“No!” Ian stood and yelled. He was serious.
“Ian—” John tried to calm him down.
“No!”
The team had gathered in the empty storage room next to the long hall, just under their second-floor offices-turned-bunks. Xana had cleared the space of junk several days before, but there was still some odd debris in the corners. Dirty windows let in light on two sides. It was Wink’s job to clean them. She never had.
“No.” Ian raised his hands. “No no no no no.”
“Jeez, Moron, nothing’s gonna go wrong.” Wink sat on a fold-out chair at a fold-out table and projected her screen onto the off-white drywall. Diagrams and colored sticky notes were posted next to the screen space. There was a large photo of an empty space near a road by the United Nations building.
Ian looked to John. “Cap, how are you even remotely okay with this?”
John shrugged. Ian was a civilian, and a naive one at that. “It’s not as uncommon as you might think.”
“A, that’s awful. B, that doesn’t make it right.”
“Agencies conduct terror drills all the time. It's a necessary part of readiness. You don't want an actual attack to be OJT for your first responders.”
“This isn’t a terror drill.” Ian pointed to the projection. “Okay? And we’re not training to be first responders. As a matter of fact, what the fuck are we doing?”
“thAt’s cLASsiFiEd.” Prophet spoke in a scrambled voice from a tablet computer on the table.
“Fuck you.” Ian made a face. “The Faction isn’t the fucking CIA.”
“Of COurSe NoT. thE cIA iS cOmPRoMisEd. wE ArE tHe LAsT liNe.”
“No. We are not simulating a terrorist attack. On fucking New York City.” Prophet had finally revealed the second phase of the hack. Ian turned to Wink. “I don’t care if you did the math. It’s wrong. People won’t know it’s fake. If they know it’s fake, then your plan doesn’t work.”
“But we have to!” the girl whined. “They have to respond like they’re actually under attack. I can’t take down every carrier simultaneously. But FEMA can.”
“NO! We’re not detonating an ‘explosive device.’” Ian made quotes in the air. Neither John nor Wink dared call it what it was. A bomb. “I don’t care.”
“In a nonpopulated area.” John interjected.
“And then what? Huh? Twenty-some million people say, ‘well shit, that sucks’ and wait patiently for shit to blow over?” Ian tried his best British accent. “Stay Calm and Have Tea. Cheerio, mate. Carry on.”
“We need FEMA to kill the network.”
“Why can’t we trigger it ourselves?”
“Dude.” Wink threw up her hands. “That's a whole ’nother hack. I can’t just bust out a joystick and jackhammer my way in by pressing the ‘A’ button really really fast.”
It was a jab at Ian’s video game skills and an attempt to make him mad. The little girl had been creaming him at everything. Ian ignored it. “That’s what you did when I was in jail.”
“That’s different!” The little girl stomped her boots in frustration. The pink color had worn off the toes and the sparkle stitching was already fraying. “All you do is create a diversion then wander around the desks until you find the old geezer who keeps his passwords on a sticky note. Humans are the weakest part of any system.”
“Are you saying it can’t be done?”
“Of course it can be done.” John cut him off. “We all know Wink’s skills. But it’s like she says. That means finding a way in. That’s more planning, more time, more risk.” He pointed to the countdown on the wall. The seconds flew by. “We have a simple, viable solution ready—”
“No.” Ian headed for the door.
Wink ran in front of him. “Just wait.”
He turned back to the others and ignored the girl. “I'm not doing it. I'm not helping you 'simulate' a terrorist attack on New York. That's it. I'm just not. Not without someone giving me a damn good reason.”
“We'RE rUnNiNG ouT Of tiME.”
“Ian’s right.” It was the first time Xana had spoken through the entire briefing.
Everyone turned.
“What?” Wink looked at Xan.
John glanced at the tablet, but Prophet was silent.
Xana was calm. “If it is convincing, as you say, then it will be no different than if we had attacked the city for real. And that makes us no better than the people we’re trying to stop.”
“Jesus, Xan.” John rubbed his eyes. It was the second mutiny in as many days.
“Please don’t say that to me, Captain. You can say it to the others if you like, but I find it offensive.”
John ignored her. “Remember what I told you in the truck? About questioning everything?”
Xana didn’t flinch. She stood. Seven feet and nine inches. Wink had measured her. She’d grown. Since whenever. It didn’t matter.
Her hair moved the ceiling tiles. She was so huge. “Can you swear to me before God that no one will get hurt as a result of this fake attack?”
John, hunched in his chair, half of his face gnarled and burnt, locked eyes with her.
“Then I am with Ian. And you can do it without either of us.”
“We can’t do it without you.” Wink complained to the big woman. “You’re totally critical to Phase Two.”
Xana looked down at the little girl like a Great Dane looking down at a Chihuahua “You are very clever. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”
Wink stepped out of the way as Xana ducked under the door.
“Where are you going?” John called.
“Out.” She called back. Xana turned right for the south lot and then again for the street just past the sliding fence gate.
Ian was sheepish. “So, uh. Yeah.” He scurried after Xan. “Hey, wait up!”
The big woman didn’t stop. She was striding. “I don’t want to talk.”
She was mad about something, Ian could tell. Something else. “I didn’t think you and I would ever see eye to eye on anything.”
Xana stopped and turned. “Why?”
Ian came up short and stared into the big woman’s chest. She was huge. “Literally or figuratively?”
“Ugh.” Xana turned and kept walking.
“Sorry!” Ian followed. “Bad joke. Okay? Sorry sorry sorry.” Ian scurried after her. “I just thought that, you know . . .”
“That because I’m Christian I am stupid.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know what you and Wink think of me.”
“It’s not that.”
Xana didn’t stop. They were approaching the tow truck parked on the street. Loud noises resounded from a mechanic shop down the street. A plane passed overhead.
“It’s not that.” Ian repeated. “I promise. Wink and I have never talked about your faith. Or anyone else’s. Mostly she just insults me. Or beats me at video games.”
“What do you want?”
Ian stopped. “Same as you. To not be here for a while. I can drive you somewhere. If you want. You can hang in the back seat and keep a low profile.”
“Why? Because I sided with you against the others?”
“Jeez, Xan. Suspicious, much?” Ian studied the big woman’s face. She seemed torn, like she had something she wasn’t sure she should reveal. “You know where AJ is, don’t you?”
Xana nodded. “Wink found him. With her drones. When I saw what they could do, at the hotel, I asked her to help me find him. This morning, I saw it on her computer. It was beeping over and over and no one was there so I went to look.”
It would be just like the little girl to leave something running on her computer and then disappear.
“School will be out soon.”
Ian realized Xana had been sitting through the briefing thinking about her son and about how Wink hadn’t said anything and how that must have looked. Xana probably hadn’t heard a word until Ian started yelling. That’s why she had objected late.
“It is a very fancy place. For rich people. For college.”
“Prep school.” Ian pulled keys from his pocket and jingled them. “I’ll drive. No strings. I promise.”
“What do you want to do?” John spoke to the tablet computer resting on the table, but he watched out of the corner of his eye as Wink typed at her laptop. She’d already killed the projection.
“We'RE rUnNiNG ouT Of tiME.”
“You already said that.”
Wink spoke like she was thinking out loud. “These people have to use the same infrastructure as the rest of the world. If they want to stay invisible, I mean. That’s why they’re at The Carrier. If they laid their own fiber and stuff, people would see. Most of the time it works to their advantage, but the goal was to turn it around.”
John hung back and moved his eyes between Prophet on the tablet and Wink on the laptop.
“The biggest problem the Minus Faction has isn’t getting in. It’s staying in. My device lets us access their system, but as long as it’s hooked up to the Internet, their active monitoring will notice and boot us out immediately. Or shut it down and route functions to another cryptic node, somewhere not here. And then we’re totally back to square one. No leads or anything. We’d have to use someone as bait to pull them out of hiding again.”
John raised his eyebrows. The little genius was more callous and calculating with other people’s lives than any black ops general John had ever met. Sometimes it was really creepy.
“I get it.” John kept his eyes on the little girl’s fingers hovering over her keyboard. She could multitask better than anyone. That was a fact. “We get the government to shut everything down. Your gizmo reads the data we need right off their hard drives. No one ever knows we were there.”
“Exactly.” She sat back, frustrated. “It was perfect,” she pouted.
Time for a test. John rolled closer to her. The sound from his electric motor was the only one in the room. “Can we do it without the others?”
Wink thought. She looked at John. “Maybe.”
The soldier could tell she wasn’t happy with their odds that way. “So that leaves only one option.”
“Right.” Wink stared at her screen for a moment.
John looked. There was nothing on it. Just a desktop image of the five members of a boy band each striking a pose in front of their own logo. Whatever the girl had been doing, she’d closed the window when John approached.
Wink looked up. “We have to bring down the Internet. Or jam it with traffic. At least locally.”
“That seems like a big deal.” John turned and rolled back across the room.
The girl leaned back to her computer and started typing again. “I could try writing a virus to take down specific sections of the power grid for a couple hours. Like a cycling outage.”
“Will that be long enough?”
“I dunno. I mean, it’s a lot of data.” The girl typed. Her phone dinged. She read it and then cleared the message.
“How long do you need?” John repeated. The cat, Roger, rubbed against his chair, and John leaned down with a grunt, lifted the animal, and put it in his lap.
“A day. Maybe two.” Wink looked worried. “I don’t know anything about the grid here. But I can’t stay.” She closed her laptop. “I have to go.”
“Go?” John did a bad job of feigning surprise. “Go where?” The girl hadn’t even tried to hide it this time. Guess she figured there was no point anymore.
“Research.” Wink ran to her colorful backpack resting against the wall. She shoved her laptop in.
“Right.” John stroked the cat in his lap and watched as the thin-legged child struggled to lift the bag over her shoulders. It was stuffed, including with clothes.
Wink didn’t look at him.
John watched her leave. Then he turned to the cat. The animal looked him in the eye.
“I think the others are hiding something.” Xana’s accent was always a little thicker when she was lying down or relaxed.
“Yeah.” Ian was quiet as the tow truck idled at a stoplight. “Kinda seems like it, doesn’t it?”
Xana was curled in a ball in the back. “Do you think the captain is trustworthy?” It was a direct question.
In the short time he’d known her, Xana had done nothing to change Ian’s initial impression of her. He thought about the question. If he said no, she’d feel cheated. If he said yes . . . “I dunno. I mean, I don’t know him very well.”
Xana didn’t respond.
“Why do you ask?”
“Do you remember when we stopped in that place where they do the races?”
Ian scowled. “You mean Indianapolis?”
Xana nodded. “I went into that department store.”
“I remember.” It was a big box discount store in a strip mall, full of clothing, toys, and home decor.
“I wanted to look at the clothes. There were so many choices. Stores like that are not common in Guyana. Everything was so neat and clean. There was jewelry. And perfumes. And everyone was smiling. And no armed man to keep out looters.” She stopped. “Sometimes you all don’t realize how nice things are.”
Ian nodded. The light turned and he hit the gas. It was late afternoon and traffic through town was slow. He looked at the clock on his phone. Almost time for school to be out.
“I knew nothing would fit me, but it’s nice to look, you know?”
“Sure.”
“The round racks were so close together. I couldn’t fit. I knocked one over. The whole thing. A little boy saw me. He just stared as I tried to put the clothes back. But my hands . . .” She looked at them. “They are so big. And the hangers are so small!” She smiled. “He asked me if I played football.”
Ian was quiet. “He thought you were a man.” He wondered how he would feel if people were constantly confusing him for a woman.
“Why did you agree to come?” Xana asked.
“What do you mean?”
“With us. You had been erased. You could have gone somewhere. A different country, maybe. Where they wouldn’t care. Started over.”
Ian had to think about that. He flipped the blinker and took a right turn. “I dunno. Being erased isn’t that big of a deal. I mean, I was already invisible. Wink just made it official.”
“So why come?”
“Life, you know, it’s not exactly full of chances to make a difference. I guess I was tired of waiting.”
“Are we going to make a difference?”
Ian thought about the bomb threat he was supposed to send in California. He thought about the real bomb Prophet and Wink and John wanted to detonate. “I dunno. What about you?”
She shifted and sat up a little. She looked out at the bustling city. “After the captain broke me out of jail, I was ashamed. I felt like a criminal, sneaking around. At one point I was riding in a truck, like now. He was driving. He stopped and told me I was free to go. I thought very hard about running. Hiding. Getting my son somehow, maybe when he came home to visit his grandfather. You know, steal him. But I knew if I did . . .”
“They’d hunt you.”
“No. I mean yes, but that wasn’t it. It’s . . . What would I leave for him then? What would he remember of me? After I was arrested. After I was dead. That I was a thief? That I was every bad thing the McDooms told him about me?
“There are so many laws. And not made by people like me. I don’t want to break the law. But I won’t be a slave to it either.”
“You trusted Cap.”
“Yes.” Xana’s voice was soft.
“And now you’re not sure?”
“He is not the patient man I met, who coaxed me gently to open my cell, who smuggled me out of Guyana and into a bigger world.” Xana looked up at the skyscrapers.
Ian nodded.
“I know he is in pain,” she continued. “All the time.”
“So you don’t want to say anything.”
Xana nodded.
“Yeah.” Ian understood that feeling. It was hard enough just to look the man in the face. To see the burns. The twitching. The tiny grimaces. “Me either.”
“And I don’t trust the man Prophet.”
“Ha.” Ian snorted. That was an understatement. “Here we are.”
The brakes squealed.
Xana raised her head and saw the school. It was so fancy, with flowers and neatly-trimmed shrubs. The stone facade was like a castle. Her heart beat faster. Suddenly she was afraid. Now it was real. Her son was in there somewhere. She was immediately conscious of her appearance. She remembered the crayon drawing Sister Rosa had shown her. The snarling monster with its arms raised above the children. “I don’t want him to see me.”
“But—”
“No. It’s not time. Please. I just want to see his face, to know he is okay.” And hopefully that he is happy, she thought. Even though some part of her wanted him to be miserable without her.
Ian nodded. He looked around. He pointed. “There.” Offices were being remodeled just down the street. The three floors above a bodega were dark and empty. A loose wire hung behind one of the windows. A ‘Space For Lease’ sign was plastered across the front.
He pulled around the block and stopped in a no-parking zone. He looked up and down the street. “Clear.”
Xana opened the door and stepped out. The old blue tow truck rocked back and forth in alternating squeaks.
“You have your radio, right?”
Xana nodded and tapped her ear. The big woman walked to the garage door on the side of the building. It was padlocked with enough chains to keep anyone out.
Or almost anyone.
Xana Jace lifted the door with a grunt. Chains snapped. Loose rings bounced and sang on the asphalt like wind chimes.
Ian watched from the driver’s seat. He counted softly. “1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . Jeez, Xan, you just broke, like, six padlocks.” She hadn’t even strained.
The big woman didn’t acknowledge. There was noise from the school. A bell. The kids were being let out.
Ian looked at her bulging arms. Her muscles seemed even bigger than the day before, if that was possible. He watched her bound up the stairs. Her powerful legs, covered in loose camo pants, propelled her body like it was a rubber ball, despite her nearly eight-foot frame.
“I’ll find a place to park,” he called.
Xana’s hair bounced as she bounded up two flights. She broke a locked door and walked on new carpet through the dark and empty office and stopped at the windows at the front, behind the ‘Space For Lease’ sign.
Her eyes darted back and forth as she scanned the growing crowd of children on the sidewalk down and across the street.
There.
Xana’s heart beat faster. She put a hand over it out of instinct, an old habit to remind herself of her doctors’ advice, to stay calm, not to strain herself. She didn’t know if she was still supposed to do that or not. She didn’t care.
He looked older, so much older, and Xana suddenly felt Time, like a jungle snake, glowering at her from the shadows, biding its time, slithering closer, waiting to pounce. Her son wouldn’t stay young forever. He would keep growing. He would become skeptical. He would begin to wonder where she had been, why she never tried to contact him. Slowly, the McDooms’ image of her would become his: that she was lazy, stupid, low-class. An embarrassment. Something to be hidden away and forgotten.
AJ looked up and saw someone, a woman, waiting at the end of the shrub-lined path from the castle-school to the street out front. The boy’s face opened to a full smile. He ran. The young woman returned the smile and opened her arms.
Xana felt sick. She looked around her secret perch for somewhere to vomit, but the half-renovated office space had nothing. She shut her eyes. She swallowed bile and tears.
It wasn’t that AJ was happy to see someone else, or even that that person was a potential mother figure. Xana knew Declun. She had expected for some time that he would find a woman who would meet his father’s expectations, someone who could keep the inheritance flowing, although Xana knew he would never be faithful to her.
In fact, Xana hadn’t pictured this phantom much different than the woman before her: young, beautiful, dark hair, clearly raised with money, someone who just wanted a family, who had little personal ambition, who was refined, and—most importantly—who could behave, who wouldn’t rock the boat or cause a scene, no matter what the McDooms did.
None of that mattered. None of it at all. Any feelings she’d had for Declun, any fantasies about turning the bad boy into a good husband or father, had long since faded. He could be dating a world-famous heart surgeon and part-time cover model for all Xana cared. Any woman silly enough to make excuses for such a man got exactly what she deserved in Declun.
It wasn’t that AJ ran to a woman. It was the way he ran. Reckless. Arms outstretched. Backpack bouncing. Mouth open. Almost like a dog. It was how he had greeted Xana when she came home from work. It was how he had run as a toddler when she chased him in tiny circles around their one-room home on the bank of the river. He would run naked rather than be changed. He would run around the oval rug on the floor—giggling, tongue poking out—never realizing that she could catch him at any time. As long as he was running, he was running away. Smiling. Wild hair bouncing. Wild hair like hers. Only darker, like his father’s, and not as curly.
Xana watched as the young woman with the makeup and the jewelry and the expensive black-and-white dress bent to hug her son. The woman’s lipstick covered her full lips in a deep fuchsia. Her earrings had real diamonds. She couldn’t be older than Ian.
Declun barely noticed. He leaned against his car and poked his phone. Talking to his friends, probably. He’d shaved his head, like the rappers Xana saw on TV, and he was dressed nicer than he ever would have dared back home, at least without an armed escort. But this was America, and he was safe to flaunt his father’s wealth.
There was an edge to him now. The fact that he was with one woman and not a mobile party suggested his father had scared him. Scared him with what, Xana wouldn’t guess. But he had patience enough to wait while AJ talked wide-eyed with his young trophy. Even something that simple would never have happened before.
Xana suddenly felt very old. She realized she must look just like her grandmother scowling down at her unmarried father from the porch as he left for work. As a young girl, Xana saw so much judgment in the old woman’s eyes. And experience. And disappointment. It made her sad for her dad, and a little scared to be alone in the old woman’s care.
But behind all that, there was always hope.
Xana wanted hope. She wanted to believe this was the beginning of something good for Declun, and thus for AJ. But in the short time she’d been gone, Xana had seen too much of the world to believe such a luxury. AJ was alive and well. He was getting a good education in a safe country. He was healthy. He was smiling. Even without her. That would have to be enough.
Xana turned and looked for a place to throw up.