CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Enda’s leg muscles spasmed, and the soles of her feet burned like she’d been running on hot coals. A notification from her fitness monitor pulsed in the corner of her vision: New Record—15.21 kilometers. And it wasn’t even midday.
She cleared the message as she entered her apartment’s small living area. It was minimally decorated—one couch upholstered in white fabric, a wooden coffee table made from reclaimed warehouse pallets, a small glass-and-metal desk, and an authentically old record player on a stand in one corner. After relocating to Songdo, she had been forced to start over with her vinyl collection; had spent her first few months tracking down reissues of her fifteen favorite albums. Online, of course. Physical retailers no longer kept anything of value on premises. On rare occasions Enda would remember the collection she left behind in the US. She missed it more than her distant family, more than most of her friends.
The blinds were open, revealing the rain-soaked city. It stretched east, to where Songdo met Incheon, an invisible border drawn in tenement blocks and lengths of highway. Enda’s was not a penthouse apartment, but it was high enough to feel inhuman—a bird’s view of the city, or a god’s.
Even after the run, Enda felt unsettled, her nerves jangled. She ran to force a calm she could never otherwise reach, but the intrusion had shattered any hope of inner quiet. She paced the length of her living room; tension dragged across her upper back, and her jaw ached.
She flicked through her records, stopping at Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. First LP, B side, title track. She placed it gently onto the record player, lifted the needle, and let the mechanism do the rest. Within moments the first notes played, the lonely thrum of a double bass, the cymbal crash, the organ drifting across the right side of the room as the drummer played a roll both gentle and frantic. Enda exhaled, let her mind get lost in the layers of sound.
She turned the volume up and went through to her bathroom. She turned the shower on, took the datacube from the pocket of her sweat-soaked leggings, and stripped. Her legs spasmed again when she stepped into the shower, calf muscles locked up painfully tight.
The meeting with Yeun had left a bad taste in her mouth. Not just the unredacted dossier, but the entire job. However distasteful her Three-Letter Agency work had been, the goals were always clear: American superiority over all other factors. Over life, over liberty, over the sovereignty of other nations, even allies. But tracking stolen property for a corporate executive? It was a step above tailing cheating spouses, but also likely to be much messier.
Enda finished cleaning herself and turned the shower off. She left her running clothes where they were and trailed wet footprints into her bedroom, drying herself. She dressed in comfortable black slacks and an airy, navy-colored blouse, long sleeves rolled up to her elbows.
She walked to the kitchen for coffee, pouring the last of her grounds into the machine and making a mental note to buy more. As the coffee dripped into the pot she called Natalya Makhanyok—the Mechanic, her not-quite-personal assistant.
“Good morning, Enda,” Natalya said.
Enda checked the time in the corner of her vision—it was still morning; of course the Mechanic was right.
“Morning, Natalya. I need you to look into David Yeun for me, an executive at Zero. He’s got me backed into a corner, and I don’t like it.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Enda,” Natalya said.
“Why not?”
“Zero Corporation provides much of the software I use, as well as the databases I access,” Natalya said. “If I were to try and access information on one of their executives, they would likely shut me down.” Hers was a distinctive voice—warm, firm, with the hint of an eastern European accent. Enda had never asked what country she was from, their discussions always too concise, too professional, for an opening to present itself.
“Shit,” Enda said. “There’s nothing you can do?”
“Sadly, no.”
“Fine,” Enda said. “I’ll figure something else out.”
“Will that be all?” Natalya asked.
“For now. I should have something more for you soon.”
“I look forward to it.” Natalya hung up without ceremony. She was never on the line longer than necessary. Initially it had annoyed Enda, but she had no way of knowing how many other clients Natalya serviced. For all she knew, the Mechanic had a bank of phone lines vying for her attention. Still, only once had she failed to answer a call.
The percolator finished, and Enda poured coffee into the largest mug she owned—no milk, no sugar. The apartment seemed oddly quiet; it took Enda a moment to realize the record had stopped. She carried her coffee to the living room, flipped the record to its A side, and sat down at her desk. The record started with a fast, quiet drumbeat, joined by the organ, then the brass dipped in, the guitar, every instrument introducing itself as the band ran headlong into the twenty-minute track, “Pharaoh’s Dance.”
Enda slotted Yeun’s datacube into her rig. It required authentication—the cube linked to her new Zero account with layers of corporate safeware. She placed her phone on the rig’s NFC reader, and waited a few seconds while the data on the cube was decrypted. It was a few terabytes all told, witness statements, police reports, and a virtual re-creation of the theft from every available angle throughout the rampartment complex.
According to police reports, entry to the enclave had been gained with the cleaning contractor’s credentials. Diversion in the form of arson and looting at the compound’s grocery store. Police dogs tagged a number of juvenile suspects on-site, but none were held, and none had been arrested. Have to find them first, and that’s harder with minors. Especially with so many kids out of school, so many with no permanent residence.
Enda couldn’t be sure if the bare-minimum policing was due to laziness or a sort of extortion attempt—pay us and
