“Why does this matter?” asked Adriana. “A gang is a gang—it was fun when we were kids, all flashy clothes and throwing money around, but we have our own kid now. We can’t live like this, and if Chuy loses his arm he can’t get a job doing anything else, either. It doesn’t matter which gang shot him; he was shot, and he’s all I have.”
“I’m sorry,” said Marisa. “I’m . . . I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on here.” She could hear her parents still arguing in the kitchen, and talked louder to drown out the sound. “This gang must have been working for a larger group—the drug they were mixed up in was way too sophisticated for some street gang to cook up. I’m trying to figure out if the payback will come from Tì Xū Dāo or from that larger group.”
Adriana held Chito tighter. “Do you think they’d come for Chuy in the hospital? Calaca said it was better to hide him, but he’s so sick, Marisa, you have no idea—”
“Attacking a hospital would be a pretty big risk just to kill one person,” said Marisa, hoping it was true. But if there was one thing she knew about these people, it’s that they weren’t concerned with risk. They’d killed, or tried to kill, three people that Marisa knew about, two of them in public places. eLiza was the anomaly there. They struck hard, and they struck fast. . . .
“Wait a minute.”
“What?” asked Adriana.
Marisa glanced at the kitchen door, then back at Adriana. “Three months,” she muttered. Grendel said eLiza had posted the code on the darknet three months ago. She was an anomaly. Saif was targeted within moments of talking about Bluescreen, and they’d tried to kill Anja just one day after she failed to infect her father. But eLiza wasn’t killed until three months after she’d started snooping.
“What if she was working for them?” Marisa said out loud.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Adriana.
“What?” asked Marisa. “Oh—sorry. I was thinking out loud.”
“Are you talking about me?” asked Adriana. “Because I would never work with La Sesenta—”
“No, no,” said Marisa, “I was talking about the girl who was killed yesterday. Did you see that?”
Adriana raised her eyebrow. “Do you have any idea how many people were killed in LA yesterday?”
“This one was killed by the same dealers who hired Tì Xū Dāo. I thought she was killed for snooping around in their business, but why wait three months? They’re not the kind that waits, which means she did something else to anger them, just a couple of days ago: she knew too much and started talking, or maybe she asked them for something they didn’t want to give. Either way, the best explanation is that she was working with them—she studied djinni programming, hell, she might be one of the original programmers for all we know. Grendel said she was asking about the code, but he didn’t say what she was asking. We assumed she wanted to know what it was, but it could just as easily be that she was working on it and needed advice. eLiza wasn’t a snoop, she was a loose end.”
“What does any of this have to do with Chuy?” asked Adriana.
“I’m sorry,” said Marisa, turning toward her. “I’m being rude. Chuy’s in danger, and I want to help him, but . . . I’d go and talk to my parents, but like I said I’m kind of on the outs right now. But this is something I can do—I can figure out how they did this, and I can make sure they don’t get the chance to do it again.” She paused, clutching Adriana’s hand. “I want to get to know you better. I’m sorry we waited for something like this to make it happen.”
Adriana squeezed her hand back. “I’m going to see if your mom is ready to go,” she said, and stood up with Chito to walk back to the kitchen.
“Tell Chuy I love him,” said Marisa. She returned to the touch screen and started another search, looking for everything she could find about eLiza. There was very little under that name—some posts on hacker boards here and there, but the hacker boards on the regular internet were mostly useless, and she couldn’t check Lemnisca.te until she got home to her secure equipment. Instead she searched for eLiza’s real name, Elizabeth Swaim, and found a deluge of info that would take her days to sort through.