Thales peers up into the ether, the snowflakes pinpricks of momentary cold. He hadn’t wanted to go back through the Club Oublier, had thought to find the car by dead reckoning. A mistake, in retrospect. Hadn’t expected snow. Vast the city, endless its streets. He checks his phone—still dead—onward, then.
Eyes flickering shut, he sees the towers in the waves, their light, ascending … He blinks, wavers, brushes snow from his shoulders and goes on.
Snow-dusted ruins, shuttered bars. Is this his street? And there, down the block, his car, he thinks, smothered in white.
Closer up, he’s sure it’s his. He grips the door’s frigid handle, waits for it to read his fingerprints, but there’s no vibration, no click—is it as dead as his phone, leaving him locked out in the cold? He yanks at the handle, steps back in surprise when the door opens, snow sloughing off in a sheet.
He’s already halfway into the car when he registers the presence in the seat opposite—it’s a girl, the maybe-Asian one from the mountain house, huddled in her thin jacket, the grip of a gun protruding from her pants pocket.
“You did come,” she says, jaw tight, shivering. “He said you would. Didn’t really believe it. Freezing my ass off and I don’t have the code to start the car. I’m Akemi, by the way. Sorry to ambush you, but we need to talk.”
He could run for it, or maybe lunge for her wrists, but his wits are foggy, his hands numb, and she seems too miserable to be a kidnaper. He gets the rest of the way into the car and pulls the door shut.
“Well?” she says a little desperately. He stares at her. “You want to turn it on?”
He taps in the password and the car comes to life. He doesn’t realize how cold he is until the hot air hits.
“You must think I’m a crazy person,” she says.
He shakes his head unmeaningly.
“You have the implant, right?” she says. “And you see things that aren’t there, that couldn’t be there?” He tries to show nothing but she says, “Yeah. That’s what I thought. He said you did. I’ve got it too, and the same thing happens to me. I think it’s time we did something about it.”
“Wait—who said I did?”
“Well, that’s a story,” she says. “I was hiding in this bar in the favelas on Sunset. Bad place, but not that bad, and I’ve been there before. I was afraid the implant would let them track me, but it’s too deep for reception there, which is why I was surprised when I heard a phone ring, and then I realized the phone was in my pocket. It wasn’t mine—I haven’t had a phone in a long time—and I knew I ought to chuck it and run, but I was feeling fatalistic so I took the call. At first it was just static on the other end of the line, and then when someone finally said my name it sounded like he was talking in a tunnel. I asked who it was and I could barely understand him when he said, ‘Your enemy’s enemy. Go talk to the boy. He’s like you. Tell him not to trust the surgeon.’ He told me how to find the car, and that it’d be unlocked, and then he hung up, and here we are. So I know this is your car and all, and I’m already imposing, but if you don’t mind my asking, just who the hell are you?”
“I’m Thales,” he says, “and you were also in my house.”
“Oh,” she says. “Right. You were the one in the car on the mountain. You’re that architect lady’s kid, the one who built my prison. There were pictures of you with your mom on her desk.”
“What were you doing there?”
“What I was told, mostly. I don’t know if they used drugs or the implant or what, but I just woke up there one day, and when I did my surgeon was waiting. He’d seemed like a nice man when I met him in Indonesia, but it was obvious it had gone wrong, so I threatened him with my powerful friends, told him Hiro would get him if he didn’t let me go. Fucker didn’t even change expression, just waited for me to wind down and then said, ‘There are some things we need you to do.’”
“What things?” he asks, trying to situate himself, decide if he believes her story.
“I had to run these boys, mostly technicals, get them to do tricks with hardware. It felt like organized crime, unless there’s another reason to monkey with servers off the subway tunnels in LA. It wasn’t what I’d been promised, but I wasn’t really surprised. Always more problems, you know?”
“Are you technical?”
“Not even a little,” she says cheerfully. “Well, I wasn’t, but the surgeon did something with his tablet, and now I remember whole technical manuals. I never thought I’d know so much about fiber-optic splicing.”
He watches her, hoping she’ll let something slip that will make her underlying intentions manifest, but her facade is seamless, if it is a facade, and he could use any ally, but there’s too much he doesn’t know and it’s probably a mistake even to engage with her. “Why didn’t you call for help? There’s a computer up there.”
“For one thing, who am I going to call? Not all of us have rich families poised to save the day. For another, that computer didn’t connect to anything but this special-purpose phone the boys used. Lost kids, mostly, scraped up off the net. I had to learn to be what they needed with just the sound of my voice. No one held a gun to my head, but the doors were locked, and there was nothing else to do. I was trying to get them to help me finagle an exit, but the fucking phone kept getting stolen and I kept having to start over. So have you got any special feeling about any of this, or did the voice in the wilderness steer me wrong?”
“Why would your kidnapers put you in our house?” he asks, thinking, unless they already have so much access to my family that they can use our assets casually.
“You got me. I’ve never seen any of you before in my life. I assumed it was just out of the way and empty. I was just glad they didn’t lock me in a basement.”
“Does the name Cloudbreaker mean anything to you?”
“Nothing,” she says, shaking her head. “It sounds like the name of an art-core band.”
“You seem to be in earnest,” he says, “but is there anything to substantiate your story? All I know for certain is I saw you in my headlights and found you waiting in my car.”
For a moment he has the sense she’s watching him coolly and from a distance but then that’s gone and he just feels her determination and her sense of being hunted. “Here’s evidence for you,” she says, taking his hand and guiding it to her forehead, where he finds a hair-fine scar. “They were careful about the scarring. I insisted, because I thought it could hurt my career. Good thing I focused on what was really important.” Now she guides his fingertips behind her ear, where he finds something hard—at first he takes it for jewelry, but it’s a socket. “No wireless. They said it wasn’t secure enough. There’s no trust these days.”
She’s leaning in close now and reaches out to put her palm on his face, and her skin is so hot it seems to burn him. “You’re cold,” she says. “You might have hypothermia.” She shrugs out of her jacket and spreads it over their laps.
She’s sitting so close their thighs are touching. “I like it this way,” she says, apparently of the snow covering the windows, how the outside world is hidden except for the blued glow of passing cars, and he’s acutely aware of their breathing. “Though it takes some getting used to, not seeing where you’re going.”
“There’s so much I want to ask you,” he says, surprising himself, wondering what he meant by it, then deciding it’s true.
“There’ll be time for that,” she says vaguely, looking at him with a strangely fixed expression, and now she’s leaning into him and her face is close to his. She laughs a little gurgling laugh, and at a distance of a few inches he sees the flush of her cheeks, the symmetry of her features, how her skin is mostly clear but at the edges of her eyes are tiny wrinkles she should be too young for, probably the consequence of worry and hard living, and as she turns her mouth toward his he says, “What are you doing?”
She freezes, then slowly withdraws.
A moment of perfect silence and then it’s like she’s become a different person as she laughs and jams her hands into her armpits and says, “Sorry, I’m just so fucking cold. Anything to warm up, you know? They say drinking warms you up but if it did I’d feel fine.” Her poise holds for a moment, then collapses before his eyes, and suddenly she seems needy, almost childlike, and close to tears. “And I may not be thinking too clearly, but I’m not so lit I can’t recognize an intelligent man. I hate to ask, since you’ve been so tolerant already, but who do you think is doing this to us, and why would they bother?”
“It’s not clear,” he says, which is both honest and appropriately unforthcoming. “There’s a pattern but I can’t quite see it.”
“Your family’s been political for generations, right? And owns like one percent of Brazil?”
“Less than that,” he says reflexively. “Especially now.”
“Maybe someone wants you for leverage? Whether hostage, spy or pawn, you’re a good thing to own.”
“Maybe the surgeon is corrupt, but how would they have gotten my mother to abandon us?”
“Maybe she had to make some hard decisions,” says Akemi. “You have two brothers, right? Maybe her back was against the wall, and she wanted to hold onto something.”
He starts to get out of the car but she seizes his wrist and it’s less like she’s compelling him than like she’s afraid he’ll disappear so he doesn’t insist and after a moment of terrible silence he says, “Is your family political too?”
“No,” she says, smiling thinly. “I wouldn’t say that. It’s less obvious why they’re interested in me. At first I thought they wanted an actress who was a reliable commodity—someone who couldn’t refuse projects, forget her lines or shoot up between scenes. I’m in the sweet spot—I have the goods, but no leverage, and no one’s going to miss me. Or it could be less than that—maybe they’ve got a new technology, and I’m just a trial run.”
“You sound so resigned.”
“You have to work within the givens. Like now. I’ll find a way out, because there’s always a way out, and I’ve been in worse spots than this. Anyway, I have an idea—you tell me if it’s dumb or not.” Her uncertainty and need for his approval are all but palpable. “You know the surgeon’s tablet? Maybe that’s how he’s changing us. They know I ran away, but they probably still think you’ll do what you’re told. You could be in a position to take action.”
“Even if I could get the tablet, it wouldn’t matter. They’ll have other means of access.”
“Couldn’t you lock them out?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“It seems desperate.”
“Yes,” she says. “But it’s better than just giving up. Do you want to let them make you a slave without putting up a fight? Anyway, it’s obvious that you’re brilliant. I could see it the moment I met you. You practically shine. You could figure it out, couldn’t you, you of all people?”
“I … maybe,” he says. “But why would he give me his tablet in the first place?”
He freezes as she takes the pistol from her pocket—it’s practically an antique, an old-school Colt revolver with a purely mechanical action—and he wonders if earlier he miscalculated and now he’s going to suffer, but she reverses the gun, puts it on his palm, presses his fingers around the handle.