“My father’s been looking for my mother for fifteen years,” he said, and then grinned. “When we finally find her, I want it to be a fat little bastard with a nickname he hates.”
“I love it,” said Anja, but then immediately scowled. “Still hate you, though. Don’t get any ideas.”
Marisa blinked, powering up Pancho’s wings, and then heaved it up into the air. It was small, about the size of a toaster; it hovered over them for a minute, calibrating its DNA sensor, and then approached Omar for a few seconds before apparently deciding that, while similar, his DNA wasn’t Zenaida’s. He circled around them slowly, then flew up higher and zoomed off into La Huerta.
“Do we hang out?” asked Marisa. “Or . . . follow it?”
“Let’s at least move in toward the market,” said Bao. “If you’re carrying a wallet, throw it away now and save yourself the trouble of being pickpocketed.”
He walked toward the wide gate in the dockyard’s chain-link fence, and the rest of the group followed him warily.
The entrance to La Huerta was thronged with kiosks and food carts, just like any high-traffic border point, though these merchants weren’t selling kitschy souvenirs. A man shouted at them in a thick Pakistani accent, hawking his street-rip IDs; beside him, a white man with long, shaggy hair called out a repeating, almost singsong ad for his premium stock of aftermarket memory chips: “Everything they never thought you’d find! Two chips for a dollar! Everything they never thought you’d find! Two chips for a dollar!” Marisa saw a little boy selling Yerba Buena, a marijuana hybrid laced with mint; on the other side of the road an old woman sat curled up in the imperfect corner of two shipping containers, a few dozen cybernetics spread out before her on a multicolored shawl. Her spread had eyes, ears, drug ports, djinnis, and even a foot. Anything an illicit shopper might want—all the overpriced, questionably legal, don’t-ask-where-it-comes-from merchandise that an otherwise upstanding citizen might try to buy—were laid out on tables or hanging from wires or lining the jackets of shady vendors in darkened alleys.
“Anyone want some black-market goods?” asked Sahara. “I think we found the mother lode.”
Bao shook his head. “These are all black-market bads, trust me.”
“How long have you been saving that one?” asked Omar.
“We don’t really have the kind of relationship where you get to mock me,” said Bao. “That said: most of the ride over here. And totally worth it.”
“Don’t buy anything in the entrance,” said Renata. “I’ve seen this kind of place before, in Mexico City—all the good deals are inside.”
“Don’t buy anything at all,” said Marisa. “Half of these places probably have undercover runners to follow you home: they sell you a tablet, they mug you and steal it back, and then sell it to the next sucker.”
“Probably,” said Anja, “but that really just makes me want to buy something and see what happens.”
“Don’t,” said Omar.
“Okay, now I’m definitely buying something,” said Anja. “That place sells Huckleberries, hang on—”
“No,” said Sahara, grabbing Anja’s arm as she started to move out of the group. “We stick together.”
Marisa got an alert from Pancho: he’d found a concentration of people, probably a marketplace or an apartment, and checked it out before moving on. “Nothing to report,” she said out loud.
“Ten o’clock,” said Bao. “Ferrat. Ooh, two of them.”
Marisa looked to her left and saw them—two black rats, each about the size of a small house cat, gnawing hungrily on the corner of a shipping container. A group of small children shouted at them, waving sticks, and the Ferrats scurried away with the children in hot pursuit.
“They eat metal?” asked Omar.
“Courtesy of ZooMorrow,” said Sahara. “We looked them up a few days ago: gengineered chimeras designed to eat scrap metal and break it down. People harvest their excrement for manufacturing.”
“Most of them are controlled,” said Bao, “but it’s hard to keep something that eats metal locked up. A lot of these places have wild ones running around.”
“What happens when they start running through the city?” asked Marisa. “That’s a doomsday scenario if I’ve ever heard one.”
“They’ll probably all die trying to chew on power cables,” said Renata.
“Or a railroad track,” said Marisa. “And take a whole commuter train with them.”
“If they’re dangerous, someone will pay to have them killed,” said Renata, and made an imaginary check mark in the air with her finger. “Note to self.”
Pancho sent another alert: population concentration number two scanned and cleared. She blinked into its app, where Sandro had prepared a map to track its movements. It was going quickly, but La Huerta was almost impossibly large. How long did they have?
They walked deeper into the village, passing out of the initial tourist zone and into a more residential-looking area: here the shipping containers had been emptied and inhabited, and the enterprising squatters who lived in them had added little touches to make them more livable: windows cut into the sides, or ladders and stairs welded onto the outer walls. The shipping containers were stacked neatly, like blocks, in an almost artful arrangement of different colors and corporate logos.
“Oye!” yelled a man, and Marisa ignored him like all the other eager vendors, but the next word took her by surprise: “Bao-chan!”
“Friend of yours?” asked Sahara.
“I skim credit cards for a living,” said Bao. “Gotta fence those IDs somewhere.” He walked to the side of the road, where an old Japanese man with a long, curved mustache leaned against the corrugated wall of a container. “Salaam, Mugen.”
“Salaam, Bao-chan,” said the man. “Here with friends today?”
“Just visiting,” said Bao. “Nothing to sell you right now, I’m afraid.”
“Just visiting,” said Mugen slowly, giving a long, meaningful look to Renata’s rifle. “Buying or selling?”
“Just keeping ourselves safe,” said Sahara.
“That’s a sniper rifle,” said Mugen. “Most visitors to La Huerta are more concerned with close-quarters threats.”
“While we’re here,” said Bao, pulling out his phone, “have you seen this woman anywhere?” He called up a picture of Zenaida, which Marisa had screenshotted from the video and passed around to everyone.
“I don’t think so,” said Mugen, “but I’ll be sure to tell you if I do.”
“Thanks,” said Bao, and tapped the screen a few times. “How about this one?” He showed another picture, and Mugen whistled.
“Suteki!” he said. “I wish I’d seen that one.”
Marisa leaned over to see the screen and saw a picture of Bennett. “You have a picture of Bennett?”
“I snapped it in the high-rise the other night,” he said, “right before I distracted her for you.” The photo was taken with a night-vision filter, but showed Ramira Bennett in profile and captured her unearthly beauty almost perfectly.
“What’s wrong with her eye?” asked Mugen.
“You’ll know it when you see it,” said Bao.
“Instantly,” said Anja. “She’s bright green.”
“We’re going to head in to Incheon, okay?” said Bao. “Let me know if either of those women show up.”
“Of course, Bao-chan,” said Mugen, and proffered the tiniest hint of a bow. Bao returned a much deeper bow of his own, and they continued down the road.
“Incheon is another marketplace,” said Bao. “The one locals actually shop in. I’ve got a contact there who might know something.”
Pancho searched and cleared another area while they walked, and three more while Bao asked around with his local contacts. The rest of them sat under a plastic awning, eating cold congee and avocado ice cream. The afternoon heat was oppressive everywhere, but here in the labyrinth of hard metal shipping containers it was focused and reflected and magnified.
Every now and then a breeze blew by, bringing a salty, welcome chill from the ocean, but these were few and far between, and gone too quickly.
Hard-eyed locals watched them from every side, each sporting a veritable catalog of weapons and physical upgrades—rail gun pistols, cybernetic attachments, and even some bizarre genhancements that Marisa knew couldn’t possibly be legal. One woman walked by, grizzled and dangerous, with a circular saw in the place of a hand and a rusting respirator replacing her mouth and nose. Her skin puckered at the edges, where some back-alley surgeon had bolted the bionic to her face. Marisa wondered what injury or illness had necessitated the change, and then, the more she thought about it, wondered how the woman managed to eat. The woman’s strangeness was almost immediately superseded by a tall, lanky man in a loose-fitting shirt, whose eyes were mounted on the ends of gently waving stalks, extending four or five inches out of their sockets. Whether the eyestalks were cybernetic or gengineered, she couldn’t say.
Another alert came in from Pancho, and Marisa blinked on it idly, wondering which jury-rigged apartment building had been searched and cleared this time, but what she saw made her stand up in shock.
“Pancho’s dead,” she said.
“That might be nuli hunters,” said Anja.
“I lost four nulis thinking it was hunters,” said Renata, and checked the magazine in her rifle. She slapped it back into place. “It’s Zenaida.”
“Good news,” said Bao, returning from one of the vendors. “The mushroom guy thinks he knows Zenaida—says she buys from him sometimes. If he’s right, she lives over in—”
“A container tower two streets that way,” said Marisa, pointing in the direction of the nearest canal.
“Yeah,” said Bao. “How did you know?”
“We just lost Pancho.”
“That’s definitely Zenaida,” said Sahara. “Let’s go.”
Anja dropped her congee cup in a recycling basket and stood up. “Did the merchant recognize Bennett?”
“No,” said Bao, “but unless she’s a local mushroom customer, that’s not saying much.”
“I’m starting to think that she might blend in a little too well around here,” said Marisa. “We’ll be lucky if anyone remembers her at all.”
“Mugen noticed her face before her eyes,” said Omar. He stood up to follow them to the container tower. “Abnormalities become pretty normal after a while, but a beautiful woman will always stand out.”
“I know,” said Renata. “It’s my curse.”
“Let’s go,” said Sahara again, and they followed her through the marketplace, weaving between tables and stalls and standing vendors wearing high racks of trinkets on their shoulders. At the edge of the Incheon, Marisa took over, leading them along the path Pancho had taken through the streets—narrow, junk-filled canyons between tall blocks of shipping containers. They reached one of the tallest stacks, where an old white man in cargo shorts and a white mesh T-shirt sat in a weathered folding chair under a fraying beach umbrella.
“Excuse me,” said Bao. “Can I ask you a question?”
“You mean not counting that one?” asked the man.
“Oh wow,” said Bao, “that’s even better than my ‘black-market bads’ joke. How about you just tell me how many questions I can ask, and we’ll skip all this negotiating?”
“Just ask your damn question,” said the man.
Bao produced his phone and showed him the picture of Bennett. “Have you seen this woman?”
He studied it for a moment before shaking his head. “No. Should I have?”
Bao swiped the screen, and showed him Zenaida. “How about this one?”
“What do I look like, a dating service? Get out of here.”
“Can you tell me where I can find the landlord?” asked Bao.
“He’s not a dating service either,” said the man.
“Listen,” said Omar, stepping forward and taking Bao’s phone. “You see this second photo? That’s my mother. She’s in trouble, and First Photo is trying to kill her. Now, if you’re done making stupid jokes, tell us where she is.”
The man stared at them a moment longer, examining Omar’s features and the photo. “Yeah, I suppose you could be Zenaida’s kid. What’s your story, then? She’s lived here long enough, and you’ve never bothered with her before.”
“We thought she was dead,” said Omar. “How long has she been around?”
“Four years, maybe?” The man leaned to the side and spat something dark and juicy on the ground. “I’ve only been landlord for three, so I don’t know for sure.”
Omar looked shocked.
“Which room does she live in?” asked Sahara. “Or . . . how does it work here?”
“She has a room,” said the man, nodding, “but I don’t know which.” He leaned forward, and grunted with the effort of standing up. “We’ll have to check the files.” He didn’t blink, and Marisa raised her eyebrow.
“Physical files?” she asked.
“They’re a lot harder to hack,” he said, turning toward a door cut into the side of a container. He walked with a painful waddle, as if his legs or his back didn’t work right. “Nobody who lives in La Huerta is eager to be found.”
“Are you sure you haven’t seen the other woman anywhere?” asked Anja.
The landlord pushed open the metal door and led them into the shipping container; it was practically an oven in the heat. “Don’t touch that outer wall,” he said, pointing to the one they’d just come through. “This isn’t one of those fancy insulated cans.” The inside of the container was filled with furniture, not in a livable arrangement but as some kind of storage room—chairs and tables and beds and hammocks, carefully stacked from floor to ceiling. Marisa figured he probably sold them to tenants. Another hole was cut into each one of the narrow walls of the room, connecting it to the neighboring containers, and the landlord pointed toward the left one dismissively. “That’s my private room, so stay out. The files are over here.” He sidled between the stacks of furniture, working his way to the back corner. He reached something, crouched down to fiddle with it, and suddenly stopped short. “What the . . . ?”
“What is it?” Sahara followed him through the narrow pathway and looked over his shoulder. “Hot damn,” she muttered, and then turned to shout to the rest of them. “His file cabinet is padlocked shut, but the padlock’s been eaten through by some kind of acid. It’s gotta be Ramira’s biotoxin.”
“She’s here,” said Anja, looking at the doors. “Or she was.”
“Hang on,” said the landlord, his earlier lazy attitude completely gone. “Let me see what they took.” He pulled open the drawers, one by one, running his fingers over the files. “I have these listed in numerical order, one for each can in the building. If I can find which can whoever broke in here was looking for . . .”
He trailed off, muttering to himself as he searched. Marisa looked at Omar, who was standing by the wall with wide eyes, staring at nothing.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Huh? Yeah, I’m fine.” He looked at her a moment, then spoke again, almost to himself. “Four years, he said. This place is barely an hour from my house, and she lived here for four years, and she never tried to see me, contact me, nothing. . . .” He shook his head. “Maybe we shouldn’t be here at all. We haven’t known anything about her for fifteen years, but she’s known everything about us, and never once visited us or tried to tell us she was okay or even just check in and see how we were doing. Not once.”
“She might have tried,” said Marisa. “We don’t know.”
“As capable as she’s proven herself to be?” said Omar. “If she’d wanted to contact me, she could’ve done it anytime.”
“Here it is,” said the landlord. “Or isn’t: the files for can 47 are missing.”
“That’s got to be Zenaida,” said Sahara. “Where’s 47?”
The landlord handed her a piece of orange paper, a crude copy of a copy. “Here’s a map
. Just don’t go anywhere you’re not supposed to—like I said before, people who live here don’t want to be found.”
“Let’s do this,” said Sahara.
“Yes!” Renata slung the sniper rifle over her shoulder and pulled out a pistol, racking the action to chamber a round. “Let’s earn some money.”
Sahara looked at the map and blinked, taking a photo and forwarding the image to each of them. Omar pulled out his pistol as well, and Sahara’s camera nulis swirled overhead, taser prongs extended and ready. Anja and Marisa were armed with the same one-shot tasers they’d had the other night, and Bao produced a similar weapon from under his shirt.
“Renata, take the lead,” said Sahara, “followed by Marisa, me, and Omar in the back. Bao and Anja, stay in the street and watch for anyone trying to slip out behind us.”
Marisa locked the image of the map in the corner of her vision and followed Renata through the door on the right of the storage room. Sahara and Omar came close behind. The door led to another container, where a sheet of scrap metal had been welded to the walls, cutting the narrow can in half; one side was a tiny room, where two small children peeked out of the crack in the door and watched them go by. The other side was a steep staircase—a rusted ladder bolted to the walls and floor at a forty-five-degree angle, forming a dangerous walkway through a hole in the ceiling. They climbed the rungs, finding themselves in another half can, and went through a ragged, doorless hole that turned into a narrow hallway. They followed this trail deeper into the stack of containers, twisting through a maze of breaks and cuts and modifications, pausing at each crossroads to try to figure out which branch the map wanted them to take. The entire system was a warren: sometimes it led them down, other times up, other times even outside, where the trail continued on a series of catwalks high above the ground.
“This can’t be the most direct route,” said Sahara. “He’s trying to waste our time so she can escape.”
“He didn’t create this map just to mess with us,” said Renata.
Marisa sent a message to Anja: Anything out there?
Plenty, sent Anja, but no Zenaida.