Shane stopped.
From the look on his face, he knew he’d gone too far. He stuck his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired. But you’ve made this bed, and you have to work around Lali just like the rest of us have to work around our covers.”
Rage rose and receded, the way it did so often. One becomes accustomed to the contempt the world feels for unwed mothers and swallowing a blooming rage to get done what needs to get done—that was just her life. Whether it was a preschool teacher side-eyeing her for showing up late or Teddy getting pissy when she called out for a shift at the last second because Lali was throwing up, she could hear them all thinking, God, these sneaky sluts sure know how to game the system for themselves, don’t they? It didn’t matter if she’d gone to college and read Barbara Ehrenreich, after a few years as a single mom, this sensation tunneled into her. She marveled at how much contempt she could sometimes feel for herself.
They walked in silence to the end of the block. At the intersection they reached a shrouded brick YMCA that had become a full-time shelter. All the towns west of here were blowing away. Pretty much every burg except Wichita and Topeka had emptied out. Ghost towns. The cities were the only places that could afford the water. The Ogallala was running dry, so now they had companies trying to drill to the center of the earth to find water. The University of Kansas was putting millions into it, but it was hard to see how enrollment would fare after this. Kai made an effort to move on.
“This won’t be like Kroll. They think they’re closing in. Once this goes down, the tactics will get tougher. They’re going to come after us in more ways than we can imagine.”
The operative, Miles Kroll, who’d driven the van and planted the bomb in northern Colorado, had gotten picked up because he’d put the device in his own backpack, which he’d purchased at a campus bookstore with a credit card. They were sure he’d ratted everything he knew, which, thanks to their system, was nothing more than a guy in a wig telling him where to find a van and what to do with its contents.
She licked at the dust that got by the mask, a fine sandy refuse on her tongue and lips. “Thirteen missions later, only one low-level operative caught. Give a gal some credit, it’s all working.”
“I’m just saying, after this they’ll break down doors looking for us.”
“We keep to what we’ve been doing. Keep the protocol and precautions in place.”
He lifted his mask to spit dust from his tongue. “Yeah, and that’s why you had to activate the new cell, and that’s why Allen and Quinn and Clay and everyone else sticks to those protocols—”
“You don’t have to tell me, Kai, I’m the one who came up with it.”
“So you’ve done your job. And I’m doing mine.”
A woman on a hoverboard came zipping toward them on the sidewalk. She had a scarf wrapped around her face and on the side of her skull was a tattoo like a saprophytic mushroom. Shane waited for her and her humming gadget to pass. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
As though he hadn’t heard her, he said, “We’re still gathering information on our targets, but I’m looking at summer right now. Less than eight months.”
“There’s something you need to know,” she tried again. “There’s something new. A threat.”
He stopped and the dust circled his head like a spiral galaxy.
“How many pieces of our bombs have they picked up? Not a mote of DNA on any of it,” he said. “What more can we plan for?”
Just by opening her mouth to describe it, Shane felt the urge to get off the street, to get away from Kai, to flee, but then again, she wouldn’t have felt safe in a lead box at the bottom of the ocean. She didn’t feel safe in her own skin. Her very cells were a telltale heart beneath the floorboards. And now this thing Tinkerbell had described to her via a coded message in a Tonganoxie mailbox.
“It’s a new AI project working with megadata. Apparently, it can identify and conceptualize data points in ways even the people who built it can’t understand. The way it was explained to me, you give these algorithms a suspect, and they can backfill their entire inner lives. Basically read a person’s mind.”
“How?” Kai asked. She assumed he meant how was it legal.
“I don’t know, you’re an adult. The same way drones and torture and data mining and the rest of it is.”
“No. I mean, how the hell do you know about this?”
She shifted her eyes away from him. Five years of keeping this a secret, longer than Lali had even been alive, but it was time to bring him in. “I have someone,” she said, “in a national security consulting firm, GBI. It’s a corporate partner of the FBI’s NatSec Branch. I recruited her in 2020 when I was in New York. She worked her way into domestic terrorism, and now she’s working with the JTTF.”
Beneath the mask, she was sure his mouth was agape. “There’s someone on the fucking JTTF who knows about us?”
#MOVEMENTS An off-campus apartment flying a Jayhawk flag with each of its three windows draped with enormous banners: BLACK LIVES MATTER | GREEN NEW DEAL | A FIERCE BLUE FIRE. Here in a campus bubble it was easy to look around and believe the country was swept up in a wave of change and possibility, a narrative propagated and commodified by the social media companies inflicting a new colonialism on people’s minds. But it was a false revolution that Kai had spent his entire twenties gazing at in disbelief. “Activists” thinking themselves impossibly brave for leading the charge to cancel a celebrity or barrage some hapless prole for her racial, gender, or religious insensitivity. All just to build new mansions for the Silicon Valley plutocracy. The righteous energy of the past decade-plus of hashtag “movements” could occasionally summon the angry poor to the streets or sympathetic liberals to their Twitter accounts, but it stood no chance of fomenting the necessary revolution. As a young Black activist, he’d been in disbelief that his peers could be so easily snookered, that they couldn’t see these hashtags for the marketing campaigns they were, the Masters’ best tool yet to misinform, disinform, and sow discord as they tightened their grip on power. Now that the Morris woman had forced the biosphere into the role of cause celeb, her movement was following the same familiar route: immense self-congratulation, vast internet hot takes, enormous promises of change, light, sound, and fury, all empty, all signifying absolutely nothing. He’d known that no movement would succeed in this fight without a major disruption. He’d just never had any idea how to create such a resistance until he met Allen and this woman walking beside him.
“I had to keep it compartmentalized. It’s a firewall. Same as the new bomb maker and the others in the Second Cell. This woman, though, she’s in a much more sensitive situation. She’s had to beat polygraphs, Kai. I didn’t want to tell anyone about her unless I needed to. But now I need to.”
Kai made an exasperated sound in his throat, but he was still processing.
“The good news is, she’s feeding me everything. And right now, they’re not even close to us. You’re right. They think Kroll was the mastermind. They’ve been sweating him in a hole for four years and he’s down to making stuff up to try to get out of it. Painting a crazy portrait of us.”
The sky was a draining vein. Above the door of a one-story home, flies did jet-fighter moves around a muted lamp. She could see the dead ones curled up inside the fixture.
“This spy versus spy shit,” he warned. “It’s dangerous.”
“I trust her. And she doesn’t know who any of you are—or the new cell. The firewalls will hold.”