Page 34 of Coldwire
“Yes.”
“The censored files in the NileCorp database.”
“Correct,” Nik answers.
“Then you already know,” I say. “I don’t remember anything about Kunlun.”
It’s not only my memories of hacking into Kunlun that remain a wide, gaping hole. It’s everything that came before it too, the moment I was injected into Medaluo’s server. I can’t remember how I stole into Kunlun. I could speculate, I suppose—though Kunlun has no physical downcountry equivalent, the servers that store its streets, its buildings, its data, are in Offron—Land of Outer Frontier—at the northern edge of Medaluo, where Kunlun was first built. If there’s anywhere that makes sense to hack into Kunlun, it’s Offron.
But that’s where all of my speculation disintegrates. Upcountry Offron and Kunlun are two separate cities. No one at NileCorp will explain to me what I did to cross that distance. It’s better that I don’t know, in fact, so that I can avoid situations like this exactly: being held under duress by anarchists to get them into highly secure locations.
“No matter.” Nik puts the handheld away. “We start work in Upsie anyway.”
I don’t understand. Nik and his team have gone through all this effort to bring me along for their mission. They’ve killed a man, dragged my name in the mud, sent Atahuan federal after me.
And then he’s flippant about whether or not I can actually help them.
It doesn’t make sense.
“Do you know something I don’t?”
It’s Nik’s turn to jolt. For the briefest moment, panic flutters over his expression, and it’s a welcome change from the noncommittal, blasé coldness he’s been wearing otherwise. “What?”
“Do you know something,” I repeat, “that I don’t? You initially said you were looking for someone who got lost and asked me about the name Sullivan. Suddenly you’ve left that out of this explanation.”
“I didn’t saylost,” he mutters. “I was just double-checking something. You don’t know it, so I left it out.”
“I have ten weeks of missing memories,” I counter. “If I don’t know it, I could just have forgotten. Tell me what you were checking.”
“It’s simply not relevant here if you have no familiarity with it.”
“What do you mean—”
The taxi hits a severe bump, shaking the entire vehicle. My gaze whips to Miz. She took over self-driving capabilities to do that on purpose.
“We’re approaching the city,” she announces. In the time since I’ve looked away from the window, the car has pulled onto a main road. It drives parallel to a highway overhead, where the underside is clustered with electric wiring that glows a hazardous white sheen. Other vehicles chug down the five-lane road, their exteriors rusted from the elements, the passengers inside made ghostly by the light.
“All right, no more time for chatter,” Nik declares. He springs up from the back seat, grabbing one of the bags in the aisle. Miz warns him to watch his head on the next turn, and the taxi jostles off the road into a tunnel, leaping across a ditch in the road with enough momentum to threaten to flip. For a moment, it’s utterly dark in the tunnel. Then we emerge out the other side, and instead of a highway overhead, it’s skyscrapers and their iridescent advertisements, swirling through the night and making a dive at anything they sense beneath them. It’s buzzing drones making deliveries at rooftop level, zipping along the buildings and finding a good window to hover in front of before releasing their packages. It’s people—movement in the apartments, movement in the night markets, a low rumble that can be heard even through the sealed windows of the vehicle, a murmuring of conversation overlapping at every tier of Upsie.
A wave of something undecipherable turns up my throat. Some mixture between disgust and nostalgia, the desire to take in Medaluo and the sick churn that immediately sets in when I realize this awe is what Atahua would point to if I were accused of being a spy. Sooner or later, someMedan who frequently scrolls Atahuan news on the feed will recognize me in physical space, and then that’ll be that. The pictures will go online; the outrage will spread. Atahua will mark me as a traitor until I get the video back. Atahua at large may continue to mark me as a traitor afterward, but that won’t matter. As long as I get my job back. As long as there’s a roof over my head and a bed at the base.
“Where are we going first?” I ask.
“Hotel.” At Miz’s direction, the taxi pulls into a side street. Here, short light poles grow out of the cobblestone every few paces, illuminating the alley a plain white-yellow. “I need the night to invade the data center network and get some information. We’ll want employee details.”
Nik yanks down one of the seats abruptly. He looks at me for an infinitesimal moment, and I can only conclude that he wanted a reaction out of me. Make me jump, give me a fright. My face stays blank. He’s turning before anyone else can observe the exchange, already opening the taxi door and stepping out prior to a full stop. “Let’s move. The less time we spend on the street with cameras, the better.”
The taxi brakes beside a thin, low-rise building. Our destination, I assume. Miz and Blare exit after Nik, the two muttering between themselves while they separate the bags. Miz is largely avoiding my gaze, but Blare’s eyes lift for a moment. They smile cautiously, offering me the gesture before clambering off. Only then do I follow suit, my shoes touching down on the sidewalk’s lumpy tread.
It’s quiet. A fragrant smell wafts from the inner end of the street— I follow its source, squinting past the lights to find an old lady with a food cart parked around the bend. Despite the hour, despite everything that I assumed about downcountry in a dying city, expecting emptied and desolate streets, there are enough people walking about that two buyers hover by the cart, waiting for their onion pancake orders to be made. They stare forward blankly, scrolling the feed displayed on their glasses, their hands shoved in their pockets.
As soon as I’ve climbed out, Miz sends the taxi off. Faint music trickles from a skyscraper next to the low-rise building. Gauging by the lights, only the first five levels of the forty are functional.
“We’re staying next to this thing?” I pose it as a question, but my tone is entirely judgment. “It could collapse in the middle of the night.”
Miz waves me forward. “It won’t.”
Partially functional buildings are common in Button City, too. Those who own or rent property downcountry are owed its upcountry value: every nation that signed on for a StrangeLoom server agreed to those terms. But that means no one can give up their downcountry property if they want to operate upcountry. There will always be some skeleton downcountry. One guard watching the investment bank’s offices so that the company runs upcountry. Two cooks in the restaurants downcountry making the dry sandwiches only attainable by bot delivery so that customers upcountry can order cocktails and steaks.
