Broken Mirror (29 page)

***

Victor carefully stirred the pasta sauce, watching the swirls left in the wake of the spoon fade before his hand circled the pot again. He could almost forget that people were out to get him.

“Your dreams are incredible,” Elena said from the living room.

Victor’s neck stiffened. “I know, literally incredible,” he said. “I told you about them before.”

“It’s different reading them. And there’s so many. Where do they come from?”

“My brain.” It seemed like a stupid question and dangerously close to Nightmareland territory. Samuel Miller believed his dreams were prescient. Victor, on good days, knew that they were just dreams.

“But have you been reading horror stories? Those could be inspiring your
—
”

“I don’t read books.”

He looked up from the pasta sauce and almost laughed at the puzzled expression on her face.

“I can’t,” he said. “The images stay with me. They’re too real. I’ve got enough junk in my brain as it is.”

After dinner they sat on a bench outside, listening to birdcalls and the occasional pinecone dropping through tree limbs to the ground.

Elena rested a hand on Victor’s knee. “I want to tell you something.”

“I’m here.” Victor prepared himself for a lecture about gift giving being against the rules.

She spoke tentatively. “When I moved to Texas, I didn’t have any friends. You know what that’s like. I was working and going to school. My parents were always asking me to help, too. Every minute of the day was busy but depressing, existentially so. I needed something good in my life when everything was bad. I tried to tell you earlier, but . . .”

Her hand squeezed his knee. The grip was strong, tense. She raised her gaze to the treetops, which were hidden in the creeping darkness. He recognized her urge to maintain control. He waited, letting her take her time. He knew the value of not being rushed.

Elena continued, “It was stupid. I mean, I knew better right from the start, but I didn’t care. It started when I couldn’t
—
I felt so awful. I knew I was out of control. I knew better, but I did it anyway.”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he said as gently as he could.

She wiped away a tear, caught her breath, and leveled her gaze at him. “I started smoking stims.”

Stims!

Victor brushed her hand away like it was a creepy-crawly and scooted to the opposite end of the bench. She wouldn’t do
that
. She’d always hated smokers. She would chop off an arm before she used stims.

But from the moment she’d found him at the funeral, he’d sensed that she was different, harder and crueler. He was finally getting the truth.

Elena wiped moisture from her cheeks with her knuckles. She breathed in harshly, perhaps trying to trick her body out of its emotions, as he did.

“Nobody told me it would be so hard to quit,” she said.

He struggled to find something to say. He didn’t want to rub salt in her wounds. But
—
Laws!
—
a stim addict.

She said, “Sometimes when I think about . . . The cravings are stronger than strong.”

“But you stopped?” he asked.

“Yes, I stopped.”

Victor could see a hard-to-pin-down emotion leaking from her eyes and mouth. She felt relief after telling him, yes, but there was something else, something greenish-yellow, shame or disgust, that she was holding back.

Victor said, “There’s something else.”

She nodded slowly, her eyes lowered to the ground. “There’s a faction of dickies in Texas. They’re called Los Puros. They helped me get clean, for a while.”

She rubbed the jade dog hanging from her neck. “They’re good people. They’re trying to provide a safe haven. As they tell it, during the Repartition, Puros fought for independence. Autonomy wasn’t enough for them. The R.O.T. government kept trying to shut them down, but they always bounced back. Then Corp drug runners moved in.”

Her eyes narrowed. Yellow bitterness colored her expression. “It’s a war. The Puros and the Corps are fighting a war.”

Elena rubbed her palms against her thighs. Victor didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t the Elena he knew. It was some stranger who had taken over her life.

“A new kind of stim showed up a year ago. Aurora. Or sometimes just Aura. It’s everywhere. I got hooked again. Everything looks so vibrant. Sounds and smells. Like how you’ve described your episodes. When I’m on Aura, I feel like I’m supercharged. All my senses fired up. It’s hard to go back to normal again after you’ve felt the resonance.”

Victor lurched to his feet and reeled to the side of the cabin, resting an arm against it and steadying himself. People were using street drugs that mimicked mirror resonance syndrome. What did
that
mean?

Elena said, “I couldn’t stay clean. The Puros kicked me out. It got really bad.”

Her voiced cracked. Victor examined her face and saw a greenish-yellow blur move across it. She met his gaze, briefly, then looked away. “I found a clinic. There’s one in the Louisiana Territories in New Venice. One of your family’s, I think. The program helped me. I’m sober now, and I’m glad to be sober. I’m going to stay this way. And . . .”

Elena’s resolve to stay clean swept away his questions and selfish concerns. Victor sat, wrapped an arm around her, and shushed her. “Let me know how I can help,” he said.

Elena wiped her eyes. “You are. Being here. It’s so peaceful. All that feels like another life.”

***

Elena slept on the bed, and Victor took the couch. The morning came, and they sat outside, drinking faux-café and listening to the trees rustle and creak around them. She read more of his dreambook. She didn’t envy his dark imagination.

Every once in a while he would glance over, a question seemingly pressing against his closed lips, but he never said a word. They spent the day in silence, waiting for Ozie to tell them it was safe to cross the border. She tried to tell him about Lucky and Bandit, but the words wouldn’t come. It was as if she’d used up her last confession and had to wait for more to grow.

Around five o’clock, Elena couldn’t take it anymore and starting pacing. “This is a pretty sweet cabin. With plumbing it could be a real homestead.”

Victor ran a palm across the wall’s wood siding. “I can afford better than this.”

“Me too,” she said. “That’s not the point.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “So where does your money come from?”

Elena turned away. He’d been stewing on the question for at least a day and had tricked her into admitting it. “The thing about the Puros is
—
”

“I don’t care about the Puros!”

She whirled on him. “What’s wrong with you? Did you take your herbs?”

Victor reached into his bag and pulled out a vial. She watched him drink, wanting to tell him to stop, not knowing why. Maybe he was doing exactly what he needed to do to calm down. She just wished she knew how she’d triggered his anger and suspicion and how not to do it again.

“Happy?” he asked. “This isn’t about my condition. I’m asking about you. How you can show up with a bag full of cash. How you can swear never to use drugs and then decide maybe it’s not so bad to get addicted to stims
—
”

“This is why I didn’t want to tell you. You have no idea.”

Elena heard a chime. Victor looked at his MeshBit, and then, like the sun breaking through a fog bank, he smiled. The dark storm in his mind had blown over, apparently.

Victor said, “It’s Ozie. He sent us a route.” He relayed Ozie’s instructions to follow a mountain road to a border station. They needed to cross during a two-hour window when Ozie had somehow arranged for it to be unguarded. They had to leave now.

When they got in the car, Elena sighed with relief. She would have gone insane with nothing to do if they’d stayed any longer, and Victor
was
insane, so it helped that both of them were now temporarily pretending to be sane together in fragile synchronicity.

Beyond Truckee they followed a winding, pitted road for several kilometers, lit only by the car’s headlights and a star-speckled dusk, skirting the well-maintained avenues linking ski resorts to North Tahoe City.

“What is that?” Elena asked, pointing to something white off to the side of the road, partially hidden behind a stand of trees. A trail of crushed shrubbery led into the forest.

Victor slowed and leaned his head out the window. “It’s a van.” He parked on the shoulder. “Like the one I saw in Little Asia. We should check it out.”

“Wait,” Elena said, “it could be a trap.”

“Wouldn’t a trap happen on the road, not off to the side? This looks like an accident.”

“I don’t think it’s safe,” Elena said. She put her hand in her pocket and gripped the stunstick.

“Pearl could be trapped in there.”

“Who?”

“The herbalist.”

Victor got out, and Elena followed close behind, moving carefully through dark brush. Several small trees had snapped off at their bases. The van had been stopped by a tall, double-trunked redwood, which seemed to be listing drunkenly.

Victor opened the rear door of the van and shined his lightstick inside.

It was empty. No blood. No body. No restraints. Likewise, when Elena checked the cab, it was empty. Crushed and messy with broken glass, but empty. If this was Lucky and Bandit’s vehicle, they must have run off the road and then hiked to safety. But how could they be this close? She hadn’t told them anything since Long Valley. How had they followed them here? Elena wondered if Ozie could be trusted. Perhaps he’d made a deal with them and offered a ransom for Victor. But why abandon the van?

“They were hit from behind,” Victor said. “Look at the rear bumper. They must have hiked down to the city.”

“Let’s get out of here. We have a deadline, remember?” Elena turned and started back to the car. He followed, sweeping his lightstick in front of them.

When they were underway again, she lowered the car window and leaned her head out. They passed above the bright and glitzy town and began climbing the eastern slopes. Soon the road weaved downward again.

Elena knew she should tell Victor about Lucky and Bandit. But they’d started acting so weird. She couldn’t explain what she didn’t understand.

The disused surface road reconnected with the state road near the eastern bore of the tunnel. The border checkpoint was a set of shacks and scanners with a nearby MeshTower. As Ozie had promised, there were no staff on duty, and the barriers were all raised. Elena wondered how he’d arranged it and whether they could trust someone with that kind of power.

Victor drove across the border to the Organized Western States without incident. They descended toward the desert plains of Reno, Sparks, and Bartley New Town
—
a recent urban adjunct full of gated communities, luxury commerce clubs, and other exclusive retreats of the O.W.S. elites. They passed them and continued into the desert.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Elena asked.

“A diner where the brainhackers hang out. Close to SeCa but beyond the reach of its police. Ozie’s there.”

She could see the diner’s effluvia long before the building itself came into sight: it lit up this part of the desert like a neon nightmare. Huge, coiling solar-cell ropes were strung in loops, towering over the structure, spelling out “The Springboard Café.” Multicolored lasers blasted radiation into the desert on every side. A rotating vidscreen cube displayed ultrashort films that featured various human organs, giant genitals included, showing how nerve patterns were activated by brainhacking scripts.

They parked in a gravel lot and walked to the entrance. Elena followed Victor inside, wondering what had happened to Bandit and Lucky, but more importantly, how was she going to help Victor now that he was calling the shots?

Great brains aren’t born; they’re grown.

—HeAdSpAcE Brainhacker Collective slogan

The interior of the Springboard Café was festooned with lightstrips, vidscreens, and mechanical sculptures activated by patrons’ voices and movements. A MeshTravel bulletin, posted next to the door, said the atmosphere inside the restaurant was so mentally exhausting that the owners had built a techless cocktail lounge with candles, drapery, and soft-droning music, a popular and relaxing place for those who could get past the automated doorman.

Victor and Elena stowed their bags in the vestibule’s automated lockers and moved further inside, stopping when the floor buzzed and an array of red
X
’s appeared beneath their feet. From the floor up, the mix of vidscreens and neon motion signs resembled the chaotic jumbles of Victor’s dreams. He pinned his gaze to the ground and watched the comforting pattern of blazing letters while they waited for a table, being careful not to lose himself altogether in blankness. A few minutes later the
X
’s disappeared and a rushing blue ribbon of photonic water on the floor directed Victor and Elena to a semicircular, overstuffed booth. They sat down.

A young tattooed woman, ornamented with several large hunks of silver covering parts of her neck, ears, and forehead, approached and touched the table. Images of food and drink swam across it.

“Place your order here, and the bots will bring your food. This button allows you to vidchat with the cook, if you want. He gets lonely. Make sure you tell him about any special dietary requirements before he starts preparing the meal; otherwise we don’t guarantee not to poison you. Click here if you want to speak to a human, and I’ll come back and yell at you.” She winked at Victor and swished away.

A few other tables were occupied by small groups, talking and reviewing Mesh feeds together, and by suspicious-looking loners. The music, which had no distinguishing features other than being loud, rhythmic, and artificial, masked the conversations around them.

Elena chose meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Victor ordered a cheese sandwich for dinner with a half liter of local beer.

“You’re drinking?” Her eyebrows arched.