“Be very careful,” Nix said.
My head lolled and I jerked awake.
For a second, panic welled up inside me as I sensed movement all around. A rush of light and sound left me disoriented, then began to resolve into the familiar surge of city streets.
A ceramic pipe smoldered in my hand as I sat at the Gong Street bar stand, little more than a wooden booth with a couple of rickety chairs propped in front. The old man behind the bar stood like a statue, the light from his phone’s screen playing on the deep wrinkles of his face as he watched it through the slits of his eyes. Next to him, a poster for a missing boy fluttered in the breeze.
I stared at the pipe, letting the chocolate mint smoke tickle my nose. The opiates that smoldered in the bowl were stronger than the typical store-bought stuff. One puff is all it would take to steady the thin thread of smoke that trickled up from it, squiggling in time with the shaking of my hand.
My cheeks flushed with shame. I hadn’t done it, not yet, but I’d come this far, and I wanted to so badly. The edges of my life had begun to unravel. I’d taken to avoiding Dragan so I wouldn’t have to tell him what kind of trouble I meant to cause, and Vamp… he’d been preoccupied. It worried me. I felt lost. The gonzos hadn’t tried to approach me again, but something told me they would, sooner or later.
“Smoke it or don’t,” the old man said without looking up. “Either way, no refunds.”
I wanted to. I really wanted to. Everything had begun to pile up, crushing me like a bug under someone’s heel. I wanted to be fuzzy again, to not feel the way I did anymore, more than anything. It had driven me here, looking over the brink and ready to jump.
Behind me, a steady flow of people trundled past, coats and briefcases brushing me from time to time. I couldn’t look at them. I sensed some of them glancing my way as they went by, maybe wondering what my problem was, but all I could do was look down at the pipe in my hand and try to slow the rhythm of my heart. How many were imposters? How many of the people passing right behind me were only pretending to be human?
I watched the smoke drift from the pipe and laughed, even as tears welled in my eyes.
I’m cracking up.
I checked the 3i tray and saw that Vamp still hadn’t responded to my messages, but some new ones had appeared.
HangfeiFriendshipHospitaclass="underline" URGENT. Please contact us at your earliest convenience regarding your recently rejected insurance claim, to discuss how this will affect your unpaid balance.
DraganShao: Sam, what gives? Stop avoiding me. Swing by this weekend and take a day trip with me to Render’s Strip like old times.
DMing: Sam, I have a proposition for you. Call me.
SultrexBOTxx1: R UR TITZ 2 SMALL? Let us FIX U.
AlexeiShao: Sam where r u? I’m waiting.
AlexeiShao: Sam?
AlexeiShao: r u coming?
Shit. Alexei. I was supposed to pick him up at his language tutor’s, and I’d completely forgotten. I started to try to figure out some kind of recovery… to figure out how fast I could get to him when I saw Dao-Ming’s message:
DMing: I have picked up Alexei, as you have failed to do so. He is with me. I understand you have a lot going on, but so do we all. He needs you. Pay more attention.
I took out my phone and called him, but he didn’t pick up. When I tried to get him on the 3i, he signed off.
He’s pissed. I didn’t blame him.
I felt like I’d begun to fall apart. I decided to call Vamp, instead, and stared at the flashing sign across the street as his phone rang.
BOTHERED BY SCALEFLIES?
The characters lit up in sequence, then went out and started over in a loop. They were selling something that would presumably help, but the store window still had flies on it, and chemical strips covered in them blew in the breeze from the awning. Underneath, a little haan construct used a tube to suck up any fallen insects.
Vamp’s phone rang so many times I thought I’d get bumped into voice mail, but then he finally picked up.
“Sam,” he said. I could hear music in the background. “What’s up?”
“Not much. What are you up to?”
“I’ve kind of had my head down, working with Shuang.”
“Oh,” I said, my heart sinking a little. “How’s it going?”
“Great,” he said. “It’s going to work.”
He shifted the phone, like he was changing positions or maybe leaving the room. The music turned quieter, and I realized then that he sounded a little bit drunk. I gnawed on my lip.
“You don’t say.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ve already got the bots deployed, and they’ll establish the hooks for us to tap into the system. Once we figure out the best way to trigger the failure, we can go in and…”
He kept going, but he got more and more technical, and the more technical he got, the less I understood. Since he’d gotten back together with his old friends, something had begun to bother me, and I realized then what it was. For the first time in a very long time, I felt like an outsider in Vamp’s world. He’d always had smart friends… techno-wizards who were all pirates—coders and hackers or whatever—but even when we hung out in a group he always made it clear that I held top spot in his book. We were a package deal. I was never on the outside looking in, but that’s how I’d begun to feel lately.
“So, yeah,” he said. “It’s going to work.”
He had definitely been drinking, I could tell for sure by then. The whole thing had him excited. He’d dabbled in the illegal before, sure. If he ever got busted for his piracy he’d be in trouble, and eyebot was more than a little subversive, but breaking copyright and maybe bending privacy laws were one thing. This was something else altogether. I thought that maybe for the first time he really felt like the person he’d always pretended to be. It charged him up in a way nothing else had in all the time I’d known him.
“How long?” I asked.
“We’ll be ready for a test run soon,” he said. “Another night or so.”
“Test run?”
“The Zun-Zhe district loses power all the time,” he said. “No one will think it’s weird if it goes out again. Before we go for the whole thing, I want to make sure we can cause a controlled, localized failure. We need to see if everything will behave like we projected, so we can make adjustments before—”
“Hey,” I said, changing the subject. “If you can get some time away, I thought maybe we could go out tonight. Just me and you.”
He paused and in that little pause I felt my heart drop. Vamp didn’t pause when I asked to see him. He never paused.
“I’m a little bogged down,” he said. “Can we do it another time?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
“Sorry,” he said. “There’s just a lot to cover.”
“It’s okay; I know there’s a lot going on,” I said.
Just then another voice, a woman’s voice, called from somewhere on the other end of the phone.
“Vamp, is it okay to smoke in here?” I thought I heard her ask. If Vamp answered her, he just nodded or something. I thought he hoped maybe I didn’t hear her. My face began to burn.
“Well, I’ll let you get to it then,” I heard myself say.
“Thanks, Sam. Maybe tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I said, and hung up.
I stared at my phone for a while, feeling worse with every second. The voice had been Shuang’s, I was sure of it. She was with him right now and maybe there was some coding going on, but there was also smoking, drinking, and music. The screen grew blurry in front of my eyes; then the call icon winked out.