“I need to narrow the search,” she muttered. “What am I looking for, specifically? Where she was? Who she was with? Yes; who were her friends, who did she know. A hacker studying djinni programming at USC would know a lot of other programmers—maybe they built Bluescreen together.” She found USC’s public registration records, and quickly coded a search to look at all of eLiza’s classes to see who else was in them, sorted by frequency. The list of common classmates was surprisingly long—Marisa supposed that they had a limited number of djinni programming students at any given level, and they all took the same classes. She wrote another search code to compare that list against eLiza’s social networks, to see which of her classmates showed up most often as friends. This search revealed a clear outlier: another programming student named Nils Eckert. It listed his specialty as cyber security.
“What’s your story, Nils?” Marisa said, and started typing in another search, when suddenly she was interrupted by a loud bang. She looked up—it had come from the street somewhere. She looked at the front windows, then back toward the kitchen. Her father was standing there, looking toward the same windows. “What was that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, walking toward her, “let me take a look—”
More bangs sounded, and distant screams.
And suddenly the front windows exploded inward under a hail of bullets.
FIFTEEN
“Get down!”
Marisa couldn’t tell who’d shouted, her or her father or both in unison. She dropped to the floor, ducking low and covering her head. She heard someone screaming, mixed with the crackle of falling glass, and realized it was Adriana, shouting Chuy’s name over and over. Chito was wailing in terror.
“Get in the kitchen!” shouted Carlo Magno. Marisa peeked out through her fingers and saw that the attack was over—but no, she could hear more guns on the street. The attacker was still shooting. Either San Juanito wasn’t the main target, or it wasn’t a target at all, just caught in the crossfire.
Another swarm of bullets burst through the front door, showering the room with shards of glass and and a hurricane of splinters. Marisa screamed and ducked her head again, curled into a ball behind the narrow hostess podium. When the shooter moved on to other targets Marisa knocked the podium over and dragged it with her across the floor, heedless of the sharp debris, pulling it behind the nearest wall for cover.
“Get in the kitchen,” her father hissed. “Now, before they shoot us again!”
Marisa looked at the wall above her, and saw it perforated with bullet holes. She shrank lower, lying flat on the floor. “We have cameras outside,” she said, tapping the touch screen. “I want to see what’s going on.”
“Leave that and use your djinni!”
“You turned off my djinni!”
Marisa accessed the restaurant’s exterior cameras. A delivery van was driving slowly up the street, the top removed, with four Chinese thugs, two men and two women, poking up out of the top, firing as they went. They seemed to be targeting everything, calmly spraying the streets with bullets like they were watering plants with a hose, pausing now and then to reload when their guns ran dry. One of them turned toward the camera, and Marisa shouted: “Everyone get down!” Bullets tore through the restaurant again, splintering tables and shattering decorations, digging long trenches in the walls. Somewhere in the back, Chito kept screaming. Marisa was just glad he was alive.
“Get off the road!” Guadalupe shouted. Marisa looked up, confused, wondering who she was talking to. She looked back at her screen: no one was outside but the Tì Xū Dāo gunners, and there was no way her mother was talking to them. When the bullets stopped again Marisa jumped up to a low crouch and ran toward the kitchen, grabbing her father as she went. They dashed through the door and threw themselves on the floor; Marisa’s mouth fell open in shock to see that the devastation had reached all the way back here—pots and ovens and thick metal cabinets were all pocked with bullet holes.
“They must be using accelerators,” said Carlo Magno. “Same thing Calaca’s idiotas were carrying when they came in the other day.” He pulled a gun from behind his apron.
Marisa’s jaw fell open. “You have a gun?”
“Those cholos came in the other day threatening my family, and I’m not going to get a gun?”
“Hide behind something,” said Guadalupe. Marisa glanced at her and saw the telltale unfocused eyes of someone talking on their djinni.
“Who are you talking to?” Marisa demanded. “Who’s out there?”
“The girls,” said Guadalupe, her eyes refocusing on Marisa. “Gabi and Pati—they were on their way here. They say there are shooters everywhere!”
The back door opened and Sahara dove in, crouching near them on the floor. She was dressed in her pajamas: pink sweatpants and a loose camisole, her makeup half-on and her hair a disheveled mess. “Who the hell is tearing up Mirador? They’re all over the barrio.”
Chito’s cries echoed through the kitchen like a primal scream. Adriana tried to hush him, but nothing seemed to work.
“They’re called Tì Xū Dāo,” said Marisa, “and my sisters are out there.”
“Can they get somewhere safe?” asked Sahara. Two camera nulis flew in behind her: Camilla and a new one.
“You brought your nulis?” asked Marisa. “Is this really the time?”