Cassie landed safely not far from TonyStark’s exploded remains.
Somehow she remembered to bend her knees on impact.
Somehow she remembered to hit the button on her chest that detached the chute.
Stumbling for three or four steps, she lost her balance and dropped to all fours. She knew she had to get up. Get up and run. The police had seen her parachute down here. She had to —
A gout of vomit erupted from her, gushing out with a force she’d never felt before. She was helpless in its throes, her jaw straining, eyes bulging as she puked up everything in her. When it was over, she dry-heaved twice, her stomach clenching and lurching, her gullet rippling with useless contractions, violently expelling nothing from her.
Gasping for breath, she crawled to one side. There was a pile of trash bags gathered along the wall, and she could hear footsteps. On panic-propelled hands and knees, she made her way to the pile and burrowed in, ignoring the smell and the occasional sharp jab from something discarded and pointy.
Deep in the dark, her teeth chattered uncontrollably, so loud that she feared the sound would give her away. She slipped the wrist of her jacket between her teeth, biting down on it over and over.
Footsteps thudded into the alleyway. The squawk of radios. Shouts and commands. She wanted to peek out, to see what they were doing, but didn’t dare risk moving. Was it even safe to breathe? Would it move the bags of garbage and point to her location?
Someone approached her. After a moment, a foot kicked at the garbage bags. She bit down on her jacket as hard as she could, crushing a scream between her teeth.
Another kick. She closed her eyes and told herself not to move, not to flinch.
A third kick, this one softer. Desultory, almost.
She waited for another kick. For a bag to shift. To be dragged out of her cocoon of trash by her hair and thrown to the crowd.
Didn’t happen.
Instead, she heard footfalls receding, the buzz and chirp of radios fading into the distance as she realized that she was weeping in utter and complete silence without moving a muscle.
*
She didn’t know how much time passed before she risked crawling out of the trash heap. She’d told herself to wait at least five minutes, but after counting to 120, she lost track and started again, then lost track again, then decided she just couldn’t stand waiting any longer. She had to do. To act.
They wanted her dead, so she had to be more alive than she’d ever been.
The alley was empty. They’d left poor TonyStark’s body there on the ground without so much as an old jacket to cover him up. A part of her thought maybe he’d survived somehow and was playing possum, but his head was split wide open, a rope of smashed intestine snaking out from under him. She forced herself to look, to study, even though she wanted to close her eyes and scream. She had to let what they had done to TonyStark imprint on her somehow so she would always remember what she was now fighting for.
She knelt down by him and touched his back with a shaking hand. “I’m really sorry,” she whispered. “Thank you for helping me.”
And then she sucked in a breath and — because she had no other choice — she quickly ran her hands over what was left of his body.
She was trapped in an alleyway with the entire country looking for her. She had no resources at all and she needed some.
TonyStark’s phone was crushed to oblivion, but his wallet was intact. There was no ID or credit cards — of course — but there was a sheaf of paper money. Some places still took that. She tucked the bills into her pocket and probed some more, sniffling back tears.
And found the gun.
It had survived the fall. Because the people who made guns were terrified of death and obsessed with survival. She pulled it from his waistband and wiped it clean on his clothes. She had no idea how to use a gun, other than what she’d seen in movies, but she figured even just pointing it at someone would get her somewhere.
Tucking it into her waistband at the small of her back, she covered it with her jacket. Now how would she move on? She had the most famous face in the country, and facial recognition software was looking for her from every ATM and traffic camera. Plus, the cops would be back soon, no doubt, to retrieve TonyStark’s body if nothing else. She had to get out of here.
The only resource at her disposal was the gun, and she didn’t think she could shoot her way through a Hive Mob and heavily armed cops. She thought frantically, hopping from one foot to the other, and then her eyes fell on her hiding spot, the pile of garbage bags.
There had to be something in there that could help, right?
The prospect of trawling other people’s refuse did not excite her, but she had no other options and time was running out. After prodding the bags with her toes, she tore open the one that felt the least squishy and liquid. It turned out to be filled with old cardboard and a broken glass that nearly ripped open the webbing between her right thumb and forefinger.
The second bag, though, was a bit more helpful. There was a pair of sunglasses with one arm twisted askew. She stared at the glasses for a moment. Facial recognition always started with the eyes. That was how it knew the subject in question was a person. Once the software recognized eyes, it proceeded to map the surrounding area, using machine learning to match features with what it already knew comprised a human face.
If you could stop it from seeing your eyes, you were halfway home.
Most cameras these days sprayed infrared dots in addition to using visible light, so sunglasses didn’t always work, but if they were polarized …
Fortunately, there was a simple way to find out. She whipped out her cell phone and turned it on. For the first time, she was glad for the ancient tech — it had an LCD screen, as opposed to the OLED screens on newer phones.
She held the phone vertically and looked at it through the sunglasses as she slowly rotated it to horizontal. Sure enough, the colors on-screen shifted. The lenses were polarized.
Great. That would help with the cameras — maybe — but human beings wouldn’t be fooled by a pair of shades. She was just too damn recognizable. She wished she could text her dad for some advice, though she wasn’t sure exactly how to frame the question to get any sort of useful advice from the bot. Maybe Hey, Dad, how do you hack people?
Much to her surprise, the answer popped up in her head, almost but not quite in her father’s voice: Social engineering, sweetheart.
Sure, sure. Social engineering — the flip side and companion to digital hacking.
First, she would need to do some pretty radical surgery, the kind she’d done on at least three dolls when she was a kid, before her mom decided to stop buying them anymore. With a piece of the broken glass held carefully in her hand, she managed to hack away at her hair. Now it was probably patchy and stood out in tufts, but that was OK.
Then she prowled through the trash some more until she found what she was looking for. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough: a short metal curtain rod, slightly bent. When she cupped the end of it in her hand, it looked like a cane.
Combined with the sunglasses and the bad haircut and the grime from her trash diving, she figured she could pass for a blind, homeless person.
Fooling machines is one thing, Dad had told her. Overrun a buffer or spoof an IP address. Whatever. To fool people, you have to work with their prejudices instead of against them.
With a deep breath, she stepped out of the alley, tapping the sidewalk with her makeshift cane, trying her best to appear as though she couldn’t see.
There was a loose cluster of people at one end of the street and a police cordon in the opposite direction. The cops or the mob?
The mob would be easier to fool. The cops would have portable face scanners, would make her take off the shades and then it would all be over. The mob would either recognize her or not.
She breathed a silent prayer that she was pretty sure headed nowhere and to no one, then tap-tapped her way down the sidewalk.
*
To her surprise and delight, it worked. A guy in his thirties even offered to help her cross the street when the light changed. It would look weird to decline, she decided, so she said yes and allowed him to take her elbow and escort her. He was a perfect gentleman, sweet and concerned, and for the time it took to cross, she even forgot that he wanted to kill her.
The police had cordoned off a three-block radius around OHM’s now-defunct headquarters, but they hadn’t set up blockades everywhere. Feigning blindness and homelessness, she became invisible to most passersby and was able to prowl the alleyways until she found one that led her out of the danger zone.
Bad thinking, that. Everywhere was the danger zone. Anywhere there was a camera, she was in trouble. All it would take was one hit on a database and the mob would descend.
One hit on a database and you die. One stupid joke and your life is over. Rowan and the Homework Coven flashed in her memory. She’d been goaded into this. She’d been pushed …
You did it to fit in, a voice told her. No one made you.
It was her mom’s voice. Clipped and unsympathetic and — oh, yeah — telling the truth, by the way.
I wish you were wrong. You’re always wrong, but not this time. And I bet you’d love to hear you were right, but who knows if I’ll ever …
She found a spot in an alley that was blocked off from cameras and sat with her back against a wall, her knees drawn up to her chest, head down. It was the safest thing she could imagine, and now that she felt safe, all she could think about was the jump from the building, watching TonyStark’s head crack open on the ledge, the way he’d tumbled through the air.
Sobs racked her. This was her life now. This was her life.