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The building’s front entrance is boarded up, as are several of the windows. It looks like no one’s used it in decades.
“Wow, what is this place?” I ask.
We walk around the side of the building, let ourselves in through a gate, and cross a courtyard strewn with junky lawn furniture. A couple of rusty chairs are occupied by burnout guys smoking a joint and staring at us like we’re the pot police.
“Salut,” Siaka calls.
“Ta mère,” one replies. The other laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
“Idiots,” I murmur.
Siaka ignores them. “To answer your question, the building’s a squat.” He pulls the door open, letting me into a darkened hallway. A potted plant languishes in one corner, and the elevator is propped open by a two-by-four. “Artists take over vacant buildings that are scheduled to be destroyed. They inform the city of Paris that they are squatting, and the authorities almost always let them stay. It’s like a semi-formal contract—the artists pay for electricity and water until the place is torn down, then they move on to another place.”
He leads us to a stairwell, and we start the climb. Luckily there’s a skylight at the very top: all the lights are burned out. I shield my nose from the sickening smell of body odor and melted plastic.
“And, um, why is your tech person squatting here?” I ask.
“Livia? She’s basically a genius: skipped a few grades, graduated early, laughed at the idea of university. Now at sixteen she does freelance work for big corporations and makes bank.”
“She can’t afford something better than this?” I ask, feeling it in my calves as we pass the fourth floor and head towards the fifth.
“Sure, she can afford it. But she’s a hacker. This place gives her street cred.”
He pushes open a swinging door, and we emerge into a cavernous loft with widely spaced concrete columns.
The tenants have divided the area into randomly sized zones, each with different decor, like a dozen different mini-worlds packed side-by-side under a ceiling crisscrossed by broken florescent tubes. Trash lines the base of the exterior walls—soda cans, candy wrappers, huge puffballs of dust—like someone swept everything out of the middle of the room but didn’t bother to use a dustpan and pick it up.
In one corner, a guy is using an airbrush on a huge canvas to paint graffiti-style art. Against a window, a girl sits at a table behind a sewing machine, attaching a giant piece of silvery plastic to fake leopard fur. Next to her, a metal clothes rack holds several finished garments that look like costumes from the Hunger Games.
A dozen couches are scattered around the space, a person draped across each one, sleeping or meditating or whatever. We weave our way through the obstacle course towards a semi-circle fortress of desks piled with computers and screens and a ton of crap like bobblehead dolls, Lego Millennium Falcons and junk food wrappers. The wall behind it is hung with a V for Vendetta poster featuring the creepy “Anonymous” mask and a Matrix poster. Life-sized cardboard figures of Neo and Trinity guard the setup on either side. And in the middle of it all sits a girl wearing chunky headphones over an orange knit cap, typing into a keyboard in front of an old-style box computer screen.
“Livia,” calls Siaka.
She keeps typing.
We walk right up. Siaka taps her on the shoulder.
She jumps up, rips off her headphones, and turns to face us, looking well and truly pissed off. Black braids drape down past her shoulders. Her skin is a shade lighter than Siaka’s and her eyes catlike without the help of liquid liner. She’s the classical example of “gorgeous but trying hard not to be.”
“Dude!” she yells at Siaka. “Do not do that. Ever.”
“I called your name, but you didn’t hear me,” Siaka says, chuckling.
She turns to me, and her scowl deepens. “Who the hell is this,” she asks, looking at me but addressing Siaka.
“This is Louis. I’m working with him on that project you’re helping me with.”
She glares up at Siaka, who’s about a foot taller than her. “What did I say about bringing people here? No visitors. None. Ever.”
“Yeah, well, Louis’s my work partner, so that’s different.”
“No. Not different. He is a person, right? And I told you not to bring people here. Dude, I’ve got so much illegal shit on this computer, I could go to jail for the rest of my lifetime... and yours.”
“Livia, if you’re so concerned about secrecy, why are you working in an open-plan squat with a ton of other people?”
“Okay, first of all, I told you not to call me that. My name is Liv.”
Siaka is unfazed. “I’ve called you Livia since you were a baby.”
He turns to me. “Our moms are sisters.” I must look confused because he specifies, “My dad’s white, hers is Vietnamese.”
“Do you really need to do that?” she says, scowling at Siaka. “I’m sure this rando guy doesn’t need our family tree explained in detail to figure out why we look nothing alike.”
“You actually do look a little...” I begin.
She lifts an eyebrow.
I cave. “Okay, fine. No resemblance.”
“Her hacker name is Legacy,” Siaka says proudly, earning himself an eye roll.
“Are you the Legacy who hacked into the CRS database and exposed how many of Paris’s riot police have criminal records?” I sound like a fanboy, but even among dabblers like me, Legacy is a legend.
She studies my face as if it were a complicated line of coding. “Possibly,” she replies. Then repositioning her headphones over her hat, she slumps back into her chair and resumes typing.
Siaka shakes his head at me, and then carefully, as if she’s a rattlesnake and not a teenage girl, lifts up the edge of an earphone. “I believe you asked me to stop by. Was there something you wanted to tell me?”
“Not in front of him.” Her eyes don’t leave her screen.
“Hey, I think I’ll check out the garbage bag clothes,” I say, glancing toward the girl with the sewing machine.
“No,” Siaka insists, draping his arm around my shoulders. I try to ignore the thrill—whether Flame-finger or just hot guy-generated—that courses through my body. “Louis’s staying right here. Like I said, I’m working with him now. The database you and I are building will be linked to one he’s moderating. He’s a part of this conversation.”
Liv-slash-Livia-slash-Legacy slips off her headphones and sets them on the desk as though it pains her to do so. She swivels in her chair to face us, crossing her arms and frowning. “I assume that means he’s one of them.”
“Yes,” Siaka confirms.
She sighs, like this conversation is costing her so much energy she has none left to breathe. She stares at her cousin from beneath heavy lids. “I wanted to show you the hub. It’s basically like WhatsApp, Facebook and Zoom combined. Each member has a profile and can leave updates, communicate by phone, text, or video, and hold video meetings with shared desktop and document capabilities. It has a Dropbox-style area to share these recipes or whatever you call them. I’ve put an automatic translation option on all of the pages, since you say your group is global. If you’re good with that, it’s ready to test.”
She says this so fast that my brain is racing to keep up. It sounds like the perfect platform to reunite the far-flung Flame-fingers and allow them to share their secrets.
“So would my group...” I pause and look around, but no one is close enough to overhear, “...be able to sign onto the same platform?”
“Yes, but for obvious security measures, seeing as you are two completely different entities, each with your own secrets, you will only share access to certain parts of the other group’s database. Which parts those are will need to be decided by each group.” She says all this with absolutely no expression, unless “bored stiff” counts as an expression, in which case she’s nailing it.
“Okay, so what do you need now?” Siaka asks her.
“Guinea pigs,” she says. “We need to beta test. Could you get together a group of FF volunteers—say, ten–preferably from different countries? Then we can test the translations and global login capabilities, to start with. We’ll do any troubleshooting we need and be ready to launch in a couple of weeks.”
“Should we do that with my group, too?” I ask her. I wondered if there was a code name for the bardia, seeing as she used “FF” for Flame-fingers.
“I don’t see why not. We’ll run the tests separately, for now, keeping the systems separate until you decide what data will be shared and what will remain private to your respective groups.”
Okay, for a sixteen-year-old, this girl is scary-smart. I look at Siaka. “I’ll explain it all to Gaspard so he can tell me what he wants to share.”
“We’ll ask Charlotte to give her input,” Siaka says. “She’s the one you’ll be taking over bardia database management from.”
“Great. Let’s go,” I say, ready to get out of there.
“I can come along and describe what Livia...”
She shoots him the rankest stink-eye imaginable.
“...Liv has set up so you guys can get started,” Siaka says, and turns to go.
I start to say goodbye, but her eyes are already glued to her screen and her headphones back on.
“She’s really a sweetheart under that impenetrable armor,” Siaka says as we walk away.
“Adorable.” I glance back. Her eyes not leaving her screen for a second, Liv raises her hand and, instead of waving goodbye, gives me the finger.