“You never fail to impress me.”
And then it clicked, like the final letter of a computer code that downloaded the whole picture into her brain, a code she’d been piecing together this whole time without realizing. “eLiza came to you with the Dolly Girls code, but you wanted it for yourself,” said Marisa. “You told her how to use it, and let her and Nils and Lal field-test it for you—see what it could do, and what it couldn’t. Where the gaps were. Then you tipped off the Foundation, and I could never figure out why, but it was because you needed someone to take the heat. You knew they’d want to make an example of it—to expose the evils of human augmentation—so you tipped them off and they hired you to clean up your own loose ends. You got to kill the field-testers, keep the tech for yourself, and pin the whole disaster on someone so willing to be your decoy that they think it’s their own idea.” It all seemed so clear now. “You wrote the attack virus.”
“And then I told you what was going on,” said Grendel, “and you obliged by cleaning up all the evidence the army of puppets couldn’t.”
“So why are you telling me this?” asked Marisa.
“Because I owed you,” said Grendel. He paused, watching her. “And because it’s more fun when you’re trying to stop me.”
Marisa fixed Franca’s eyes with a cold, steely glare. “If you think you want me as an enemy, you don’t know me very well.”
“Of course I know you, Mari,” said Grendel. “I’ve known you since you were two years old.”
Marisa’s eyes went wide. Two years old. The car accident. The mystery that had changed her life forever—the focal point of every feud, every fight, every great, unanswered question of her life. “What do you know about—” she started, but Franca’s eyes closed, and her head slumped over. A moment later she looked up again, and her eyes narrowed spitefully.
“I thought I told you to leave.” La Princesa was back. Grendel had disappeared.
Marisa turned, shaken, and walked away. Was Grendel an enemy, or an ally? she wondered as she walked down the brightly lit hospital corridor.
“Maybe he’s both,” she whispered, “or at least maybe he thinks he is.”
“Who you talking to?” asked Bao.
Marisa looked up, startled to see Bao leaning casually against the wall, but smiled when she recognized him. “I thought you went home.”
Bao shrugged. “Figured I’d wait. You live closer to me than Sahara anyway.”
They fell in step beside each other and walked out of the hospital into the warm Los Angeles night. Nulis flew overhead, as busy at midnight as they were at noon. The streetlights shone like stars.
“The world’s a lot more dangerous than I thought it was,” said Marisa.
“No me digas,” said Bao, and laughed at Marisa’s surprised look. “What? I live in Mirador, you don’t think I’ve picked up any Spanish?”
“Not bad,” said Marisa. “Now say ‘Trienta y tres tramos de troncos trozaron tres tristes trozadores de troncos.’”
“Whoa,” said Bao. “That’s hard-core Spanish. I’m still playing on beginner.”
They fell into a comfortable silence, and Marisa thought again about Grendel, and about the Foundation, and about Ti Xú Dāo and Don Francisco and the whole gigantic world full of people she couldn’t trust. People she was afraid of. Even Anja’s father, and the vast collection of corporate interests he represented, slowly and cheerfully bleeding the rest of the population dry. That was the world she lived in, but it wasn’t the world she wanted.
Maybe it was time somebody changed it.
“You know what else?” she asked.
“What?”
“I think we’re a lot more dangerous than the world thought we were.”
Bao smiled. “What are you planning?”
Marisa smiled back.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS