ZerOes (19 page)

“Yo, hey, Dipesh Mode,” DeAndre says, jogging forward. “What's wrong, man?”

Miranda holds up a hand and shakes her head. Her smile is strained. “We're okay. Really.” Then, to Dipesh: “Come, Dipesh.”

Chance approaches from the other side, puts a hand on Dipesh's shoulder. “It's all right, dude. Whatever it is, just let it all hang out. No judgment here, brother.”

Aleena hangs back, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. Chance gives her a look, tries to do that thing where you psychically convey a message:
You okay?
She must get enough of it, because she gives an awkward nod, then looks away.

Dipesh stands up straight. Fishes out a mealy tissue from his jeans,
blows his nose. Wipes his eyes with it, too. “Thanks, guys,” he says, his words sticky. “It means a lot.”

Miranda puts her arm around him and he leans his head on her shoulder. He stares out, not
at
anyone, but rather, over them. Miranda says: “It's just been a hard day.”

A bitter bark from Dipesh. “Hard day?”

“What happened, D?” DeAndre asks.

“We can't talk about it,” Miranda says just as Dipesh opens his mouth.

“Miranda, we have to tell them.”

“Don't make things hard,” she pleads. Her voice cracks and some emotion bleeds in, too. “Today was hard enough, like you said.”

Chance and DeAndre share looks. Chance says, “I gotta admit, I'm a bit lost.”

“You'll see,” Dipesh says. “You start your pod missions, right? You'll see.”

Miranda starts to pull Dipesh away.

“Who is Typhon?” Aleena asks.

Miranda and Dipesh halt, shell-shocked by the question. Deer in the headlights of an onrushing Peterbilt.

Aleena asks it again. Louder this time. “Who is Typhon?”

Miranda says, almost sadly: “We don't know.”

“But we want to find out,” Dipesh says.

And then they really are gone. They whirl away, the unanswered question lingering.

Suddenly, Wade's off the boulder and with them, too. He grunts at them: “Dinnertime, kiddies.”

Shane runs his key card through the slider next to the door, which pops open with a hiss. Reagan enters, reverent. Shane's cabin is like a palace. A temple.
A place worthy of awe
. The rest of the cabins at the Hunting Lodge are nice enough, she guesses: simple, utilitarian. But Graves's cabin? Decked. The. Fuck. Out.

First, he lives alone. Like, nobody else here but him. And he has an access card that allows him entrance. Nobody else gets that.
Nobody
.

Then, he's got a bed in the loft. A flat-screen TV downstairs with a
video game console hooked up (“Last gen,” he says somewhat disappointedly, like a rich kid who has to play with last year's toys). A small couch (white pleather, ugly as a sun-bleached whale carcass) sits across from it, and next to the couch is a mini-fridge. Full of water, soda, lunch meat, shit like that. Posters on the walls show movies from the eighties and nineties. Some popular (
Ghostbusters, Gremlins 2
, and, of course,
Fight Club
), some obscure (
The Osterman Weekend, Robotrix, Lost Highway
).

But the real kicker? He has a laptop. All his own. It's not connected to any network, so it can't reach outside the Hunting Lodge, but nobody else is afforded the privilege. Giving a laptop to a jailed hacker is like giving any other prisoner a hunting knife, some rope, and a loaded shotgun. (When she first saw that he had it, he remarked: “Ironic, because if I had gone the other way—taken my chances with the legal system—they would've banned me from using a computer for ten, maybe twenty years.”)

Two of Shane's crew are on the couch, playing some racing game. One of the Need for Speed titles, she guesses. They've probably been in here all day. The one is Daryl Scafidi, aka “the Warlock”: he's a thick-necked halfwit with acne scars so bad Reagan teases him that if he's not careful NASA will try to land on him, plant a flag. Next to him sits the LARPer: Shiro, the Tokyo-born goth who online—and often in person, particularly when he's role-playing—goes by Kuei-Jin Orochi, White Worm of Hokkaido. Both turds.

“Shandor, 'sup,” Scafidi says, lifting a fist over his head as Shane passes. Shane ignores the fist bump and keeps walking. Reagan loves that about him: he
so
doesn't give a shit. And the more he ignores his own pod, the more they
love him for it
.

“Get out,” Shane says finally.

Scafidi looks to Reagan and says, “You heard the man.”

Reagan makes a V out of her index and middle finger, then waggles her tongue in the space between them. Scafidi makes a face like he just caught a glimpse of
2 Girls 1 Cup
, then goes back to his game.

Shane, voice louder: “I mean you, Warlock. You too, Shiro.”

The two of them scoot past Reagan on the way out. She bites her lip and makes a lusty face at them as they hurry by. “Scurry, little mice, or I'll gobble you up,” she says. “Nnnngh.”

“You're fucked up, Stolper,” Shane says, going to the desk on which his computer sits. He opens a drawer, riffles through it.

“So, what's the deal?” Reagan asks. “How do you manage all this stuff? You can give up the ghost. I'm on your side by now, you know that.”

He pauses. “The hacks need things. I get them things.”

“Like, what, you buy them beer? Nudie mags?”

“Jesus Christ, Stolper, no. Take Roach, for instance. Roach is going through a bad divorce. Apocalyptically bad. She's making all kinds of accusations about him—which, you know, are true, because James Roach is a scumbag. But Roach needed a little counterbalance, so I hacked his wife's accounts, found out she's been cheating on him with her boss. Or—consider our minder, Rivera. You actually see much of Rivera?”

She shakes her head. “Nope. Just at mealtimes. And I think he jerks off in the supply closet near the rec room.”

“He leaves us alone because I'm getting him
paid
. Shiro hacked a few cryptocurrencies—Simoleons, Spec-Coin, Chimpcharge—and cashed out in Rivera's name. Now Rivera doesn't even
look
in our general direction. I could kick a puppy and he'd look the other way.”

Reagan shrugs. “You're the king. What can I say.”

“I have to be. Like I said: bigger designs at work.” He walks up, slaps a USB key into her hand. “Tonight, dinner. Get this into Dalton's pocket.”

“Uhhh.” She snort-laughs. “How am I supposed to do that? I'm not a master thief.”

“Just get it in his pocket. You do that, you're in.”

“I'm in?”

He nods and gives her an odious half smile, a look that conjures a sense of disappointment in the ugly compromise he's making. “I'll get you in my pod, yeah.”

Bingo.

THE CAFETERIA

A
leena is in line with her tray. Chance is behind her, and DeAndre is off “draining the dragon” (his words, not hers). Wade is sitting down because he likes to wait till everyone else is done, then take his sweet time picking food.

It seems like there's a pall hanging over the cafeteria. Some dark, invisible thread she can't quite tease out. Maybe it's Dinesh. There's not even a hundred people here in this room—some news travels fast. Though, they're also a secretive, hush-hush bunch, so maybe not. Still, Dinesh, Miranda, and the rest of their pod are absent. Their normal table sits empty—a notable absence that has a kind of black hole gravity to it.

It's affecting her, too. So many things going on inside her head. There's an excitement—
the Widow of Zheng contacted me
. There's fear—
I don't know what's going on at home, or with Qasim, or with the protests
. There's . . . something else. And there she looks back and sees Chance just behind her in line and he gives her a smile and she gives him a smile,
but then
she frowns because she doesn't want him to think she likes him. (
You don't like him
. This she repeats, a strange mantra.)

That's when she feels it. A hand. Right on her ass. She thinks:
It's Chance
. A spike of anger lances through her and she wheels around and sees Shane Graves standing there. Lips puckered in a cheeky smirk. “I know you want it,” he says.

“Get your hand off my ass,” she growls. She reaches down, grabs Shane's wrist—

And a tray comes out of nowhere, hits Shane square in the face. A cob of corn and a burger pinwheel in the air.

Graves staggers back and Chance presses the attack, raising the tray again.

“That's your freebie,” Shane snarls—just as Reagan passes behind him, hot-stepping out of the way. Graves kicks out with a leg. The heel of his foot snaps hard into Chance's knee. Chance howls. Then he plants the wounded leg back and brings the tray down again upon Shane's head.

That's the last hit Chance gets. At that point, Shane takes Chance apart with the mercilessness of a butcher. He knows some kind of martial art—what looks to Aleena like Krav Maga. He stabs out with the flat of his hand, catches Chance right in the throat. A knee to the side. A knee to the groin. Then he throws Chance into a table—which flips over, knocking the book Wade was reading up into the air.

Aleena reaches behind her, grabs the fork off the tray. A voice inside her makes clear what's going to happen next:
I'm going to kill Shane Graves
.

That's a curious thing, that thought, because she's wanted to kill people before but not quite this viscerally—and not in a way where she could really
act
on it so fast. She steps toward Shane—who has his back to her—and twirls the fork so the tines face down—

Reagan steps in front of her.

“Move,” Aleena hisses.

“Not now,” Reagan hisses. “The hacks are coming.”

“Reagan, get out of my—”

Reagan holds up a key card. “You want Shane? I'm in. But you gotta sit still for now and”—she gently plucks the fork out of Aleena's hand—“stand. Down.”

And then: boom. The hacks are in the room. Roach grabs Chance just as he starts to get up, throws him back against the table. Metzger steps in front of Shane, waggles a finger, says, “Nuh-uh, sweetheart.”

Aleena feels gutted. Like she could've acted—
should've
acted—and didn't. But then, in another moment straight from Bizarro World, Reagan is shouting and pointing at Shane. “He's got a weapon! Back pocket!”

Things feel slippery, topsy-turvy, when Metzger spins Shane around and begins to pat him down. Shane protests and gives Reagan a look that has fangs.

“Hey, what's this, Graves?” Metzger says. She pulls a USB key from his back pocket.

Suddenly the rest of Graves's pod is there—stepping up, yelling, shouting. The rest of the hackers start yelling, too. It's chaos, like something out of a primate house at a zoo—everyone smells blood in the air and the coppery tang has them thrashing against the bars of their cages. Aleena watches, dazed and confused, as one of Graves's pod—Daryl something or other, she thinks they call him Warlock—rushes Roach and gets a Taser in the gut. He shakes like an epileptic, piggy-squealing as he drops.

Reagan hooks Aleena's arm in her own. “Now's our chance, c'mon.”

And Aleena is dragged along for the ride.

Chance struggles. Elbows out, legs kicking, anything to make it harder for them to drag him back down through the woods. But halfway to the springhouse, Roach has the others hold him up as he grabs Chance's hand—or, rather, grabs all four fingers and straightens them out just before bending them back. Pain like an arc of lightning goes from Chance's hand to his shoulders. “Quit thrashing around like a fish,” Roach growls, “or I'll break these. Gonna be a lot harder to do all your typing with a hand full of broken fingers, yeah?”

Chance nods. “I'll stop. I'll stop.”

“Good.” Roach nods to Chen and another guard—this one a strip of human beef jerky named Ashbaugh—and they carry him back down the forest trail.

“Look at the footage,” Chance says. “Shane attacked Aleena. You'll see. You'll see, c'mon. And God, he was beating my ass and—” He hears the desperation in his voice, each word corroded by fear.

Suddenly they're at the springhouse. Door open. They don't drop
him by the chair. They take him to the Dep. Chance tries to scrabble for the door, but Roach kicks him in the side.

The other two open up the Dep. The seal pops. A wet smell tinged with chlorine fills the air. Ashbaugh grins. “You know they use these in Guantánamo? On high-value suspects. Cool, huh.”

Roach pops his Taser, fires one into Chance's chest. Everything goes full-tilt pinball.

Roach says, “I think given our last meeting in here, it's time to go right to twelve hours. Don't you think, Chen?”

Chen just laughs.

They toss Chance in and close the top over him. It drops, pops, and locks. And suddenly he's alone with himself, the water, and the darkness.

Chance screams.

DeAndre comes back from the bathroom, finds the cafeteria in disarray. A handful of chairs overturned. A table, too. Food is splattered around and the Lodge janitor—big flabby guy named Pike—is lazily pushing a mop.

Wade sits on one chair, has his feet up on another. He's reading a book.
Watership Down
.

“The hell happened in here, man?” DeAndre asks.

Wade shrugs. “Some kind of pissing match, the ramifications and permutations of which remain blissfully hidden to my old eyes.”

“Man, whatever.”

Wade goes back to reading.

Hollis sits across from Shane Graves. It's just the two of them.

“Shane Graves,” Copper says. “I do not believe we've been formally introduced.”

The hacker sits there, arms folded across his chest like an impudent child. “We haven't met, but I do my homework, Agent Copper of the FBI. Ex-wife: Shiree. Son: Kyle. Been in the Bureau for . . . thirty years? I haven't even
turned
thirty yet.”

“Next year, though.”

“Hm?”

“Next year. You turn thirty.”

“Yeah. That's right.”

“I liked my thirties. I feel like I really grew up in my thirties,” Copper says. “Feels like you know yourself. Know what you want. Know just who you are.”

Shane sneers. “I already know who I am, thanks.”

“I know who you are, too. I can do my homework. I know you're a wet-nosed punk who thinks he's some kind of celebrity. Getting on YouTube and showing people how you hack into airplanes and insulin pumps and all that shit.”

“Vimeo. Not YouTube.”

“I give a shit. I know you. I've seen you. Rich white kid who's somehow convinced himself he's the underdog. Just you against the world. Daddy was a cheat. Mommy was a pillhead. Makes you mad. So you go out, do your thing, pretending you're some kind of iconoclast hero, some champion of the common man when really,
really
, all you're interested in is getting high off your own shit-stink. Meanwhile, you start gathering enemies. Because you're like a stage magician who decides to expose the magic tricks of your fellow
illusionists
.”

“I just speak truth to power.” Shane shrugs. “People don't like it when you show them how vulnerable they are.”

“Is that what you're doing?”

“Everything's connected, Copper. Every day we plug another part of our lives into the grid. We have
refrigerators
that connect to the Internet, for fuck's sake. People fill those refrigerators using handheld Wi-Fi scanners from their favorite big online retailer, and all that stuff talks to each other. Your thermostat talks to your smoke detector which talks to your phone which talks to a thousand different things, and each of them talks to a thousand more, and soon you start to realize how your fucking garage opener is connected to the stock market by a very tenuous string of ones and zeroes, bits and bytes, and all I have to do is jump into the stream somewhere.”

Hollis blinks. Fakes a yawn. “I gotta be honest, I faded out there in the middle.”

“You should pay better attention. Everything is connected to everything else. Like a spider's web. Pluck a thread on one end? The spider
feels it on the other. Twenty years ago, Copper, no way I would be able to tell you that I saw what happened at Fellhurst.”

A cold knife, invisible, slides into Hollis. His fingers and toes tingle. Every part of him wants to panic. Instead he just tightens his jaw. “What?”

“Fellhurst, Agent Copper.”

“I don't know Fellhurst.”

“I'm pretty sure you do.” Shane smiles. “I know what you did there. I know what you did to that woman. I know that it wasn't long after Fellhurst that your wife left you. I know that your performance reviews after Fellhurst went
up
, not
down
—indicative of throwing yourself into your work. Driven by guilt, maybe. Or maybe because you got a secret thrill, you sick fucking—”

Hollis stabs out with a hand, catches Shane's throat. He squeezes. Shane starts to flail, hands into fists, but already the FBI agent has his pistol out and the gun pressed against Shane's breastbone. “Shut up. Stop moving.”

The tension doesn't leave Shane's body, but the fight does.

“You don't know rat shit from a rubber hose,” Copper seethes. His face feels hot. He lets go of Shane's neck, pushes him back into his chair, then sits back into his own, holstering his Glock.

Shane, stung, wounded, rubs the skin around his neck. Already Hollis can see the gears turning behind the hacker's eyes. This one's got an eye for vengeance. Best to cut his legs out from under him.