amodaresi/NoLiMa · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 5 2.18k
It was a bug.
My heart thudded in my ears. It was dark and quiet in the house, but it wasn't a comforting dark. There were eyes out there, eyes and ears, and they were watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced at school had followed me home, but this time, it wasn't just the Board of Education looking over my shoulder: the Department of Homeland Security had joined them.
“True. We won’t need to worry much about efficiency or scalability. Quick and dirty will do the job; the question is whether we have enough commonality here to make ‘quick and dirty’ work.”
“We do,” I said. I had an intuitive grasp of the math already; it was laying itself out in patterns in my brain like beautifully crafted knitwork. “I can tell we do. If you can write the code, I can do the math.”
“Well—we can try it. But no promises.”
His reply might not be the resounding enthusiasm I’d hoped for, but at least he’d said yes. “You’ll see. We can do this.”
Checker cleared his throat. “Cas, pick the phone back up, please.”
I avoided catching Arthur’s eye as I did so. I levered myself up off the bed, making a face as my wet clothes pulled against my skin and my chest wound twinged, and walked between Arthur and Rio to head over by the windows. “You’ve just got me now,” I said into the phone.
He came straight to the point. “I can’t trust you. Or Arthur.”
I didn’t blame him. “So we do this remotely,” I said. “So what?”
He sighed heavily and folded the note back up to tuck in a pocket. “I’ll bring it to Sonya.” He turned to go, then came back and leaned on the table. “Do me a favor?”
“I thought I was already doing you one,” I said, not entirely without bitterness. “Isn’t this whole job a favor?”
He huffed out a breath. “Talk to Checker?”
Fury clawed up in me, shockingly hot, clogging my head until my scalp prickled with it.
Arthur twitched back. “Not about that, Russell. Not talking about you. I swear.”
I clamped my jaw down on what I had been about to say. “What, then?” I growled through my teeth.
Arthur hesitated, his fingers pressing against the laminated pine of the tabletop. “This thing with the Lancer. Was hard on him.”
“It was hard on him?” I repeated. “Excuse me, was he shot at and locked up and also almost blown to pieces three separate times?”
“He could use a friend, ’s all I’m saying.” He made a vague gesture and headed out the door.
I turned and leaned my head against the wall. Arthur had too high expectations of me, as always. I wasn’t in any condition to be a friend to anyone. I’d never been very good at being a friend to anyone.
He crouched down again to touch the girl’s wrist, checking for a pulse I knew wouldn’t be there. I looked away.
The sounds of the street filtered up through the broken window, traffic noise and horns and people going about their days. A light breeze accompanied them, stirring the air in the office and making the cuts on my face start to sting.
“Thanks,” said Tresting suddenly.
The word parsed oddly, as if I were listening to a foreign language speaker say something and knew it wasn’t coming out the way he intended. “Sure,” I said.
Tresting stood back up and regarded me with a slight frown, as if I were a puzzle with a new twist. “They would’ve killed me,” he said. “This neighborhood, cops would’ve been too slow.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“I ain’t...thanks,” he said again.
I looked around the ruined office. Depression had neatly replaced the smugness. “They’re kids,” I whispered. Maybe I was the monster he thought I was after all. “They’re kids.”
“I know,” he said heavily, and it sounded like he did.
She shook her head. "You never give out your passwords, Marcus."
"I don't think it matters anymore. Either you succeed or I -- or it's the end of Marcus Yallow. Maybe I'll get a new identity, but I don't think so. I think they'll catch me. I guess I've known all along that they'd catch me, some day."
She looked at me, furious now. "What a waste. What was it all for, anyway?"
Of all the things she could have said, nothing could have hurt me more. It was like another kick in the stomach. What a waste, all of it, futile. Darryl and Ange, gone. I might never see my family again. And still, Homeland Security had my city and my country caught in a massive, irrational shrieking freak-out where anything could be done in the name of stopping terrorism.
Van looked like she was waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to say to that. She left me there.
Zeb had a pizza for me when I got back "home" -- to the tent under a freeway overpass in the Mission that he'd staked out for the night. He had a pup tent, military surplus, stenciled with SAN FRANCISCO LOCAL HOMELESS COORDINATING BOARD.
"Oh, she's your favorite, isn't she?" Trish asked, goosing Damian's bicep and taking a sip of his peach ginger-ade. The pundit had been in heavy rotation since the TV went back on the air. She was a Norwegian academic mathematician who wrote books of popular philosophy. She was a collection of trademark affectations: a jacket with built-up shoulders, a monocle, a string tie, nipple tassels, and tattooed cross-hatching on her face that made her look like a woodcut of a Victorian counting-house clerk. Damian loathed her -- she'd been on the committee to which he'd defended his Philosophy of Networks thesis, and she'd busted his balls so hard that they still ached a decade later when he saw her on the tube.
The pundit explained the packet-switching, using trains versus automobiles as a metaphor: "In a circuit uniwerse, every communication gets its own dedicated line, like a train on a track. Ven I vant to talk to you, ve build a circuit -- a train track -- betveen our dewices. No one else can use those tracks, even if ve're not talking. But packet-svitching is like a freevay. Ve break the information up into packets and ve give every packet its own little car, and it finds its own vay to the other end. If vun car doesn't arrive, ve make a copy of its information and send it again. The cars have brakes and steering veels, and so they can all share the same road vithout too much trouble."
I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "Van, I'm not the problem, they are. I'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disappear. The Department of Homeland Security are the ones doing that. I'm fighting back to make them stop."
"How, by making it worse?"
"Maybe it has to get worse to get better, Van. Isn't that what you were saying? If everyone was getting pulled over --"
"That's not what I meant. I didn't mean you should get everyone arrested. If you want to protest, join the protest movement. Do something positive. Didn't you learn anything from Darryl? Anything? "
"You're damned right I did," I said, losing my cool. "I learned that they can't be trusted. That if you're not fighting them, you're helping them. That they'll turn the country into a prison if we let them. What did you learn, Van? To be scared all the time, to sit tight and keep your head down and hope you don't get noticed? You think it's going to get better? If we don't do anything, this is as good as it's going to get . It will only get worse and worse from now on. You want to help Darryl? Help me bring them down!"
She held up her left hand and shook it in his face. “An addict! Is that what you think?” Her middle finger and little finger on that hand had never bent properly in all of Valentine’s memory, and when Valentine had asked her about it, she’d said the terrible word knucklebreakers which was the old name for the police. “You think I’m addicted to this ? Harald, honor and courage and patriotism are virtues no matter that you would make them into vices and shame our children with your cowardice. I go to fight now, Harald, and it’s for all of us.”
Popa couldn’t find another word to speak in the two seconds it took for Mata to give her two children hard kisses on the foreheads and slam out the door, and then it was Valentine and Popa and Trover, still screaming. Her father fisted the tears out of his eyes, not bothering to try to hide them, and said, “Well then, who wants pancakes?”
But the power was out and he had to make them cereal instead.
Two weeks after the siege began, her mother didn’t come home and the city came for her father.
He was gone for a moment, then reappeared carrying a long metal tube that looked to be emitting white vapor. He next opened yet another ersatz stone cabinet to reveal a microscope with a CRT screen above it. He took out three glass ampules from the tube—frozen embryos, undoubtedly—and placed them in a container. When he switched on the microscope, its CRT screen showed him whatever he needed to know. Interesting. In surgery, he was coldly efficient, no "human touch." Here he was the "scientist" Alex Goddard.
Next, Marcelina activated an ultrasound scanner and began running the wand over the woman's stomach. The screen above the table showed her uterus and her Fallopian tubes with flickering clarity.
He'd been readying the embryos, and now he walked over and carefully inserted a needle into the woman's abdomen— ouch—his eyes on the ultrasound scan, which indicated the precise location of the needle's tip.
I watched as the screen showed the needle on its way to its destination, a thin, hard line amidst the pulsing gray mass of her uterus. Seconds later all three embryos had been implanted with such flawless precision it was scary.
The sobs that came then didn't sound like my voice. They sounded like an animal noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in the night. I sobbed so my throat burned and ached with it, so my chest heaved.
Mom took me in her arms, the way she used to when I was a little boy, and she stroked my hair, and she murmured in my ear, and rocked me, and gradually, slowly, the sobs dissipated.
I took a deep breath and Mom got me a glass of water. I sat on the edge of my bed and she sat in my desk chair and I told her everything.
Everything.
Well, most of it.
At first Mom looked shocked, then outraged, and finally she gave up altogether and just let her jaw hang open as I took her through the interrogation, pissing myself, the bag over my head, Darryl. I showed her the note.
"Why --?"
In that single syllable, every recrimination I'd dealt myself in the night, every moment that I'd lacked the bravery to tell the world what it was really about, why I was really fighting, what had really inspired the Xnet.
“I’ve been thinking a good deal about that very thing lately,” she replied. “I believe feelings like that are a warning. I’m sure it’s wrong—foolish and wrong—to disregard them. Even if every one else, even if your own mind tells you it’s all nonsense, you mustn’t care!”
“I think you’re right,” he gravely agreed. “I’ve been trying to tell myself that I’m an utter ass, but all the time I knew I wasn’t. I knew—I know now—that there’s something—”
An unreasoning dread possessed Lexy. She felt for a moment that she didn’t want to hear any more.
“I’d like to tell you about it, if you wouldn’t mind,” he said. “Somehow I think you could help.”
For an instant she hesitated.
“Please do tell me,” she said at length. “I’d be glad to help, if I can.”
“It’s this,” he said. “Do you mind if I smoke? Thanks!”
He took a cigarette case from his pocket. As he struck a match, she could see his face very clearly in the sudden flame; and, for no reason at all, she pitied him.
“It’s this,” he said again. “It’s about my sister.”
“Sorry.”
I almost followed up with “Has anyone told you your kitchen could be listed on the EPA website as a dangerous toxic waste site?” but because of Wilson, I kept it to myself.
“How old are you?”
I started to say something, then for some reason told the her truth. “nineteen.”
“Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“I go to an alternative school. It’s all self-paced. Besides, school let out already.”
She sipped her tea, then seemed annoyed that it fogged up her glasses and she had wipe them off with a handkerchief. “So, your brother was arrested on terrorism charges?” she finally said.
“Bogus terrorism charges. There’s video of it online.” I pulled out my phone, found the clip that was making the rounds on YouTube, then handed it over to her.
She squinted, turned it on its side. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Push the little arrow.”
She pushed it, lowered it into her lap, then tried looking at it from under her glasses, as if trying to sneak up on it. “The screen’s far too small.”
When the interview began to wind down, losing its punch, I suggested we call it a day. With the time pushing two o'clock, I wanted to get the film to the lab, get it developed, and take a look at the rushes. I also had a doctor's appointment, not to mention a meeting with David to bring him up to speed on what I was doing. But surely he was going to be pleased. The interview, with Carly's honest intensity, would give the picture spine and guts. Just as I'd hoped.
You could always tell by the reaction of the crew. Even Roger Drexel, who usually hid his thoughts somewhere in his scraggly beard, was letting his eyes sparkle behind his Panaflex. Scott was also grinning as he struck the lights and Cafiero ripped up the power lines, now taped to the floor. Everybody was in wrap mode, flushed with a great shoot.
I followed Carly into the kitchen, where Marcy was feeding Kevin some Gerber applesauce. The time had come, I thought, to spring the next big question, out of earshot of the crew.
"Of course you don't. Men have no interest in the careers of women! But I know Rebecca better than you."
"You understand her mind better, but not necessarily her heart. You are considering her for the moment as prodigy; I am thinking of her more as pearl."
"Well," sighed Miss Maxwell whimsically, "prodigy or pearl, the Randall Protective Agency may pull Rebecca in opposite directions, but nevertheless she will follow her saint."
"That will content me," said Adam gravely.
"Particularly if the saint beckons your way." And Miss Maxwell looked up and smiled provokingly.
Rebecca did not see her aunt Miranda till she had been at the brick house for several days. Miranda steadily refused to have any one but Jane in the room until her face had regained its natural look, but her door was always ajar, and Jane fancied she liked to hear Rebecca's quick, light step. Her mind was perfectly clear now, and, save that she could not move, she was most of the time quite free from pain, and alert in every nerve to all that was going on within or without the house. "Were the windfall apples being picked up for sauce; were the potatoes thick in the hills; was the corn tosselin' out; were they cuttin' the upper field; were they keepin' fly-paper laid out everywheres; were there any ants in the dairy; was the kindlin' wood holdin' out; had the bank sent the cowpons?"
I remembered to switch off the camera, finally, and looked around for a weapon. There was a can of Axe I could spray into his eyes. If I broke the spotty mirror over the sink, I might be able to pull out a shard to stab him with. I could probably find a knife in the kitchen but I was too scared to unlock the door.
“Baaaaybee . . . “ His blurry voice faded. I held the spray can so tight my hand hurt, listening, half expecting him to wrench the door open and grab me. I waited. Then I waited some more.
When the record finished playing and everything was quiet I finally opened the door. I found a knife beside the sink and held it and the spray can as I went through to the room where he was curled up on the bed. I watched him. He didn’t move. When I nudged him with the toe of my boot, it felt like I was poking a sandbag.
I started to breathe again. I stepped across the room, set down the can, unbolted the door, and grabbed my bag and coat. I was standing outside on the porch, still holding the knife, when the cold air seemed to clear away the fog in my head. I remembered why I had come to his apartment in the first place. My feet felt as if they were weighted with lead as I stepped back inside.
Then one of the matched set smacked his head. “Oh my god.
You’re Shad.”
I teetered on the edge of denying it. But I finally nodded, feel- ing sick. Feeling stabby. Feeling like I’d just busted something pre- cious that could never be glued back together.
“Wow. It’s so great to meet you. We just didn’t . . .” He looked around. “I’m sorry. For some reason I always assumed . . .”
Another one finished the sentence he couldn’t seem to com- plete. “We didn’t know you were a girl.”
It had all started the previous day with an encrypted message: <wheeze> Your brother just got busted.
A photo was attached, showing a familiar ramshackle house in the middle of the block, Wilson’s bike chained to the porch railing next to pots full of plants that had died because nobody remembered to take them inside when it got cold. In front of the house, there was a traffic jam of police cars. A herd of big guys in windbreakers with letters on them were standing around looking muscular and mean, somehow swaggering even though they were standing still. There was also a mean-looking woman with a pony- tail sticking out of her hat. A hat that said FBI on it.
“Oh, my dear!” she cried impulsively, and held out her arms.
Mrs. Quelton rose. She came toward Lexy, her hands outstretched—when a sudden cry from Mrs. Royce arrested her.

It was a bug.

My heart thudded in my ears. It was dark and quiet in the house, but it wasn't a comforting dark. There were eyes out there, eyes and ears, and they were watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced at school had followed me home, but this time, it wasn't just the Board of Education looking over my shoulder: the Department of Homeland Security had joined them.

“True. We won’t need to worry much about efficiency or scalability. Quick and dirty will do the job; the question is whether we have enough commonality here to make ‘quick and dirty’ work.”

“We do,” I said. I had an intuitive grasp of the math already; it was laying itself out in patterns in my brain like beautifully crafted knitwork. “I can tell we do. If you can write the code, I can do the math.”

“Well—we can try it. But no promises.”

His reply might not be the resounding enthusiasm I’d hoped for, but at least he’d said yes. “You’ll see. We can do this.”

Checker cleared his throat. “Cas, pick the phone back up, please.”

I avoided catching Arthur’s eye as I did so. I levered myself up off the bed, making a face as my wet clothes pulled against my skin and my chest wound twinged, and walked between Arthur and Rio to head over by the windows. “You’ve just got me now,” I said into the phone.

He came straight to the point. “I can’t trust you. Or Arthur.”

I didn’t blame him. “So we do this remotely,” I said. “So what?”

He sighed heavily and folded the note back up to tuck in a pocket. “I’ll bring it to Sonya.” He turned to go, then came back and leaned on the table. “Do me a favor?”

“I thought I was already doing you one,” I said, not entirely without bitterness. “Isn’t this whole job a favor?”

He huffed out a breath. “Talk to Checker?”

Fury clawed up in me, shockingly hot, clogging my head until my scalp prickled with it.

Arthur twitched back. “Not about that, Russell. Not talking about you. I swear.”

I clamped my jaw down on what I had been about to say. “What, then?” I growled through my teeth.

Arthur hesitated, his fingers pressing against the laminated pine of the tabletop. “This thing with the Lancer. Was hard on him.”

“It was hard on him?” I repeated. “Excuse me, was he shot at and locked up and also almost blown to pieces three separate times?”

“He could use a friend, ’s all I’m saying.” He made a vague gesture and headed out the door.

I turned and leaned my head against the wall. Arthur had too high expectations of me, as always. I wasn’t in any condition to be a friend to anyone. I’d never been very good at being a friend to anyone.

He crouched down again to touch the girl’s wrist, checking for a pulse I knew wouldn’t be there. I looked away.

The sounds of the street filtered up through the broken window, traffic noise and horns and people going about their days. A light breeze accompanied them, stirring the air in the office and making the cuts on my face start to sting.

“Thanks,” said Tresting suddenly.

The word parsed oddly, as if I were listening to a foreign language speaker say something and knew it wasn’t coming out the way he intended. “Sure,” I said.

Tresting stood back up and regarded me with a slight frown, as if I were a puzzle with a new twist. “They would’ve killed me,” he said. “This neighborhood, cops would’ve been too slow.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“I ain’t...thanks,” he said again.

I looked around the ruined office. Depression had neatly replaced the smugness. “They’re kids,” I whispered. Maybe I was the monster he thought I was after all. “They’re kids.”

“I know,” he said heavily, and it sounded like he did.

She shook her head. "You never give out your passwords, Marcus."

"I don't think it matters anymore. Either you succeed or I -- or it's the end of Marcus Yallow. Maybe I'll get a new identity, but I don't think so. I think they'll catch me. I guess I've known all along that they'd catch me, some day."

She looked at me, furious now. "What a waste. What was it all for, anyway?"

Of all the things she could have said, nothing could have hurt me more. It was like another kick in the stomach. What a waste, all of it, futile. Darryl and Ange, gone. I might never see my family again. And still, Homeland Security had my city and my country caught in a massive, irrational shrieking freak-out where anything could be done in the name of stopping terrorism.

Van looked like she was waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to say to that. She left me there.

Zeb had a pizza for me when I got back "home" -- to the tent under a freeway overpass in the Mission that he'd staked out for the night. He had a pup tent, military surplus, stenciled with SAN FRANCISCO LOCAL HOMELESS COORDINATING BOARD.

"Oh, she's your favorite, isn't she?" Trish asked, goosing Damian's bicep and taking a sip of his peach ginger-ade. The pundit had been in heavy rotation since the TV went back on the air. She was a Norwegian academic mathematician who wrote books of popular philosophy. She was a collection of trademark affectations: a jacket with built-up shoulders, a monocle, a string tie, nipple tassels, and tattooed cross-hatching on her face that made her look like a woodcut of a Victorian counting-house clerk. Damian loathed her -- she'd been on the committee to which he'd defended his Philosophy of Networks thesis, and she'd busted his balls so hard that they still ached a decade later when he saw her on the tube.

The pundit explained the packet-switching, using trains versus automobiles as a metaphor: "In a circuit uniwerse, every communication gets its own dedicated line, like a train on a track. Ven I vant to talk to you, ve build a circuit -- a train track -- betveen our dewices. No one else can use those tracks, even if ve're not talking. But packet-svitching is like a freevay. Ve break the information up into packets and ve give every packet its own little car, and it finds its own vay to the other end. If vun car doesn't arrive, ve make a copy of its information and send it again. The cars have brakes and steering veels, and so they can all share the same road vithout too much trouble."

I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "Van, I'm not the problem, they are. I'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disappear. The Department of Homeland Security are the ones doing that. I'm fighting back to make them stop."

"How, by making it worse?"

"Maybe it has to get worse to get better, Van. Isn't that what you were saying? If everyone was getting pulled over --"

"That's not what I meant. I didn't mean you should get everyone arrested. If you want to protest, join the protest movement. Do something positive. Didn't you learn anything from Darryl? Anything? "

"You're damned right I did," I said, losing my cool. "I learned that they can't be trusted. That if you're not fighting them, you're helping them. That they'll turn the country into a prison if we let them. What did you learn, Van? To be scared all the time, to sit tight and keep your head down and hope you don't get noticed? You think it's going to get better? If we don't do anything, this is as good as it's going to get . It will only get worse and worse from now on. You want to help Darryl? Help me bring them down!"

She held up her left hand and shook it in his face. “An addict! Is that what you think?” Her middle finger and little finger on that hand had never bent properly in all of Valentine’s memory, and when Valentine had asked her about it, she’d said the terrible word knucklebreakers which was the old name for the police. “You think I’m addicted to this ? Harald, honor and courage and patriotism are virtues no matter that you would make them into vices and shame our children with your cowardice. I go to fight now, Harald, and it’s for all of us.”

Popa couldn’t find another word to speak in the two seconds it took for Mata to give her two children hard kisses on the foreheads and slam out the door, and then it was Valentine and Popa and Trover, still screaming. Her father fisted the tears out of his eyes, not bothering to try to hide them, and said, “Well then, who wants pancakes?”

But the power was out and he had to make them cereal instead.

Two weeks after the siege began, her mother didn’t come home and the city came for her father.

He was gone for a moment, then reappeared carrying a long metal tube that looked to be emitting white vapor. He next opened yet another ersatz stone cabinet to reveal a microscope with a CRT screen above it. He took out three glass ampules from the tube—frozen embryos, undoubtedly—and placed them in a container. When he switched on the microscope, its CRT screen showed him whatever he needed to know. Interesting. In surgery, he was coldly efficient, no "human touch." Here he was the "scientist" Alex Goddard.

Next, Marcelina activated an ultrasound scanner and began running the wand over the woman's stomach. The screen above the table showed her uterus and her Fallopian tubes with flickering clarity.

He'd been readying the embryos, and now he walked over and carefully inserted a needle into the woman's abdomen— ouch—his eyes on the ultrasound scan, which indicated the precise location of the needle's tip.

I watched as the screen showed the needle on its way to its destination, a thin, hard line amidst the pulsing gray mass of her uterus. Seconds later all three embryos had been implanted with such flawless precision it was scary.

The sobs that came then didn't sound like my voice. They sounded like an animal noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in the night. I sobbed so my throat burned and ached with it, so my chest heaved.

Mom took me in her arms, the way she used to when I was a little boy, and she stroked my hair, and she murmured in my ear, and rocked me, and gradually, slowly, the sobs dissipated.

I took a deep breath and Mom got me a glass of water. I sat on the edge of my bed and she sat in my desk chair and I told her everything.

Everything.

Well, most of it.

At first Mom looked shocked, then outraged, and finally she gave up altogether and just let her jaw hang open as I took her through the interrogation, pissing myself, the bag over my head, Darryl. I showed her the note.

"Why --?"

In that single syllable, every recrimination I'd dealt myself in the night, every moment that I'd lacked the bravery to tell the world what it was really about, why I was really fighting, what had really inspired the Xnet.

“I’ve been thinking a good deal about that very thing lately,” she replied. “I believe feelings like that are a warning. I’m sure it’s wrong—foolish and wrong—to disregard them. Even if every one else, even if your own mind tells you it’s all nonsense, you mustn’t care!”

“I think you’re right,” he gravely agreed. “I’ve been trying to tell myself that I’m an utter ass, but all the time I knew I wasn’t. I knew—I know now—that there’s something—”

An unreasoning dread possessed Lexy. She felt for a moment that she didn’t want to hear any more.

“I’d like to tell you about it, if you wouldn’t mind,” he said. “Somehow I think you could help.”

For an instant she hesitated.

“Please do tell me,” she said at length. “I’d be glad to help, if I can.”

“It’s this,” he said. “Do you mind if I smoke? Thanks!”

He took a cigarette case from his pocket. As he struck a match, she could see his face very clearly in the sudden flame; and, for no reason at all, she pitied him.

“It’s this,” he said again. “It’s about my sister.”

“Sorry.”

I almost followed up with “Has anyone told you your kitchen could be listed on the EPA website as a dangerous toxic waste site?” but because of Wilson, I kept it to myself.

“How old are you?”

I started to say something, then for some reason told the her truth. “nineteen.”

“Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“I go to an alternative school. It’s all self-paced. Besides, school let out already.”

She sipped her tea, then seemed annoyed that it fogged up her glasses and she had wipe them off with a handkerchief. “So, your brother was arrested on terrorism charges?” she finally said.

“Bogus terrorism charges. There’s video of it online.” I pulled out my phone, found the clip that was making the rounds on YouTube, then handed it over to her.

She squinted, turned it on its side. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Push the little arrow.”

She pushed it, lowered it into her lap, then tried looking at it from under her glasses, as if trying to sneak up on it. “The screen’s far too small.”

When the interview began to wind down, losing its punch, I suggested we call it a day. With the time pushing two o'clock, I wanted to get the film to the lab, get it developed, and take a look at the rushes. I also had a doctor's appointment, not to mention a meeting with David to bring him up to speed on what I was doing. But surely he was going to be pleased. The interview, with Carly's honest intensity, would give the picture spine and guts. Just as I'd hoped.

You could always tell by the reaction of the crew. Even Roger Drexel, who usually hid his thoughts somewhere in his scraggly beard, was letting his eyes sparkle behind his Panaflex. Scott was also grinning as he struck the lights and Cafiero ripped up the power lines, now taped to the floor. Everybody was in wrap mode, flushed with a great shoot.

I followed Carly into the kitchen, where Marcy was feeding Kevin some Gerber applesauce. The time had come, I thought, to spring the next big question, out of earshot of the crew.

"Of course you don't. Men have no interest in the careers of women! But I know Rebecca better than you."

"You understand her mind better, but not necessarily her heart. You are considering her for the moment as prodigy; I am thinking of her more as pearl."

"Well," sighed Miss Maxwell whimsically, "prodigy or pearl, the Randall Protective Agency may pull Rebecca in opposite directions, but nevertheless she will follow her saint."

"That will content me," said Adam gravely.

"Particularly if the saint beckons your way." And Miss Maxwell looked up and smiled provokingly.

Rebecca did not see her aunt Miranda till she had been at the brick house for several days. Miranda steadily refused to have any one but Jane in the room until her face had regained its natural look, but her door was always ajar, and Jane fancied she liked to hear Rebecca's quick, light step. Her mind was perfectly clear now, and, save that she could not move, she was most of the time quite free from pain, and alert in every nerve to all that was going on within or without the house. "Were the windfall apples being picked up for sauce; were the potatoes thick in the hills; was the corn tosselin' out; were they cuttin' the upper field; were they keepin' fly-paper laid out everywheres; were there any ants in the dairy; was the kindlin' wood holdin' out; had the bank sent the cowpons?"

I remembered to switch off the camera, finally, and looked around for a weapon. There was a can of Axe I could spray into his eyes. If I broke the spotty mirror over the sink, I might be able to pull out a shard to stab him with. I could probably find a knife in the kitchen but I was too scared to unlock the door.

“Baaaaybee . . . “ His blurry voice faded. I held the spray can so tight my hand hurt, listening, half expecting him to wrench the door open and grab me. I waited. Then I waited some more.

When the record finished playing and everything was quiet I finally opened the door. I found a knife beside the sink and held it and the spray can as I went through to the room where he was curled up on the bed. I watched him. He didn’t move. When I nudged him with the toe of my boot, it felt like I was poking a sandbag.

I started to breathe again. I stepped across the room, set down the can, unbolted the door, and grabbed my bag and coat. I was standing outside on the porch, still holding the knife, when the cold air seemed to clear away the fog in my head. I remembered why I had come to his apartment in the first place. My feet felt as if they were weighted with lead as I stepped back inside.

Then one of the matched set smacked his head. “Oh my god.

You’re Shad.”

I teetered on the edge of denying it. But I finally nodded, feel- ing sick. Feeling stabby. Feeling like I’d just busted something pre- cious that could never be glued back together.

“Wow. It’s so great to meet you. We just didn’t . . .” He looked around. “I’m sorry. For some reason I always assumed . . .”

Another one finished the sentence he couldn’t seem to com- plete. “We didn’t know you were a girl.”

It had all started the previous day with an encrypted message: <wheeze> Your brother just got busted.

A photo was attached, showing a familiar ramshackle house in the middle of the block, Wilson’s bike chained to the porch railing next to pots full of plants that had died because nobody remembered to take them inside when it got cold. In front of the house, there was a traffic jam of police cars. A herd of big guys in windbreakers with letters on them were standing around looking muscular and mean, somehow swaggering even though they were standing still. There was also a mean-looking woman with a pony- tail sticking out of her hat. A hat that said FBI on it.

“Oh, my dear!” she cried impulsively, and held out her arms.

Mrs. Quelton rose. She came toward Lexy, her hands outstretched—when a sudden cry from Mrs. Royce arrested her.