“Have you called the cops?” Masaki asked.
“Oh, come on, Masaki. You must know how useless that would be.”
“I guess so,” Masaki agreed. Then he shot her an accusing look. “I thought you said those goons wouldn’t come after us if we aired the piece.”
“It wasn’t them,” Carla said. “It was runners.”
“Who?”
“Shadowrunners,” Carla explained. They saw our story and came after the chip, hoping to steal it and sell the spell formula. They were originally hired to fake a kidnapping of Farazad. He told them he wanted a cover for an unauthorized leave of absence, but the extraction was probably designed to prevent Mitsuhama from taking revenge on him after he went public about their research project. Farazad had planned to disappear the morning after his interview with you. But it looks like the runners he hired got greedy and were planning to sell him to the highest bidder.”
Masaki gave Carla an incredulous look. “How do you know all this?”
Carla nearly told Masaki of the recording made by her hidden camera. But then she paused. Masaki liked to gossip; if Carla told him she had a camera in her bedroom, the story would be all over the newsroom before Carla had poured her morning soykaf. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to say, over an uncoded frequency, that she had good, clean images of two professional shadowrunners on file. Given the right scanners, anyone could listen in on a cel phone conversation.
“I have my sources,” Carla said, winking.
“You say they wanted to sell Farazad? Who to?”
Carla thought back over the conversation her camera had captured. What had the shadowrunner named Raven said? He’d started to say a name-something like “ren.” Carla had thought it to be a man’s name. Renny. Or Reynolds, perhaps. But now she realized what it had to be. “Ren” wasn’t a who, but a what. A corporation.
“Renraku,” she whispered.
Masaki caught the whisper. “Renraku Computer Systems? That fits. They’re Mitsuhama’s chief rival. They’d naturally want to know what the competition was up to.”
“And now they do,” Carla answered. “The runners got what they came here for.”
Masaki frowned, then realized what her comment meant. “You mean they got your copy of the spe-”
“Masaki!” Carla said abruptly. “I think we’d better save this chatter for tomorrow morning in the newsroom.”
Masaki’s eyes widened. “Oh. Right.” He tried to feign a casual air. “Well, good night, then. See you tomorrow.”
The screen of Carla’s cel phone went blank.
13
Pita sat in a corner of the main branch of the Seattle library, wedged into a space between two stacks of archaic twentieth-century books. She’d run here after escaping from the Yakuza at the hotel, and hadn’t set foot outside since. The library offered everything a street kid needed-warmth, shelter from the rain, washrooms to clean up in, free entertainment, and the cafeteria had plenty of vending machines that offered Growliebars, soykaf, and nutrisoy snacks. Best of all, the library was open twenty-four hours a day. The only trick was in avoiding the security guards. who would turf out anyone they caught sleeping.
The secret was to keep moving from one area of the building to the next. Pretend you were scanning a chip at one of the data displays in the reading room, and had fallen asleep because it was boring. Then catch a nap in one of the viewing booths on the second floor. Then off to the children’s department, where animated holos played continuously. The volume was a little intense, but the padded benches were soft. Then over to the reference department, where you could use an old piece of datacord to make it appear you were jacked into one of the municipal decks. If you could sleep sitting up, it was easy to look as if you had merely closed your eyes to eliminate noncybernetic input.
But the best place to crash was in the tiny, cramped section that contained old-fashioned hardcopy-books. The aisles were narrow and cluttered, and hardly anybody could be bothered with the cumbersome task of turning pages and manually scanning each one. The data display units, with their instantaneous keyword searches, animated holo graphics, and automated download systems were vastly more popular.
By moving from one area of the library to the next, Pita had been able to catch a few quick, brief naps. When morning broke and her stomach began to rumble, she jimmied one of the vending machines and grabbed a Growliebar and a kaf, then returned to the hardcopy section. She pulled the paperback she’d stolen from Aziz’s shop out of her pocket and began to look through it. The colorful illustrations called to her somehow, and she couldn’t stop looking at them. They aroused in her a curiosity that the vis-aids at school never had. Driven by yearning to know more about these fascinating images, the forced herself to read the accompanying text.
Most of it was pretty complicated and difficult to understand. But Pita was able to glean a few of the basic concepts. According to the book, everything-people, plants, stones-even the book she held in her hands existed both in the physical world and in astral space. But there were some things whose true form could only be seen in astral space-totem animals, for example. Like the one called Cat.
The human shaman who followed Cat could do the same thing. And it was the totem that did the choosing, not the other way around. It wasn’t just a matter of getting someone to give you magical training, or of building a “medicine lodge”-whatever that was. You could do all that drek, and still not become a shaman. Not until Cat called you.
Pita smiled at that one. It sounded pretty silly. She imagined a cat calling to her, just as her old neighbors had called their pet cat home at supper time. Instead of, “Here kitty, kitty, kitty! Come and get your dinner!” it would be, “Heeere Pita! Come and get your magic!”
Tired of reading. Pita set the book down and sat with her chin on her knees, thinking. A lot of strange drek had happened to her over the past couple of days. First there’d been the dream she’d had in the studio that had warned her about the disguise the elf mage would use to lure her out of the news station. She should have paid more attention to that. And then there was the weird trance that Pita had been able to put on the yakuza guard, back at the hotel room. Did that mean she had some kind of magical talent? She hoped so. Because that would also mean she wasn’t just another gutterpunk-some ugly ork girl that didn’t amount to anything. She was magic. She was special.
Pita’s mouth broke into a wide grin as she thought about the possibilities. Just wait until she met up with those kids from her old school who’d called her “porkie.” She’d show them.
She heard footsteps, and looked up. A security guard-the same one who’d rousted her earlier from another corner of the library-rounded one of the stacks. Spotting her, he stopped, then pointed a finger at her.
“All right, kid, this is your last chance,” he said. “This is a library, not a hotel for street trash. You’ve been here for hours, and now it’s time to go. Shift your sorry ass out of here.”
Pita smiled smugly at him. Staring hard at the man, she visualized him turning around, walking away. She curled her hand into a claw. “Go” she whispered. Leave me alone.”
Nothing happened. Pita’s heart began to beat more rapidly. The power that had infused her earlier had deserted her. She was alone again. Just a powerless kid, about to be turfed back out on the street, out into the open where the yakuza could find her.
She looked wildly around, preparing to make a break for it. But she couldn’t focus clearly. Something had happened to her vision. The shelves around her had gone all shimmering and fuzzy, and the books on them were translucent. The guard had a weird glow surrounding him, an ugly purple and green smudge that she instinctively recognized as his anger.