The nearest casa de mu?ecas was in Puerto ?Limón. In English, they were called “dollhouses,” and in Japanese they were “schoolgirl observation clubs.” Japan was where they started. Customers – mostly men – entered what looked like an ordinary apartment building and watched high school girls through one-way mirrors as they did whatever it was high school kids – mostly girls – did every afternoon. They paid by the half hour. They paid more if they wanted to see the kids do anything more than text each other and eat snack foods.
Now, vN did that job. Little vN. Child-sized vN.
Javier would find a Rory there. He was sure of it.
The steader hydrofoil bounced along the waves as they made their way to the port. They were in an old boat, flying the flag of a company that had long since cut its sponsorship. It was pissing down rain. Tyler seemed unfazed. He stared into the darkness, hand steady on the controls, until they came within sight of the massive cruise ship docked in the harbour.
“Have you ever been to Puerto ?Limón?”
Javier shook his head. “No. But my clade was designed for work in the La Amistad corridor. I’m an arboreal model. That’s why I can jump so high.”
“Right. So this is kind of a homecoming for you, huh?”
Javier had not thought of it in this way, before. His father had iterated him somewhere in the forest shared by Costa Rica and Nicaragua – either the Barra del Colorado refuge or the Indio Maiz reserve. At the time, they didn’t know which side of the border they were on. In the forest, it didn’t matter.
“I guess,” he said.
“Tell me this plan, again?”
“You two get me into the Zona Rosa, I find the casa, I find a Rory, and I shake her down for information about where Sarton’s cache is.”
Tyler nodded. Across from Javier, Seamus also nodded. “So, we’re just three guys going out on the town?”
“Right. We’ll hang out for a while in the Zona, and then we’ll split up once I find the casa.”
“How will you know it?”
Javier shrugged. “I’ll know it. The men are different.”
“Different how?”
Javier wiped rain from his face. He stared at the distant lights of the city, growing ever brighter as that distance closed. He had never wanted to come back to this place. Ever. He had sworn to Amy that he was done with it. He had done everything in his power to remove his children from it, for good.
“They’re sad.”
The storm only worsened as they neared the port. They’d outfitted Javier in a neoprene shell hoodie with a long bill in the front, and given him a watch wallet in the form of a printed band with the appropriate chips in it and a line of credit the stead petitioned for from a local tourist services union.
“It’s nothing special,” Seamus had said. “All the impressive technology is inside you, already.”
Javier had smiled. “That’s my line.”
Now, this close to the port, his usual confidence was flickering. He’d kept it together thus far. Hadn’t lost it. Hadn’t cried. Hadn’t even asked about his children. (Because his children were better off without him, and it would be best for them if he never found out where they were, was never tempted by that knowledge, so he couldn’t darken their doorways.) But here, in the dark, on the water, with thunder at his back and lightning lancing the sky, it was easy to sense the world closing in.
He needed to find Amy. And he needed his failsafe broken. Because he was going to kill Powell.
Thinking about it gave him the pixels, but he found he could consider it as a kind of absence. Not Powell’s death, not the moment of it, but rather what the world would be like with him gone. Which is to say, improved. Better. Cleaner. He had no idea how he would go about it. All of that would come when he was ready. When he was hacked.
Javier had no specific timeline for that last part. He did not expect that Amy would join him on the journey, after he brought her back. She had no reason to, and her hands would be full. He knew Powell’s trail would probably go cold before he was ready to edit him out of the world. He knew he might spend years searching for him. That was fine by him. He had spent most of his life on the road in one way or another, and he was content to continue on that way if it meant getting his revenge. He was an ageless self-replicating humanoid whose body fed on sunlight and trace metals. He didn’t feel pain. He could jump ten feet standing. He had the advantage.
If it took a year, it took a year. If it took ten, it took ten. If it took the rest of his life, if he died in the pursuit, then that was that. Que sera, sera.
“We’re here.” Tyler cut the engine and looked over his shoulder at Javier. “You ready?”
“I’m ready.”