The Courier (San Angeles) (20 page)

The only light in the office came from the two glowing displays and the small lamp sitting on the desk. Hunched over the desk, Devon
was trying to find a new way to optimize his algorithms, to make the computer perform its function with a higher degree of accuracy and speed.

Yet he knew it was all a ruse. If he was away from his computer he wouldn’t have access to all the data. Without the data he was useless to his employers. Every two minutes, he looked at the screens and scanned them, hoping to see something new.

Sitting alone in this room gave him a degree of separation from the jobs performed by other members of ACE. But this time, he was feeling it even more than normal. The computer had still not been able to find a common thread between all the individual pieces of information related to the courier. Some of it tied together, but nothing formed a complete whole. But Devon knew the computer didn’t have all the information yet.

What the systems had managed to figure out was disturbing. It appeared as though the package source, the individual that sent it, was a Meridian mole. Someone who had ingrained himself in the SoCal systems so well that he was part of the machine. What he had sent to Kadokawa was still a mystery, but the computer gave it a sixty-two percent chance of relating to the executive-class cruiser that had stopped sending its positional beacon for about twenty minutes several days ago.

Besides sifting through the old information, the computer was still watching all of the new raw data coming in.

The courier had arrived at the hotel meeting about an hour ago, and Devon listened in on the conversation. It sounded like the AD was getting what he wanted, as usual.

Suddenly, the screens flashed. Remote audio monitors detected gunfire in the hotel, somewhere just off the lobby. Devon sat and listened to the scene unfold a couple of levels away. He knew the information he had supplied was now being used to change the real
world. The data that lived briefly on his screen was alive, was real. With his help, it was changing, shaping reality. Devon smiled, flipping his ponytail over his shoulder.

I rolled over in a bed, pulling the sheets higher around my neck. Something square pushed into my back and brought me to full wakefulness.

Opening my eyes, I found myself in a small room with a real bed and clean sheets. Warm light streamed in through the frilly yellow curtains and splashed against the far wall. A plain black dresser sat in the corner by the closed door. From what I could see, there were no other furnishings or decorations in the room. It didn’t feel like a place people stayed in for long.

I ran my fingers through my hair. It was matted and dirty, but my hand came away blood free. The thought of blood brought back a rush of memories; the cheeseburger, Nigel, the way his body twitched when the bullet hit him. Then there was the blood, warm and sticky, running down my face, into my eyes and down my shirt. He was dead, and with him, any information he had about my parents.

I sat up, pulling the sheets away. My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and I leaned back against the headboard, feeling the square object press into my back again. The cool air in the room touched my skin. I was naked, or almost anyway. Whoever undressed me had left me in just my bra and panties. Dried blood still clung to the straps and the top of the cup. Two strands of thick tape, white and textured, wrapped just under my breasts. I reached back, following the tape. It held on a small box, strapped securely to my back.

There was a quiet knock at the door, and the knob turned slowly.
I dropped back down on the bed, pulled the sheets up, and closed my eyes, leaving them open just enough to look out from beneath my eyelashes.

Miller stepped in, carrying a bundle of clothes in his hand. He took a quick glance over at me and placed the clothes on the dresser before leaving and closing the door behind him. From what I could see, his own clothes looked freshly washed, with no trace of yesterday’s supper on them.

I waited a minute before slipping out of bed, every muscle groaning in protest. I limped to the dresser, grabbed my clothes, brought them back to the bed with me. On top of the pile was my—Frank’s—gun. The spare clips, still full, sat beside it. Between the gun and my clothes was the package, its flap torn and open. Under the package was my envelope of cash. I moved them off my clothes and quickly got dressed, pausing only long enough to examine the purple bruise forming on my calf. It still hurt, but it could have been so much worse. I left the box taped in place, tugging at my shirt when it snagged on a corner. I wanted to know what it was before I tried to do anything with it.

When I was done, I did a quick search of the room. Starting with the dresser, I pulled each drawer open, making sure I made no noise. The drawers were all empty. They didn’t even have a piece of lint or thread in them to indicate they had ever been used.

Behind the curtains lay a quiet suburban street. If I was still on Level 4, it was a pretty high-end neighborhood. Tall trees lined the empty street, casting shadows across the pavement and into the neighbors’ front yards. The Ambients overhead were on tracks, simulating the motion of the sun during the day. I never really understood that. To me, the lights came on slowly in the morning and dimmed again at night. What was the point of moving the light source? Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. Dogs. High-end for sure.

I was pretty sure if I opened the window I’d hear kids screaming
from the backyards and lawnmowers running. The mythical suburbia in all its glory.

The smell of bacon wafted in from somewhere in the house, and for a second I was back home with Mom and Dad. My stomach growled in appreciation, bringing me back to reality. I moved to the door and twisted the knob, half expecting to find it locked. The knob turned easily and the door opened into a carpeted hallway. Two other doors were open in the opposite wall, and I could see bedrooms behind them. I followed my nose to the kitchen.

Miller stood by the stove in a kitchen right out of the vids, huge and apparently well stocked. He glanced up from the frying pan and must have seen me looking around.

“Yeah, the kitchens are always the best part in the safe houses. If you’re in one of these, you never know when or where your next meal will be, so they keep ’em stocked up.” He went back to moving the bacon around the frying pan. “Did you sleep good? You were pretty out of it by the time we got here.”

“I must have been.” I couldn’t remember anything after the restaurant. I took a second to study Miller. He looked different today, younger than he had last night. And not too bad looking either, now that I had time to really see.

A blush crept up the back of his neck. “Y . . . Your clothes were pretty messed up. I . . . I figured I’d better get ’em clean for ya.”

“And the box on my back?”

Miller’s blush deepened. “You tore the blocker at the restaurant. We had to replace it in the van on the way. That old box was all we had.”

“And the tape?” I couldn’t help giving him the little extra jab. The way he stuttered and wouldn’t look at me was something I’d never seen a guy do before. It made him seem like more of a real person instead of some top secret agent.

“Yeah, uh. The black box was falling off, and I, uh, I needed to keep it on.”

Feeling a bit uncomfortable myself, I let the subject drop. “You got any coffee to go with that bacon?”

He raised the spatula from the frying pan and indicated the counter beside the fridge, dripping bacon grease on the floor. “It ain’t decaf.”

“Thank god for that.” I opened the cupboard above the coffeemaker and found the mugs. Pouring two cups, I passed one over. “If you put anything in it, you’ll have to take care of it yourself.”

“No, just black. Thanks,” he said.

The Ambients shone through the window above the sink. I could see why I thought he was older last night. The left side of his face had a fine network of scars, miniature white lines and cracks lacing a pattern across his cheek and temple. In the daylight, he didn’t look like he’d even reached thirty yet. Maybe a lot closer to twenty-five, or younger. For some reason, thinking he was younger reassured me. Maybe because he was almost in my age group, and by the looks of things, knew what rough times were. Someone like me.

The silence stretched out as Miller placed the bacon between two sheets of paper towel. I watched him drain some of the fat down the sink, followed by a copious amount of hot water from the tap, and then crack four eggs into the pan.

“Sunny side up?” he asked.

“Over hard.”

“Okay. You wanna get plates? They’re just above the sink. Knives and forks are beside it, on the right.”

I made myself busy setting the table. The activity reminded me of home, of my little space above the Fish Market. Granted, I didn’t have a kitchen, and I hadn’t been able to afford bacon since I ran away, but just the motion of setting a table and drinking a cup of
coffee did it. It just seemed so normal, as if nothing strange had happened. Who would have thought that I’d feel nostalgic about the smelly, cramped place?

“You okay?”

Miller had turned from the stove and must have seen me lost in thought.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just . . . this doesn’t seem real.”

He placed the bacon on the table and reached up to touch my cheek. “I know.”

Tears suddenly flooded my eyes and overflowed, falling down my face and on to the floor. It was as though I could feel the barriers it had taken me years to build drop as reality set in. I moved into Miller’s arms, wanting . . . needing some form of human contact, and pushed my face into his chest.

The memories of the last few days, images of blood and death, of running afraid for my life, washed over me. My legs turned to rubber and my sobs came out in huge gasping breaths. Miller’s arms tightened around me, supporting more of my weight as my sobs started to quiet down. His arms were strong and warm. I felt safer in them than I had in days. In years. I wanted nothing more than to sink into the warmth and never come back out.

But I wasn’t some snot-nosed kid who needed help. I couldn’t be. Not now, not ever. I pushed myself away, angry at myself for acting like a wimpy baby.

“I’m, I’m sorry. I don’t know why . . .”

“It’s okay, don’t worry about it.”

I smiled, feeling heat creep into my cheeks, and reached for his shirt, pulling at the wet material. “I think I’ve ruined your shirt.”

“It’ll dry. Sit and have some bacon, I’ll bring your eggs.”

I looked into his eyes, feeling the heat increase, and noticed they weren’t really brown at all, but more of a deep hazel speckled with
flakes of gold. They created a feeling in me I didn’t know I had anymore.

I tore my gaze away and moved to the table, picking the chair that put my back to the wall. An old habit. I pulled over the plate of cooling bacon and filled my own. By the time Miller came back with the eggs, I was already halfway through them.

Miller sat down across from me and started moving bacon on to his own plate. “Damn, I forgot the toast.” He jumped up from his seat and threw bread into the toaster. “It’ll just be a minute.”

I wanted to ask him if he knew my parents, but even thinking of the subject almost brought me back to tears.

The rest of the meal passed in silence. When the toast popped, my whole body shuddered and my heart lurched into my throat, beating a million times a minute. If Miller noticed, he didn’t show it, and I forced myself to relax.

When we were finished, I leaned back in my chair. The black box dug uncomfortably into my back, and I leaned forward instead, resting my forearms on the edge of the table.

“So, is Miller your whole name?”

“My friends used to call me Ian, back when I had time for friends.”

“And what do I call you?”

“Miller will do.”

I looked down at my dirty plate, the second good meal I’d eaten recently, and felt a too-familiar hole open in my chest. “I can’t call you Ian?” Even to me, my voice sounded small and plaintive.

“No one does. I’m not sure if I’d even respond to the name anymore.” He pushed himself away from the table and collected the dishes, putting them into a dishwasher under the counter.

I moved into the living room. It was pretty much the same as the rest of the house, sparsely furnished and a little cold-feeling. There
were no pictures on the walls, no little knickknacks on any flat surfaces. Barren of all personality. A giant vid screen took up one wall. It was the biggest one I had ever seen outside of a corporate office.

Was this my life now? Is this all I would know if I signed up with ACE?

When Miller walked in behind me, I moved and sat on a black couch by the window, careful not to lean back too quickly, and looked at him. “Tell me about ACE.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Where I come from, ACE is just a bunch of kids spray-painting buildings. Nothing serious. That’s not what I see here,” I said.

“That is ACE, just not all of it. ACE is a countercorporation entity. That’s the words they want us to use. What it comes down to is, we don’t think our lives and the lives of everyone else, on- or off-planet, should be controlled and monitored by the corporations. They’ve grown into things, beasts, bigger than any government. The top three pretty much make the rules and control what happens in our lives down to the smallest detail.

“If—” He looked around the room, trying to find an example. “If plastic couches became all the rage next year, you can bet that one of the big three planted the seed that started the trend, and they’d be making money hand over fist. The human race has turned into bunch of mice running around a maze, being controlled by our corporate masters.”

“And ACE wants to stop that?” I asked.

Miller started pacing across the living room, from the vid screen to the kitchen door. “Stopping it would be impossible. Sure, there are a few radicals higher up the food chain that think destroying the corporations would solve all our problems, but most of us just want some control back. We need checks and balances against the
corporations. We need to make sure they aren’t controlling us for their own benefit, for their own profit margin. We need to stop them from destroying the planet for their own purposes.”

That was, supposedly, where my parents came in. “And how do you do that?”

“You know, there used to be laws in place that limited what a company could tell you. If they advertised a new drug to cure the common cold, they had to list its side effects, no matter how nasty. The government . . . the people . . . decided there was too much sugar in kids’ cereal, so they placed limits on how the corporations could advertise those cereals. They put down guidelines on how they could advertise to children. The government used to limit a corporation’s size, forcing them to split if they got too big . . . too powerful. We need to get back to that, we need to be able have our checks and balances. We need to speak up and have our voices heard.”

“You sound like a political activist, and stop pacing, you’re driving me nuts.”

“Sorry.” He moved to the loveseat and sat down. “I guess in a way, we are. Except politics doesn’t work anymore. The corporations feed so much money into the lobbying groups that the government has just become another pawn in their game. It’s been decades since our voices, our words, have made a difference.”

“So what do you do, then? If your vote is worthless and you don’t have enough money to play the game, what can you do?” It all seemed kind of pointless to me.

“We go underground. We find out the corporations’ secrets and expose them. Some of them reach down to such a fundamental level, you start seeing them spray-painted on the sides of buildings. Others just need to be spread around. If you can spread the knowledge, the power, to the little guys, then it helps everybody. Not just the mammoths.”

“Where do you fit in to all of this?” I asked. “You can’t just go around rescuing female couriers all the time.”

Miller laughed, a good deep laugh that started way down in his stomach. A laugh that, when I looked into his eyes, made me feel warm inside. A laugh that took a few more years off his face. I couldn’t help but laugh with him.