The answer seemed to surprise him. His mouth opened and closed a few times, but no words came. Finally, he shook his head, as if to clear the board of his thoughts.
“Yeah, OK,” he said. “You’re right. Let me know when you’re ready.”
His understanding and the clear sympathy in his voice bled her of her anger. She was grateful she hadn’t lashed out at him and that the REMIND software had helped her stay cool. He was the last person on earth she wanted to hurt.
“I’m sorry,” she said, not really sure why.
“You saved our lives, you know?” he said.
“I don’t even know how I did it.”
“It was a surprise. That’s all. Seeing you like that.”
“I’m still trying to process it myself.”
From the corner of her eye, she watched as he spaced out for a while, his fingers tapped against his jeans in rhythm to the music she couldn’t hear. Eventually, the beat he was tapping out on his leg slowed then stopped. At some point, he nodded off for a good twenty minutes. He startled awake, and she felt the press of his gaze before he shifted and stretched.
Looking out the window, Kaizhou asked, “Where are we?”
“The four-ten,” she said. “I thought it might be best to avoid Tacoma.”
“Good idea.”
More commonly known as Chinook Pass, the two-lane blacktop cut through the mountains. They had a steep, hilly incline to one side and rolling banks of fir trees on the other. Ahead, the white-capped points of Naches Peak and Mount Rainier were obscured by a thick layer of grayish clouds.
“That’s amazing,” he said, absorbing the view.
“I want to stop in a few and check the Somnambulist feeds.”
“You think that’s wise?”
“I won’t be diving in unmasked,” she said. “Should be fine. We’ve still got some of our LA peeps loose in the wind, and if any of them keyed on my offer to help, then… well, we have to help. I need to check.”
“Seems as good a place as any to stop then. Get out and stretch.”
“It is nice,” she agreed. “Perfect, really. We’ll have to come back for pictures when we’re not wanted fugitives.”
“Is that what we are?” he asked, the implication dawning on him as if for the first time.
She shrugged, letting the question dangle.
After putting a few more miles behind them, she pulled off onto the shoulder of Sunrise Park Road and parked the Jeep alongside the shrubs and firs. She didn’t know if she’d ever seen such vivid greenness in her life.
Kaizhou let out a long loud breath and let his head fall back against the headrest. He watched Mesa as she dove deep into the feeds, embracing the digital realm fully and putting reality on hold for a few.
Once she’d synched up with the Somnambulist board, she lurked with a calm satisfaction. She owed Rameez big time. The masking software and the cloned pIP were genius moves, and they saved her a lot of hassle and anxiety. Unfortunately, as she delved deeper into the postings and browsed the updated feeds, her unease grew.
Several private messages were waiting for her, and she recognized the handle of one of the senders. It belonged to Mariann Korgan, one of the missing LA memorialists, and she was responding to Mesa’s offer of assistance.
Shell-shocked, Mesa moved on to other, more pressing posts. Others had initially caught her eye, but she had avoided them in order to assess the totality of her waiting messages. Three messages were aimed directly at her, from an unknown handle.
The name was a random mix of letters and numbers, with no matching profile, no geotag, and no associated IP. The lack of information and the tone of his message made him a goblin, and even without any identifiers, she knew exactly who he was.
The kill crew hadn’t been able to find her in the physical realm, and they were trying to draw her out through the digital world with a fake Somnambulist account.
The first message was simple. TURN YOURSELF OVER. IT WILL GO EASIER.
Below that were the other three messages. The first header said simply “DORIS.” The second said “SRI,” and the third was labeled “ASHITA.” The two women were inseparable, and before she even opened the messages, Mesa’s heart ached for the lovers and for what she had inadvertently brought to their door.
She gasped in surprise upon seeing Doris’s battered face. Both eyes were swollen. His lips were cracked and puffy, and his nose was clearly broken. Gloved hands pulled at his hair, yanking his head back, while a knife opened his throat from ear to ear.
There were no words, no demands, no warning. Only murder. Then Mesa’s tears. She squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath, knowing she had to continue. She didn’t want to. Their suffering and pain was her weight to bear, and she owed it to her friends to witness their sacrifices. She could not simply ignore it, no matter how badly she wanted to.
The DRMR files for both Sri and Ashita were composites, but both carried the same gist and the same inevitable outcome.
Mesa knew better than to put herself through the trauma, but she did it anyway. She needed to suffer the agony they had felt and to take their suffering as her own.
Within seconds, she realized how her friends had been discovered and mentally raged against herself for her own culpability. Their killers had found them because Mesa had known where they were. She’d abandoned her cache of private memories in her apartment, where the killers could find them.
The opening moments of the composite were proof enough. They were straight from her own memories.
On a bright and sunny day, she and Jade were holding hands as the pretty Brit introduced her to the Pakistani girlfriends. Mesa remembered it well, even without the digital support and electrochemical encoding being pumped into her hypothalamus. Three days went by before her flirtatious experimentations with Jade dissolved under the weight of mere friendship and an obviously insurmountable challenge to something deeper. Although Mesa had no idea who she, herself, was as an individual, her gender preferences were clearly firmly engrained.
Sri and Ashita were hand-in-hand, their smiles as bright as the late afternoon sun. Their warmth and friendliness quickly disarmed and won over Mesa, welcoming her into their small group.
The heat of their common bonds was violently disrupted. The jump splice was jarring as a masked face jolted into view, her mouth covered by a heavy, leathery hand. She felt a coldness against her throat then a surge of liquid warmth. And then searing pain. Her throat convulsed, choking on itself as air escaped her severed windpipe with a whispery hiss.
The weight of the man atop her eased, and in her dying moments, she turned toward her partner and watched Sri suffer a similar fate. She felt the spray of her lover’s blood against her face then watched the pool of darkness expanding around her, even as the world itself shrank away and lost all color and familiarity.
Mesa felt them die, the memories layered one atop another, a stereophonic murder. And as the girls faded away, a rough-hewn voice, distant in their dissolution from life, said, “Mesa, Mesa, Mesa.” Her name was issued forth with a tone of disappointment. Scolding her for her transgressions. Blaming her for their murders.
She couldn’t deny it, and she accepted the accusatory tone as a base truth. Their deaths were her fault.
And while the damage was beyond repair, she promised to repay their killers a thousand fold. She could not bring them back, but she could exact vengeance.
Mesa returned to her waiting messages and the plea for help. Mariann Korgan was a twenty-four-year-old waitress with a scattershot of dark freckles against pale skin. Thick red hair fell in long, wavy kinks, making her already-slender face seem small and impish. Her tiny upturned nose helped accentuate that impishness. Her big, toothy grin failed to disguise the sorrowful surrender in her jade eyes.
T
he message held a mnemonic subtext, a chemical encoding that let Mesa in on the girl’s personality, enough to know first-hand that Korgan had become a memorialist simply for the eclecticism of the experience. Also attached was a straight-up mem.
She saw glimmers of Korgan as a younger woman, a brash teenager who’d once had a headful of metal studs and pierced cheekbones, before the necessity of a job to pay the growing bills and fund the essential basics of life. Tiny flecks of healed-over holes still marked Mariann’s skin, but the freckles were a natural camouflage. Though the skin-deep level of rebelliousness was history, a firm contrarian streak ran through her marrow. With the memorialists, she’d found a home.
And then she’d learned that her friends had been gunned down and massacred, with a small handful scattered to the wind and cut off from contact.
While their small basement-level enclave was under attack, Korgan had been delivering a stack of flapjacks, a side of bacon, one order of scrambled eggs, and another over-easy to Table Twelve. Multiple memorialists used their last moments on earth to push out a warning to the few not on-site. Mariann had nearly lost her grip on the orange carafe of decaf when the last-ditch emergency alerts hit her hard.
Dazed, she put the carafe back on the burner and asked Steve to cover her tables. He was sweet on her, and when she started to lie and tell him she was having female troubles, he blushed and said not to worry. When she offered him a small smile, it came off more like a wince. She’d received not only the alert but a glimpse at the violent affair as well. She supported herself against the counter as she walked into the small staff area in back, trying not to lose it.
She pulled her purse and a light jacket from her locker. The restaurant did not have a standard uniform, but employees were asked to dress neatly in black jeans, a black polo, and black shoes. Stepping outside, she squinted in the daylight and tried to remember the burn protocols she’d been taught years ago.
The mem was Korgan’s attempt to sell herself to Mesa and establish credibility. Mesa appreciated the effort, still chilled by the DRMR files of her friends’ final moments.
Different memorialist groups had similar burn protocols, but they varied in how strictly the group followed them and instructed others to adhere to them. Mostly, they included the basics: leave your car, your apartment, and your personal belongings. Stay off the web. Stay hidden. Find some place secure you can hide and stay there. Don’t tell anybody where you were or where you were going. Don’t ask for help; don’t offer help. Mesa had ignored the last. Mariann was glad for it. In the end, their humanity and desire to live had won out, but Mariann lacked the safeguards that Rameez had deployed for Mesa.
Mesa copied the data codes and software bundles that Rameez had given her then sent them off to a secure, private back-channel in a datafarm they’d hacked years ago. She gave Mariann instructions on how to access it. She disconnected and waited for the woman to reconnect and verify her secure, falsified creds.
Minutes passed, which she spent chewing on the inside of her cheek. A short time later, Mesa accepted a CommNet alert from Janet Dopplier and was pleased to see Mariann’s face.
Korgan had attempted to quell her riotous hair into a high-up ponytail, but multiple strands had gotten loose. She was pale and clearly afraid.
Mesa found herself unsure of what to say or how to proceed. Korgan was equally oblivious once their hellos were done with.
“Where are you?” Mesa asked. “Are you safe?”
“For now,” Korgan said. “I’m out in the desert with some friends.”
“Whoever is responsible for all this could come after them. Are you sure it’s safe?”
Mariann let loose a jagged smile, one that was far more natural than her usual canned pleasantry. “They’re off the grid. I think it’s as safe as I can manage for now.”
“We can come get you, band together. Maybe it’ll be safer?”
“They’re hunting us down,” Korgan said. “I think maybe I’m the last of the LA bunch.”
Mesa recalled the Kessler mems, wondering about the others. She swallowed. “Why do you say that?”
Mariann shrugged, staring at some far-off point, lost. Mesa wondered if she was high or on some kind of depressant.
“You’re the only one I heard from,” she said. “The only one who posted. I took a risk logging on, you know.”
“Reaching out was brave of you,” Mesa said, recognizing the undercurrent of her words, the unspoken message. She alone had broken the burn protocols and reached out to put her own life at risk. At the time, she’d felt risking contact was more necessary than stupid. She wasn’t sure anymore.
“I lurked on some of the hidden deep sites, too,” Korgan said. “There’s rumors out there that others are dying. That everyone in LA is dead.” She paused, stabbing at an eye with a knuckle. “Well, everyone but me, I guess.”
“We’ve lost a lot of people, too,” Mesa said. For a brief instant, she watched Jonah die. She saw Sri lying next to her, a red tide surging from a large smile that had been carved into her neck.
“Do you know who they are?”
“Do you?” Mesa asked, with a bit more bite than she’d intended. She hated feeling useless. Hated feeling watched. Hated that lazy, half-hearted shrug Mariann used to answer her question.
“I might,” Korgan said. “I pulled up other mem feeds, from other enclaves. Some of the memorialists are starting to recognize how big this is and are working to piece things together. I have some information, but I can’t risk putting it online. Not yet.”
“You should be safe with those creds,” Mesa said, determined to move forward. “Kaizhou and me, we’re as good as cloaked. We can meet. We should meet.”
“I can’t come back,” Mariann said.
“We’ll come to you.”
Silence echoed in her skull while she waited for the girl to decide. Then a small ping notified her of a GPS marker, showing Mariann’s location.
“We meet there. Just you, just me.”
Mesa closed her eyes, bowing her head in relief. “That’s good, Mariann. We’ll meet tomorrow night.”
A nod of agreement. “Ten o’clock.”
Mesa assured Mariann she would be there and disconnected. Then she took a deep breath, trying to center herself and study the map. She closed her eyes, practicing the relaxation breathing techniques the REMIND program had advised her on, and put the car into drive.
She pulled back onto the four-ten, anticipating twelve hours of road-time.
“Well?” Kaizhou asked.
She told him, and he pulled the seat belt across his body, clicking it into place. He played with the seat controls, lowered the back, and shut his eyes. They had a long ride to Elko, Nevada.
Chapter 10
They drove along Interstate Eighty-Two across the open border on the eastern side of Oregon, into the lower reaches of Idaho, where they switched over to US-93 South and crossed into the northern edge of Nevada to I-80.
After twelve tedious hours of driving, they found themselves in Elko with Kaizhou behind the wheel. They’d made a point of stopping every few hours to stretch, take bathroom breaks, and get coffee or fast food. Dawn was breaking across the grubby sky, met with long yawns. Mesa was in desperate need of caffeine, despite the coffee and soda she’d had along the way.
Elko was a tiny town hidden in the dessert. During the ride, Mesa had used her cloner creds to do some anonymous research, and she couldn’t help but laugh when she came across a quote from Hunter S. Thompson. The gonzo journalist had said, “The federal government owns ninety percent of this land, and most of it is useless for anything except weapons testing and poison-gas experiments.”
Seeing it in person, she struggled to come up with an argument against his claim. The Shoshone called it Natakkoa, literally “rocks piled on one an
other.” That, too, seemed a fair assessment.
They’d seen very few people, but the day was early. The only signs of life came from the bright displays of the abundant casinos. Driving past, she stared out the window at the large white polar bear adorning Commercial Casino, at its parking lot packed with the cars of gamblers pulling all-nighters, and the empty lot of the Thunderbird Motel across the street.
They passed a cluster of bored prostitutes dressed in skimpy outfits, their bare skin already baking under the early morning heat.
From Idaho Street, they navigated the one-way lanes around the block at Sixth, made the right at Railroad, and passed the old Pioneer Hotel on Fifth. Mesa spotted a sign and asked Kaizhou to pull into a vacant spot.
The small block was a combination of vacant buildings and a bar. In between were a bright-green awning and a black metal sign of a coffee mug wearing a cowboy hat. Beneath that, in red neon was the word espresso. He looked at the Cowboy Joe Coffee sign with a lopsided smirk, and Mesa was out of the vehicle before it had even come to a full stop.
Mesa was surprised by the size of the coffee shop. It was tiny, barely large enough to hold more than a dozen people. She was grateful the place was nearly empty. Kaizhou ordered a regular coffee and grabbed a couple of brownies. Mesa requested an extra shot in her fuel and a bagel with cream cheese. They tipped the barista well, hoping to buy her silence should anyone come searching for them, and took their food and drinks back to the Jeep.
Mesa was happy with Mariann’s choice of Elko as a meeting spot. The town was low-end, and the modern world had passed it by almost as soon as it had been settled in the late 1800s. The lack of jobs and industry and the threat of warfare across the state’s borders had left Elko on its last legs. The town was practically a black hole, surrounded by desert and dry scrub that threatened to turn into a wildfire without any warning. The few people Mesa had seen all had the same bored, far-off void in their eyes. With its collection of inns, motels, casinos, and brothels, Elko was the definition of a transient town. Taking an interest in anyone was pointless, because they would be gone and replaced with yet another itinerant.
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