Hannah hoists her shoulders in a shrug. “Something bad. Something they’ve been planning for a long time. Something called Zero Day.”
“Zero Day? When is—” Her voice drops away when another siren wails past the shelter and a kaleidoscope of red-and-blue color momentarily lights up the room. Lela cocks her head and listens for a moment. Then slips her computer out of her purse and splits it open to check the police and fire scanner. A few weeks ago, she had someone set up her laptop so she could tune in live to the dispatch system. The screen slowly brightens to show her inbox. There is a tall pile of new messages, all from different senders, all with attachments.
“What are you doing?” Hannah says.
“I need to know what’s going on out there.”
But first she opens a message marked IMPORTANT from her editor. She never takes a day off, never goes off the clock, which makes it impossible to resist dipping into the office conversation now, just for a moment. No matter what Brandon wants, she’ll say no, but she needs to make clear to him that she’s out for days, weeks, however long it might take her to sort out the mess she’s in. The computer chugs and bleeps. The screen goes dark and she thumps it with her knuckles. “Stupid thing. What’s wrong with you?”
Just then the red code begins to map its way across the monitor. But Lela gets no more than a glimpse. Hannah lurches across the table and grabs hold of the laptop. “No!” Lela says, reaching for it, but the girl is too fast—hurling it against the wall. The screen snaps off and skids away. Black keys litter the ground. A green chipboard sticks out of the cracked base like a bulging organ. There is a spritz of electricity, and the fan gives a dying gasp.
A part of Lela wants to scream, slap the girl. How dare she? Lela should throw her against the wall. That’s what she should do. Over and over again until her brains dash out her ear. She grinds her teeth and lets out an animal cry and slams a hand flat against the table.
And then she sees Hannah. Really sees her. The girl is backing away fearfully, shivering where she stands. “Don’t,” Hannah says, holding up her hands. “Don’t. I’m sorry. I was just trying to protect you.”
Lela shakes her head. Blinks. Looks blankly at her hands, which are clenched into fists so tightly that her nails bite her palms. She loosens her grip. Shudders out a breath. Whatever possessed her—ever so briefly, like the bee-buzz that bothers her brain when she stands up after hours at the keyboard—it’s gone now.
“It’s not safe,” Hannah says. “They’re in there.”
“On the Dark Net?” Lela says, and remembers what Josh told her. “Digital hell.”
“Yes. It’s like an—I don’t know—incubator for evil.”
Some dampness bothers Lela’s upper lip. When she wipes at it, her hand comes away bloody. She bunches up a napkin to staunch the flow. She drops herself back into her seat. “Jesus,” she says. “I’m sorry, Hannah. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“It wasn’t you.”
“I’m so goddamn sorry. About everything.”
“I need you to help me.”
“I know. I will. I’m here for you.”
“No, Aunt Lela. I mean, thank you. I’m glad. But I don’t mean that. What I mean is, I think I know what to do. I need to get on the Dark Net, and for that to happen, I need your help.”
Lela says nothing. Outside, more and more sirens rise from different corners of the city, like wolves calling to each other. “What are you talking about?”
Hannah explains what happened when the cable fitted into the Mirage port, when the red eye trained its gaze on her. The sense of simultaneously filling up on and falling through a channel of darkness. “That’s where they are. That’s their—I don’t know the right word—womb. Well. Foundation. Factory. Battery. Source. Whatever. When they come for us, that’s where they’re coming from. What you saw on your laptop just now, I saw in that chamber. It’s a virus. An infection. It gets inside our devices,” she says, “and our devices are us.”
“Possession,” Lela whispers, as though afraid to say it out loud. She writes stories that consist of facts. If she makes a claim, she backs it up with data from a census or case study, quotes from expert sources. That’s why she has never been able to take any religion seriously; the lack of evidence. Now she has proof, and she doesn’t know what to do with it, how to process what she has for so long been in denial of, the extra-normal. It’s all a matter of perspective, she supposes. One person’s blue might be another person’s orange. Time slows down or speeds up according to gravity, so that seconds tick along faster in space than on Everest than in Death Valley than at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The peanut butter that makes one mouth water can make another throat close. Someone might see a ghost or a god where others see a shadow. Everyone is making sense of the unknown world with what limited, contradictory sensory equipment we have at our disposal. We’re all, to different degrees, blind.
Hannah can see now. Lela still can’t seem to process it all, but she’s trying. She’s never had trouble with confidence. She’s said on more than one occasion that she has no regrets. That’s because she never looks back, always forward, always in pursuit. Chasing the next story, certain she’ll conquer it. But now she doesn’t know what lies ahead. She doesn’t know the next story and how it will end. She doesn’t know anything anymore, it seems.
“Why?” Lela swallows down a gulp of coffee. “Why do you want to go there? And why would I ever let you go there?”
“Because I think that’s the only way to stop them.”
“Who says you need to stop them?”
“Lump.”
“Lump? The crazy homeless guy?”
“He’s not crazy. He’s part of this. He’s—whatever you want to call it—on the spectrum. He saved me.”
“I’m the one who’s trying to protect you here, Hannah. Let me do that. It doesn’t matter how bad you begged, I wouldn’t take you to a meth lab, a strip club, a dogfight in a junkyard. This is worse than the same thing.”
Hannah sweeps her hand and knocks the M&M’s off the table. They clatter to the floor, and Hemingway grumbles awake and crawls out from under the table to slurp them up. “I know this sounds weird,” Hannah says, her voice too calm, “but I just know. Okay? I can just feel it. It’s like what Juniper said before. About me being different. Having some antenna that tunes me in to another frequency.” She readjusts the Mirage and tucks her hair behind her ears. “I can see the darkness. I know where it’s coming from. I just know, Aunt Lela.”
At that moment Lela’s phone begins buzzing in her pocket. She pulls it out, still staring confusedly at Hannah. Before she can answer, the girl’s hand falls over it. “Wait,” she says.