The question never gets answered. Their attention turns to Hannah. She rises from the futon and crosses the basement and stands beside Derek. He feels uncomfortable enough to scoot a few inches away from her. He waits for her to say something, and when she doesn’t, his hands rise and fall to slap the armrests of his chair. “What, kid?”
“We’re wasting time. I need you to take me into the Dark Net.”
Derek cocks his head, studies her a moment. “Why?”
“You said you’re one of the good guys.”
“Yeah?”
“I need to go after the bad guys.”
“And who are they?”
Lela answers: “A group known as Undertown, Inc.”
“Who is this kid?” he says to Lela, and doesn’t wait for an answer. “Look. Listen. Let me explain something to you. The NSA knows your movement from site to site, can track your GPS, can track your credit card purchases, can hack the camera on your phone or computer and spy over your shoulder. They can follow every email you’ve ever sent, including edits, deletions, whether you were picking your nose or drinking a root beer when you wrote it. They know everything about you, and if you make a wrong move, they throw you in a cell and pipe Britney Spears through the loudspeakers all night and rip out your toenails until you confess to what they already know. If that’s what the good guys are capable of, imagine the bad. The bad guys are on the Dark Net. The bad guys are causing all of this. You don’t want to mess with them.” He finishes off the bottle of Mountain Dew, stifles a burp. “Besides, you’re just a kid.”
Lela says, “She’s not just a kid.”
“I don’t know what that even means.”
“She’s special.”
“So am I.”
“This is different. She’s—I don’t know the word—touched.”
“By whom?”
It isn’t easy for Lela to say, “I don’t know. God?”
Derek rolls his eyes. “Know your audience, lady.”
“Twenty-four hours ago, I felt exactly the same.”
“You guys are a joke. A bunch of freak-show zealots. I can’t believe you’re wasting my time.”
Lela tries to explain herself—stumbling through a half-assed description of the spectrum—and who knows how long the argument would spiral on if not for Hannah slapping Derek across the face. This silences him, makes his eyes go wide. He brings a hand to the cheek where the imprint of her hand rises red.
“Plug me in,” Hannah says.
Lela blinks once and sees Hannah as a twelve-year-old girl, blinks twice and sees her ten times the size. Derek hunches down in his chair as she looms menacingly over him. “Do you understand?” the girl says again, and still Derek does not respond. Her voice sounds as though another voice threads together with it, an adult voice that amplifies her words, giving them reverb. “You’re going to help me get inside the Dark Net.” Her hands shoot forward and take hold of his head. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but it appears that a whiteness hazes from her mouth, her visor, her nose and ears, as if she swallowed the moon. The ceiling seems to lift and the walls to bend and the floor to drop, every atom nudged aside to make room for something outsized.
Hemingway comes out of the bedroom and wags his tail and perks his ears and begins to bark and won’t stop even when Lela shushes him. Finally she clamps his snout and says, “Stop it. Be quiet, you dumb dog.” She holds him and pets him furiously and tries not to feel terrified of her own niece.
“Let me go,” Derek says. “Please!”
At last Hannah releases him, and he rolls his chair away and trembles as if run through with electricity.
A long silence follows. Josh breaks it. “What the hell is going on?”
“Are you familiar with the term jeremiad?” Juniper says, his voice carrying from the other room. He does not wait for an answer and he does not rise from the bed, but explains that it comes from the book of Jeremiah. It is a list of woes, a lamentation that denounces society and prophesizes moral downfall. “It’s a form of storytelling. Preachers use it, politicians use it. Spirit clashes with flesh. And in the end, one triumphs over the other. Sometimes the good, sometimes the bad. We’re caught up in a kind of jeremiad now. Flesh and spirit, light and dark, physical and digital. A clash of opposites. Right now I’d put my money on Hannah as our only chance of winning. Do you understand?”
Derek’s nose is bleeding, a thread of red that traces his upper lip and smears down his chin, but he doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes are on Hannah. “All right. Sure. Let’s do this.”
Chapter 26
THE MIRAGE RUNS through the lightning port behind Hannah’s ear, wiring stimuli into her brain. She unplugs the feed now and slips off the prosthesis. The sudden darkness is familiar, comforting, a pressure relieved. She senses Derek beside her, holding the cable that runs from his desktop.
“It’s not going to work,” he says.
“It’s going to work.”
“I’m telling you. It’s not going to work.”
But it will. The Internet is code, and so is everything around them. When you’re a child, you struggle to read what later becomes second nature. A red light makes your foot depress a brake. A skull and crossbones alerts us to poison. None are direct representations, but signs and symbols that serve as vehicles of meaning and experience. The Internet is no different, made up of ones and zeroes akin to the tiny atoms that build up into the appearance of swords and books and coffee mugs. By plugging in, Hannah will simply need to learn not just a new way of seeing, but a new way of feeling, of living. Because even though the Internet might seem like an unguessable expanse, those ones and zeroes are charged with energy and so they must have mass, a physicality she can negotiate. She knows this, but the knowledge comes from elsewhere, as though voices were whispering in her ear, hands urging her forward. She feels part of a company greater than even those in this room.
Derek reaches behind her ear, fits the cord into place. The computer makes a sound like knocked door, indicating its detection of new hardware, requesting approval. She hears Derek drop into his chair and roll across the floor. The mouse clicks. The keyboard patters. His voice announces, “Okay, let’s give this a try.”
For now all programs are shut off, the Internet connection severed. He has only one file open. That’s where they’ll start, he tells her. Baby steps.
She remembers the word Juniper used on her the other day. Aperture. She feels one opening inside her now and bends every nerve in its direction. It is as if she were floating in some porous borderlands. She is dimly aware of everyone watching her in the chair, while also blurring into another world. A world streaming with code.