“You won’t find me in your system,” he said. He was right.
“Where do you know me from, then?” I asked.
He looked out the window, out onto the street, toward the intersection where the line of vehicles had begun to move forward again.
“The revivor stood right there,” he said, pointing. He was looking at the spot where, five years ago, the van had stopped and the revivor stepped out, strapped with explosives. I could still see its face and the way it looked around almost curiously when I tried to contact it over the JZI. I remembered its stony stare as it pinpointed the source of the transmission and made eye contact with me.
“I waited on you that day,” the boy said. “You and your lady friend.”
“Oh.” I didn’t remember him at all.
“I didn’t see the bomb at first. By the time I did, you had run outside to confront the revivor.”
He stared out at that spot. His face was calm, but his eyes were intense.
“You want to sit down?” I asked him. He glanced back at the front to make sure no one would see him; then he took the seat across from me.
“It was hard to see what happened after the explosion,” he said. “I thought maybe you died that day. I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Me too.”
He looked out the window again and watched the people stream past.
“We had run out of green onions in the kitchen,” he said. “My mother had run across the street to buy some, to get us through lunch. Coming back, she was caught in the blast and killed. She was fifty-one.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I remember that day so clearly. You know? I saw her, on the other side of the street just before it happened. You had raised your badge, and the revivor looked at you. Your lady friend tried to pull you away, and my mother watched as you suddenly turned and pushed the woman down behind a delivery truck. I knew the explosion was coming then. I opened the door and shouted to my mother, but she didn’t hear me.”
He wanted answers. He wanted to make some kind of sense out of why the whole thing happened, but even if I could tell him everything I knew, I didn’t think it would help much. The truth was that while I’d never forget the attack that day, it was just one of many and it was already in my rearview mirror. The threats kept piling up, eclipsing the ones before them.
“You really got to me that day,” the boy said. “I thought if I had been you, or someone like you, at least I might have had a chance to save her. I was determined that when I was old enough, I’d enlist, but my father needed me here, and as you can see …” He shrugged.
I wished I could tell him that we’d at least gotten the ones responsible, but he knew we hadn’t. Samuel Fawkes’s main target, Motoko Ai, controlled much of the media through the Central Media Communications Tower and its mogul, Robin Raphael, but even they couldn’t cover up things completely. Only a small handful of people knew the truth, but our investigation was too big to keep invisible. Something big was still brewing out there, and everyone knew it. Whispers of mass arrests and secret detention centers kept circulating. It was starting to happen faster than Motoko’s people could keep up with.
“We almost went out of business back then,” the boy said. “A lot of places on the strip were struggling and the damage was too much for them to absorb. No one wanted to come here after what happened. It made no sense that there would be a second random attack in the same spot, but people were afraid.”
He pointed again out onto the street.
“But when you look at it now,” he said, “it’s like it never happened. Right? We all came together in the aftermath. We helped each other. The damage was repaired, the streets are clean now, and everyone is open for business. Some are even better now after rebuilding, and there’s something here that wasn’t here before. Like a bond. You know? Now if a stranger or a tourist were to come here, they would never even guess what happened right there.”
I hadn’t really thought of it that way. I hadn’t thought much about the area at all since then. As I watched the dark spot in front of my eyes drift across the falling snow, I knew there had to be stories just like his all throughout the city. Had I begun to lose touch? That had been both Fawkes’s and Ai’s mistake.
The thing was, though, that the kid didn’t know everything. He had gotten caught in the crossfire of a conventional bombing that didn’t really even have anything to do with him. If Fawkes had pulled off his plan three years prior, there would have been at least three nuclear detonations in the heart of the city, one for each of Ai’s strongholds. How long would it take to bounce back from that?
I opened my mouth to say something when my phone buzzed inside my jacket pocket. I took it out and saw the name VAN OFFO flash on the LCD.
A year ago, Alain Van Offo became my partner. The assignment came from high up, and he reported privately to Alice Hsieh. Motoko and her people knew they couldn’t directly control my mind anymore, but they still had him shadow me. Van Offo was a good agent, but he was one of them and he never pretended to be anything else. Like all of them, he controlled the minds of the people around us as a matter of course. Sometimes he had a good reason for it. Sometimes he didn’t. I dropped the phone back into my coat pocket without answering.
“You’re busy,” the boy said. “I should go.”
“I wish there was something I could tell you,” I said.
He waved his hand. “Maybe it’s stupid, but I wanted to tell you that we are okay. I wanted to tell you that even though you couldn’t stop the bomb that day, we are persevering. We’re strong. If another attack comes, we will overcome that too. If my mother was alive to see us still here, she would be very happy. You know?”
“It isn’t stupid. And thanks.”
Someone yelled across the restaurant in Chinese, and he glanced back before getting up.
“No charge for the food,” he said.
“Thanks again.”
“When you find the prick that did it, though, kill him for us.”
He wormed his way away from my table and back through the crowd.
“I’ll do that.”
I brought up details on the location and found it off the projects of Dandridge. The satellite photos showed that a big chunk of it was out of commission. A graveyard of retired freight carriers sat half-buried in the snow, waiting for the scrap heap.
I browsed through the satellite footage and the more I did, the more convinced I became that we were dealing with Fawkes. Since he’d gotten out of stasis and rejoined the living, we knew he’d disappeared somewhere inside the UAC. That meant sticking to places no one wanted to go. Even when he’d directed things from his box on the other side of the planet, that had been his MO. The city’s underbelly was big, bigger than it should have been. It was easy to get lost in, and he knew that.
