Another “friend of a patient” alert popped up in Marisa’s djinni, as she walked slowly down to the hospital lobby, and she blinked on it absently. The halls were mostly quiet now, well lit but empty, with no one but a few errant visitors sleeping in chairs while they waited for morning. Marisa started reading, but stopped in surprise—it wasn’t for Anja, but Francisca Maldonado. Marisa had been the one to check her in when she fainted, and she was still in the system as an auxiliary contact. She read the alert again, and found the key message: La Princesa had woken up.
Marisa looked at the bottom of the message, where it listed which of the patient’s other friends were in the building. Marisa was the only one. She groaned, desperate to leave, but she couldn’t bear to leave a brand-new coma survivor alone in the middle of the night. Even one as horrible as La Princesa. She turned around and walked back upstairs.
Franca looked up when she came into the room—a far, far nicer one than Chuy was in—but looked away in disgust when she recognized Marisa. Her voice was bitter. “Come to gloat?”
“I thought you might like some company.”
“From a Carneseca?” asked Franca. She laughed, but it turned almost immediately to a cough. “I’d rather be alone.”
Marisa clenched her fist, feeling her anger boil up. “I’m trying to be nice.”
“Y luego?” asked Franca. “You say you feel sorry for me, and suddenly the feud is over and our families love each other and everything’s good again?”
“We don’t have to hate each other,” said Marisa. “Our fathers do, but we don’t even know why. Some car accident so old we don’t even remember it? Can’t we think for ourselves?”
“Some of us trust our fathers,” said Franca. “If he hates you, he has a good reason; that’s all I need to know.”
Marisa let her anger boil over, snapping back with the worst thing she could think of: “Do you know what your father’s been involved in? A lot’s happened while you were asleep.”
“I’m watching the reports.”
“Do they talk about the great Don Francisco?” Marisa shot back. “Do they talk about how he paid for the drug that almost killed you—for the VR system that let another man wear your body like a suit? Does that bother you at all, or will you just forgive everything, and go right back to him, and let him buy you presents and dress you like a doll and sell you to whichever other crime family he wants to make a deal with—”
“Get out,” hissed Franca. There were tears in her eyes, and Marisa felt suddenly guilty, but her anger was high and she didn’t want to back down. She stood in the doorway, staring coldly at Franca, who stared right back. “Get out,” she said again.
Marisa waited, just long enough to show that she was making her own decision to leave, then turned and took a step into the hall. Almost instantly Franca called her back.
“Marisa.”
Marisa hesitated, confused. Franca’s voice didn’t sound right, almost like it had before, when Nils had used her to deliver his message. But that was impossible—the software was deleted, the hardware was destroyed—
—but Franca had been offline when the virus had destroyed itself, and the server had been destroyed before she’d come online again. She still had the software in her head.
But who was using it, if the hardware was gone?
“I have another message for you.”
Marisa turned slowly, as scared as if she were talking to a ghost. Franca was sitting in the bed, unnaturally calm, watching her with that same disconcerting detachment of a Bluescreen puppet.
Marisa stayed in the hall, too spooked to get closer. “Nils?”
“Nils is dead,” said Franca’s voice. “One of many things I want to thank you for.”
“I didn’t kill him,” said Marisa.
“But you facilitated it,” said the stranger. “You were always the wild card in this plan, but you played your part perfectly. I’m in your debt.”
“Who are you?”
Franca cocked her head to the side. “You don’t know?”
Not Nils, thought Marisa. Not eLiza. Certainly not Lal, or Omar, or anyone else she’d seen at the warehouse. But who else knew about Bluescreen? Who else had talked to her, had given her information, had guided her along some path she’d thought she’d been choosing on her own—
The answer struck her like a thunderbolt. “Grendel.”