She also needed to get to that security system, so she followed the green smears of light. Passing a bathroom and a mirror facing the door, Mel stopped in her tracks and stared. Feeling for the light, she gasped when she was lit by the harsh and badly placed fluorescent strip. That kind of lighting should have made her look older. It should have enhanced the perpetual dark circles under her eyes and the premature aging her job brought with it.
But that’s not what she saw.
“Fuck!” she exclaimed. The young woman in the mirror touched her face even as Mel touched hers. It was her reflection, but she hadn’t seen that fresh-faced visage in the mirror for long years. The thought did cross her mind that she should be happy to see it. It was ironic that she was probably the only person in the world that would be unhappy about being suddenly younger.
“How am I supposed to go to work with this shit?” she asked her reflection. Her skin was smeared with the greasy particles, as was her hair, but that did nothing to hide the youth shining out of her face. Had she really ever looked this young? She leaned close to the mirror and marveled at the texture of the skin reflected there.
Shaking her head and turning away from the mirror, she said, “I’ll just find Baby and ask. There’s got to be something I can do. Get your head on, Mel. Get to work.”
Hitting the light and closing the bathroom door so the mirror wouldn’t distract her again, Mel followed the green smears into a back room. Paydirt. The window was covered and the interior of the room entirely lined in a wire mesh of some sort. Servers stood in the center and a cooling unit warred with the heat they produced. A tiny workstation that matched her vision exactly stood to one side.
That man was the webmaster, and maybe more, so there was definitely information she could use inside these columns of blinking lights. She grabbed the pair of latex gloves she’d brought along out of her pocket and sat at the workstation. Drawing in a deep breath, she focused on the keyboard.
And she knew what to do.
Green Fairies
An hour later, Mel stepped into the tiny foyer with its reek of rancid oils and old cooking. In her arms she carried a fat stack of papers printed from the secret server. Her pockets were stuffed with the man’s wallet, keys, and a stash of money she knew she would find under a cabinet in the kitchen.
The man was gone, absconded or taken to any curious eye. A reasonable course of action considering the raid on the RV park and his line of work. That his apartment was a wreck? Well, Mel could do nothing about that. Let it look like a break in, perhaps one arm of the criminal enterprise cleaning up loose ends. In the end, it wouldn’t matter, because while the numbers were fresh in her mind, she’d tapped in a lot of code that was already becoming incomprehensible to her. She’d exposed the servers.
Not all of the data, though. Some she had saved for herself, hence the papers.
The strange vision had faded a little while she worked on that server. The blue glow of the neighbors lost definition, then lost radiance. Through the walls she eventually saw nothing. Mel thought it was gone, like the numbers in her head, and her knowledge of the passcodes.
It was only when she left and walked past the door to the other apartment on this floor that she realized she still had it. A faint blue radiance leaked around the door where the old woman lived. In a way, she was glad of that. It would be terribly distracting to be able to see through walls. Embarrassing too, considering she lived in a building filled with apartments.
As she pushed out of the access door, she glanced up at the dead camera she hadn’t even seen on her way in. It was a tiny thing, meant to be missed. It wouldn’t tell anyone anything. The footage of her entry was gone, the system no longer in operation.
The night had grown cold and even more damp while she was inside. Cold mist settled onto her face and made her shiver. She was still worried about being seen, so her head was tucked well into her coat’s lapels and she didn’t look around until she was away from the door.
When she glanced up, the world was a very different place. Once again, she was baffled by the colors. Losing any sense of caution, her lips parted as she took in the scene. Though it was late, the stroll was a busy place. The colors didn’t make sense though.
Some of the prostitutes shone with a blue glow, which she understood given the blue radiated by the building’s tenants, but that wasn’t the only color. Two women, head’s close together in tense conversation, emitted a vaguely grey light. It was more like a lack of color than anything she could define, perhaps better described as an indecisive shade that simply looked grey.
Another woman further away, one with her back to Mel, had the pale white shimmer she saw on her own body. She watched, wondering if she would find a tattoo of wings on that woman. A car turned onto the street, headlights washing over Mel and momentarily blinding her, then reflecting off the moisture coating the world as it slowly crawled along the stroll.
Blinking the harsh glare away, Mel watched in amazement as the car’s interior lit up in bright yellow, like a sun had been brought to life inside. Mel wondered how anyone could possibly not see that, but most of the women merely eyed the approaching car with a predatory gaze, adjusting clothes for their upcoming beckoning of a potential customer.
Not the woman dressed in a white glow, though. She turned in a lazy half-circle,
