“Do you trust everyone here?” Hairo whispered into my ear, examining Gyula and Manny.
He didn’t ask about the others—since I’d brought them with me, that meant they could be trusted. I gave a barely perceptible nod, raised my hand. Silence descended. Everyone looked at me.
“Thank you for your hospitality, Gyula. You all already know Hairo and Willy. They’re going to be responsible for the safety of the clan’s members in real life. We’ve gathered to make a decision about our base, the place we’re going to live. But first, I have a question for Hairo. What do the preventers know?”
“You were right not to pay us any more, Alex. Almost all the Alliance leaders already know that you’re the Threat,” Hairo said. “But if you think I cheated you out of a million, think again. The Excommunicado analysts put you at the head of their list of suspects only as of today.”
“How?”
“Back in Kinema, they paid attention to how you fight when you don’t use your nuke. Not counting your, let’s say, special abilities, they remembered your hand-to-hand combat style. They started to root out all the strong unarmed combat fighters. Completely by chance, they happened upon a video of a duel between you and another Threat, Crag, in the sandbox Arena. Then they found a recording from an amateur tournament in the Tristad tavern. You showed your skills in unarmed combat then too. They put two and two together and realized that Oyama’s appearance and your battles are links in the same chain.”
“Why aren’t they pursuing me in real life?”
“All the members of the Alliance have been instructed by Snowstorm. Kiran Jackson gathered all the preventer leaders and forbade them from influencing you through any non-game methods. I don’t know the details, but I heard that if a clan breaks the rules, its whole membership will be banned and its property frozen. And of course, nobody will get any rewards for eliminating you.”
“Then why should we hide?” Malik asked. “Why should we bother with a clan base and a security team at all?”
“There are plenty of lower-ranked preventer clans outside the Alliance,” Willy answered for his partner.
I recalled Yoruba and nodded. The top players might be forced to somehow maintain their reputation, but the rest…
“Worse, the Triads don’t limit themselves for anyone,” Hairo added. “They’d kidnap Alex if they knew where he was. Glyph from the Azure Dragons may be friendly with the Triad, but he won’t leak information about you. They’ll use their own methods to get intel if they take an interest in you.”
“There are other dangers to Alex too, but you can let us handle those now.” Hairo cracked his knuckles. “You don’t need to know about them. No point in worrying. Let’s get down to business…”
We shared our own ideas about the real-life clan base with the security officers. Manny and Gyula started to tell them about the spot they’d chosen, and Hairo suggested we inspect it.
We flew on Morales’s personal flyer to the new anthill highrise. It wasn’t inhabited yet, so it looked pristine. Long, spacious corridors with marble-effect plastic, bright panel lighting, fast lifts. And disgustingly tiny rooms.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Manny whispered. “Everything here is cheap. I wouldn’t be surprised if the decor is toxic.”
The complex manager showed us around. He was a spry fifty-year- old Latin American trying to look younger, with a robot guard escort.
“All the rooms are empty for the moment. The bottom five floors are all infrastructure,” he jabbered, constantly gesticulating. “There’s a parking lot, laundrette, mall, a huge gym, a pool, a virtcapsule hire station, an internal park, a playground, a school…”
“Not bad!” Hung whistled. “I thought this district was supposed to be a dump.”
“We have all that in our complex too, it’s just premium,” Manny said. “Nobody uses it. Way too expensive. And it’s a ‘mall’ in name only. They sell whatever doesn’t sell in the citizen stores, stuff past the due date…”
“Ahem,” the manager servicing us coughed, drawing our attention, and quickly spoke: “I would like to note that demand begets supply. If the customer can afford it, the mall s AI can order higher-quality produce. But Im getting ahead of myself…”
None of us took part in the adults’ conversation. Especially since Hairo had insisted that only Ed and I come along. Rodriguez was introduced as Morales’s son, and I was Gyula’s. We’d disabled comm identification a long time ago, after the Arena final.
While Hairo was talking to the manager, Willy Brizuela carefully studied the surroundings. Rooms with windows cost more, but were worse for security, so the choice fell on windowless rooms. Gyula was discussing the extent of possible alterations—the clan had enough funds to give its members five times more space than the little rooms the noncitizens currently lived in.
Personally, I didn’t really care about the details. I had no plans to live there. Sure, w^e’d crash here until the citizenship tests, but then we’d move to a better district.
I was actually just wasting time. I didn’t understand wiiat they were talking about anyway, and Gyula, Manny and Hairo already knew what we needed: secure rooms with enough space for a premium capsule with plenty of bandwidth. The rest didn’t really matter to me. What mattered was that we’d begun to sort out the base, and by Gyula and Hairo’s reckoning, we could move in within a couple of weeks. As long as the money didn’t stop, but that was up to dad. He had the funds.
Hairo took Ed and me back, to the roof of block thirty-six. We picked up Hung and Malik and flew home from there.
Along the way, we decided to throw a
