“Don’t you think that’s an overreaction?” asked Marisa. “We don’t even know what’s going on yet.”
“What’s Lemnisca.te?” asked Omar.
“It’s like a central hub for cyber criminals,” said Anja. “They all have their own little hidey-holes, but when they want to talk to each other they go to a darknet message board called Lemnisca.te. Marisa and I use it sometimes for stuff like this, just information gathering, but we’ve never messed with anything big enough to attract real attention. You steal one gold piece from the dragon’s lair, the dragon doesn’t wake up; when the dragon talks to you directly, though, you drop what you’re holding and run.”
“It’s not gold we’re carrying,” said Marisa, “it’s a monster. And it’s in your head. If he can help get rid of it, I think we’ve got to talk to him.”
“Don’t even think about it,” said Sahara. “This is not a game, Mari.”
“I know that,” said Marisa, trying to sound braver than she was and accidentally sounding angry instead. “What else are we supposed to do? Best case scenario, following your suggestion: I scrub my ID and hide from this guy and we never hear from him again, but Anja’s still got this crap in her head. We lose everything and we have nothing to show for it.” She tried to say more, but she was shaking and lost her voice.
“It sounds dangerous,” said Omar.
“Of course it’s dangerous,” said Marisa, swallowing nervously. She clenched her hands into fists, drawing strength from the pain of her fingernails in her palms. “That’s why we have to do it. You don’t get experience points sitting on your butt, right? You gotta go out and kill monsters.” She sucked in a breath and glanced at Anja. “Play crazy, right?”
A slow grin spread across Anja’s face. “Play crazy.”
“You’re insane,” said Omar.
“That’s what she just said,” said Sahara, and Marisa felt a surge of confidence at the sudden power in her voice. It was time to get to work, and Sahara was all business. “If we’re going to do this, we do it right,” said Sahara. “How does he want to meet?”
“NeverMind,” said Marisa, and shivered involuntarily. She’d never used NeverMind before, and it terrified her.
“Spooky,” said Sahara, “but probably the safest. Anja, do you have a tablet?”
“Just Marisa’s MoGan,” said Anja, shaking her head to disconnect it, “but it’s been plugged into my djinni, and we don’t want to use it till we’ve had a chance to scrub it.”
“I’ve got a MoGan,” said Omar, pulling one of the six-inch miniscreens from his pants pocket. “I don’t know if it’s got the software you need; I really just use it for the speaker.”
“This is why we have rich friends,” said Sahara. “Marisa, plug it in and let Anja monitor your firewall. I assume you’re using Yosae?”
Marisa clipped her adaptor cord into the port at the base of her skull. “Of course.”
“Good,” said Sahara. “Anja’s an expert in it.”
“Alles klar,” said Anja, clipping Omar’s minitablet to the other end of the cord.
“Watch her like a hawk,” said Sahara. “If this blowhole tries to upload anything, you kill the connection immediately, okay? No waiting, no trying to contain it.”
“You can’t upload over NeverMind,” said Marisa, “that’s what makes it so safe.”
“What’s NeverMind?” asked Omar.
“It’s a direct VR connection,” said Marisa. “Brain to brain. Normal VR invites the user into a shared space and controls your djinni’s sensory feeds, telling your eyes what to see and your ears what to hear, and so on. Really paranoid hackers—like Grendel, apparently—don’t trust that method, because that gives a third party access to your djinni. NeverMind bypasses that by skipping the VR and going straight into the feeds. The only thing giving it commands are the two brains connected to it.”
“Whoa,” said Omar, looking deeply suspicious. “You’re going to . . . That’s like stepping inside another person’s mind.”
Marisa shivered again, and grimaced. “Yeah.”
“That’s a VR program built out of some creep’s subconscious,” said Omar. “Some creep who named himself after a half-human viking cannibal.” He shook his head. “You’re not going to do this.”
“It’s freaky as hell,” said Anja, “but it’s safe. There’s no bad code in there, because there’s no code at all—there’s nothing but what you take with you. He can’t upload anything into Marisa’s djinni, just like she can’t upload anything into his. We can’t even monitor their conversation. I’ve done it before, and it’s fine—it’s the only way some of these weirdos can trust each other enough to communicate.”
“Anja’s going to watch the incoming data,” said Sahara, “just in case this guy’s found a loophole. And I’ve already got Marisa’s ID copied, so I can start tracing the signal back toward him, just to keep him occupied. If he’s busy trying to jam my trace, he won’t be able to mess with Mari.”