Bluescreen

  “Here they are,” said Omar, pointing toward Marisa and the others. “They won’t admit it, but it’s true.”

  “What is he doing?” asked Sahara, scowling at Omar as she stood up. Bao stood as well, and Mr. Litz walked toward them. He shook their hands firmly.

  “Omar has told me everything,” said Mr. Litz. “Thank you for saving Anja’s life.”

  Marisa stammered, caught by surprise. “We . . . uh . . .”

  “She’s our best friend,” said Sahara, handling the surprise far more effectively. “We’d do anything for her.”

  “And some people would do anything to hurt her,” said Mr. Litz. “The news has been telling stories about Bluescreen’s ability to control people, and Omar has filled in some frightening details for me. Do you really think they were targeting me, as well? Targeting Abendroth?”

  “You’re one of the most powerful men in Los Angeles,” said Marisa. “If they’d been able to corrupt you, all of that power would have been theirs.”

  “It’s good to know we have such capable allies,” said Mr. Litz. “Thank you again. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see Anja—father’s privilege.” He shook their hands again, then left them in the waiting room.

  Marisa looked at Omar. “Somehow, this makes me like you even less.”

  “Consider it a peace offering,” said Omar. “You hack computers, I hack people. He likes me because I always show him exactly the kind of young man he wants to see.”

  “One day he’ll see the real you,” said Marisa.

  “You he sees as a bunch of club-hopping losers,” said Omar. “Horrible influences on his only daughter. After this he’d never have let you see her again, but I vouched for you. I’m calling us even now.”

  “Not even close,” said Sahara. “People died today because of you, and Anja is never going back to you.”

  “I don’t expect her to,” said Omar. “It was never serious anyway.”

  “What a douchebag,” said Marisa, shaking her head. “Just using her for her body?”

  “For her father,” said Bao. “He is, like you said, one of the most powerful men in Los Angeles. And now he thinks Omar saved his daughter’s life—that’s a pretty big foot in some very important doors.”

  “You got your best friend back,” said Omar, ignoring Bao’s accusation. “We’re even.”

  “And the Maldonado mafia?” asked Marisa. “You don’t think your family’s going to prison for their part in this?”

  “I told you,” said Omar, “all of that evidence was destroyed. And the police aren’t likely to look for any more. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to visit my sister. She’s still in her coma.” He turned and walked away through the crowd.

  An alert popped up in Marisa’s vision: a “friend of a patient” contact, updating her on Anja’s condition. She glanced at Sahara and Bao, seeing that they’d received the same thing; Bao’s, of course, had appeared on his phone. Marisa scanned through the message quickly, read that Anja was stable but sleeping, and sighed in relief.

  “Good,” said Sahara. “Now I can go home and get some sleep.”

  “Me too,” said Bao. “If I start walking now I can be home by midnight.”

  “We’ll split an autocab,” said Sahara. “Marisa, you coming?”

  “I’m going to visit Chuy first,” said Marisa. “See you tomorrow.”

  “We’ll skip a few more days of practice,” said Sahara. “Rest up.”

  “You’re still going to the tournament?” asked Bao.

  “We’re going to lose,” said Marisa, “but we’re definitely going.”

  “Winning isn’t everything,” Sahara said, and winked at Marisa. “I mean, winning is still most things, but the occasional awesome video is good, too, right?” She smiled. “Play crazy.”

  “Play crazy,” said Marisa. “See you later.”

  She left them in the waiting room, and walked through the halls toward the long-term care ward. Chuy was alone in his hospital bed, watching something on his djinni, and Marisa knocked on the open door to get his attention.

  “Hello?” His eyes focused on her, and he smiled. “Mari, come in.” He was wrapped in bandages and tubes and wires, simultaneously treating and collecting data on his abdominal wound. “I’d get you a chair, but—”

  “I can get my own chair,” she said, laughing at his helpless chivalry. She pulled a small seat to the side of his bed. “You okay?”

  “It’s healing pretty quick,” he said. “Some minor organ damage, but this gene-bath they’ve got pumping through me is regrowing everything bien machin. They say I might be out in two days, and I promise I will pay Papi back—”

  “Forget the money,” said Marisa. “Go to Mexico, get a real job, and that’s all the payment we need.”

  “I . . .” He grimaced, looking guilty, and Marisa felt her heart sink. He spoke softly. “I’m not going to Mexico.”

  “But you promised—”

  “Do you know how many of my friends died today?” asked Chuy.

  Marisa hardened her face, trying to look serious instead of heartbroken. “That’s why you need to leave.”

  “Goyo was one of them,” said Chuy. “His little brother Memo is taking over. Do you know how I got shot last night?”

  “By running with La Sesenta.”

  “By jumping in front of Memo,” said Chuy, “and taking the bullet that was meant for him. The entire power structure is shaking up, and I saved the new leader’s life. I’m almost at the top now—I’ll be getting more money, and with less danger, than ever before. I can’t walk away from that.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “These are my brothers,” said Chuy, repeating his argument from before. “I won’t just walk away from them when life gets rough—that’s when we need to pull together even more.”

  “But your family?” asked Marisa. “Who provides for them the next time you take a bullet for someone?”

  “We’re looking out for all the widows,” said Chuy. “We take care of our own. And someday, god forbid, if I go down, they’ll take care of Adriana as well.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” asked Marisa. “Just . . . wonder all the time? Wonder if you’re going to live, or if Pati’s going to get more drugs at school, or if Calaca’s going to come back and try to shoot me again?”

  “Calaca’s going to leave you alone,” said Chuy. “I’ve already seen to that. And as for you, you’re going to do what you do best, what you’ve always done your entire life: you’re going to help other people instead of yourself. It’s who you are.” He took her hand and squeezed it gently. “I think that makes you the best person I know.”

  Marisa squeezed his hand back, feeling warmed by the words.

  And ominously frigid at the same time.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Another “friend of a patient” alert popped up in Marisa’s djinni, as she walked slowly down to the hospital lobby, and she blinked on it absently. The halls were mostly quiet now, well lit but empty, with no one but a few errant visitors sleeping in chairs while they waited for morning. Marisa started reading, but stopped in surprise—it wasn’t for Anja, but Francisca Maldonado. Marisa had been the one to check her in when she fainted, and she was still in the system as an auxiliary contact. She read the alert again, and found the key message: La Princesa had woken up.

  Marisa looked at the bottom of the message, where it listed which of the patient’s other friends were in the building. Marisa was the only one. She groaned, desperate to leave, but she couldn’t bear to leave a brand-new coma survivor alone in the middle of the night. Even one as horrible as La Princesa. She turned around and walked back upstairs.

  Franca looked up when she came into the room—a far, far nicer one than Chuy was in—but looked away in disgust when she recognized Marisa. Her voice was bitter. “Come to gloat?”

  “I thought you might like some company.”

  “From a Carneseca?” asked Franca. She laughed, but it
turned almost immediately to a cough. “I’d rather be alone.”

  Marisa clenched her fist, feeling her anger boil up. “I’m trying to be nice.”

  “Y luego?” asked Franca. “You say you feel sorry for me, and suddenly the feud is over and our families love each other and everything’s good again?”

  “We don’t have to hate each other,” said Marisa. “Our fathers do, but we don’t even know why. Some car accident so old we don’t even remember it? Can’t we think for ourselves?”

  “Some of us trust our fathers,” said Franca. “If he hates you, he has a good reason; that’s all I need to know.”

  Marisa let her anger boil over, snapping back with the worst thing she could think of: “Do you know what your father’s been involved in? A lot’s happened while you were asleep.”

  “I’m watching the reports.”

  “Do they talk about the great Don Francisco?” Marisa shot back. “Do they talk about how he paid for the drug that almost killed you—for the VR system that let another man wear your body like a suit? Does that bother you at all, or will you just forgive everything, and go right back to him, and let him buy you presents and dress you like a doll and sell you to whichever other crime family he wants to make a deal with—”

  “Get out,” hissed Franca. There were tears in her eyes, and Marisa felt suddenly guilty, but her anger was high and she didn’t want to back down. She stood in the doorway, staring coldly at Franca, who stared right back. “Get out,” she said again.

  Marisa waited, just long enough to show that she was making her own decision to leave, then turned and took a step into the hall. Almost instantly Franca called her back.

  “Marisa.”

  Marisa hesitated, confused. Franca’s voice didn’t sound right, almost like it had before, when Nils had used her to deliver his message. But that was impossible—the software was deleted, the hardware was destroyed—

  —but Franca had been offline when the virus had destroyed itself, and the server had been destroyed before she’d come online again. She still had the software in her head.

  But who was using it, if the hardware was gone?

  “I have another message for you.”

  Marisa turned slowly, as scared as if she were talking to a ghost. Franca was sitting in the bed, unnaturally calm, watching her with that same disconcerting detachment of a Bluescreen puppet.

  Marisa stayed in the hall, too spooked to get closer. “Nils?”

  “Nils is dead,” said Franca’s voice. “One of many things I want to thank you for.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” said Marisa.

  “But you facilitated it,” said the stranger. “You were always the wild card in this plan, but you played your part perfectly. I’m in your debt.”

  “Who are you?”

  Franca cocked her head to the side. “You don’t know?”

  Not Nils, thought Marisa. Not eLiza. Certainly not Lal, or Omar, or anyone else she’d seen at the warehouse. But who else knew about Bluescreen? Who else had talked to her, had given her information, had guided her along some path she’d thought she’d been choosing on her own—

  The answer struck her like a thunderbolt. “Grendel.”

  “You never fail to impress me.”

  And then it clicked, like the final letter of a computer code that downloaded the whole picture into her brain, a code she’d been piecing together this whole time without realizing. “eLiza came to you with the Dolly Girls code, but you wanted it for yourself,” said Marisa. “You told her how to use it, and let her and Nils and Lal field-test it for you—see what it could do, and what it couldn’t. Where the gaps were. Then you tipped off the Foundation, and I could never figure out why, but it was because you needed someone to take the heat. You knew they’d want to make an example of it—to expose the evils of human augmentation—so you tipped them off and they hired you to clean up your own loose ends. You got to kill the field-testers, keep the tech for yourself, and pin the whole disaster on someone so willing to be your decoy that they think it’s their own idea.” It all seemed so clear now. “You wrote the attack virus.”

  “And then I told you what was going on,” said Grendel, “and you obliged by cleaning up all the evidence the army of puppets couldn’t.”

  “So why are you telling me this?” asked Marisa.

  “Because I owed you,” said Grendel. He paused, watching her. “And because it’s more fun when you’re trying to stop me.”

  Marisa fixed Franca’s eyes with a cold, steely glare. “If you think you want me as an enemy, you don’t know me very well.”

  “Of course I know you, Mari,” said Grendel. “I’ve known you since you were two years old.”

  Marisa’s eyes went wide. Two years old. The car accident. The mystery that had changed her life forever—the focal point of every feud, every fight, every great, unanswered question of her life. “What do you know about—” she started, but Franca’s eyes closed, and her head slumped over. A moment later she looked up again, and her eyes narrowed spitefully.

  “I thought I told you to leave.” La Princesa was back. Grendel had disappeared.

  Marisa turned, shaken, and walked away. Was Grendel an enemy, or an ally? she wondered as she walked down the brightly lit hospital corridor.

  “Maybe he’s both,” she whispered, “or at least maybe he thinks he is.”

  “Who you talking to?” asked Bao.

  Marisa looked up, startled to see Bao leaning casually against the wall, but smiled when she recognized him. “I thought you went home.”

  Bao shrugged. “Figured I’d wait. You live closer to me than Sahara anyway.”

  They fell in step beside each other and walked out of the hospital into the warm Los Angeles night. Nulis flew overhead, as busy at midnight as they were at noon. The streetlights shone like stars.

  “The world’s a lot more dangerous than I thought it was,” said Marisa.

  “No me digas,” said Bao, and laughed at Marisa’s surprised look. “What? I live in Mirador, you don’t think I’ve picked up any Spanish?”

  “Not bad,” said Marisa. “Now say ‘Trienta y tres tramos de troncos trozaron tres tristes trozadores de troncos.’”

  “Whoa,” said Bao. “That’s hard-core Spanish. I’m still playing on beginner.”

  They fell into a comfortable silence, and Marisa thought again about Grendel, and about the Foundation, and about Ti Xú Dāo and Don Francisco and the whole gigantic world full of people she couldn’t trust. People she was afraid of. Even Anja’s father, and the vast collection of corporate interests he represented, slowly and cheerfully bleeding the rest of the population dry. That was the world she lived in, but it wasn’t the world she wanted.

  Maybe it was time somebody changed it.

  “You know what else?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “I think we’re a lot more dangerous than the world thought we were.”

  Bao smiled. “What are you planning?”

  Marisa smiled back.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We live in a world where cars can talk to refrigerators, and a robot on Mars sends messages to a supercomputer I keep in my pocket, and yet despite all of this I never fully realized how much technology had changed the world until I read a story about a professional video-game player getting an athletic visa to travel to a tournament. Video games are sports now. I don’t know why, but that’s what finally did it for me. The online world has subsumed the physical one. We live in the future.

  This book is the first of what I hope will be a very long series, combining three of my favorite things in life: reading, games, and Mexican food. Even more than that, though, this series is about disruption: technologies and ideas that change the way we live our lives, sometimes for the better and sometimes much, much worse, but always looking forward and striving for something new. Disruption asks us hard but necessary questions: Why is my society/government/world/life the way it is? Do I like it that way?
What would be a better way, and how do I make that happen? Or maybe we simply ask: What happens if I do this? And then live with the consequences. Writing a book about the future forced me to look at every different branch of science I could think of—programming and engineering and biology and fuel and robotics and genetics and so many more, but the most important one is the social science: How do we react when things change? And the corollary to that, if we’re smart enough to think about it: How can we change things so that we get the reaction we want?

  In the process of asking those questions I had some really amazing conversations with people much smarter than I am; some of them, though I’m certain I’m leaving some out, are Steve Diamond, Claudia Gray, Josiah Happel, Michael Happel, Mary Robinette Kowal, Gama Martinez, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, Rebecca McKinney, Patrick Miller, Ben Olsen, Maija-Liisa Phipps, Alexander Robinson, Brandon Sanderson, Eric Sumner, Howard Tayler, Natalie Whipple, and Stacy Whitman. Some of them I approached with specific questions, and others might be wondering why they’re included here, but their ideas and friendship were invaluable, and I couldn’t have written this book without them. Further thanks must be given to my agent, Sara Crowe; my editor, Jordan Brown; and of course my wife and children. They’re the best.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DAN WELLS is the author of the bestselling Partials Sequence as well as the John Cleaver series. He has been nominated for the Campbell Award and has won a Hugo Award and three Parsec Awards for his podcast Writing Excuses. He plays a lot of games, reads a lot of books, and eats a lot of food, which is pretty much the ideal life he imagined for himself as a child. You can find out more online at www.thedanwells.com.