“What do you mean, she didn’t come back?” asked Anja. “She hasn’t talked to you again?”
“Her mind hasn’t come back online,” said Marisa. “She’s in a brain-death coma in the hospital, because the way Nils severed the link caused a glitch in her neural circuits. Bluescreen took control of her body and then never gave it back again. She’s a shell.” She looked at Saif, because she couldn’t bear to say the next part while looking at Anja. “If the link goes down while anyone else is being controlled, I think the same thing might happen to them, too.”
“That’s . . .” Bao shook his head. “I speak two languages, and I don’t know any words bad enough to express how bad that is.”
“How many people have the malware?” asked Sahara.
“Ask the dick who sells it,” said Bao, and looked at Saif. “That word’s not bad enough either, but I had to say something.”
“Hundreds,” said Saif, “maybe thousands. Look, Mari, can I talk to you in private?”
“Anything you have to say you can say in front of all of us,” said Anja. The group looked at Saif, but he only growled and looked away. “Fine,” said Anja. “That’s more or less what I expected.” She looked at the rest of the group. “Frankly, I don’t think brain death is our primary concern here: before that ever becomes an issue we have mind control, gang warfare, and world domination to deal with first. We know we can’t go to the police, so who? Some random programmer on the inside? That’s a great resource if we can use it, but how do we contact him? He said he’d feed you information, right? I’m not volunteering to be the next speaker he talks through and then puts into a coma.”
“We could follow Tì Xū Dāo,” said Sahara. “They probably went back to whoever hired them, right? That might lead us straight to Bluescreen, and then . . . I don’t know. Maybe we can get a message inside somehow.”
“That’s not going to help,” said Saif. “Even if you could find them—which you can’t because you don’t have their djinni IDs—what are you going to—”
“We do have their IDs,” said Marisa suddenly. Her father mumbled and shifted in his chair, not quite waking up, and Marisa lowered her voice, practically bubbling over with excitement. “San Juanito has them.” She ran to the corner where she’d dragged the fallen podium that contained the hostess touch screen, and stood it up with a grunt. It powered on, and she brushed away the layer of drywall dust that had settled on it after the fight. “I used the restaurant’s digital marketing system to flood their vision with ads during the firefight. That means it read their IDs, just like any other storefront. They should still be in the cache.” She opened the file system, found the ad board history, and scrolled through it for the time of the attack. Six names appeared, none of which she’d ever seen before, in the same block as the Maldonado enforcers who’d come to fight them off. “That’s them.”
“Johara’s the best way to track them,” said Anja. “Do you still have that back door open?”
Saif raised his eyebrow. “You have a back door into Johara? The biggest ISP in the world?”
“Not full access,” said Marisa, “but we can piggyback on their positioning system to find djinnis. I’ve been saving it for a rainy day, never using it because there’s always a risk that they’ll see what we’re doing and plug the hole. I’d say this is the rainy day we’ve been waiting for.” She blinked onto Johara’s website, entered the message board, and flipped the preference switches that opened the back door—a security hole in their forum that gave a user limited access to the company’s tech support tools. A few seconds later she was in. “Technically speaking, this is illegal,” she said. “Not just the hacking, but tracking djinnis for private use. Sahara, I need you to cover my trail.”
“Already working on it,” said Sahara. “Find those blowholes fast, and let’s get out of here.”
Marisa copied the IDs over from San Juanito’s computer, and started the search. The Johara system narrowed them down slowly, pinging satellites and data centers and relay towers, leaving in each one a tiny remnant of the search itself, all evidence that could be traced back to Marisa.
“Still searching . . . ,” she said, flexing her metal fingers, barely daring to breathe.
“I’m burying your server trail as well as I can,” said Sahara, “but if I do much more they’ll be able to just follow mine and find us anyway.”
“I need to help you,” said Anja.