“We’re going to kill her,” said Marisa. “She’s going to kill herself!”
“So grab her and stop her!” said Bao. “We need to tie her down so we can figure out how to—”
Anja landed a kick on his head, snapping his head back and dropping him to the ground. He didn’t move.
“Please, Lal,” said Marisa. “Please don’t do this.”
Anja walked toward her, limping, bleeding, so damaged she shouldn’t even be walking, but the algorithm wouldn’t let her stop.
“We have to trick it,” said Marisa suddenly. “We have to make it think it’s won—”
Anja punched her again, rocking Marisa’s head to the side, and it was all too easy to slump to the side, falling to the ground, pretending that Anja had defeated her. Anja swayed in the middle of the room, surveying the destruction. Bodies lay in crumpled heaps in a chaos of broken walls and overturned chairs.
Stop now, Marisa thought. It’s over. Stop, and let go of Anja. Let her go to sleep. Let her turn off her djinni.
Anja turned, and shuffled toward the door. Marisa’s voice caught in her throat, terrified to let her go, even more terrified to call her back. Anja walked outside, and was gone.
“She’ll get herself killed,” Marisa sobbed. “We have to stop her.”
“You can’t stop them all,” said Saif. He was shaking his head, staring at the floor. “They’re everywhere. All over the city. Every Bluescreen user in Los Angeles—they’re under control now.” His eyes focused on Marisa. “The city is burning. They’re an army, and they’re destroying everything.”
Marisa struggled to sit up, her head still reeling from the head-butt. It felt like Anja had broken her nose. “What are they doing?”
“I don’t know!” said Saif. “I don’t even know how they’re doing it! There’s nothing in the code that should allow for this.”
“How do you know?”
Saif turned on her, and Marisa looked at him, her head slowly clearing, and the question grew more terrifying with every second. How did he know? She could hear screams outside, screams and cries and shattering glass. Anja, and others; every Bluescreen user in the city.
Except one.
“I told you I needed to talk to you,” said Saif. “Now I need you more than ever. I don’t know code—you do. You can help us figure this out, and stop it.”
Marisa’s heart sank, and then seemed to stop altogether. She looked at Saif and forced out the question she could barely stand to think:
“You’re connected to the net. You’re reading the news—that’s how you know all of this. But if every Bluescreen user in the city is affected, if they’ve all turned into puppets at once in one giant attack . . . why not you?”
“I thought you were just some kid,” said Saif, “some party girl with more guts than sense, but you’re brilliant, Mari. Do you realize what we could do if we worked together?”
“You lied to me,” she said. “You’re not infected with Bluescreen at all—you never were. You faked it to make me trust you, and then you gave me all this information and asked all these questions, and . . .” She shook her head. She could barely believe it. “You’ve been lying the whole time. Everything we’ve done together, everything we ever tried, they’ve adapted so quickly we couldn’t keep up. We followed them with a drone, and they figured it out. We found their headquarters, and made a plan to get inside, and you listened to all of it, using us to find the holes in your security.”
“Think about it, Mari!” His terrified desperation was giving way to anger, as if volume and force could convince her as effectively as reason. “The world is upside down—it’s not even upside down anymore, it’s shattered, it’s unrecognizable. I was just as poor as you, a dead-end street rat with nothing to eat, and nowhere to go, and a hundred years ago we might have been part of a communist revolution, taking back the power from the oligarchs on top to the workingman who makes it all possible. But there isn’t a workingman anymore. Machines make it possible, nulis and autocars and automated factories, and nobody has anything but the people on the top. Bluescreen was our ticket to change that. To take back the power and—”
“And what?” asked Marisa. “To become the new oligarchs? To rob from the rich and give to yourself and kill anyone who gets in your way?”
“Revolutions are bloody,” said Saif. “As bad as this has been, it’s still one of the cleanest in history.”
“If you think—”
“If you want to add more compassion, bring more compassion!” He stepped toward her, eyes wide and pleading. “That’s what I’m telling you—what I’ve been trying to tell you all day. You can help us, Marisa, you’ve more than proved it. Help me build a better world.”
“What happened to Anja?” Marisa demanded.