Hearing this, the girl laughed — a bitter and cynical cackle, at odds with her pale little face — and Bill Peek made the mistake of being, for a moment, rather impressed. But she was only imitating her elders, as he was imitating his.
“Go home,” he said.
Instead she set about burrowing her feet into the wet sand. “Everyone’s got a good angel and a bad angel,” she explained. “And if it’s a bad angel that picks you out”—she pointed to a craft swooping low—“there’s no escaping it. You’re done for.”
He listened in wonderment. Of course he’d always known there were people who thought in this way — there was a module you did on them in sixth grade — but he had never met anyone who really harbored what his anthro-soc teacher, Mr. Lin, called “animist beliefs.”
The girl sighed, scooped up more handfuls of sand, and added them to the two mounds she had made on top of her feet, patting them down, encasing herself up to the ankles. Meanwhile all around her Bill Peek’s scene of fabulous chaos was frozen — a Minotaur sat in the lap of stony Abe Lincoln and a dozen carefully planted IEDs awaited detonation. He was impatient to return.
“Must advance,” he said, pointing down the long stretch of beach, but she held up her hands, she wanted pulling up. He pulled. Standing, she clung to him, hugging his knees. He felt her face damp against his leg.
“Oh, it’s awful bad luck to miss a laying out! Melly’s the one knew where to go. She’s got the whole town up here,” she said, tapping her temple, making the boy smile. “Memoried. No one knows town like Melly. She’ll say, ‘This used to be here, but they knocked it down,’ or, ‘There was a pub here with a mark on the wall where the water rose.’ She’s memoried every corner. She’s my friend.”
“Some friend!” the boy remarked. He succeeded in unpeeling the girl from his body, and strode on down the beach, firefighting a gang of Russian commandoes as they parachuted into view. Alongside him a scurrying shape ran; sometimes a dog, sometimes a droid, sometimes a huddle of rats. Her voice rose out of it.
“Can I see?”
Bill Peek disemboweled a fawn to his left. “Do you have an Augmentor?”
“No.”
“Do you have a complementary system?”
“No.”
He knew he was being cruel — but she was ruining his concentration. He stopped running and split the visuals, the better to stare her down. “Any system?”
“No.”
“Therefore no. No, you can’t.”
Her nose was pink, a drop of moisture hung from it. She had an innocence that practically begged to be corrupted. Bill Peek could think of more than a few Pathways boys of his acquaintance who wouldn’t hesitate to take her under the next boardwalk and put a finger inside her. And the rest. As the son of personnel, however, Bill Peek was held to a different standard.
“Jimmy Kane had one — he was a fella of Maud’s, her main fella. He flew in and then he flew out — you never knew when he’d be flying in again. He was a captain in the Army. He had an old one of them…but said it still worked. He said it made her nicer to look at when they were doing it. He was from nowhere, too.”
“Nowhere?”
“Like you.”
Not for the first time the boy was struck by the great human mysteries of this world. He was almost fifteen, almost a man, and the great human mysteries of this world were striking him with satisfying regularity, as was correct for his stage of development. (From the Pathways Global Institute prospectus: “As our students reach tenth grade they begin to gain insight into the great human mysteries of this world, and a special sympathy for locals, the poor, ideologues, and all those who have chosen to limit their own human capital in ways that it can be difficult at times for us to comprehend.”) From the age of six months, when he was first enrolled in the school, he had hit every mark that Pathways expected of its pupils — walking, talking, divesting, monetizing, programming, augmenting — and so it was all the more shocking to find himself face-to-face with an almost nine-year-old so absolutely blind, so lost, so developmentally debased.
“This”—he indicated Felixstowe, from the beach with its turd castings and broken piers, to the empty-shell buildings and useless flood walls, up to the hill where his father hoped to expect him—“is nowhere. If you can’t move, you’re no one from nowhere. ‘Capital must flow.’ ” (This last was the motto of his school, though she needn’t know that.) “Now, if you’re asking me where I was born, the event of my birth occurred in Bangkok, but wherever I was born I would remain a member of the Incipio Security Group, which employs my father — and within which I have the highest clearance.” He was surprised by the extent of the pleasure this final, outright lie gave him. It was like telling a story, but in a completely new way — a story that could not be verified or checked, and which only total innocence would accept. Only someone with no access of any kind. Never before had he met someone like this, who could move only in tiny local spirals, a turd on a beach.
Moved, the boy bent down suddenly and touched the girl gently on her face. As he did so he had a hunch that he probably looked like the first prophet of some monotheistic religion, bestowing his blessing on a recent convert, and, upon re-watching the moment and finding this was so, he sent it out, both to Mr. Lin and to his fellow Pathways boys, for peer review. It would surely count toward completion of Module 19, which emphasized empathy for the dispossessed.
“Where is it you want to go, my child?”
She lit up with gratitude, her little hand gripped his, the last of her tears rolling into her mouth and down her neck. “St. Jude’s!” she cried. She kept talking as he replayed the moment to himself and added a small note of explanatory context for Mr. Lin, before he refocused on her stream of prattle: “And I’ll say goodbye to her. And I’ll kiss her on her face and nose. Whatever they said about her she was my own sister and I loved her and she’s going to a better place — I don’t care if she’s stone cold in that church, I’ll hold her!” “Not a church,” the boy corrected. “Fourteen Ware Street, built 1950, originally domestic property, situated on a floodplain, condemned for safety. Site of ‘St. Jude’s’—local, outlier congregation. Has no official status.”
“St. Jude’s is where she’ll be laid out,” she said, and squeezed his hand. “And I’ll kiss her no matter how cold she is.”
The boy shook his head and sighed.
“We’re going in the same direction. Just follow me. No speaking.” He put his finger to his lips, and she tucked her chin into her neck meekly, seeming to understand. Restarting, he flagged her effectively, transforming little Aggie Hanwell into his sidekick, his familiar, a sleek reddish fox. He was impressed by the perfect visual reconstruction of the original animal, apparently once common in this part of the world. Renamed Mystus, she provided cover for his left flank and mutely admired Bill Peek as he took the traitor vice president hostage and dragged him down the Mall with a knife to his neck.
—
After a spell they came to the end of the beach. Here the sand shaded into pebbles and then a rocky cove, and barnacles held on furiously where so much else had been washed away. Above their heads, the craft were finishing their sallies and had clustered like bees, moving as one back to the landing bay at the encampment. Bill Peek and his familiar were also nearing the end of their journey, moments away from kicking in the door to the Oval Office, where — if all went well — they would meet the president and be thanked for their efforts. But at the threshold, unaccountably, Bill Peek’s mind began to wander. Despite the many friends around the world watching (there was a certain amount of kudos granted to any boy who successfully met the president in good, if not record, time, on his first run-through), he found himself pausing to stroke Mystus and worry about whether his father would revoke his AG after this trip. It had been a bribe and a sop in the first place — it was unregistered. Bill had wanted to stay on at the Tokyo campus for the whole summer, and then move to Norway, before tsunami season, for a pleasant fall. His father had wanted him by his side, here, in the damp, unlit graylands. An AG 12 was the compromise. But these later models were security risks, easily hacked, and the children of personnel were not meant to carry hackable devices. That’s how much my father loves me, Bill Peek thought hopefully, that’s how much he wants me around.