If this was one of her family members, it was obvious who. Val wouldn’t have bothered hiding, since Sophie had made it clear she was welcome in anti-Pilot spaces. David wouldn’t have been able to post during some of the time GNM had been posting, since most sites were restricted from the bases where he’d been deployed.
Which left Julie. Julie, who always had two or three devices open in front of her. Julie, who never had trouble justifying anything she did. Julie, who would have convinced herself it was perfectly reasonable to spy on her daughter in the name of making sure she was safe, or something like that. Julie, who probably thought she was helping.
Julie, who had helped. Sophie couldn’t deny that Grandma had made hundreds of useful comments. There were a dozen bores like Greggg who liked the sounds of their own voices, liked being first to comment, liked thinking they were useful without ever doing anything remotely useful. Grandma had been in a different category, with the people who weighed their words.
Except she was a spy. No, not a spy, because if Julie was here, she wasn’t reporting to anyone. It still didn’t mean she had any right to be here, any more than someone without a kid should go to a parent group and pretend they had one, or someone without a medical condition or a connection to it should fake it in a support group. This was a group for people who believed Pilots were bad for society, and no matter how many good ideas Grandma-or-Julie had, she didn’t belong.
Sophie contemplated the flaws in their system. If Julie could convince them she was one of them, were there other people who’d snuck through? She thought about what had been said here over the years. They generally treated this as a public space, one where anyone could be listening, where anything could be copied to the public. Anything secret was discussed in person. People—including herself—sometimes said stuff that was maybe too private, might be considered oversharing, but she didn’t think there was anything useful for a spy. Just public organizing. Public organizing with at least one traitor in their midst.
The more she considered it, the angrier she got. It was a lie, sure, but more than that, it was a violation. Her finger hovered over the “deactivate account” button, but then she thought better of it. Don’t let on that she’d noticed. Hold on to this for the right moment. Gather all her med bottles, not just a few days’ worth, and walk out the door, because her home, where she was supposed to trust people and be trusted, was suddenly a place she couldn’t stand to be. Better to go back to the meeting space, where she was surrounded by friends and strangers who thought she was smart and capable, not a kid to keep tabs on.
CHAPTER SIXTY
VAL
Val had long since gotten used to one kid or the other not coming home for the night, though she never liked it. She knew sooner or later someone would move out for good, but while they still lived there, she preferred knowing where they were at night.
What she wasn’t used to was neither of them coming home, and not knowing where either was, for multiple days in a row. Stranger still, when she asked Julie, when she’d pointed out that Sophie usually took only a few days’ worth of her meds with her, but had taken the whole bottles this time, Julie shrugged and said their kids were adults with busy lives, and it wasn’t their place to keep tabs. Of course it was, to some degree. She didn’t need an exact location for them: she’d settle for a city, a state, a state of being.
In the fifth week of shrugs, the fifth week of no David, the fifth week of no answers to her phone calls, the fourth day of no Sophie, she left school after practice and drove to Sophie’s headquarters. She remembered the time Sophie had allowed her to come to a meeting and how carefully the kid had chosen their route, a curated experience. She had found it sweet, the assumption that she didn’t know her way around the city, that she wouldn’t recognize she was being led on a circuitous route to avoid the worst neighborhoods in between their home and the meeting space. She’d let Sophie have that deception.
Now she drove the most direct route. The neighborhoods in between were poor and besieged with drugs and dealers. Pilots hadn’t changed that. The dealers had them, their lookouts had them, the people on the streets had them to keep themselves aware. A system in dire need of change, but the wrong change had arrived. The wrong changes were everywhere.
Val’s thought had been to sit through the meeting, but when she opened the door she suddenly felt intrusive. She had every right to go inside, but invading her daughter’s space for information, not solidarity, felt wrong.
She closed the door without entering. Instead, she leaned against the Formstone wall and waited. It was a nice evening, neither cold nor hot. The basketball court on the corner was full of laughing teenage girls. Two Black men sat on the stoop of a house directly opposite, each with a can of beer in hand. One raised his and pointed to it, a question in his raised eyebrows. She was about to shake her head no, then reconsidered. If she was waiting out here until people started departing, she might as well have company.
As she crossed, the guy who’d offered stepped into the row house, then returned with a second can, ice-cold. She took it and clinked hers to his, then the other man’s.
“They never cause trouble, but a lot of people go in and out of that building night and day,” the one who’d brought her the beer said. He was older than the other, but
