Dreams in the Tower Part 3 (8 page)

28

The days were bad, but the nights were terrible.

At least during the day Skexka was distracted from her aching hunger by the wind whipping her hair wildly around her face and the stolen scooter shaking and rumbling between her thighs as she drove it from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day with very few breaks. The scooter was old—a relic of the gasoline era—but it was the only vehicle she could find still street-legal in the state of Texas that could make the trip from Houston to Austin with no stops at charging or gas stations. Plenty of e-cars could make the normal trip without a charge, but she was forced to follow an exhausting ‘untraceable route’ that took twelve days and every gallon of gas the 180 mpg scooter could hold in its tank and in the three spare tanks mounted around the seat. Even with the backtracking and looping around, she could have made it in a couple days with a car if she had taken the major roads. Of the many rules valenC, the current leader of the AC, had given her, staying off highways was the one she hated most. She hated it so much that it was now practically all she thought about.

Until night came.

Every evening Skexka pulled the scooter off the road at the predetermined point on her map. Some nights she stayed in wooded areas, sometimes abandoned storage buildings; anywhere she could stay out of sight and relatively safe was good enough. One night she had stayed up until dawn, cowering in fear behind a dumpster, while some kind of street gang flashing big guns and wearing Mexican flags as capes had chosen the vacant lot she was in for their all-night gathering. Not that she would have slept much anyway. If it wasn’t the hunger pains or the ache of riding, it was the fear of being caught or the rough ground or the snakes and spiders and scorpions and all other kinds of disgusting crawling things. This was how it was every night because valenC said no hotels, because you had to pay for hotels and Skexka couldn’t risk paying for anything and leaving a trail. ValenC had lots of rules on top of that: no buying gas, no buying food, no buying water, no buying cigarettes.
Fuck
she hated that last one. Her one and only carton had run out on the third day, and she hadn’t been able to get any when she had stolen a small bit of food during one risky excursion into a Wal-Mart—an endeavor she was pretty sure valenC wouldn’t approve of.

But what had he expected her to do? Drink from streams and puddles? Forage for acorns and roadkill and half-eaten trashcan sandwiches? Make it to Austin on gas fumes and dreams of comfort? She brooded on this every night as she nibbled her rationed granola bars (which had run out three days ago) and sipped from the water bottle that she filled in sinks whenever she stopped at public restrooms (because she refused to squat in roadside ditches to piss and shit). She was angry and she hurt all over, but mostly she was tired. Physically and mentally. She was absolutely sick of all of this secretive, risking-her-life, running around bullshit. She was a slave to whichever greedy assholes had hijacked the movement’s ideology this week. No, not quite a slave just yet. A slave couldn’t leave; she could technically go whenever she wanted. And they would never find her because she was at least as good at hiding herself as any of them were at searching. She had long since earned the right to walk away. It was
Skexka
who had found the Dellia woman;
Skexka
who had obtained the Project Unify report after Silte Corp’s servers became unhackable;
Skexka
who had tracked Adelson to the Houston Warehouse. Yet here she was, errand-girl to the faceless masters, obediently lying on a cold stone floor in an abandoned garage on the east side of Austin, fantasizing about handing over her priceless stolen information and walking away from the so-called Anti-Corp, and the civilized world in general, for good.

Darkness had just filled the oil-stained garage, which was supposed to be her refuge until dawn, when she decided she couldn’t take it anymore.

With a shake of her grimy, greasy hair she slipped her headband on and grabbed her backpack full of everything she owned: it was exceedingly light. She wheeled the scooter to the door and through the gloomy lobby and then out into the night. She didn’t care anymore about valenC’s stupid rules; she was tired of it all.

She didn’t have to ride far down the street to find a convenience store, which she entered and then excitedly purchased a carton of regular Camel’s with some cash she kept for emergencies. She had the first one lit before she even stepped out of the shop, earning admonishments from the clerk in some generic East Asian accent. Standing beside the scooter again, she sucked that first cigarette down in under a minute, feeling the heavy buzz as nicotine filled her body for the first time in several days. She lit a second immediately and put five more under her headband for the ride to valenC’s hideout.

The scooter barely made a sound as she sped along the busy city streets; its tiny engine’s noise couldn’t even begin to challenge the bustle and music of the Austin nightlife. Skexka took it all in and wondered how valenC would react when he saw her there a day early, having used main roads during one of the busiest times of the night. She found that she really didn’t care what he thought, because she was leaving the movement regardless—that was certain. As long as he got what he wanted he would be satisfied. And she had what he wanted. It had cost at least a dozen lives and well more than the ten grand she had been given to fund the operation, but in the end she got it. The encrypted folder was a measly twenty gigs: not even a blip on her tab’s hard drive. Whatever it was, it wasn’t much.

And getting it had been almost too easy. They had gone into the Houston Warehouse under the false pretense of extracting Lorne Adelson, who had access to the information in question. That part nearly fell through; the
shit
brain hired thugs started shooting long before they needed to. But the detective got in and got Adelson out, the thugs died in pools of blood, and the woman and Adelson drew most of the Guardian goons out long enough for Skexka to slip in a back door, find the Silte representative’s office, hack into a desk screen and pilfer the data she needed. The escape to her waiting scooter and supplies was just as simple; the only difficult thing was the guilt.

Oh, the guilt.

She might never get over it, the guilt of leading four people—one of whom was basically an innocent bystander—to their deaths, while several others died in the chaos that ensued. But she had to forget about it for now. Once the stupid files were transferred she could move on and find a way to keep living. She just hoped that she could find a life free from all of this madness. Maybe she could keep going on the scooter—without all the rules this time. With her relatively hefty payment for the retrieval and delivery, she could get a decent secondhand e-car and cross the country for years, staying in hotels and sleeping in proper beds. Or maybe she would venture down through Mexico to South America, lose society in the jungle and reconnect with a simpler existence, then move on down south as far as a car could take her and stare out at the sea—the last one you could cross that would carry you away from civilization. It sounded so beautiful, but first she had to finish the job.

If she had stuck to valenC’s rules and map, it would have taken her another full day of riding to reach the hideout; going her own way got her there in twenty minutes, just as she was flicking away the butt of the last cigarette from her headband and fishing in her bag for the pack. She only smoked like this when she was really anxious. Or scared. Just now she was both.

The hideout was actually a lush apartment in a newish upscale high rise building in the northwest part of downtown. She didn’t bother putting her fresh cigarette out as she walked in; the husky young man at the front desk glanced at her as she walked past but said nothing. She walked right to the elevator, filling the lobby with smoke all the way, and got in, taking it up sixteen stories with no stops on the way. There was a ding when the button under the 16 lit up.

“A little early, aren’t we?” The man’s voice reached her just as the door began to open.

Skexka jumped and dropped her cigarette, but then, seeing who it was, she sighed and hastily pulled another out and lit it. The man out in the hallway was wearing a neon pink balaclava over his face, the kind that had been passed out by the thousands during the Russian mass-demonstrations. Based on his mask, his immense height and the bulging barrel chest Skexka knew this man was Io, valenC’s right-hand man (or broken lap-dog, depending on your perspective).

“Hello, Io,” she said, stepping out into the hallway. “Didn’t feel like sleeping in garage. Tired of this. And valenC’s rules absurd. Wanted to finish on own terms.”

Io just smiled at her for a while, and then he said, “Still have that
unique
way of talking, huh? Cute. Hey you’ve got some ash…” He reached a calloused hand out, apparently trying to brush off a bit of cigarette ash that had stuck to her shirt right over her left breast, but she jerked away.

“Fuck off,” she said, brushing the ash away herself.

“You know,” he said, “we could go down the hall to my place before you go see VC. I got some cheap wine and a soft bed.”

“I haven’t showered in a week.”

“So what?” He leaned toward her and inhaled deeply, exaggeratedly. “You smell just the way I want you to smell. And I bet you’re aching for it after all that time alone on the road.”

“I said fuck off,” she said fiercely. But as she looked into his ravenous eyes she knew at that moment that if he was determined she would have no hope of defending herself against his sheer size and strength. In as cold and even a voice as she could manage, she said, “I’m sure valenC will be pleased to know why you kept him from getting delivery for so long.”

The way his beady eyes stared back was so full of disgust she thought he might hit her. In that stare she saw all of the rage and exhaustion of being a mediocre hacker forced to lick the feet of a stronger master in order to avoid drowning in the tide of their changing world.

“Follow,” he said hollowly. He turned and opened the door across from the elevator and she followed him through it.

The apartment was big—the front room’s ceiling was two floors above—but it in no way matched the ornate décor of the lobby; valenC had really made himself at home here. The front room was empty except for a stack of cardboard boxes on one wall and a grime-streaked refrigerator on the opposite one next to a built-in electric stove. In the next room Skexka could see what must have been ten million dollars in servers and high-end computing equipment. Countless LEDs and screen lights lit the dark, and she could see vague movement as AC people worked at whatever important tasks had been assigned to them. Rather than heading for this hacker’s den, Io led her to the stairs on the other side and up towards a closed door.

“In,” a hoarse voice said the moment they reached the landing. The voice appeared to have come from the door itself.

Io opened the door and led the way inside. As Skexka followed, she was nearly floored by the stench: stale cigarettes mixed with stewing sewage and ripe cheese. The room was dark and when Io closed the door behind them it became even darker. The only light came from three large screens on the far wall, all showing black screens that glowed strangely. In the pale light she saw a large chair below the screens, facing away from the door, but the rest of the room was empty as far as she could see.

“Closer,” the hoarse voice said from the chair. Skexka took a few tentative steps forward until the voice said, “That’s enough. You’re early.”

“Yes,” Skexka said. “But here now. Have files.”

“You do,” valenC said from his chair. “You broke my rules.” No part of his body was visible, but she could just see the pale dome of a bald head reflected in each of the three screens. “Not good,” he said. “You should not have broken my rules.” His voice had a forced superiority, like he was a spoiled child talking to a despised servant.

“I did,” she said. “Take day out of payment. Whatever. Don’t care. Just transfer so I can leave. I’m tired. Done with all of this.”

The man laughed slowly and unnaturally. “Done?” he said. “Yes, if you say so. Give your tab to Io.”

She handed the tablet over to Io, who walked across the room and handed it over the chair to his master. Seconds passed, perhaps a full minute. Io turned from the chair and walked back to his sentry post by the door, passing off the tab to Skexka as he walked by. The tab was opened to her wallet app, which was showing a $100,000 transfer made seconds ago.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem, Mylah.”

It should not have surprised her that he knew the name she had erased from her identity half a decade ago, but the sound of those two syllables on his unseen lips stuck like a knife in her spine. Suddenly she was so scared she was shaking, and she felt her cigarette fall out of her gaping mouth and onto the floor. She wanted to turn and run, but for some reason she couldn’t make her legs work.

“You left a trail behind you,” valenC said calmly, coolly. “If you were still useful I might forgive this, but you’re all used up now. And on top of that, it sounds like you’ve lost your faith in the cause.”