“Go!”
And then Shane was sprinting through the dark, blinking to get her eyes to adjust. She could hear the kid, huffing with terror, crashing across a fallow field where the Fords grew a bit of wheat. The stars shattered the night sky, and the instinct buried in the human cell, the recall of the hunt under a burning Milky Way, fueled a wild, panicked kind of joy, and she could run faster than she ever imagined.
Then the boy tripped, maybe forty feet in front of her, and sprawled face-first onto the ground, skidding through dirt and leaves. He paddled forward, tried to get back to his feet, but Shane was standing over him now, finger on the trigger. “Stop,” she said, breath pluming in front of her.
He flipped himself onto his back and met her eyes. A galootish version of the youngest boy from the picture. Perry. Maybe he was college age by now. He waved his hands in front of his face, a smartwatch lighting up with the red glow of a failed text message. “I don’t even know you,” he begged. “I don’t know you—I don’t know any of you.”
Shane pulled the trigger and the bullet punched through his stomach. His scream was louder than the gunshot, high-pitched and keening, like Lali in the throes of a tantrum. She took a step forward, aimed for his head, and fired again. But she’d never used a handgun before, and she missed, the bullet kicking up dirt beside his shoulder. He was crying, clutching his abdomen.
“Go get my dad get my dad get my dad go get my dad,” he kept crying. She aimed for his body, and the weapon kicked for the third time, and now the bullet hit him square in the chest. It made a small, dark typographical mark in his clean white T-shirt, and his pleading turned to a ghastly wheeze hissing from his throat. To make sure, Shane took another step and pulled the trigger one last time. The bullet tore through his mouth and out the back of his neck, and the boy was still and quiet. It was too dark to see much of the blood, but she could smell it, coppery and wet, mixing with the burned tang of gunpowder. She stood in the field for a moment, sucking wind. Perry Ford had probably tried to text or call from his watch, but the cell jammer had done its job. So he’d panicked and made a run for it. She felt her own hot tears in her mouth, though she didn’t think she’d been crying. She began running back toward the house.
The postpartum terror swallowed her immediately upon returning home from the hospital. They warn new mothers of this possibility, but there is no such thing as preparation. Shane’s was a fear and sadness internal and external. Throbbing in her bones while being buried alive. She was in a small box under ten feet of earth screaming for help while her air ran out. She felt like this day and night. It was all she could do to leave her bed in the morning to feed her daughter. She needed a job, she needed work, she needed help, she needed her pelvic floor to heal so she’d stop pissing herself every time she sneezed. The baby never slept, barely ate, and screamed so much it was like the child wanted to tear her own throat out. The worse it got, the more Shane could not bear to leave her bed. By the tenth month of having her baby home, desperation had set in. She began thinking through other avenues. Two years earlier, before the pregnancy, she’d interviewed for a job down the highway. Ricardo and Molly’s All-American Taqueria served diner food and Tex-Mex. A proud little mom-and-pop with a video camera system that didn’t work anymore. She’d learned this in the interview. “But don’t tell no one,” said owner and part-time manager Molly. “And don’t rob us neither.” This memory came buzzing back like a fly landing on her nose.
After emptying gallons of bleach over house and field, Allen, Emmy, Perry, and their home had gone up easily in a few splashes of gasoline. Why had Perry thought it mattered that he didn’t know who they were? He thought his murderer must be a known enemy? That a killer could be a stranger—or worse, a faceless bureaucracy—had seemed an alien concept to him, and this troubled her for some reason. At least she figured out the mystery of the dog. Before they left she found the vet bill. They’d just put him down that week. Quinn drove them upstate, crossing into North Carolina, where they slept in the car at a rest stop. Despite her exhaustion, Shane barely closed her eyes the whole night, blinking awake at the first spires of dawn. They switched cars the next morning, exchanging keys with a bearded operative in a pleasant park in the suburbs of Baltimore. He hid his eyes behind sunglasses and made no comment about being abruptly called into service without explanation. They drove north, stopping at a safe house to shower and change.
“What do we tell Murdock and Kai?” Shane asked.
“Nothing just yet. We see what she says first.”
Shane stared out the window and watched Pennsylvania go by. Patches of snow covered the fields and homes. She’d seen the flag flying more than once: HATE—YOU KNOW WHAT IT STANDS FOR.
“What if she doesn’t see things our way?”
Shane thought of the first squeeze of the trigger, and the awful sound Perry made. A shriek, a squeal, and a plea all in one vicious exhalation of breath.
She hadn’t been to New York City since her recruiting trip in 2020, but the new security protocols felt fantastical, part of another society’s future. Crossing into Manhattan from any entrance point, you had to pose for a picture. There was no entrance or exit without this brief catalogue of who was coming and going. They removed their hats so the FaceRec, mounted in an old-fashioned tollbooth, wouldn’t flag them. Police officers, at ease in body armor, helmets, and full tactical gear, watched, rubber straps of gas masks jiggling on their thighs. The booth they approached had an ICE van beside it, along with a graffiti tag, Chinga la Migra. They were taking an enormous risk, a gift to law enforcement and the AIs that served them. If the algorithms saw these two women, who supposedly lived on opposite sides of the country and had no known connection, sitting chummily in a car not registered to either of them, perhaps digital flags would begin to fly. But once they were in the city, Quinn took out her laptop, hacked into the NYPD databases, and erased their images from the files in less than five minutes.
TIME FOR A CHANGE Of leadership. Of direction. Of purpose. Shane had been right in Wisconsin. They had built something incredibly powerful, and it wasn’t being used to its full effect. Not even close. Quinn had known Kai since undergrad, and when he’d recruited her, he’d described the group as democratically organized. This, of course, had been bullshit.
CONTROL In practice, Kai was a shadow dictator with a firm grip on the money and logistics. Yet Quinn was the one who had to go online and make it all function. She and her small team of hackers worked to cover the tracks of their operatives in the field. They ran background checks on recruits and slipped nooses around the necks of their ops lest they go Kroll. They turned out lawyers to defend the captured, and they wiped clean money, houses, cars, and bomb materials when necessary. Fry a license plate scanner in Oregon, track an ATF agent who’d actually traced the blasting caps back to the correct retailer, delete an ATF file, work with impeccable OpSec. Find the vulnerabilities of the targets. Erase your tracks. Do meticulous work. All Kai did was funnel her the cash. She and Shane had been discussing this for a while. If they were going to “shut down” Allen (as Shane put it), they should make their move. Get the money on their side and there was no longer anything to discuss.
The building was old, squat, and brown, crammed onto West Twenty-Second Street, looking ripe for a teardown so some mirrored glass and steel could take its place. Floor one belonged to Sally Jacobson Salon, floors two and three to the Grimm Consultancy, and four, five, and six were the domain of Styx Capital Management. She and Quinn had dressed business formal that afternoon at a truck stop. Shane wore a black pantsuit purchased at a discount department store and had pulled her hair into a scalp-stretching topknot. She had to empty a full package of bobby pins and a can of hairspray before achieving the desired effect while Quinn threw on a fringe tweed collarless jacket and snapped into a professional look in ten minutes.