Frightened of what?
Someone contacted her about your ticket. They were trying to reach her father, because the points used to purchase it were his. But he is traveling. They spoke with Kelsey instead. I think they threatened her.
With what?
I dont know. But she gave them your name and the number of the cashcard.
Chia thought about Maryalice and Eddie.
Zona Rosa took a knife from her jacket pocket and squatted on a shelf of pinkish rock. Golden dragons swirled in the shallow depths of the knifes pink plastic handles. She thumbed a button of plated tin and the dragon-etched blade snapped out, its spine sawtoothed and merciless. She has no balls, your Kelsey.
Shes not myKelsey, Zona.
Zona picked up a length of green-barked branch and began to shave thin curls from it with the edge of the switchblade. She would not last an hour, in my world. On a previous visit, shed told Kelsey stories of the war with the Rats, pitched battles fought through the garbage-strewn playgrounds and collapsing parking garages of vast housing projects. How had that war begun? Over what? Zona never said.
Neither would I.
So who is looking for you?
My mother would be, if she knew I was here
That was not your mother, the one who put the fear into Kelsey.
If someone knew my seat number on the flight over, they could get a ticket number and trace it back, right?
If they had certain resources, yes. It would be illegal.
From there, they could go to Kelsey
From there they are in the frequent-flyer files of Air Magellan, which implies very serious resources.
There was a woman, on the plane She had the seat beside me. Then I had to carry her suitcase, and she and her boyfriend gave me a ride into Tokyo.
You carried her suitcase?
Yes.
Tell me this story. All of it. When did you first see this woman?
In the airport, SeaTac. They were doing noninvasive DNA samples and I saw her do this weird thing Chia began the story of Maryalice and the rest of it, while Zona Rosa sat and peeled and sharpened her stick, frowning.
Fuck your mother, Zona Rosa said, when Chia had finished her story. The translation rendered her tone as either amazement or disgust, Chia couldnt tell.
What? Chias confusion was absolute.
Zona looked at her along the length of the peeled stick. An idiom. Idioma. Very rich and complicated. It has nothing to do with your mother. She lowered the stick and did something to her knife, folding the blade away with a triple click. The lizard shed adjusted earlier came scurrying low across a narrow ledge of rock, clinging so close as to appear two-dimensional. Zona picked it up and stroked it into yet another color-configuration.
What are you doing?
Harder encryption, Zona said, and put the lizard on the lapel of her jacket, where it clung like a brooch, its eyes tiny spheres of onyx. Someone is looking for you. Probably theyve already found you. We must try to insure that our conversation is secure.
Can you do that, with him? The lizards head moved.
Maybe. Hes new. But those are better. She pointed up with the stick. Chia squinted into the evening sky, dark cloud tinted with streaks of sunset pink. She thought she saw a sweep of wings, so high. Two things flying. Big. Not planes. But then they were gone. Illegal, in your country. Colombian. From the data-havens. Zona put the pointed end of her stick on the ground and began to twirl it one way, then the other, between her palms. Chia had seen a rabbit make fire that way, once, in an ancient cartoon. You are an idiot.
Why?
You carried a bag through customs? A strangers bag?
Yes
Idiot!
I am not.
She is a smuggler. You are hopelessly naive.
But you went along with sending me here, Chia thought, and suddenly felt like crying. But why are they looking for me?
Zona shrugged. In the District, a cautious smuggler would not let a mule go free
Something silvery and cold executed a tight little flip somewhere behind and below Chias navel, and with it came the unwelcome recollection of the washroom at Whiskey Clone, and the corner of something she hadnt recognized. In her bag. Stuffed down between her t-shirts. When shed used one to dry her hands.
Whats wrong?
I better go. Mitsuko went to make tea Talking too quickly, biting off the words.
Go? Are you insane? We must
Sorry. Bye. Pulling off the goggles and scrabbling at the wrist-fasteners.
Her bag there, where shed left it.
17. The Walls of Fame
We had no time to do this right, the woman said, handing Laney the eyephones. He was sitting on a child-sized pink plastic bench that matched the table. If there is a way to do it right.
There are areas we could not arrange access to, said the Japanese-American with the ponytail. Blackwell said youve had experience with celebrities.
Actors, Laney said. Musicians, politicians
Youll probably find this different. Bigger. By a couple of degrees of magnitude.
What cant you access? Laney asked, settling the phones over his eyes.
We dont know, he heard the woman say. Youll get a sense of the scale of things, going in. The blanks might be accountancy, tax-law stuff, contracts Were just tech support. He has other people someone pays to make sure parts of it stay as private as possible.
Then why not bring themin? Laney asked.
He felt Blackwells hand come down on his shoulder like a bag of sand. Ill discuss that with you later. Now get in there and have a look. What we pay you for, isnt it?
In the week following Alison Shires death, Laney had used Out of Controls DatAmerica account to re-access the site of her personal data. The nodal point was gone, and a certain subtle reduction had taken place. Not a shrinkage so much as a tidying, a folding in.
But the biggest difference was simply that she was no longer generating data. There was no credit activity. Even her Upful Groupvine account had been canceled. As her estate was executed, and various business affairs terminated, her data began to take on a neat rectilinearity. Laney thought of the dead bundled squarely in their graveclothes, of coffins and cairns, of the long straight avenues of cemeteries in the days when the dead had been afforded their own real estate.
The nodal point had formed where she had lived, while she had lived, in the messy, constantly proliferating interface with the ordinary yet endlessly multiplex world. Now there was no longer an interface.
Hed looked, but only briefly, and very cautiously, to see whether her actor might be undertaking tidying activities of his own. Nothing obvious there, but he imagined Out of Control would have set a more careful watch on that.
Her data was very still. Only a faint, methodical movement at its core: something to do with the ongoing legal mechanism of the execution of her estate.
A catalog of each piece of furniture in the bedroom of a guesthouse in Ireland. A subcatalog of the products provided in the seventeenth-century walnut commode at bedside there: toothbrush, toothpaste, analgesic tablets, tampons, razor, shaving gel. Someone would check these periodically, restock to the inventory. (The last guest had taken the gel but not the razor.) In the first catalog, there was a powerful pair of Austrian binoculars, tripod-mounted, which also functioned as a digital camera.
Laney accessed its memory, discovering that the recording function had been used exactly once, on the day the manufacturers warranty had been activated. The warranty was now two months void, the single recorded image a view from a white-curtained balcony, looking toward what Laney took to be the Irish Sea. There was an unlikely palm tree, a length of chainlink fence, a railbed with a twin dull gleam of track, a deep expanse of grayish-brown beach, and then the gray and silver sea. Closer to the sea, partially cut off by the images border, there appeared to be a low, broad fort of stone, like a truncated tower. Its stones were the color of the beach.