She sat up, holding her pillow tightly in her lap. She felt isolated, the same as she’d felt the first time she’d turned off her djinni—not just isolated, but abandoned. Even the house didn’t recognize her. She hadn’t seen her father punish anyone this severely since he’d thrown Chuy out of the house.
It surprised her, all over again, how much she relied on her djinni. When was the last time she’d been truly alone? She could talk to anyone she wanted, anywhere in the world, in a nanosecond or less. She could hear her friends’ voices; she could see their faces. She could read the latest Overworld news, or even jump in a game and forget the real world completely. Now was she simply here, stuck in one place and one time and one small room. The seconds ticked on, with no new noises or photos or chats.
“I’m not completely cut off,” she said, looking at her desk. The hotbox was isolated, but she had two other systems that were still connected to the network, systems with a mouse and a keyboard and a touch screen, for a better interface when designing avatars or doing a lot of heavy coding. She stood and walked to the desk, moving the broken Jeon arm gently to clear a space. She could talk to someone, but who?
Not her father. He was too angry; she needed to give him time to calm down. She’d gotten into far too many screaming matches over the years, and she knew how they played out. Her mami would be just as useless, at least tonight. Maybe Sahara or the others? What could they do? But Marisa had dragged them into far too much of this already—yes, it was Anja who’d gotten them all involved in the first place, but it was Marisa who’d poked her nose where it didn’t belong, studying the code and attracting the notice of hackers like Grendel, and eventually the Bluescreen dealers themselves. Sahara and Anja and everyone else was busy enough tonight, protecting their IDs and searching for a way to scrub the Bluescreen code out of Anja’s head. They didn’t have time to dig Marisa out a hole she’d dug all by herself.
Marisa stared at the computers, wishing she could do something—needing, in some primal way, to make something better. To fix something, anything, since she couldn’t fix herself. But the problems all seemed so big: Chuy and Adriana, jobless and half-starved. A whole city full of hungry, homeless nobodies, scraping out whatever existence they could in the shadow of people and companies so rich they seemed to live on different planets. But they were all right there, in the same big city. Maybe the Foundation was right to protest the new Ganika plant—it wasn’t going to help anyone. It wasn’t going to make any new jobs, it wasn’t going to feed anyone, it wasn’t going to do anything but make expensive new toys for people like Anja, so rich she could just replace her djinni at the drop of a hat.
It made Marisa feel uncomfortable, just for a moment, to sympathize so strongly with a terrorist group like the Foundation. The Ganika plant was just one building, just one more circuit in the giant machine that was LA, but it represented so much more. More people put out of work by nulis. More neighborhoods bulldozed to make room for a factory that none of the unemployed masses could ever hope to find a job in. For one brief, exhilarating moment, she thought that maybe Bluescreen was the best possible thing that could happen to this city: get everyone good and terrified of djinnis, force people to realize how much they depended on them, and how easily their technology could slip its leash and destroy them. How would the city react if they knew about a virus so powerful it could break through all your firewalls and control you like a marionette? How many people would turn their djinnis off, just like Marisa had, and go back to a world where people had to open their own doors, and do their own laundry, and build their own world? If Bluescreen was what it took to save the city . . . would that be worth it?
As soon as she thought it, though, she grew angry. Bluescreen in Brentwood was one thing, but they had brought it into Mirador. Into Pati’s school. Into Marisa’s home. Selling this drug to children was as unforgivable as it was inexplicable. Why make a drug that controlled people’s minds, and give it to kids who had nothing? What could they possibly hope to gain? Certainly not money—how much could Paolo, whoever he was, possibly have paid for his handful of drives? It didn’t make any sense.
But it did make her mad. If they were going to hurt her sister, Marisa was going to hurt them back.
She turned on her largest machine, a computer she called Huitzilopochtli—the Aztec god of war. It was time to follow up on that nuli they had sent to follow Kindred, and see what she could find.