Iceweasel looked away, blushing, remembering Gretyl’s generous curves, the feel of her breasts on her own, hot breath on her neck and in her ears, the way she teased at Iceweasel’s lips with thick fingers until Iceweasel caught them, sucking greedily, satisfaction in Gretyl’s gasp as she licked their tips.
She probed the package, found its seams, split them, pulled away the tyvek. The clothes were extreme normcore, the most nondescript garments she could imagine, the kind of thing that extras in dramas wore. There was a faded Roots sweatshirt, high-waisted slacks frayed around the cuffs, woolen athletic socks that sagged from overworn elastic. To complete them, a pair of Walmart panties and a one-size bandeau bra of the sort they gave you when you got busted for being out-of-uniform at school, dispensed out of a kleenex-style box on the Dean of Girls’s desk. Both the bandeau and the panties were gray from repeated washings.
Except they weren’t. All the clothing had a printer-fresh smell, still offgassing pigment-infusions. When she looked closely, she saw the dirt and the gray and even the faded ROOTS letters all printed on, the dirt betraying itself with minute compression artifacts. These clothes had been printed to look like they weren’t brand new.
“Where did these come from?” She pulled on the panties, which felt fresh from the wrapper.
Nadie watched her examine them, watched her undress. She conjured up the feeling of the B&B, the onsen state of mind that refused selfconsciousness about nudity. She used the feeling to banish the horniness and Gretyl-longing that filled her.
“A service. There are times when someone has to go from one place to another without being noticed. Your father uses these services. They can be co-opted, but only with very high-level pressure, and never quickly. They are expensive. The record of this journey is not something anyone can find easily, not even the police. Especially the police.”
Iceweasel struggled into the rest of the clothing, found a parka with a fake-fur fringed hood, decided to leave it for now. Between the drink and the blasting passenger compartment heater, she was starting to sweat. She rubbed a spot on the compartment’s side. It made a window for her, showing the streets of Toronto sliding past at a steady clip, the private-hire car sliding nondescriptly through the traffic without any of the showy maneuvers of her father’s cars.
They crossed the Bloor Viaduct, heading west. There was something … wrong.
“Did you see that building?”
“What building?
“With the metal shutters and crash barriers.”
Another building, similarly fortified, slid past. Then another, windows smashed and blackened by fire, scorch marks stretching up far as she could see, two stories’ worth of fa?ade gone altogether, a round hole in the building’s skin like a screaming, black-toothed mouth, charred furniture inside.
“Was that one bombed?”
“There’ve been riots. It’s why your father is away.”
“Who’s rioting?”
Nadie snickered. “Depends on who you ask. The opposition says it’s provocateurs staging false-flag operations. Security services say it’s radicals and walkaways and people paid by foreign governments to destabilize Canada.”
“What about the rioters themselves?”
Nadie shrugged. “Some say they’re black bloc. Some are the usual concerned citizens, down with corruption, up with democracy. Many young people, a lot of kids from the general strike contingent—once you’ve been kicked out of school, why not go running loose in the streets?”
“General strike?”
“Lots of things happened in default while you’ve been off in the woods, Iceweasel.”
Intellectually, she knew this was true. Sometimes new walkaways told stories about default. Once they’d built the second B&B, she stopped caring. Being a walkaway had once been in opposition to default, but after a year or two, being a walkaway became who she was. Default was a distant, terrible phenomenon, like a volcano that occasionally sent up plumes that overshadowed her sky, something she could do nothing about except avoid.
“How does it get to be a riot? When I was—” One of you. She caught herself. “Before I left, they’d kettle you before you took ten steps. The only protests you saw were tiny, shitty ones with permits, behind fences down alleyways—”
“Sure, when it was a few protests. But the protesters are canny. Some get together at one site, wait for the kettle, then others gather somewhere else, and somewhere else—if they have numbers and patience, they occupy all police resources and still take to the streets. A lot of them get arrested afterwards, from footage, or if they leave DNA or their gaits are recognized by the cameras, but they’re canny.”
She stared more.
“But why? What do they want—”
Nadie shrugged again. “What everyone wants. More for themselves. Less for people like you.”
Iceweasel felt a jet of anger, saw Nadie’s microexpression, testing.
“Like you, you mean. Not mine anymore. You can have it.”
“We take care of that next.”
The car barreled west and west, through increasingly unfamiliar neighborhoods. For an unbelievable stretch—forty-five minutes, in swift traffic—they moved through a forest of towering high-rises whose south faces were skinned with sun-tracking mirrors focusing light down on solar arrays in their high-fenced yards.
Beyond these were brownfield sites, chain-link-fenced, ringed with ostentatious sensor arrays intended to intimidate anyone pondering climbing over. She knew this kind of place—it was the mainstay of walkaways. She did strategic assessments of the sites, figuring out camera-angles, estimating the salvage that could be dragged away from within the fence’s perimeter before a security crew arrived.
They turned off the two-lane highway onto a rural road, then into the remains of a small town. It looked uninhabited, an abandoned main street with a gas station and a grocery store and a shuttered Legion Hall. Another car was parked by the roadside, low-slung, with blue flashers on top—a police interceptor.
Her asshole tightened and the taste of pumpkin-spice stomach acid rose up her throat. “Shit.”
Nadie shook her head minutely. “Don’t worry.”
They pulled in, head-to-head with the police car. The doors of their car opened. They stepped out—Iceweasel grabbed the parka as she did, pulled it on, heart hammering. The doors closed themselves and the car carefully reversed between them, did a three-point turn on the main street and drove the way it had come, their old clothing in it.
“It’s off the grid now.” Nadie watched it drive away. “It’s heading for a scrapper, will get broken up there, all identifying transponders smashed and melted. Single-use cars are more expensive, but it’s the only way to be sure nothing is recovered.”