasmart Home”.
“This is Home,” Lisa said.
Inside, Kurt was greeted by another vast expanse. Home alone was as big as most other malls, and there seemed to be a lot of stock lying around the place. There were couches and tables near the entrance, which had evidently been moved into position by members of the group. Lisa explained that Home, like the food court and monorail stations, had been used extensively to film promotional material ahead of the mall’s opening. Because of this, it was well stocked. And because of this, it made a natural base for the group.
The meeting was being held in a small enclosed room, Lisa said.
As they passed a line of joined-together tables covered in what looked like suitcases and bags, Lisa asked Kurt to wait while she put the first aid kit back where it went.
She walked towards the table but stopped after a few steps. “Actually, I was meant to make sure you don’t have a concussion.” She came back and placed her hands around Kurt’s chin. “Have you noticed any changes in your vision?” she asked, looking closely into his eyes.
“I’m totally fine,” he insisted.
Lisa didn’t reply; she just kept looking. Ten seconds passed, which was pushing the longest time Kurt had ever seen her go without talking.
“UltraLenses?” she eventually said, disbelieving her own eyes. “But… but….”
Kurt scolded himself. With nothing overlaid in his vision and no zoom, he had forgotten he was even wearing them. The only thing keeping him calm was that Lisa’s atypical reaction to panic had been lowering her voice.
“They’re not connected to anything,” Kurt said, speaking in as measured a tone as he could manage. “I hacked them like I did before the Talent Search. Trust me: it’s totally safe. I can use them to zoom and record locally with my computer, but obviously I don’t have it right now.”
“So why are you still wearing them?”
It was a good question. Glad that Lisa at least seemed to believe that they weren’t operational, Kurt searched for an answer. “Habit,” was the best he could come up with. Lisa scanned the area to make sure no one was around then lowered her voice even further.
“And does Ernesto know about this habit?”
“I’m going to tell him,” Kurt promised. “I am going to tell him. But not today. He’s already so on edge, you know? And he just started trusting me, so I can’t give him any reason to be suspicious.”
“Does anyone else know?”
“Only Minter,” Kurt said. “No one else. Including you.” He took his Lenses out and put them in his pocket. “Okay?”
“I dunno,” Lisa shrugged.
Kurt pointed to the bruise on his face. “This is what he did when he suspected me of something. What do you think he’ll do if he finds out I actually am keeping secrets?”
Lisa shrugged again, but this time her eyes reflected sympathy with Kurt’s position. She turned away, sighing, and kept walking. Kurt didn’t want to annoy her by forcing the issue so he stayed quiet.
Not too far inside Tasmart Home, they reached an unmarked door on the side wall which led to a room intended to one day function as an employee lounge. “This is it,” Lisa said.
Kurt paused at the door. “You’re not going to tell him, right?”
Lisa opened the door without answering and held it open for Kurt. He hoped against hope that no answer meant “no” and walked nervously in behind her.
10
Inside the room, Kurt saw only one unfamiliar face. The man had a large, imposing figure which matched Minter’s description of Michael Richardson. Michael stood in the far corner beside Ernesto and Val, with his son Anthony also close by
.
Lisa immediately joined Mary and Ty across from Ernesto’s group. Everyone looked at Kurt. He looked only at Lisa, willing her to keep quiet about his Lenses.
Minter stood beside Harry and Joyce, who was sitting in the room’s only chair. Kurt walked over to his three recent co-arrivals. Much to his surprise, Minter embraced him with a so-glad-to-see-you hug.
“You okay?” Kurt whispered.
“Yeah, man. You?”
Kurt pulled away and nodded. At this point Minter saw his hand, spread wide by Lisa’s handiwork. It made him laugh, which lightened the mood slightly.
The room’s groupings were clear. Kurt hoped that groupings would prove a more accurate word than factions or divisions, but so far he hadn’t seen a whole lot of mixing. Of even greater concern to Kurt was that this seemed to be everyone. He knew that Minter should be able to do what was needed on his own, but it was a shock to see that Ernesto’s fabled resistance movement contained only eleven members, at least five of whom — Kurt, Minter, Harry, Joyce, and Lisa — hadn’t even been invited by Ernesto.
Kurt felt that Stacy had exaggerated the group’s strength, which was perhaps understandable given that her brother was its head, but he wanted to hear everyone out before prejudging the situation.
The room itself was very plain, with matt white walls and panel flooring. There was no round table like there was in the meeting room at Sycamore HQ, and nothing at all on any of the walls.
“Okay,” Ernesto said, addressing Kurt quite directly. “Minter has told us all why you’re here, and I suppose you might be wondering what we’re doing here. I’ll run through it quickly. Some of us have been here in the mall for the past six months, completely undetected.”
Kurt interrupted straight away. “Six months? I hadn’t even pitched the Seed six months ago. Why would you be planning something back then?”
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