“In the middle of the day?” Tinkerbell demanded. “I had to say my kid was sick.” She appeared to Shane as a sleek, black humanoid void, her head an oily bulb in the ether, her fingers long chopsticks fiddling on the recliner’s armrests. Shane appeared to her as the same black, leather-suited abscess. Both their voices were disguised by the same flat electronic cadence.
“It couldn’t wait. You’re not going to like it.”
There was a beat as the faceless black avatar gazed at her. “What?”
“I’ve come to believe I’ve lost control of the cell.”
“What does that mean?”
“They’re working behind my back. Our backs.”
“On what?”
“A number of things I’d rather not go into.”
“So I’ve had to trust you all these years, but you can’t trust me?”
“I’m sparing you. So you have a chance to shield yourself.”
“Shield myself from what?”
“The others know about you. That you work on the JTTF.”
“How the fuck do they know that?”
“I told them.”
“Why?” she demanded, the slick black mask lurched forward, menacing her space.
“I needed their trust at the time. The point is, if they’re caught and interrogated—I’m not sure if they’d give you up.” Tinkerbell was silent for a while. “You knew there were risks when we started this.”
“Of course I knew that. Don’t patronize me.” The avatar smeared spindly fingers across its expressionless mask. Somewhere in Colorado, she was wiping away tears. Then she said matter-of-factly, “You want me to stop them.”
“Only if I can’t. I need to get back to Lawrence first.”
“If the governor doesn’t lynch you at the border.”
She shook her head. “What?”
“Your governor. Justis. He declared a state of emergency for the dust storms. He says until The Pastor is inaugurated as president, Kansas will be its own independent nation. He has the Kansas Army National Guard and the League at the state borders running checkpoints. He illegally executed three people on death row last night.”
“What are the Feds doing about it?”
“Got me. No one seems to know who’s in charge at the moment. They have darker paramilitary arms hunting for your people right now too.”
Shane felt a bug land on her neck, and she swatted. The illusion of the VR was suddenly as shallow as the set of a high school play. “We need a way to stop them without putting you at risk.”
“How?”
Shane chewed her lower lip. “The investigation has been close to the bomb maker before, right?”
“The original bomb maker? Yeah. The theory’s come up over and over that whoever’s building the IEDs might have a military background. We usually get a contingent that pooh-poohs this just because bomb making has become so democratized. You go online now and you can find detailed AR-VR instructions that walk you through incredibly intricate ordnance. The theory was harder to ignore after the missile in Anacortes.”
“Could you put a clue in front of someone without drawing attention to yourself?”
She sighed. “He fits the profile: explosives background, single, and they’re looking for someone who travels for work or at least has an excuse to move around the country. Like I told you, he was crossed off our list back in ’30 after the Ohio River Massacre because our algorithms told us he was a right-winger.”
“Find something we can use,” said Shane. “But don’t do anything until I tell you.”
“What are they planning?”
“I’m sorry, I wish I knew.” Shane shook her head. “I lost control of it all.”
The avatar rubbed where her eyes would be. The voice-altering tech drained so much of the sorrow from what she said next. “How did I get here?”
Shane exited Slapdish and pulled the VR set from her head, half expecting her truck to be surrounded by FBI agents. Instead, just a half-bright afternoon, yellow sun cutting through cloud banks and glistening on the water. She’d left the window open, and horseflies buzzed in and out while a garter snake sizzled through the grass. She forced herself to drive the speed limit back to the motel. People had long ago stopped wearing either 6DEGREES OR THE WEATHERMEN on T-shirts. When the five of them started, they had an idea, but that idea did not belong to them. And once others got hold of it, they could mutate it, and pretty soon the program would become how best to scatter blood around. Then one day, very soon, they would all look around, and nothing would be changed, and nothing will have worked, and the dead would still be murdered.
In the motel, she roused Lali and told her to pack quickly. She crammed their clothes into her ancient Osprey, the pack mostly duct tape now. Then they lit out on Highway 49, heading home to Kansas.
Before Allen and Perry, before Anacortes, La Grange, and Fort McMurray, before the Ohio River Massacre, before Lali was born, before they’d even set off their first bomb, Shane heard about a protest in North Dakota over a pipeline.
These were still early days, just maps, materials, ideas, and codes. Obama still president. Clay Ro had been recruited at this point, but Miles Kroll had not. Energy Transfer Partners was set to build its $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline through the territory of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation right along the Missouri River. An enormous protest erupted in response, with thousands making their way to Sacred Stone Camp, mostly local tribes of the Oceti Sakowin, along with plenty of allies eager to make this fight about more than Indigenous land or the health of the water but a battle over the future of the planet itself. In those days, this was what the movement had settled on: trying to blockade the industrial machine one oil pipeline at a time. Of course, Shane wasn’t there to actually join the protests. ETP had retained the services of a security firm called TigerSwan, which was working with local, state, and federal law enforcement to not only suppress and drive out the protestors but to document them. Everyone who camped out in the pipeline’s path or chained themselves to machinery would be marked for life with a kind of digital scarlet letter and useless to Shane and her comrades.
Her aim, then, was to catch the sympathetic before they actually reached Sacred Stone. She’d been living out of a camper for the past two years, moving across Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and the Dakotas, changing her appearance, scrubbing her past life clean to cement a new identity. She’d buzzed her head and bulked up with a protein-rich diet and a vigorous workout regimen. Backpacking and climbing, she got into the best shape of her life, moving from town to town, doing under-the-table seasonal work, switching out for better-paying bartending gigs if she could. She made friends and vanished. Had affairs and slipped away. She took her paycheck and left nothing behind. She carried no phone, no laptop, just her pack and a paper map. A butch ski bum drifter just looking for love and adventure after college, man.
She found work at a bar thirty miles north of the reservation in Fort Rice and pretended to know nothing about what was going on down where the Cannon Ball River met the Missouri. Her boss, Nanette, was an old chain-smoker who knew just about everyone who came or went from the bar and recognized almost every vehicle that lumbered down Highway 1806. Shane watched for patrons other than the old Lakota who came in to pound pitchers of cheap beer and the white men who did the same. On her days off, she’d drive south and rotate between convenience stores and groceries where water protectors might go for provisions. She kept an eye out, uncertain of who she’d approach or how. She always drove the limit but got pulled over nevertheless, her age, skin color, and general look simply too suspect to not harass. The cop relaxed when she said she tended bar for Nanette and didn’t give a shit about any pipeline. They got to know her truck and left her alone.