I held the flame and the note, but I couldn’t do it.
Darryl.
With all the crap with the Xnet and Ange and the DHS, I’d almost forgotten he existed. He’d become a ghost, like an old friend who’d moved away or gone on an exchange program. All that time, they’d been questioning him, demanding that he rat me out, explain the Xnet, the jammers. He’d been on Treasure Island, the abandoned military base that was halfway along the demolished span of the Bay Bridge. He’d been so close I could have swam to him.
I put the lighter down and re-read the note. By the time it was done, I was weeping, sobbing. It all came back to me, the lady with the severe haircut and the questions she’d asked and the reek of piss and the stiffness of my pants as the urine dried them into coarse canvas.
“Marcus?”
My door was ajar and my mother was standing in it, watching me with a worried look. How long had she been there?
I armed the tears away from my face and snorted up the snot. “Mom,” I said. “Hi.”
She came into my room and hugged me. “What is it? Do you need to talk?”
The note lay on the table.
“Is that from your girlfriend? Is everything all right?”
She’d given me an out. I could just blame it all on problems with Ange and she’d leave my room and leave me alone. I opened my mouth to do just that, and then this came out:
“I was in jail. After the bridge blew. I was in jail for that whole time.”
The sobs that came then didn’t sound like my voice. They sounded like an animal noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in the night. I sobbed so my throat burned and ached with it, so my chest heaved.
Mom took me in her arms, the way she used to when I was a little boy, and she stroked my hair, and she murmured in my ear, and rocked me, and gradually, slowly, the sobs dissipated.
I took a deep breath and Mom got me a glass of water. I sat on the edge of my bed and she sat in my desk chair and I told her everything.
Everything.
Well, most of it.
Chapter 16
This chapter is dedicated to San Francisco’s Booksmith, ensconced in the storied Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, just a few doors down from the Ben and Jerry’s at the exact corner of Haight and Ashbury. The Booksmith folks really know how to run an author event — when I lived in San Francisco, I used to go down all the time to hear incredible writers speak (William Gibson was unforgettable). They also produce little baseball-card-style trading cards for each author — I have two from my own appearances there.
Booksmith: 1644 Haight St. San Francisco CA 94117 USA +1 415 863 8688
At first Mom looked shocked, then outraged, and finally she gave up altogether and just let her jaw hang open as I took her through the interrogation, pissing myself, the bag over my head, Darryl. I showed her the note.
“Why —?”
In that single syllable, every recrimination I’d dealt myself in the night, every moment that I’d lacked the bravery to tell the world what it was really about, why I was really fighting, what had really inspired the Xnet.
I sucked in a breath.
“They told me I’d go to jail if I talked about it. Not just for a few days. Forever. I was — I was scared.”
Mom sat with me for a long time, not saying anything. Then, “What about Darryl’s father?”
She might as well have stuck a knitting needle in my chest. Darryl’s father. He must have assumed that Darryl was dead, long dead.
And wasn’t he? After the DHS has held you illegally for three months, would they ever let you go?
But Zeb got out. Maybe Darryl would get out. Maybe me and the Xnet could help get Darryl out.
“I haven’t told him,” I said.
Now Mom was crying. She didn’t cry easily. It was a British thing. It made her little hiccoughing sobs much worse to hear.
“You will tell him,” she managed. “You will.”
“I will.”
“But first we have to tell your father.”
Dad no longer had any regular time when he came home. Between his consulting clients — who had lots of work now that the DHS was shopping for data-mining startups on the peninsula — and the long commute to Berkeley, he might get home any time between 6PM and midnight.
Tonight Mom called him and told him he was coming home
