Page 38 of Coldwire
“Why do you think we were followed?” Kieren asks. “Any suggestions are welcome.”
“I’m going to have to circle back on that.”
“What? Just tell me what you think. Is it possible that there’s a threat from Medaluo here?”
“I’ll circle back. Keep the social chatter to a minimum, Kieren.”
And Headmaster Murray hangs up.
“You know…” Kieren pushes his empty coffee cup to the middle of the table. “He didn’t used to be such adick.”
Headmaster Murray clearly doesn’t think there’s a problem. I suppose it does sound silly when spoken out loud. If Medaluo knew we were in theserver, we wouldn’t be sitting in a café making a call home. We would be in a dark room with government agents, blindfolded while Medaluo tried to keep us from logging out long enough to question us.
I take another sip of my overly sweet coffee. Medaluo doesn’t govern its country as Atahua does. It doesn’t have several branches of government, checks and balances among its departments. Medaluo has one federal agency maintaining its affairs and the largest national military in the world. There are no corporations with their fingers in the national reserve, no powerful families outside of the ones that work for the government. If someone upsets the Medan government, there is nothing to stop its agents from dragging them in downcountry and making sure no one finds them again.
“I have to imagine this was a coincidence,” I finally say. “Let’s not press on it anymore. I don’t want usactuallygetting the government’s attention.”
I’m not particularly fond of the Atahuan government either, but at least it’s significantly harder to vanish in Atahua. At least there, we can go kicking and screaming, with hundreds of accounts on the feed chattering about the wrongdoing. Medaluo is most frightening for its silence.
“Maybe we should,” Kieren mutters. “Maybe that’s how we actually get something done.”
I frown, waving my hand in front of his face. His eyes have glazed over. Any casual passerby would assume he’s staring at something on his display, but I’m well acquainted with his furrow of concentration. This is Kieren lost in his thoughts.
“Hey,” I say. “Relax, would you? We’re on a missing person case, not the elimination of the cold war.”
That seems to bring Kieren back to earth. His shoulders slump. At the front of Lovers’ Café, the door thuds open for a double date spilling over from the restaurant across the street. A small cleaning bot swivels under our table, slurping up the few droplets of coffee that splattered out the side of my cup without my notice.
“Thank you,” I whisper down to it.
The bot lights up with a flash of pink.
I sit comfortably for a moment, finishing my coffee. Despite the loud ambient hum, I can hear the hostess laughing by the door, so entertained by whatever the customer at the front of the line has said that she’s bowed over. The café warms from the activity, and the glass windows creak open an inch on automatic regulation.
“Do you ever get the sense that my dad has a wire feeding him answers?”
The question comes entirely out of left field. My eyes widen, my attention snapping back to Kieren. He’s being serious.
“I don’t think I’ve spoken to your dad enough to make that judgment call,” I say carefully. “What do you mean—that he’s under NileCorp’s thumb for everything he does?”
It’s rare that someone can disappear without a fuss in Atahua, but it’s also rare that anyone is making a fuss at all.EveryAtahuan is under NileCorp’s thumb to some degree simply by using upcountry, where our activity and messages are cataloged in its servers down to the minutiae. When federal and NileCorp are so tightly collaborative, most of us are convinced the police will knock on our door merely at an inflammatory thought toward the company.
There’s still plenty of crime. Petty thefts, robberies, homicides. NileCorp executives might know about it while someone is putting together the plan, but that doesn’t mean they’ll waste precious resources to stop it. They don’t care if the old man living in the box downcountry got his throat cut in the night. They don’t care to stop someone’s electronics from getting stolen. More money feeds back into the supply chain when NileCorp-branded replacements are bought anyway. I’m sure they’d like to prevent the hits that go higher—it’s not to say nothing escapes NileCorp’s notice, especially when plenty of powerful people have been targeted by anarchists recently. But most perpetrators are caught before long. Only a few end up as big-name problems, and even then NileCorp will no doubt catch up eventually.
“He goes beyond being under their thumb sometimes. He’s practically their walking mouthpiece,” Kieren grumbles. “He used to be different when I needed help. He might have been strict when people were watching, but if it was just us behind closed doors…” His shoulders crawl up to his ears. “Look at me, protesting that my dad isn’tniceto me anymore.”
I shift in my seat. “I’m sure it’s hard for him. He doesn’t want to be accused of playing favorites.”
A clunk sounds beneath the table. The cleaning bot has nudged up against Kieren’s leg. He prompts it away, back onto its correct path, and it whines in confusion. It probably got thrown by the lack of wrinkles in any of Kieren’s clothes and thought there was more smooth surface to roll onto.
“Unbelievable that I thought he might actually help.” The bot finally pivots, turning for the next table. “Before Hailey and I started at the academy, he told us he took the job to keep an eye on us. Our education was the only reason he left NileCorp’s corporate ranks.” Kieren pulls his leg up onto the seat. “But it doesn’t really seem like he cares much about us one way or the other, does it?”
I don’t know what to say, so I stay silent. My dad is a public figure too—I know how it feels to be tiptoeing around what responsibility he owes the rest of the world. It seems cosmically fitting that Kieren has the same conflict. As different as Kieren and I are on the surface, our minds have always been mirrors. It’s the reason we’ve been able to go head-to-head without tiring all these years later.
Another notification appears at the edge of my display. Kieren has sent me a pinned location.
“I was looking around for lodging while I waited. There’s a hotel one block over.”
Ah, I see. It’s time to change the subject.
