The Beam: Season Two (46 page)

If Shadow was on mail now and Leah was on mail now, there was no reason not to streamline the process and do it in real time.
 

Leah inputted the coded mail identifier from Shadow’s last message into Diggle and waited. Moments later, the same node, as per protocol, popped a message at her:

> yt?

Leah looked at the “you there?” prompt, felt vulnerable, and replied anyway. She posted extensively on the Null forums, tagged with her handle as if begging someone to follow her breadcrumbs. A walled Diggle chat wasn’t any more dangerous.
 

>> yeah I’m here whats up

He replied, and suddenly Leah found herself following along. She kept trying to allow Shadow to impale himself more than she was impaling herself, but as the dialogue unfolded, the dance grew too awkward, and her guard began to fall.
 

> i have to trust you

>> ??

> i need help and don’t know if I can trust you. don’t have a choice

>> oooookay…

> you follow about nicolai costa?

>> saw the posts

> his connection was off all day yesterday. not down, off. he was there, was off for hours. i started digging. he met isaac ryan at the border. hes from w.e., came over in 30s

>> i don’t know anything about him or where hes from.
 

> italy.
 

>> ok

> last group over before borders closed. i think i.r. was waiting for him for something

>> so what

> found another trailing code while looking for beau monde. costa has it. found a few others who have it. not beau monde code, but has a lot of the same strings. looks like there’s a code dongle that serves as an authenticator, meshes with code quark is thought to bake into cs trackers.

Leah stopped and thought. It wasn’t universally agreed upon that City Surveillance had baked
any
sort of recognition criteria into its trackers beyond those used (obviously) to keep an eye out for overt criminal activity. There was no evidence at all and the system seemed to be unhackable, but Null acted as if it were an absolute truth because Null was paranoid. The theory was that before you crossed a street, City Surveillance knew your number of jaywalking tickets and whether they should watch you with one eyebrow raised. Outrage followed the proposition, with shouts that “the system” and “the man” were judging people guilty in advance of evidence. As with most of Null’s rants, though, Leah didn’t see the big deal. Did these people think that a body called “City Surveillance” wasn’t judging everything people did within the core network anyway?

But what Shadow had just said about the authenticator code was a relatively new theory that had been gaining popularity within the community. The idea was that certain people, when scanned, caused the CS trackers to do the opposite of what other tags did, essentially prompting the snoopers to
look away
. Something tied to these people’s IDs, the theory went, was giving them a get-out-of-jail-free card.
 

>> you’re saying costa is…what?

> tracked like the others. but it’s different and subtle. if I had to guess id say he doesn’t know hes being given a pass

>> paranoid. i don’t believe the code shit

> do you believe that there’s an upperclass? beau monde

>> theres always an upper class

> systematized though. not like an old boys network but in the network itself.
 

>> conspiracy. but maybe. i don’t like to lump in with null. its why i identify myself.

Leah looked at the last line, wondering if she was opening herself too far. It was true, though. Null’s inherent anonymity could make them very powerful, but it was also a crutch. The smallest and most cowardly person could act like the biggest shit when hidden behind a Guy Fawkes mask. It became hard to tell the sincere revolutionaries from the hangers-on, the bullies, and those who joined movements because they weren’t secure enough to contribute on their own.

> just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Leah chuckled.
 

>> so what do you want to do about it?

> we need to tinker. again I have to decide to trust you. if you’re nps I’m fucked.

>> im not nps

> good. we need to meet irl.

Leah felt her heartbeat quicken. That was out of the question. Shadow was clearly in DZ, and Leah went into the city all the time, but Null wasn’t a group who got together “in real life” for coffee or tea. They were faceless for many reasons, and a deep suspicion that their closest compatriots might be NPS plants was just one of them.
 

>> not happening

> i can’t explain over diggle

>> try

> sigh. shift is being manipulated. too much to say. i have an idea to disrupt it. okay? see if enterprise and directorate are really holding hands. come and arrest me. GE?
 

The last bit meant “good enough?” — roughly equivalent to a pouting reply like “you happy now?” But it almost
was
good enough, Leah had to admit. Diggle messages all self-destructed after ten exchanges or sixty seconds, but that wouldn’t matter if Leah were an agent. She’d have screencapped what he’d just typed with any one of many visual add-ons, and suddenly NPS would become much more interested in the underground personality known as Shadow. They were looking for him now, but only with a few groping fingers. If his last message fell into the wrong hands, The Beam could be made to empty its pockets, shaking him out as if his protections were nothing. It was his way of putting himself at her mercy in an effort to engender her trust.

She decided to play back a little, to rib him:

>> your fly is unzipped

> no shit. so GE?

>> ill think about it

> and just leave me hanging

>> youd do the same don’t lie

> sigh fine

>> hmb tomorrow

> one more thing. you know about integer7?

>> y

> he’s not responding to pm. like you. still not though

>> why d y care?

> makes me nervous

>> just off grid.
 

> who goes off grid?
 

>> me

> sigh okay

>> ciao

Leah closed Diggle, watching the bomb animation until the fuse reached its bottom and showed her a cartoon explosion. Diggle was goddamn good. Leah had once tried to see if she could hack it — if she could make it remember a conversation history — as an exercise. She hadn’t been able to. But despite Diggle’s imperviousness, couldn’t you just subvert it by taking an image of the screen with an ocular implant or any other external device?
 

But then again, she’d never actually
tried
to screencap a Diggle conversation. Were there ways to make an image un-cappable? There might be. If the nanopixels tracked the reader’s eyes and shone directly into them, they’d be unreadable from anything but the perfect angle. Even an ocular implant would fail if the pixels weren’t properly targeted because eye-mounted cameras had to be offset to keep from obscuring natural vision. Maybe a direct brain feed could capture the images, but Leah, if she made her mind paranoid enough, could think of ways around that.
 

Shadow was plenty paranoid. Would he have thought of what she had? Would he have tried it? And if it turned out that his arrestable message was, in fact, as anonymous as Diggle wanted it to be and couldn’t ever have been used against him, did Leah still think she could trust him?
 

For a few beats during their conversation, she’d almost wanted to tell Shadow about Stephen York. But now, looking back on their exchange and her tentative suggestion of meeting with Shadow in the future, she felt her better instincts reassert themselves.
 

In the end, she had nothing to use against Shadow. Here and now, though he’d said much that could get him in trouble, his fly was plenty zipped. And maybe, if he knew things about Diggle that she didn’t, he’d known all along that it would stay that way.
 

Sitting on the remnants of Vance Pilloud’s wooden floor, Leah suddenly found herself very glad that she’d kept the Stephen York ace securely in its hole.

Chapter 6

The door swung open in front of Kai. Nicolai was beside it, acting as if he needed to hold it for her. Behind him, she could see by the room lights and shimmering wall displays that he’d reestablished his canvas and Beam connection. Thank West. Despite what he’d said about impervious hacks, she had serious doubts that no one had noted his disconnection. But did it matter? Micah already knew he’d gone offline. Maybe it was even going offline that had brought Micah over in the first place, nudging him to investigate and find out what Nicolai was hiding.
 

“You turned your stuff back on.”
 

“I needed something to eat.”

“You’re used to foraging. Killing animals and roasting their meat over a fire. After shooting them with your crossbow.”
 

“It’s been a long time.” Nicolai stepped aside so Kai could enter. “And I was unable to find any animals. On this floor
or
the one below me.”
 

“So,” she said. “What’s going on?”
 

Nicolai looked around, surely knowing her question to be about his meeting with Rachel Ryan. He seemed to be assessing his canvas’s security, perhaps wondering if he should turn it back off.
 

“Nothing much,” he finally answered.

“Is this how we’re going to talk for the rest of our lives? Don’t be so paranoid, Nicolai.”
 

He sighed. “Okay. Fine.” He projected his voice, talking over Kai’s shoulder. “Canvas, go incognito.”
 

“Incognito,” said a soft voice.
 

“As if that means anything,” Nicolai muttered.
 

Kai, thinking of the wonders she’d seen — twice now — in the Ryans’ apartment, had to agree. But a girl could only be so guarded, and a canvas operating as incognito didn’t really seem any less secure, fundamentally, than speaking with a canvas entirely off. The nanobot tricks Kai had done mere hours earlier could have snooped on this conversation as easily as it had snooped on Natasha’s non-unfaithful infidelity. It was just additional evidence that in many ways, Kai deserved Beau Monde status more than many of the Beau Monde. She’d earned it. She deserved it. She’d been
promised
it. And if anyone snooped here, all they’d see would be her fearless efforts to seize what was owed.
 

“So you saw Micah’s mother.”

“And you saw Isaac.”
 

“You first,” she said. They were standing in the middle of the room like two fighters facing off. It was appropriately challenging — Kai wanted Nicolai to give up what he had before she surrendered her relative nothing — but it was also raising their defenses. She’d never get what she wanted by playing hardass…and in the end, she didn’t want to oppose Nicolai at all. Kai was a sneak, a spy, a lover of many men, and a cold-blooded killer, but that didn’t stop the little girl inside her from wanting a prince beside her.
 

So she sat on the couch, clearly leaving a spot for Nicolai to join her. She didn’t pat the seat to encourage him. That would be too much. She knew it from psychology 101, but she also knew it because the behavioral profile and response data her canvas’s AI had gathered from Nicolai over the years told her so. Every man was a puzzle. The fact that she genuinely liked Nicolai didn’t change that.
 

He sat on a chair across from her instead of joining her on the couch. It wasn’t what her profile had predicted at all. It was, in fact, a Micah Ryan move. The chair was angular and square, placing him higher in a subtle position of power.
 

“Okay,” he said. “I went to see her.”
 

Kai nodded.
 

“Interesting lady,” he added.
 

“I’ll bet.”
 

“Sweet.”
 

“Hmm. And what did she say about your past, and the family’s?”
 

“Her father was in league with the Italian Mafia. They were pressuring my father for his technology. They didn’t get it but needed the nanobots because of what they would mean for…well…for everything.”
 

“Hmm. This isn’t new. You knew this weeks ago.”
 

“Well, she confirmed it.”
 

“So you just walked in and said, ‘Hey, Mrs. Ryan — can you confirm some things for me?’”
 

“What did you find out from Isaac?”
 

Kai had to be careful. She hadn’t spoken to Isaac, of course, or to Natasha. She’d merely snooped in, snooped out, and decided quite firmly that she would grab Micah by his balls and squeeze until he gave her what he’d promised — until she had what his own stupid brother had. The idea that a weak-willed Directorate layabout and his bitch wife had more than Kai was a travesty. Kai had followed in the footsteps of her idol, Alexa Mathis, who’d taken the lone commodity that never lost value — sex — and used it to build an empire. Kai had paid her dues. She had scrapped, fought, innovated, and assumed innumerable risks. All Isaac had done to earn status superior to hers, on the other hand, was to be born.