Just saw them, Marisa sent back. And with a frakking MyDragon. Just to let us know how much richer they are than the rest of us.
I’m wearing a bouquet of flowers on my shoulder, sent Sahara. Franca’s wearing a gengineered custom pet.
I drove here in a taxi so old it still had a steering wheel, sent Marisa. They look like they were carried here on a palanquin while someone waved palm fronds over their heads.
“Earth to Marisa,” said Bao. “Are you volleying insults with Sahara again?”
“I applied my own makeup in under five minutes,” said Marisa out loud. “She looks like she has a closet full of 3D-printed faces, and just swaps them out whenever she goes somewhere.”
“Don’t compare yourself to them,” said Sandro. “You’ll just make yourself feel bad.”
Why are they even here? sent Sahara.
Pati and Carlo Magno walked toward them through the crowd, with Triste Chango following behind like a box-shaped puppy.
“I couldn’t find Bao but I found Papi—” yelled Pati, and then stopped instantly when she saw that Bao was already there. “Hi, Bao! Good to see you! Did you see Sandro’s nuli? Isn’t it awesome?”
Marisa smiled. At least Pati wasn’t shy.
“I saw it,” said Bao. “It’s the best one here by a mile and a half.”
“For all the good it’s going to do him,” said Carlo Magno, angrily shaking his cane toward the knot of people that had formed around the Maldonados. “Do you know why that chundo’s here?”
“I was just wondering that,” said Marisa, but she felt her stomach sink as she realized there was only one possible answer.
“He’s the judge,” said Carlo Magno, confirming her fears. “Don Francisco Maldonado is picking the winner of the science fair, and handing out the check with his own filthy hands, and do you think he’s ever going to pick a Carneseca?”
“I think he’ll let the work decide,” said Sandro, but their father cut him off with a loud bah.
“You’re a fool,” said Carlo Magno. “A genius, but a fool as well. He hates us, and he always has, and no science project is ever going to change that. No matter how brilliant.”
Marisa realized that she was clutching her metal arm with her human one. She’d lost the arm in a car accident when she was two years old, and the mysteries that surrounded that one event seemed to permeate every aspect of her life. The basic details were well known to everybody in Mirador: Don Francisco’s wife, Zenaida, went for a drive—actually driving herself, like people used to do before self-driving cars were the norm—and got into an accident. Nobody knew where she’d been going, or why, and since she’d been thrown from the car and died on impact, no one had ever been able to ask her.
But that’s where things got weird. The first people to arrive on the scene had found three children in the car with her: Jacinto Maldonado, their second child, very nearly dead as well; Omar Maldonado, their fourth and youngest child, completely unharmed—and Marisa Carneseca, who had absolutely no reason to be there whatsoever. Her arm had been severed just below the shoulder.
Why had Marisa been in that car? Why had Zenaida been driving it manually? And why did any of that cause Don Maldonado and Marisa’s father to hate each other so intensely?
Great. Holy. Handgrenades, sent Sahara. That’s not just the purple MyDragon, it’s the iridescent purple MyDragon. They only made three of them!
Yeah, sent Marisa, and closed the chat window. She didn’t feel like gossiping anymore.
“Good evening, Mr. Carneseca,” said Bao, trying valiantly to cut the tension that had silenced the group. He reached out to shake his hand, and Carlo Magno absentmindedly shook back. “It’s good to see you up and moving around.”
“I’m doing my best,” said Carlo Magno. “Well enough I don’t need this stupid thing.” He kicked feebly at Triste Chango, and it beeped cheerfully in response.
“We couldn’t afford one of the really good livers,” Marisa explained, “or even a midrange one. The cheapest ones come with a ten-week nuli rental to make sure nothing goes wrong. Hospital subsidy to help prevent lawsuits.”
“Way to clip the coupons,” said Bao.
Carlo Magno sneered at the Maldonados. “My wife couldn’t even be here tonight because we can’t afford to close the restaurant, and he brings his entire family.”
Bao smiled. “I always forget how much like Marisa you are.”
Carlo Magno and Marisa looked at each other, neither one certain if they liked that comparison.
“Not the whole family,” said Pati. “Not Jacinto.”
“Jacinto hasn’t left home since the . . .” Carlo Magno looked at Marisa again, then gave another loud bah.
“Here comes another group,” said Sandro. “Give me some room, I’m going to do my presentation again.”
They moved to the side, away from the Maldonados, and Marisa found her father a bench to sit down on. Triste Chango scooted in close. “Your heart rate is approaching the upper limits specified by your doctor. Please take deep breaths as follows: in, out. In, out.”
Carlo Magno hit it with his cane.
Another message popped up from Sahara, and Marisa leaned her forehead against the wall. Why wasn’t anything ever easy? Sahara sent a second message, and then a third, and the icon started glowing faintly red. Marisa blinked on it, and the messages exploded across her vision.
Omigosh.
Are you seeing this?
MARI, ARE YOU SEEING THIS?
Marisa frowned, confused, and sent a response. Seeing what?
Look at Don Francisco!
Marisa snapped her head around, searching through the crowd, but there were too many people. She craned her neck in various directions, trying to get a look at whatever Sahara was freaking out about, and finally just stood on the bench next to her father. A space had cleared around the Maldonados, and a woman was talking to Francisco.
A woman holding a badge.
“What’s wrong with you?” asked Carlo Magno. “Get down from there before a teacher sees you.”
“It’s a cop,” said Marisa, still wondering what exactly was going on. “Don Francisco’s talking to a cop.”
“He talks to cops all the time,” said Carlo Magno. “They’re practically his own private army. His son’s the captain of the local precinct!”
“But that’s not a Mirador cop,” said Marisa. “I know all the locals. She’s not in uniform, either. And she’s not happy.”
“Off duty?” asked Bao.
“She’s showing him her badge,” said Marisa.
Found her, sent Sahara. I ran an image search through the LAPD database—her name’s Kiki Hendel, and she’s a homicide detective from downtown.
Why is she here? sent Marisa.
How am I supposed to know?
“Maybe they finally got him,” said Carlo Magno. “Maybe they finally caught him on some charge, and he’s going to prison—taxes, maybe. That’s how they got Al Capone.”
“Who?” asked Pati.
“Tā mā de,” whispered Bao, standing on the other side of the bench. “She’s taking him away.”
“What?” asked Carlo Magno. He stood up so fast that the bench unbalanced, and Bao and Marisa had to jump clear to keep from falling. The bench clattered to the ground, and Carlo Magno raised himself to his full height. “Are they arresting him?”
“It didn’t look like it,” said Bao, trying to stand the bench back up again. “Just . . . leading him outside.”
What the what? sent Sahara.
I know! sent Marisa.
I’ll see if I can get Cameron outside after him, sent Sahara, and across the room Marisa saw one of Sahara’s small camera nulis rise up above the crowd and race toward the door.
“Look online,” said Marisa, blinking on her djinni. “All of you—look for everything you can. What’s in the news, what’s going on here or downtown or at their estate in Mirador, what’s going on with any of their investments or their enforcers o
r anything at all.” She started running searches on the internet, going through all the local news blogs.
Hold up, sent Sahara. What was his wife’s name again?
Zenaida, said Marisa, but you’re not going to turn up anything on her, she’s been dead for fifteen years—
Are you sure about that?
Marisa froze.
The LAPD found her . . . hand, sent Sahara. At a crime scene in South Central. Her left hand, severed at the wrist, lying on the ground.
Marisa couldn’t move. She could barely comprehend the words in Sahara’s next message:
I don’t know what happened fifteen years ago, said Sahara, but Zenaida was alive last night.
TWO
“This changes everything,” said Sahara. She’d left her own coding project—a social app for tracking fashion memes in real time—and found Marisa by the back wall. Sandro had righted the bench, and Marisa was sitting on it, still in shock, while Sahara tried to keep her calm. “This changes everything.”
“You’re not really keeping me calm,” said Marisa.
“Sorry, sorry,” said Sahara. She was wearing a bright yellow dress with a high neck and long sleeves but no shoulders, the fabric replaced with sprays of deep red flowers. She had both red and yellow flowers in her hair. The warm colors contrasted flawlessly against Sahara’s dark brown skin, and the whole effect was perfectly designed to help sell the value of her fashion app. “What should we talk about instead? Alain? Have you heard from him?”
“We need to talk about Don Francisco,” said Marisa. “Wait—where’s Pati?”
“With Bao,” said Sahara, “and she’s practically floating with joy, so chill.”
“And my dad?”
“Ten feet away from you, calling your mom and abusing a nuli.”
Marisa turned and saw Carlo Magno on a nearby bench, arguing in Spanish while fending off the medical nuli with his cane. His heart rate was probably through the roof. He was talking to Guadalupe, Marisa’s mother, but it was a djinni call, so it looked like he was a crazy person howling at his robot wife. Marisa laughed at the image, and the laugh broke down her emotional barriers, and seconds later she was bawling into the flowers on Sahara’s shoulder.
“Shhh,” said Sahara, rubbing her back. “It’s okay.”
“She was alive this whole time,” said Marisa. “I thought she was dead my whole life, but . . .”
“What does this mean?” asked Sahara.
“I . . . I don’t know,” said Marisa. “But I guess I don’t know anything anymore. That crash was my whole life: the feud between my parents and the Maldonados started that night. It’s everything. And it was a lie.”
“They took Don Francisco downtown,” said Sahara. “I saw it on Cameron’s video feed.”
“In handcuffs?”
Sahara shook her head. “She didn’t arrest him, just . . . took him. They’re probably questioning him.”
“Do they think he knows something?” asked Marisa. “Did he hide his wife for fifteen years and then . . . cut her hand off? Or did he even know she was alive?”
“We don’t know,” said Sahara. “And we won’t know until it breaks on the news, so calm down.”
Marisa sat up straight and wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand. “We could hack the police station’s security cameras.”
“In the next ten minutes?” asked Sahara. “You’re good, but you’re not that good.”
“Then we can . . . I don’t know,” said Marisa. “We can call Omar.”
“Are you serious?” asked Sahara. “I think Omar Maldonado’s got enough to worry about with his mom’s hand turning up out of nowhere. Besides, how many times has that bastard betrayed us?”
“We used to be friends. He might . . . understand.”
“You used to be little kids,” said Sahara. She rubbed Marisa’s back again. “Just be patient. We’ll know soon enough.”
“Soon enough for what?” Marisa rubbed her eyes again, and then looked at her hand in disgust. “Did I smear my mascara? I must look like a raccoon.”
“Sexiest raccoon I’ve ever seen,” said Sahara. She stood up, and dragged Marisa up with her.
“Why are we standing?”
“Because it’s time for the award ceremony,” said Sahara. “We’re going to watch me lose the coding category to Rosa Sanchez.” She pulled Marisa through the crowd, to where Principal Layton was standing awkwardly in front of a microphone nuli, the two assistant principals behind him. It looked like he was already done with the standard litany of thanking all the teachers and volunteers and school district bigwigs, and Marisa had just enough presence of mind to be ironically grateful that this world-changing news had distracted her from that. He started on the first category—chemistry—and Marisa tuned him out while she looked for more news about Zenaida. She found several news blogs talking about homicides—dead bodies were hardly a rare occurrence in LA. She skimmed through several stories before finding the one she wanted: a severed hand in South Central. Even finding the right story didn’t mean she’d found any useful information: blah blah shootout, blah blah dangerous part of the city, blah blah gang activity. She refined her search and found a POV video from a bystander’s djinni, but even that didn’t include a lot of useful information. At least four shooters that she could see, both male and female, but at such a distance that she couldn’t make out anyone’s features.
“Clap,” whispered Sahara.
Marisa started clapping immediately, and blinked on the video to pause it and refocus her eyes on the school cafeteria. Polite applause filled the room.
“What happened?” asked Marisa.
“Sandro won third in his category,” said Sahara.
“Whooooo!” shouted Marisa, much louder than before. “Ándale, moreno! Viva la lechuga!”
Sandro accepted a certificate from the principal, then turned and smiled at Marisa. She whooped again, and leaned toward Sahara.
“You win anything?”
“I promise you would know if I’d won something.”
“True,” said Marisa. “Have you lost anything?”
“You’d know that, too,” said Sahara. “My category’s next.”
“I’ll give them twenty seconds,” said Marisa, “and then I’m watching this video again.”
It ended up being forty seconds before they announced the winners of the coding category, and Sahara officially lost to Rosa Sanchez. Marisa gave her friend a squeeze, watched the shootout video again, and growled in frustration. It barely showed anything.
“Just calm down,” said Sahara, and took Marisa gently by the shoulders, planting herself firmly in her friend’s center of vision. Marisa focused on her, and Sahara spoke: “Take some deep breaths, okay? Feel better?”
“That depends. Better than what?”
Sahara squeezed her shoulders with a reassuring grip. “You’re going to find out, okay? Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week—sooner or later you’re going to learn everything. You’re going to know the whole story. You’ve been chasing that darknet hacker Grendel for months now just to get whatever scrap of information he has about the accident and your past. But now you don’t even need to. You don’t have to hunt, you don’t have to freak out, you just have to breathe and stay calm and wait.”
“Grendel’s not the only one who knows what happened that night,” said Marisa, and looked at her father, still ranting into his phone call. “My dad knows, too.” It bothered her, all over again, how angry it made her that he refused to tell her what he knew about the crash. Like the news had peeled a scab off her emotions, revealing a fresh red wound underneath.
“You’ll find out soon,” said Sahara. “Whether he wants you to or not.”
Marisa kept her eyes on her father. “How soon?”
And then her father froze.
“Disculpe, corazón,” he said softly. “I have another call.” He blinked, closing the call with Guadalupe, and shot a glance at Marisa before blinking again.
“Mándame,” he said firmly. “This is Carlo Magno Carneseca.”
Marisa took a step toward him, as if being closer could help her overhear a conversation being fed straight into his auditory nerves. He watched her for a moment, then turned away.
“Yes,” he said. He listened for a moment, then said yes again.
“Papi?” asked Marisa.
“Tonight?” asked Carlo Magno. “No—out of the question. I’m at my son’s science fair.” Another pause. “Yes, I saw that. No, I already told you, it’s completely—” Another pause. “Fine. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
He blinked one more time, and sighed.
“Papi?” asked Marisa. “Who was that?”
“You’re not coming with me,” said Carlo Magno.
Marisa stepped toward him, her suspicions confirmed. “Was that the police station? They want to interview you, too, don’t they? Because you know what happened.”
“You’re not coming with me,” he said firmly.
“You can’t go alone,” said Marisa. “The doctors said one of us has to accompany you at all times.”
“I need you to take the girls home.”
Marisa folded her arms and looked him straight in the eye. “Sahara, would you mind taking my sisters home?”
“On it,” said Sahara.
Carlo Magno shook his head. “Absolutely not. I’ve told you you’re not going, and you’re not going. My word is final.”
A police badge icon popped up in Marisa’s vision, and her heart skipped a beat at the shock of it. Why were they calling her? She recovered, stared at the icon, and then blinked on it, patching the audio into a small external speaker built into her metal arm. Her father would have no trouble overhearing the conversation.
“Hello?” she said.
“Marisa Carneseca?” said a voice on the other end. “My name’s Kiki Hendel; I’m a detective with the LAPD. Do you have a moment for a few questions?”
It was the same woman who’d come to fetch Don Francisco in person. “Sure,” Marisa said, “but I don’t know what you want with me. I was only two years old when she was killed . . . or disappeared, or . . .”