A flash through the darkened window, lighting the dash and then gone. As he looks up the reverberation hits and shivers through the car. Missiles, he’s thinking—drones fighting in the air—when the next firework bursts.
Traffic is bad, the car hemmed in and crawling. The windows reveal only the barest suggestion of the texture of the city, and the crowding shadows of people by the street. The car is unhappy here, with no room to maneuver, its targeting system saccading between potential threats a dozen times a second; he brings up its security UI and overrides protocol enough to open the window, revealing a sidewalk packed with the young and mostly inebriated, and letting in a waft of garbage, smoke, the sea. An emerald detonation paints the low clouds in the night sky and illuminates a graffito on a wall reading “THERE’S AN ENEMY IN THE CITY AND IT’S OPENING ALL THE DOORS,” and he wonders what’s being celebrated, why he has this sense both of terror and elation.
Looking back at the road he realizes he’s lost track of the other car, and that it’s gone from his car’s display, and so probably lost for good, and for a moment he’s unmoored by frustration and regret, though he understands their uselessness, but no, there, it’s the ragged woman on the sidewalk, the crowd flowing around her as she studies the facades of the street’s ruins and bars.
Without stopping to think he throws the door open, warnings cascading down the car’s screen, and he feels a lightness as he steps out into the night and kicks the door shut.
She disappears through an unmarked door and he pursues her, not ten seconds behind, and the door opens onto a narrow staircase leading down between water-stained red brick walls, the product of some ancient building code, and floating in the darkness down toward the bottom are neon capitals spelling out CLUB OUBLIER.
A woman’s amplified voice is wailing that history repeats itself and that nothing is lost or ever will be as he descends into a restaurant lit with dim red light and fog pours out from behind the bar which makes a specter of the barman, an effect of such eeriness that he has to stop and stare though he knows it’s just dry ice and a staple of haunted houses, and there’s an English word for this, he thinks, but it won’t come to mind as he blows off the maitre d’ and searches for the ragged woman among the booths and tables in discreet haste but he finds only another staircase going down.
Even darker, down there, barely light enough to see the plush red walls and chandeliers evoking an Old World dustiness of centuries past; there’s a sustained shriek of laughter from a table of giddily drunk women whom he dismisses at a glance as lacking the ragged woman’s seriousness. He bobs and peers into the shadows where there are antique photographs of nudes in harems and underlying his urgency is such a weariness that it occurs to him he could have a drink—it is, after all, a bar—despite the morning’s handful of vibrantly colored alcohol-precluding pills.
Movement in the shadows behind a half-draped doorway and it could be nothing but he has no choice but to commit himself on the basis of fragments and intuition, and as he hurries on he’s annoyed because he knows there’s a word for this but it still won’t come to mind, though it feels closer now and it might actually be two words, not quite “collide” and not quite “raker,” and then he pushes through a velvet curtain into a bland and spotless bedroom—a secret hotel associated with the restaurant?—and where the window would have been there’s a screen offering a nocturnal view of black serpentines of water flowing through an estuary encased in ice. The bed’s been slept in, and he wants to check it for warmth but there’s only one other door and she’ll be getting farther away.
He brushes through another plastic curtain and the ground crunches underfoot so he thinks he might be walking on styrofoam but it radiates cold—it can’t actually be snow, he thinks, but he gathers a freezing handful and crushes it into slush that starts melting on his palm. The walls here are screens, barely illuminated, showing a winter park at night in some European city. He looks up, sees light pollution on clouds, a few stars—he thinks he’s traveled in Europe, wishes he remembered it well enough to situate himself. In the snow there’s a slight depression, perhaps the imprint of the body of a woman, legible even under all the bootprints, and he peers around in the dimness, as though to see if some half-naked girl were shivering in a corner after making a snow angel on a dare, but of course there’s no one, and the imprint remains legible even as new snow drifts down from the machines humming from the ceiling, and this formal absence of a body has both a mystery and a sadness, a memorial less substantial even than a ghost.
He’s surprised to find himself weeping; he catches the tears on his fingertips and regards them with interest, like signs of someone else’s grief.
He notices the lasers mounted up in the corners of the room, a cheap infrared model meant to be used safely by schoolchildren, ideal for sculpting shapes in snow, so this is just someone’s idea of art but even so it has an uncanniness and he’s glad to push through the next curtain.
Dark corridor before him. By the light of his new phone he sees a figure some hundred feet ahead, looking back over her shoulder. “Wait,” he calls, but she’s gone.
He runs after her through corridors where loops of cable hanging from the ceiling cast shadows like vines in his phone’s light, and even now he can’t shake the feeling that there’s a word for this though it’s not “colluder” and not “berater,” and the absence of the word is like a hole that pulls him in.
He stops. The footsteps are gone. He shines his light around—doors and branching corridors like so many black mouths. He turns the phone’s light off, which seems to heighten the silence, and there, ahead, a faint glow.
He finds an alcove lit by a buzzing, clicking lightbulb in a dusty cage on a steel door whose overbuilt solidity suggests a bank vault. There’s a screen by the door, inert and black. EXIT TO CENTRAL is stenciled in black letters on the wall and he wonders what kind of infrastructure requires such protection.
His phone bleats in his hand. Intrusion attempt detected appears on the screen, then again, then the message repeating, scrolling by in a blur. Some random crim trying his luck, apparently, though he’s surprised there’s signal down here, and if it weren’t for the timing it would almost be amusing because the family electronics are inviolable.
His phone goes dark. He swipes at the screen but nothing happens, and now random alphanumerics are scrolling down the screen by the door.
Clanking from inside the door, and a thin, high tone as its lock releases, and as it does he realizes that this establishes a pattern, one in which all the devices are compromised, but of course there’s one device left, and that’s his implant.
He clasps his forehead and wants to run or think of a plan but there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do and then, finally, he remembers the word.