Her father had already cut off her Wi-Fi access, but it only took her a few seconds to hop on the neighbor’s network—she’d learned some of their access codes last year, planning ahead in case it ever came in handy. She felt a sharp stab of guilt as she did it, circumventing her father’s rules not ten minutes after he’d accused her of betraying his trust. But what else could she do? It was either guilt about this, or guilt about not stopping the people behind Bluescreen. That didn’t stop the sick feeling in her gut, but she pushed ahead anyway.
She started with a quick message to Sahara: I’m fine. Papi freaking out. Send me the nuli feed.
The answer came just a few seconds later: Nothing yet. Still working on the malware. Still can’t get Anja’s security software to kill it. At the end was a link to the nuli feed. Marisa clicked on it, and a camera window spiraled open on her second monitor.
Kindred was still cruising around the city, his car a sleek black shape that seemed to warp and glitter as it rolled past streetlights, headlights, and the multicolored reflections of passing nulis. She clicked an icon in the corner and another window opened, showing her a GPS tracking map of everywhere the car had been: from Compton to Pasadena to Beverly Hills, and currently heading south on La Cienega—in the direction of Inglewood, though she couldn’t tell if that was his final destination. The route seemed to meander, sometimes on the freeways, sometimes on the surface streets, stopping here and there for what she assumed were more drug handoffs. The nuli was doing a good job of staying discreet, keeping the car in sight but skittering off every few minutes, dropping back or zooming ahead or slipping off to the side. Sahara had probably fed it one of the tracking algorithms she’d written for Cameron and Camilla. With the sky already full of nulis, one more or less would be almost impossible to notice.
And then Kindred’s car pulled off La Cienega and up a hill, turning quickly from a dense city to a forest—one of the few left inside the city borders. Marisa toggled the map labels: it was the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area. A small lake, some hiking trails, and a winding, scenic drive. And almost no nulis to blend in with.
Marisa’s hands flew across the keyboard, looking through the nuli’s admin controls to see if Sahara had left a back door for manual control. Thankfully, she had. Marisa blew out a puff of air, realizing that she’d been holding her breath. She found the hardware controls and turned off the nuli’s running lights—that was a ticketable offense, but so was stealing one in the first place. She hit a few more keys and took control of the now-stealth nuli, and followed Kindred’s car through the trees to a long parking lot, almost empty.
Almost.
Three cars waited at the end of the pavement, their headlights on, five or six figures standing beside them, silhouetted in the darkness. Marisa steered her nuli to the side, out of the line of headlights, and kept it low to prevent a similar silhouette effect. Kindred’s car rolled forward, and Marisa’s nuli flew along beside it, forty yards away, weaving behind tree trunks and picnic tables. She didn’t have access to a microphone, so she couldn’t tell what they said when Kindred stepped out. She circled far to the side and came in behind for a closer look, and gasped out loud when she saw the waiting men up close. They were four men and two women, each armed with a heavy rifle, their long magazines dotted with the glowing text that marked them as smart ammunition. The roof panels on the cars signified some pretty extensive upgrades in them as well, possible armor or some kind of advanced computer package. Maybe both. For what seemed like the fiftieth time in three days, Marisa realized just how far in over her head she was.
Kindred handed the lead man a roll of cash, and two of the thugs opened one of the cars and pulled out a case, hauling it across to Kindred’s car. This was the next step up the chain, the link between the street suppliers and, she hoped, the manufacturers themselves. But what could she possibly do?
And yet she had to do something. The police weren’t exactly reliable or trustworthy, but they were at least armed, and trained for dealing with this kind of thing. She swung the nuli farther toward the back and crept in closer, barely hovering above the ground, trying to get in close enough to read the license plates on the cars. She blinked on the numbers, trying to save them to her notepad, and when it didn’t work she blinked again, only belatedly remembering that she didn’t have a djinni. She grumbled at her stupidity and searched the desk for a pen, scrambling through the pile of old computer parts until she found one. She jotted down the numbers and backed the nuli away, hiding it under a picnic table to watch the drug dealers talk while she opened another window. She routed her connection through a string of straw-man proxies, and accessed the police server with a dummy account.