She looks up, tracing the cables across the sky again. “Right.”
“It’s carnival this weekend.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, no shit. We come down here and hook a massive system up to the battery. Put some decks up on the turret, turn it into a DJ booth. Everyone comes down and dances around the tank. Your tank.”
She smiles at the thought. “I like that.” She looks at him. “You know what—can I ask you a question?”
“Sure. What?”
“I never got around to asking you this before, it always bugged me. Why they call you College?”
“Because I went to college.”
“Everyone went to college, College.”
“Not where I’m from.”
“Sorry, of course.” She’s embarrassed. “You mean Barton Hill?”
“Yeah. Up in the towers. Up in the sky.” He sighs. Wistful, stoned. “When we was kids most of us up there dropped out of school at sixteen. Couldn’t afford to stay on. Not me. Instead I got myself involved in some shady shit just so I could pay my way. Loved my fucking video games too much, wanted to know all about them, make them. All my mates started calling me College.”
“That’s when you knew Grids, from before?”
“Yeah. We came up together. Were pretty tight. Got ourselves in enough trouble back then. But then I finished college here, down in St. Bart’s, and I went off to university. I’d actually made enough money running around with Grids to do that, which was crazy, thinking about it. So yeah, I went off to Manchester. Came back three years later and everything had changed. You know how it is. Friends drift apart, innit? Grids was dealing, Mel… Melody was off doing her music thing. I was twenty-one and all kinds of fucking fired up about saving the world. Barton wasn’t the place for that. Or me. So when I bumped into Rush and saw what he was doing I moved down here.”
“And now you and Grids are tight again.”
“I guess. It’s different. Everything’s different.”
“Yeah. It is.”
College takes another toke, then steps over rubble to pass her the joint. “So then, my turn.”
“Huh?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.” She takes a hit. It burns her throat.
“As much as I’d like to think it’s because you were missing me, why’d you really come back here? I mean, for someone that’s on the LA’s wanted list, it’s hardly the most sensible place to come. Whole city is crawling with ’em.”
“I dunno. I thought…” She’s suddenly stoned, space echoing around her head. From somewhere down the street she can hear the scattershot rolling drums of jungle, bass throbbing. An MC chatting. Pirate radio vibes. Bristol. She can’t help but smile.
“You thought what?”
“I thought maybe there’d be something that’d give us an advantage. In Wales, I mean. Against the LA.”
“The tank?”
“What? No.” She laughs, stoned. “No, not the fucking tank, College. It’s not that kind of war.”
“Then what?”
“I dunno.” She feels embarrassed, suddenly too self-aware. “Something that might help us be organized, keep us one step ahead.”
He doesn’t reply, an awkward pause. She climbs down from the tank, hands him back the joint.
“Y’know, something left over from before,” she continues. She looks at the tank, feels light-headed. Its collage of patterns seems to strobe, a faint stoned memory of ancient GIF art.
“Yeah, well, sorry to disappoint you, but this is it,” College eventually says, an edge of discomfort to his voice. “An old tank and some solar panels.”
She looks at him, knows he’s holding something back. “What about the network? You been trying to get it up and running again?”
College takes a hit, blows out purple-tinted ganja smoke. He shakes his head, scratches his beard. Sheepish. He looks at the ground.
“It’s gone, Anika. Went the same way as this tank.”
Anika holds his gaze, even as he tries to look away. “Really?”
“Yeah. Really.”
“You sure, College?”
“What you saying, Anika?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” She can’t decide whether he’s genuinely offended, angry, or covering for something. She can’t decide whether to push him further.
She lets it hang in the air for a minute, watching him smoke. Then she decides.
“It’s just… y’know. I was never an expert on how it all worked, that was your and Rush’s gig. But I thought it was meant to be self-repairing?”
“It is. I mean it was. But that was before we blew the jammers up. You remember us doing that, right? I mean, it was a busy day, but you remember that?”
She smiles at his trademark dark humor. She’s missed it. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Well, that was the end of the network. Turn off the jammers and you turn off the barrier to the outside world, to the Internet. With that gone we were just as susceptible to infection as the rest of the world.”
“Huh.” It’s not quite how she remembers it, not quite how she thought it worked, but okay. Time to try a slightly different angle. “So you never even tried to get it back up?”
College sighs, irritated. “For fuck’s sake, Anika. I’ve been busy. Look at all this shit, the power, the solar, I built all this. I’ve been fucking busy. I had to get this shit up and running, people’s lives depended on it.”
“Yeah, of course. I’m sorry.”
“It just wasn’t ever a priority. Especially not for Grids. And he calls all the shots around here. And he made it pretty clear I wasn’t to waste my time on that stuff.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. He fucking hates all that stuff. Always has. Social media, everything. Hated it when we were kids and hates it now. He made it pretty clear I wasn’t to touch any of it.”
“But you must have, y’know, experimented…”
He can’t meet her eyes now. “Anika, I told you. It doesn’t work. And Grids made it super fucking clear to me it was out of bounds. He hates it. Plus maybe—I dunno. Maybe he sees it as threatening his power, or maybe he’s got something he wants to hide, he doesn’t want being dragged up again.”
“Maybe.” Her head floods with images: firefights, street executions, bodies hanging from lampposts, the last few days of chaos. “Maybe he has.”
She stares up into the night sky, filled with more stars than she’s ever seen above Bristol. Dead cities bleed no light, she thinks. It reminds her of Wales. She can’t give up now.
“What about this girl, then?” she says.
“What girl?” She’d swear he blushes.
“This girl that everyone says can see ghosts on Stokes Croft?”
College’s face drops. “That’s nothing. Just some Traveler kid. Gypsy magic bullshit. Urban myth. Where’d you hear about that?”
“I dunno. Rumors. Stories.”
“Stories?”
She’s got him now, she can feel it. “Yeah. Stories. Stories about some girl that puts on her glasses and can see things that ain’t there.”
“Yeah, well, that’s all it is. Stories. Stories about some gypsy girl.”
“Ah, okay. Nothing more than that?”
“Nothing. People believe all sorts of bollocks these days.”
“Then you won’t mind me popping in and seeing her then? Getting her to read my tea leaves?”
College pauses, sighs. “Fuck you, Anika. Go fuck yourself. Really. Everything was just getting normal around here, and you have to come and stir shit up. As always. Fuck you.”
Anika smiles at him. “I missed you, too.”
“Fuck you.”
Anika looks at him for a second or two.
“What is it, man? What you holding out on me? What’s up with the girl?”