Saga (3 page)

“Now, stay still.” He had tied ice into a cloth and was trying to wrap it around my swollen ankle. I waved him away.

“No time for that, Nath. We’re going on a mall raid.”

His face fell. “You should rest, keep the weight off it.”

“I’ll be fine. Toss me the medic bag, will you?” This was directed at Milan, who looked up from the projection, then pushed himself across the floor, the wheels of his chair allowing him to coast to where we kept a bag of medical supplies.

“Here.” He lofted it over.

There was a lot of junk in the bag, in no particular order, but I rummaged out some spray and elastic binding. The effect of the spray was instant and I prodded at my ankle, curious that I couldn’t feel the pressure of my finger, let alone any pain. After I had bound my ankle tightly, the boot went back on easily. I was aware of Nathan’s anxious presence somewhere behind me.

“I’m set,” I announced.

“Me, too.” Carter beamed happily.

“We’re out of here in ten, then.” Jay snapped off his laser pen and jumped from his chair, looking for his gear.

“Nobody is going anywhere!” You hardly ever got to hear Athena shout, so when she did, you listened. Even the pigeons stood still. “We are not setting out while you two are rushing. Let the jeebie burn off some, or you’ll charge out thinking you can do anything and you’ll forget the basics.”

“But I can do anything!” Carter laughed.

Milan gave Carter a long, steady look. “Athena’s right. Take your time, get your head together.”

While we packed our satchels, Nathan came over to me again.

“You gonna tell me not to go?” I looked at him defiantly.

“Of course not. I brought you this.”

It was a board tattoo.

“Oh. Sweet. Thanks, Nath. Let’s see it.” I heaved my board around and we knelt on either side of it. Holding back his hair with one hand, Nathan sprayed off the old tattoo, and then peeled the backing from his new one. The tattoo settled on the center of the board, before spreading its tendrils toward the edge. The focus of the design was a black ♥, but all around it a terrible specter took form, a wraith of bony claws and hooded eyes. When the design stabilized, it was perfect. I had a board from hell.

“Wow, Nath! That’s your best one yet.” I leaned over and gave him a light punch on the shoulder. “Thanks, mate.”

He smiled, a very shy and genuine smile. “Pleasure.”

 

Thirty minutes later, we were mall raiding. A professional hit squad, not a bunch of kids. T-shirts and torn jeans had been swapped for combats, pockets filled with sprays, tags, gum, putty, ball bearings: anything that could really make a mess of a shopping center in a short space of time. Then there was the high-tech gear donated to us by a variety of stores with poor security systems. We all had Levcast body armor: “Tough times demand tough protection.” Our coms were Fcom Ava 440s, “pure sound, pure listening,” and I was particularly pleased with our anti-tracking Celere V IIs: “freedom is a right.”

Right now, our coms were saturated by a series of two-minute punk anthems.
The Greatest of the Greatest Punk Bands—
Volume 34, no less. They weren’t bad for hyping you up, although I’d never have deducted good credit to download them.

The music suddenly stopped mid-riff, which was slightly disconcerting. We were in position, on a walkway behind a restaurant. My face screwed up against the odor of rotting vegetables. That stink wasn’t on the schematics.

“See it?” Jay pointed to a nearby alley.

“Aye-aye, Cap’n.” You could hear the mockery in Carter’s voice.

“Masks on; here goes,” Jay continued, unperturbed.

The masks were not just for disguise—vision actually improved in the goggles; dark shadows were enhanced and glare cut out by a green tint.

This was my part of the raid, and I was the first to tip my board over the edge of the walkway, gliding down the alley to where it joined the delivery road.

“Two cameras. Wait here.”

I left them in the shadow of the wall, while I double-footed. The alley was sufficiently narrow that you could ollie your board to get alternative uphits, frontside and backside, zigzagging to get some height. Once high enough, I took off, to land on the cameras from above. Then I slid my toolkit from its pocket and paused the video send. I quickly boarded over to the other camera. Both were frozen in less than a minute, locked onto an image of innocent order.

Once I was down again, opening the gates took less than thirty seconds.

“Go.”

Silent and swift, they boarded past me and into a vast underground parking lot, from which trucks unloaded their goods into elevators. There were a few trucks around and several workers in overalls, but they were a long way off.

We continued along the shadows of the walls to a corridor that led to the elevators we had identified as the best way in. There were two ways of reaching the end of the hall undetected. One was to disable or fool the swipe-card access, which I could certainly do. But the second was the quicker way.

“Fibers in the hole!” I tossed a grenade.

Fummpfff
. With a soft sigh, the corridor was filled with minuscule strands of polypropylene. As they swirled around, millions of tiny reflections revealed the path of some fifty laser trips. Now we rode the corridor like a stunt course, ducking and weaving along a path created by the gaps between the beams.

Once we were in the elevator, it was Athena’s turn to set to work, opening a panel to get at the colorful wires behind, and clipping her notebook into their system. I felt a surge of affection for her. It was fantastic to have someone so competent on your team. I hoped the others felt the same way about me. The elevator carried us all up, smooth and swift, a gentle mall broadcast in the background.

A polite, warm female voice spoke over a distant melody. Carter was nodding his head to the background Muzak, and I couldn’t tell whether this was a parody or the effect of the jeebie he had taken earlier, turning the music into something he actually enjoyed.

“Customers, enhance your shopping experience with a visit to Fowler’s manicure and pedicure parlor. Browse the catalogs of all our stores while you relax in their award-winning comfort seating, and receive the attentions of the finest beauticians in the City. All free and part of the service of Mountain Vistas Mall.”

The Muzak swelled up slightly.

“Fowler’s can be found on the fourth floor, between the swimming pool and Café Noir.”

Ding.
The elevator doors opened.

There are chemicals in the air of shopping malls, I’m sure. Every time we got in one, I was struck by their smell, a kind of sweet vanilla. Probably years of research have gone into the subject, to make the air as shopper-friendly as possible.

This mall was worth its green rating. We looked down a wide central space through which we were about to descend, at six floors that glowed with a pleasant shopping ambience, created above all by the huge glass dome above us.

Time for chaos with wings.

“Customers, as a special offer—”

We will never know what treat was in store for the green-card shoppers. A massive heavy guitar chord crashed through the mall’s P.A. as if someone had thrown a piano down all six floors. Drums kicked in, a thunderstorm breaking in the ears of the people below.

“Customers, we apologize for”—
bzzt
.

Athena shrugged. “Sorry, they have a good system. But it’s ours now.”

And the band played on.

Personally I preferred more sophisticated lyrics. But it was Jay’s band, and it did make mall raiding more fun to have it blasted out around us by the mall’s own system. A kind of revenge for the Muzak they forced on people.

I was already on floor three, the tropical island experience. Security guards were beginning to recover from their initial shock and were all talking at once into their nonfunctioning walkie-talkies. Rapidly I fired out a few slogans. I began with big red anarchy signs. They looked good on the glass frontage of a swimwear store. Even better on the autobarman’s white shirt at Malibu Bar. Best of all, a nice row along “Vistas of Heaven—Art Prints for the Discerning Home.” A red-faced guard, waving his arms, caused me to cut back, but no harm. I hadn’t yet gummed the escalators, which I did now, smiling to see the consternation of those who now found themselves having to engage in the unexpected exercise of walking up a staircase.

Then I lined up on some immense billboards and shot.

Shop, don’t stop till you drop
. That looked good on a sports footwear ad.

Property is theft.
A classic. Worked well, I thought, on a board showing green-card apartments.

Poverty is a crime.
Lacking in humor, but still, needed to be said.

Consume more. It is the measure of your life.
Exaggerating the real slogans of the corporations sometimes worked well to expose the absurdity of their claims. Occasionally, though, the advertisers themselves shamelessly used the very same slogans.

“Four more minutes.” Athena’s voice came through our headsets.

“How we doing?” asked Nathan.

“I’ve got the giggles. I’m still twisted; I can’t stop giggling.” And we could hear a constant
gurr-gurr
sound as Carter chuckled away to himself.

Time for a couple more slogans. I weaved in and out through frightened shoppers, leaving the chasing guards far behind.

“Heads right up, look at this!”

It took me a moment to reach the center so I could look up and see what Jay was referring to. He was grinding along a metal stanchion right underneath the roof of the dome. A can was in his hand from which he was spraying a jet of yellow-and-blue flame.

“Lunatic,” Milan muttered.

“What are you doing?” asked Carter with genuine curiosity.

Jay didn’t have to answer. A moment later, cascades of water sprang from the fire-safety nozzles. Soon a thousand wonderful rainbows glittered throughout the mall, created by the reflection of the bright lights of the shops in the thin haze made by the spray.

“Class, huh?” Jay laughed.

“Classimundo!” cheered Carter.

It was a good touch. I had to admit it.

“You have a hundred and fifty seconds to get out. Time to leave.” Athena called it. She was monitoring the police systems.

As I nose-boarded down toward my designated exit, arms outstretched, feeling the simulated rainfall, I took a moment to enjoy the view. Green-card holders in expensive dresses and suits were hurrying toward the exits, bags with the logos of the large corporations held above their heads, flimsy protection from the thin but persistent spray of the fire alarms.

The others had done a good job, and the mall was a parody of its former self. Bedraggled and smeared with a hundred anarchist slogans, it looked like a waistcoated groom who had run through a factory paint shop, staggering out the other side a bright and disheveled ruin.

“Get out now!” Athena cried into our headsets.

“What’s up?” asked Milan. But there was no reply.

A moment later, everything shut down.

Instinctively I ducked down to grab my board, but it was no help. For the second time today, I fell, this time hitting the escalator stairs and rolling head over heels to their bottom, lucky not to have broken an arm or worse. Every neon sign in the building was off, including the green safety signs. All my equipment was dead. Someone must have fired a high-energy radio frequency bomb into the mall. Someone who really wanted us and didn’t care about the cost.

Above the glass roof, a giant shadow, like fingers spreading, reaching down to clasp the whole mall, and the slow, ominous throb of a powerful aircraft.

Limping with the resurgent pain in my left leg, I ran into mr. green. Frightened and desperate, I even left my beloved airboard behind; it couldn’t help me now that its engine and anti-grav units were fried. Two security guards saw me and, with a shout, came running.

Somewhere deep down, a little nine-year-old girl was screaming with terror. Never, even when I was sneaking around blue zones, had I felt this close to capture. The very thought of it made me gag. I was sobbing aloud as I staggered through eveningwear, dragging over the rails of black suits to slow down the pursuit.

They were only ten meters behind me when I leaped over a credit desk and through the swing door beyond into a staffroom. I kicked open another door that opened up to women’s casual wear, but ducked back into a small kitchen instead of heading out into the sea of pink, white, and pastel colors.

They blundered past. Fooled? No, they had stopped.

“Where’d she go?”

“You keep going, I’ll check the staffroom.”

By this time, I was squeezed tight into a cupboard, crushing beneath me packets of instant soup and nutribars. The urgent steps of the guard came into the room. Tears were in my eyes as I tried to control my heart. It was banging so hard inside my chest that I was more worried about dying right there than the fact that he might hear me.

The cupboard door opened.

“Hello, little girl.”

Oh mercy.

Never had I
felt as much dread as I did in this stark-white police room. Not a fear based on the prospect of some kind of punishment for having broken into a mall and sprayed slogans but an inchoate terror, springing from some unfathom-ably deep, unconscious core of my being. Some part of me, a part formed long before my first memory, was howling like a caged wolf. It was impossible to suppress the shudders that welled up from my stomach, or the wave after wave of sweat that caused an acrid odor to linger in the air around me.