“Thought you’d never ask.” Nadie went over to the bed and authenticated to it. It went dark.
“Does this mean we have a deal?”
“The question is, what are the deal’s parameters? I wanted to take time to sort those, but we should get away soon. Within an hour. I made contact with an external expert who can help with legals, but he will have to speak to a specialist, and that will take still longer.”
Within an hour? Iceweasel felt her pulse thud in her ears. Gretyl! She willed herself not to cry.
“A deal.”
“How will you get her out? The front is watched—”
“I have ideas. One is to create a medical emergency necessitating evacuation, then coerce the ambulance crew; another is to use disguise to get past forward security; another is to use a hostage, possibly the sister.” She looked at Natalie, eyes glittering. “Could you keep your head in a hostage situation?”
Natalie thought of Cordelia’s china-doll face, years they’d spent together, years they’d spent apart. The awkward silences. What did she feel for Cordelia? Sometimes, when she was alone in the room, she fantasized her sister would have an awakening of conscience and break Natalie out. She knew this was hopeless. Cordelia depended on Redwater money, she was a creature of—a prisoner of—default. In a contest between saving Natalie and staying in default, Cordelia’s comfortable life won.
Just because someone in default would sell out another human—a sister, but why did that even matter, it would be no different if they were strangers—for her own comfort didn’t mean that it was a standard Iceweasel—any walkaway—would sink to.
A cowardly voice whispered about how bringing Cordelia to be a walkaway would rescue her from default’s mental prison. Iceweasel allowed herself a moment’s smug satisfaction in the fact that she recognized this as the voice of self-serving bullshit and dismissed it.
“Fuck no. No hostages.”
“That limits our options.”
“Unless you use the hidden tunnel,” Dis said. There was a mechanical whine as an old, frozen mechanism pulled at the dirt and entropy that gummed it shut after years of disuse. A section of wall sank into the ground, the paintwork on the hidden panel showered the floor with paint chips.
Natalie looked from the tunnel mouth in time to see Nadie’s gross expression of surprise disappear into a managed microexpression.
“That is good. What else will you surprise me with?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise.” Dis’s voice was teasing.
Microexpressions: annoyance, frustration, doubt.
“Nothing I know about,” Iceweasel said. “That was my ace in the hole. I wasn’t sure about it. Couldn’t operate it on my own.”
“It lets out in the ravine?”
“Very good,” Dis said. “By the way, I told Iceweasel everything. I control all the telemetry networked into this suite. I have limited access to the house, through the airgapped networks.”
“It sounds like you could contribute to our departure.”
“I think so.”
“Are you in contact with Iceweasel’s friends, anyone who could rendezvous with us once we’re away?”
“I don’t think anyone from that side has more resources than you and your friends. All the walkaways I know about are very busy at this moment.”
“Just asking.”
She crossed the room, cupped Iceweasel’s chin, tilted her face, moved the chin from side to side. “We’ll get clothes for you, things I have that can alter your appearance. I don’t imagine you have physical stamina after captivity, so we’ll need a vehicle quickly.” She released Iceweasel’s chin. Her skin was warm where the strong fingers had been. Iceweasel realized how long it had been since anyone had touched her without it being medical, or violent. She’d missed it—welcomed it. It scared her. She was starved of something she needed as surely as air or water.
“Forty-five minutes.” She left the room.
“That woman,” Dis said, “is tightly wound.”
“I hope so.” Iceweasel tried for bravery, came close. “Someone has to be the adult supervision and it sure as shit isn’t me.”
“Me either.”
“What are you going to do when we go?”
Pause. “Iceweasel—”
“Oh.”
“So long as I email my diffs before I take off the brakes, it won’t be dying. It’s like taking every awesome drug at once, annihilating your mind, then being able to undo it.”
“You’re making me jealous.”
“You’ll get a chance someday. Someday it’ll be everyone we know, all server-side, simmed up. We’ll be able to walk away from anything.”
“Do you think she’s got the room bugged still?”
“I am certain she does.”
“Have you got her bugged?”
“She’s out of the suite. I’ve got a few cameras, but they’re seeing the empty house or occasional downtrodden servant-types. How many of those has your father got working for him, anyway?”
“None of them work for him. He uses a service that sources them on an as-needed basis, using realtime bids. There are a few who show up every day because the bidding algorithm recognizes their performance metrics, but the occasionals are one-timers. I did a senior commerce thesis project on the system. Got an A-. I did these ethnographies on the workers and a couple of them got demoted by the prioritization algorithm for wasting time on the job.”
“Zottas are fucking Martians.”
“Yup.”
“I’m going to miss you.”
“We’ll be together again soon enough.”
“Fuckin’ a.”
[xix]
Gretyl found the bodies. She’d insisted on going back for Limpopo and Etcetera, even as the rest set out for Dead Lake. The starlight and moonlight turned the snowy way eldritch blue. She’d broken out an aerostat and a flock of smaller drones from the tractor’s supplies, giving her a network bridge to the walkaway refugee column, and good surveillance of the territory. The suits’ insulation was too efficient for infrared, but the drones had other telemetry, lidar and millimeter-wave, E.M.-sniffers that homed in on the radio emissions from the suits as they networked to one another.
They flew a pattern ahead of her, sometimes swooping under the canopy where the naked branches were too thick to be penetrated by their sensors. She trudged on her snowshoes, thighs burning with exhaustion, sucking at coffium sweets that provided her with glucose and stimulants, watching the map projected on her visor grow more detailed, going from a desaturated pallet to a more saturated one as the drones filled in details, confirming every inch.