“This isn’t the background radiation of surveillance,” Nadie said. “This is focused lasers. Coherent light, understand? Even with the kinds of budgets they swing in spookland, they can’t aim this at everyone—you’re in an exclusive club.”
To hear Nadie explain it, the upper stratosphere was full of hi-rez drones tasked to match her gait and face (should she be so unwise as to look at the sky), every bio-war early-warning sensor was sniffing for her DNA, any person she met was even-odds an undercover whose decade could be made with the bounty on Iceweasel’s head.
“If you’re trying to scare me, it’s working. You don’t need to. I told you I wouldn’t go anywhere until you were sure all the money stuff was final. I’ll be here when you get back.”
“You’ve mistaken me, Ms. Weasel. I don’t tell you this because I’m worried you’ll run away and I won’t find you. I say it because I’m afraid you’ll run and get snatched by something bigger and smarter than either of us. I am good, but there is the question of overwhelming force of numbers and unlimited budget. Your father has convinced his brothers that if you are allowed to carry out this plan, it will present a ‘moral hazard’ to others in their employ. Every zotta knows that only the eldest can expect their own fortunes, and the lesser siblings who’re destined to a life of mere wealth might be tempted to walkaway as you were. If the hired help can be swung to their cause, how could that be allowed to stand?”
“What’re you saying?”
“We are both to be made an example of, I’m afraid. If they can stop this, they will, even if it costs them more than they stand to lose. The good news is I have reliable intelligence that their Plan B, should this fail, is to pretend this never happened, do little to draw attention to it. I expect if we maintain disciplined opsec, we will both walk away with what we want.”
Iceweasel endured a new kind of captivity with the South Bend walkaways, her skin dyed three shades darker—she had to take tablets, every morning, and it got a little splotchy anywhere her skin creased—wearing fingertip interface surfaces that looked like affectations and got in the way but ensured she didn’t leave behind any fingerprints; wearing colored contacts and letting Nadie gum long-lasting glue between her smallest toes on each foot to change her gait.
She called herself Missioncreep, a name assigned by Nadie. She did chores around the factory, took long walks in the blighted woods, taking care to scrub her hands and shoes when she returned, again before eating or touching her mucous membranes. She read books, walkaway classics, Bakunin and Illich and Luxemburg, old dead anarchists. She’d read Homage to Catalonia and felt she finally understood Orwell—the seeds of Nineteen Eighty-Four were in the betrayals and the manipulation. Just as she warmed to old George, she remembered with a bolt that he had sent a list of names of his friends and comrades to a secret policewoman he’d fallen in love with, betraying them. She realized she didn’t understand Orwell at all.
Being a walkaway was supposedly about refusing to kid yourself about your special snowflakeness, recognizing even though different people could do different things, that all people were worthy and no one was worth more than any other. Everyone else was a person with the same infinite life inside them you had.
In the isolation of the squatted factory—which turned out hundreds of pieces of furniture every day, free for anyone—she experienced people as obstacles. She waited until the commissary was likely to be empty before descending from her aerie to grab furtive meals, avoiding eye contact, making the least conversation without being hostile. It was the worst walkaway behavior, treating communal resources like a homeless shelter, not being a part of the world. She’d seen people advised to leave the B&B for less. But Nadie must have spun some yarn about her traumatic past, because people looked on with sympathy and never called out her behavior.
Reading alone, playing the stupid telepathy game where she pretended that she knew what people thought just because she read words that supposedly bridged the thoughts of one person to the mind of another, she was overcome by a feeling she had traded the indefinite detention of her father’s panic-room for an enforced, fugitive isolation.
She went through that feeling, came out the other side: numb acceptance that this was life. Living as Missioncreep, speaking to no one, making as little mark on the world as possible. Nadie was her role model; the merc and her bizarre vigilance that demanded you be both attentive and absent. The more she practiced, the more natural it felt, except for panicky flashes when she wondered if she was losing herself in this persona. Those were so unpleasant that she was glad when they receded and were walled away behind the sentry’s wooden fa?ade.
Now, sitting there, rarely seen morning sun on her skin, looking at Nadie’s shit-eating grin. She struggled to come to grips with this new reality.
She guzzled her champagne, a flavor she’d never liked, liked even less with the taste of walkaway country on her tongue: public toothpaste formula and gummy, scummy of morning breath. But as bubbles and sweet, cold tartness washed her tongue and a burp forced its way out her nose with a burning, CO2 tingle, reality sharpened. She recalled, in fast shuffle, the times she’d drunk ostentatiously proffered champagne at family events, then the taste of corn-mash white lightning she and Seth and Hubert, Etcetera sipped as they slipped away from her father’s house, the beers and vodkas they’d made at the B&B, and then—
“I’m free?”
“Darling, you are free as anyone can be in this world.”
Missioncreep—no, Iceweasel—realized Nadie was drunk, had been drinking something else while she went to whatever hidey-hole she’d kept the champagne in. She had never seen Nadie in this state. She was almost … sloppy. Not to say she didn’t exude the air of sudden death, but it was a jovial, even sexy kind of sudden death.
“Congratulations.” She set down her champagne and scrubbed her eyes, the scratchy contacts’ familiar itch suddenly vivid. She impulsively plucked them out and rolled them like boogers and flicked them away, blinking tears from her eyes until her vision cleared. The contacts were supposed to be optically neutral, but there was an unmistakable difference. She looked at her funny, dark brown skin, the blotches in the creases of her palms and the crook of her elbow. She, too, was smiling.
“So, does this mean I can use the net again? I can call my friends?”
“You can join your friends, chickie—I even know where you can find them.”
“I don’t know what to say, I mean—”