She pulled hers off and squinted against the sudden brightness of the day. When her eyes adjusted, she peered out Wes’s window, then Ken’s. They were parked in front of a ranch house with boarded-over windows and faded tan siding. It sat atop a little rise, on a clearing skirted in pine trees. The other car was parked ahead of them, the doors already open and passengers climbing out. Joe and Andy exited, then opened Wes’s and Ken’s doors. Marta scooted out after Wes.
“Go stand over there,” Joe said. He waved with his rifle stock at Berto and Edie, who were leaning against the front of the house. Marta, Wes, and Ken did as he said. Violet seemed to be the one tasked with watching the hostages while June ordered the men around, and Marta studied her carefully, hoping for some look or signal or sign of reassurance—a reminder, now that she was behind a gun, that she remembered whose side she was really on—but she wore the same stony expression she always had. It was enough to make you doubt, well, everything. Even Edie. Maybe she’d misunderstood. Confused something Violet said. Maybe Violet was manipulating them, testing them, setting them up—
June strolled over. “This is a little satellite of ours. We’re close enough to the Wall here to be able to scan feeds from in-zone. Andy, get the door, would you?”
Andy popped the padlock.
“Let Randall through first. He has his hands full.”
Randall, arms straining with the weight of a large square plastic cooler, said, “Where you want this?”
“Kitchen,” said June. “Through the door and to your right.”
So Randall had never been here before, Marta noted.
Violet followed, then the hostages. June, Andy, and Joe brought up the rear. Marta, entering the dark living room, took in its contents with surprise. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this—especially that huge 3D display playing the waterfall animation. How in the world had they gotten that kind of technology out here? Those monitors went for ten thousand credits in-zone.
“First we eat,” June said. “Then we get down to business. Sound good?”
Knowing what she knew now about June, Marta was more disgusted than ever with June’s little shows of joviality. She didn’t bother to react. She accepted her sandwich with her bound hands and dropped down on the ladder-back chair Violet indicated. The sandwich was folded in a faded, almost transparent square of cotton: some of the excellent Ruby City sourdough (though she’d had enough of it in the last couple of weeks that she was sick of it), a salty slice of ham, some bitter greens. The usual fare. They were all given a couple of skins of water to share.
Marta, chewing through a pasty bite, found herself staring at Violet. Yes, there might have been a thickening around her middle—hard to make out, given the baggy local uniform. If Edie had told her anything else about Violet’s motives—that she wanted revenge on June, that she wanted in-zone to get her face worked on, that she simply wanted to see how the other half lived—Marta probably wouldn’t have believed it. A baby, though: that she bought. When Marta was pregnant, she’d read in one of her baby books that DNA from the fetus could migrate back into its mother, so that the mother didn’t just carry her child, she became changed by him—or, in Marta’s case, them. Pregnant, she had merely seen this as interesting trivia. In the years after Sal’s and Enzo’s birth, however, she’d come to understand both the wonder and horror of such a concept. She had felt the impact of that reprogramming. It called her home even now, even if home meant returning to David, his mansion, his rules, his rule. If she could make it over to London, or get the boys back from London, she’d have some options. Until that time, she had only the one.
Violet, perhaps, was also answering a call.
As if hearing this thought, Violet looked over at Marta, piercing her with that bright blue eye. The look lasted only a second, but Marta’s doubts dispelled. They were in this—whatever this turned out to be—together.
“OK, it’s time,” June said. “Let’s make the call.”
—
Things got to a rather humdrum start with an argument over technology. Joe and Andy disagreed about the best way to transmit information through the feeds without being traced. Andy wanted to ping off an IP in Gulf Zone, then worm through a back channel in the dark web; Joe wanted to “hitchhike” on an automatic signal burst from the Lenoir substation. They also disagreed about how to best set up the TI Dimension-Tech display and cameras before at last remembering that one of the cofounders of Tanaka Industries was in fact stowed on a nearby couch, and then Ken, offering the caveat that his sister had been the product engineer (a slip of tense that the Ruby citizens seemed, thankfully, to have missed), gave them his recommendations, which seemed to satisfy them and settle the matter.
Andy consulted a nearby laptop screen. “Looks good,” he told June.
At last Marta was positioned within the wings of the display, so that her field of vision was occupied by app icons and the waterfall wallpaper, and the conversations happening behind her were muffled with the soft roar of churning water. Andy snipped the zip tie binding her wrists.
“You ever used a display like this?”
“Not much,” Marta admitted.
“Your script will appear on screen. The adaptive software’s good,” Andy said, “so the text document will adjust to your vision, and you can look beyond it to see your husband if you want to make eye contact or whatever. Try to stick to the talking points. If you’re not sure about what to say, ask June. The big no-no is anything about Ruby City: what we’ve got, how many we are, hints about where we’re located, or where this house is located. If you start trying to be sneaky, if you start saying stuff to him we don’t understand, we’ll have to stop you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” Marta said. Yes, his meaning was perfectly clear.
“And you say he always answers calls?”
“In my experience, yes.”
“We’ve labeled the trace-code Marta Severs, so that should create some urgency. You ready?”
Marta craned her neck around so she could see her captors, her fellow prisoners, the cramped, dark room where the rest of this would play out. Wes, seated in a recliner by what had been the fireplace, lifted his hands in a little wave.
“Yes,” she said.
Andy typed in the trace-code Marta had given him—the one that went to David’s most private line (or at least the most private one she had been allowed to know about). The waterfall desktop vanished; in its place, an animated fishing pole cast out a line toward a distant vanishing point, splashed softly, tugged, and then reeled in, accompanied by the appropriate winding sound effect. Marta’s heart beat harder as the sound grew louder, and the animated spool fattened with line. A beautiful big fish burst out of glassy water and flapped on a bright golden hook.
“Connected,” the screen flashed.