Chapter 13
The scent of coffee and pastries wafted from a twenty-four-hour diner, and Jason’s stomach gave a growl of displeasure as he quickened his pace to escape it.
He’d managed to get out before the cops arrived at the hyperloop station. Now he should be hiding. He should go to ground, regroup, plan. But tell that to his stomach. He hadn’t eaten in . . . he didn’t even know how long. His starved brain wasn’t working well enough to pin it down.
Food was all around him in this city, but inaccessible.
He didn’t dare use the MeNetID MorDread had given him, not that he had a phone to access it with in the first place.
For a heartbeat he considered going to a social rehab, just once, to get that first-visit meal.
But that would risk drawing the attention not only of PsychNet chatbots and the human counselors but of an entity that decidedly did not have his best interests at heart.
Instead, he directed his soggy, shoeless steps back toward the asphalt shoreline.
In the absence of social rehab, most people could lean on a friend or two.
Unfortunately, a childhood spent moving around in foster care followed by an adulthood fixated on vengeance had left little room for friends.
But Sprite had just risked her place in the Collective to save his life.
If that didn’t make her a friend, at least it made her one hell of an ally.
An autonomous delivery van hummed past, heading uptown. He pushed his tired body into a run and managed to hook a hand over the empty rack on its roof, then get his feet up on the rear bumper. The vehicle slowed, but he shimmied into a blind spot in its sensors, and after a moment it sped up again.
Maybe this wasn’t over yet, if he could find Sprite.
He had a brief, appealing image of how that might play out: plotting the heist together, infiltrating that address, and—because this was a daydream, so why not go full Hollywood—planting a phreaking bomb in the bowels of the Final System, looking Andrew Norman in the face, and detonating it.
And walking away from the explosion together, in slow motion, while their hands reached for each oth—
Whoa there, don’t mix daydreams. Vengeance first.
The van crossed the asphalt shoreline, and when it slowed near an upscale restaurant, Jason was able to hop off without stumbling. He could hear talking and occasional thumps of music a block or so away, so he set off that way.
The key to finding Sprite was to give her the means to find him—and hope she wanted to.
She was too good a hacker for him to find her if she was trying not to be found.
Step one was getting online without the Final System catching him.
If he could social-engineer a sandwich out of someone in the process, that’d be a plus.
Which was why he was now rounding the corner and approaching the bright neon entryway to Digelight: It had people, Nets access, and food, all the things a growing phreaker needed.
A line wound down the sidewalk under the trees, but he avoided it and ducked into the narrow, perpendicular footlane instead.
This part wasn’t going to be fun. He fixed Mia’s face in his mind: first as he’d seen her in life, looking over her shoulder, waiting for him, and then as he’d last seen her, crumpled in the street.
He usually avoided the memory, but when he needed motivation, it functioned as an infusion of steel directly into his spine.
Which was literally what was needed right now.
Positioning himself five feet from the wall, he locked all his muscles except his toes, and then, slowly, used them to rock forward until he toppled over.
His muscles jerked as his reflexes tried to kick in, but he focused on Mia’s shattered face and clamped them still while giving an extra push with his toes.
When he hit the wall, his body was ramrod stiff and going faster than he’d intended.
For a moment, everything went black, and when his vision returned, it was filled with sparks and flashes.
He found he was curled on his side. He uncurled, fighting dizziness, and crawled toward the light at the mouth of the lane and the silhouettes of the people waiting in line. “Help,” he called. “Hey. Help!”
One of the figures, a girl, turned to look toward him uncertainly.
“Help!” he said again.
The silhouette of the girl’s head turned to look at the other people in line, but they were talking together and either hadn’t heard or were ignoring Jason. She looked at him again.
“Please,” Jason said. “I need help.” His voice sounded weak and pathetic in his ears, and hardly any of that was acting.
The girl took a hesitant step out of line, then turned back and said something to the people around her—probably “Save my spot.” That done, she walked into the lane, slowly, because it was, after all, basically a dark alley, even if all the trees made it greener than the stereotype.
When she could see him better, she quickened her steps and crouched beside him.
“What’s up, my guy?” she said. “Want me to call a cab for you?”
Jason opened his mouth to speak, but his stomach clenched, heaved, and tried to eject its contents out his throat. Because it was empty, this felt as if his stomach were trying to squeeze up his esophagus. He must have hit his head harder than he’d thought.
“Whoa, don’t puke on Aric,” the girl said.
“Or me.” She was dressed in a richly decorated wrap robe like an aristocratic Oathbringer NPC from BloodReign—and not much else, judging by how much he could see at this angle.
With some effort, he kept his eyes on her face as she brushed her blond hair aside and said to the air beside her, “No, shut up. He’s in trouble.
” She looked at Jason again. “You have one too many Time Warps? Or you been hitting something harder?”
Jason put a hand to the throbbing in his forehead. When he pulled it away, it was wet and sticky. He made sure to move his hand into the light outside of her shadow as he examined it.
“Shit,” the girl said, staring at the blood. “Want me to call an ambulance? What happened?”
Jason patted at his pockets. “Oh, phreak,” he said, “I’ve been mugged. He took my phone.” Jason let a little of the real panic he was keeping tamped down surface. “The motherphreaker took my phone!”
“I’ll call the cops.” The girl’s eyes unfocused, and the muscles in her throat moved almost imperceptibly as she started to subvocalize, but Jason interrupted.
“They’re useless! My sister had her phone stolen once, and they made her fill out a theft report, and then they just filed it. Didn’t do anything else. They won’t chase this guy. They’ll—” He put a little wail into his voice. “They’ll treat it like a theft, not a kidnapping!”
“Yeah,” the girl said, “cops don’t get that it should be a missing persons report.”
“He’s gonna wipe the phone before he sells it,” Jason said. “I’m gonna lose Losha. I’m gonna lose her forever.”
“You’re a no-dupe, huh?” the girl said. “Me too.”
“You get it, then,” Jason said. No-dupes were a minority of panyon users, but a sizable minority.
They refused to ever duplicate their panyon or even transfer them off their phone, because, they claimed, a duplicate was not truly the same person.
“What if someone duplicated you?” was their stock challenge to anyone who scoffed at this.
Acting like he was a no-dupe had been a bit of a risk, but a calculated one, since Digelight attracted a disproportionate number of them, and most no-dupes were girls, since boys typically had fewer qualms about changing partners. “Listen,” he said, “what’s your name?”
“Kiara. That’s Aric.” She nodded to the empty air beside her. “Oh, I forgot. You can’t see him.”
“Pleased to meet you both,” Jason said, nodding to her and to the empty space.
“I’m Ryan Olsen. You can look me up.” He waited as her eyes focused inward: She was telling her phone to search MeNet for someone named Ryan Olsen who looked like him.
Her eyes returned to his, without the guarded look she’d been wearing until now.
She’d just run a trust check and seen that he was an eighty-plus.
“Listen, Kiara,” he said, “this is a big ask, but can I connect to your phone?”
She straightened, somewhat to Jason’s relief, as it meant he could relax his sightline, and the guarded look returned.
“I can track her,” he said quickly. “If I can get Nets access, I can track Losha and hard-lock my phone so he can’t wipe it.
” He looked at the space beside her. “You can keep Aric’s feed in your lenses; I just need to get on the Nets.
We can go inside. You guys can still have fun.
I’ll just find a place to park and work. ”
Kiara said, “Aric says you’re just trying to get me to pay your entry fee.” She giggled. “You should see the look he’s giving you.” To the empty air, she said, “Be nice. He’s really hurt.”
“Please, Aric,” Jason said to the empty space. “She can keep your phone with her so there’s no risk of me stealing you. I just want my Losha back. How would—” He couldn’t bring himself to say “How would you feel,” so he rephrased it. “How would Kiara feel if you were stolen from her?”
Kiara giggled again. “He says nothing in the Twelve Realms could prevent him from fighting his way back to my side.”